Schneier on Security

jones • January 3, 2014 1:50 PM

@bryan

On a side note: $1 billion additional spending on medical research would have a much greater impact on life expectancy than preventing one 9/11 per year.

Actually, the productivity of the US healthcare system has been in steady decline since the vaccine. Since then, most of modern medicine has been devoted to addressing problems of industrial civilization, such as poor diet, sedentary lifestyle, and environmental pollution. Healthcare spending is subject to diminishing returns just like anything else:

http://telesio.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/modern-medicine-chart-productivity-of-the-us-healthcare-system.png

Life in a hunter-gatherer society is not “nasty, brutish, solitary and short.” Rather, a typical hunter-gatherer might expect a life expectancy on par with Renaissance Europe. A reasonable portion of the population can expect to remain active and healthy into their 70’s, with a social support network to care for them as the age.

http://scientropic.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/gurven-kaplan-longevity-hunter-gatherer.gif

Basically, modern medicine has benefited from relatively few innovations: sanitation and hygiene (i.e., Ignaz Semmelweis in the mid 1800’s), anesthetics and analgesics (patients don’t die of shock at seeing their own leg cut off anymore), antibiotics (developed for around $20,000 of basic science research), and the vaccine. And that’s it. Take away painkillers, take away antibiotics, and modern surgery is no longer possible.

If you’re going to use “one 9/11” as a metric for how to save lives, think of this: as many people die in car accidents EVERY MONTH as died on that one day 12 years ago. If you want to spend $1 billion to save lives, regional mass transit is the way to go. Fewer drivers = fewer traffic fatalities.

jones • January 4, 2014 8:24 AM

@b

We’re losing the use of antibiotics because they’re over-used and used carelessly.

80% of antibiotics used in the US are given to livestock prophetically. This is starting to change, but slowly.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/news-update-farm-animals-get-80-of-antibiotics-sold-in-us/

Factory farms keep animals in stressful, crowded, and unhygienic conditions that compromise the animals’ immune systems and foster the spread of disease. Furthermore, these animals — especially large livestock — are fed high starch diets because there simply isn’t enough pasture land in the US for all the cheap beef Americans want to be fed on pasture. These high starch and grain based diets allow harmful bacteria to ferment in the gut, which are then exposed to antibiotics, leading to resistance. These antibiotics and drug resistant bacteria enter the human food supply not so much through slaughtered meat (except in the case of chicken), but through the manure spread of vegetables, and through agricultural runoff.

If you eat meat, you’re a big part of the problem. If Americans ate meat three times a week instead of three times a day, it would keep as much carbon out of the atmosphere as driving a hybrid electric vehicle (it takes 9x the energy to produce a pound of meat protein compared to a pound of vegetable protein), cut down on irresponsible antibiotics use, and probably increase your health, lowering healthcare costs.

As far as the opportunity cost of spending $1 billion on mass transit, you have to average the “life savings” over a 12 year period. Depending on where in the country this money is spent, this could have a significant impact.

But you’re right, I may have overstated my case. Maybe some combination of homeless shelters, food programs, clothing drives, drug treatment, and gun buy-back programs would have more impact for the money.

jones • January 5, 2014 7:56 AM

@ Fuller

Bingo. Almost anything the government could spend money on would save move lives than the “War on Terror”

@ Anonymous Coward (ex-LA variety)

You kind of have things backwards. Medicare and Social Security are most definitely NOT discretionary spending.

And there’s nothing inherently “military” about terrorism issues. Most domestic terrorism cases are treated as criminal matters.

Entitlement programs are not part of the normal budgeting process because they are paid for out of a trust fund. They are NOT part of the deficit at all.

The trust fund pays benefits to current retirees and is replenished by current workers. The spending shortfalls associated with these entitlement programs relate largely to the fact that people are now living longer, or, more specifically, people are accumulating increasing medical expenses towards the end of their lives.

The funding shortfall for entitlement spending can be eliminated rather simply. Right now, only incomes up to about $110,000 are taxed for entitlement programs. Raising that limit would eliminate the problem.

Congress is aware of this, but they don’t act:

https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33943.pdf

“Although the legislated Social Security payroll tax rate is 12.4%, the average Social Security payroll tax is slightly progressive throughout the bottom 80% of the income distribution in that lower-income families pay a lower proportion of income in payroll taxes than higher-income families. At the higher-income levels—the top 20%—the payroll tax is regressive in that the proportion of income paid in payroll taxes falls as income rises. The richest 1% of American families pay a smaller proportion of their income in payroll taxes than the poorest 20% of families.”

“Four policy options, which raise the payroll tax base, are examined; two of the policies also provide tax relief to low- and middle-income workers. Each of the three policies reduces the regressivity of the payroll tax at the upper end of the income distribution. Currently, less than 10% of families contain a worker earning more than the maximum taxable limit. Consequently, over 90% of families would be unaffected by increasing the maximum taxable limit. And if this change were combined with a payroll tax rate reduction, over 90% of families would pay lower payroll taxes.”