Learn from the mistakes of others

you can thank warren ellis [the warren ellis] for pointing me to the little gem that inspired the enclosed rant.

a recent 'op-ed' by some guy in the new york times, wittily entitled 'worse than death' where he writes:

I'm almost convinced by Steven Landsburg's cost-benefit analysis showing that the spreaders of computer viruses and worms are more logical candidates for capital punishment than murderers are.

Professor Landsburg, an economist at the University of Rochester, has calculated the relative value to society of executing murderers and hackers. By using studies estimating the deterrent value of capital punishment, he figures that executing one murderer yields at most $100 million in social benefits.

The benefits of executing a hacker would be greater, he argues, because the social costs of hacking are estimated to be so much higher: $50 billion per year. Deterring a mere one-fifth of 1 percent of those crimes - one in 500 hackers - would save society $100 million. And Professor Landsburg believes that a lot more than one in 500 hackers would be deterred by the sight of a colleague on death row.

and if you think he's joking: "Feed the Worms Who Write Worms to the Worms," by Steven E. Landsburg. Slate, May 26, 2004.

i'm sorry, but some economists are just plain fucking stupid, arrogant and - oh, what the hell - retarded. [don't say retarded, when you mean stupid. ok. so i mean intentionally fucked-in-the-head.]

the death penalty does not discourage people form breaking laws. the idea, supposedly, is that if you're frightened of being killed if caught, you'll reconsider offending. this is ridiculous because people who break laws do not expect to be caught, let alone punished by death or anything else.

what the death penalty does do is make the appeal process much more desperate. after all, you could literally die if you don't.

and as for the 'cost' of hacking. first: lets get the terminology right here. american journalists call people who do stuff with comuters that they don't understand 'hackers' coz it sounded cool. a hacker is someone who engineers a creative solution to a problem - they literally hack their way to a result. people who break into computers might well be hacking, but the act of breaking into a computer is still - like breaking into safes - a form of cracking.

and if you're writing [or more accurately in most instances, cutting and pasting] a virus or whatever, you're still programming. no need to come up with witty, idiotic idioms so you can feel all clever for 'naming' something. mr landsberg might be attatched to his 'term' 'vermiscripters', but it's both redundant and clumsy.

back to the costs of this activity: i hate to remind people, but the computer security industry is a multi-billion dollar a year global affair. it wouldn't exists without two groups: microsoft and the ever resourceful (if often naive) programmers who create the software that breaks computers - and that includes the armies of typists and coders working for microsoft et al, wherever they may be this week.

mr landsberg writes about the millions of dollars that his 'vermiscripters' cost the economy each year. perhaps one might consider amortising the annual cost of economists and accountants over the same period? accountants might have neat little amortisation tables for calculating the value of a human life, based upon a range of factors - but that neither makes the table represent the value of a human life, nor substitute for one. [and the man is just so condescending when he talks about rehabilitation.]

if he's going to advocate killing people for fucking with computers, perhaps mr landsberg and his cheer squad would support the death penalty for corporate execs who fuck the economy and the lives of employees on a regular basis. 25 years in jail might be called a 'death sentence', but the guy ain't gonna be executed. and if he lives that long, he'll get to go home.

ok. so perhaps landsberg isn't a slavering kill-kill-kill advocate. but he does write in that annoying, pseudo-scientific language that economists like to use to sound all empirical and scientific and clever.

landsberg finishes off with this flourish ...

But this essential point remains: Governments exist largely to supply protections that, for one reason or another, we can't purchase in the marketplace. Those governments perform best when they supply the protections we value most. We can measure their performance only if we are willing to calculate costs and benefits and to respect what our calculations tell us, even when it's counterintuitive. Any policymaker who won't do this kind of arithmetic is fundamentally unserious about policy.

the first sentence is merely an assumption of market capitalism; grudgingly acknowledging that the market cannot, does not - and will not - provide everything we need - let alone everything we want.

the second is another assumption. he's now showing that he believes in the "government as a corporate entity in the marketplace" kind of market capitalist.

the third sentence ... "we can measure their performance only if ... willing to calculate" ... which assumes that performance is only meaningful if we 'calculate' it - and what are these 'costs' and 'benefits' he speaks of? why does everything have to be measured/measurable in monetary terms? [economists seem to be largely unable to think in any other terms.]

'counterintuitive' ... wtf?

and my all time personal favourite form of public abuse: "Any policymaker who won't do this kind of arithmetic is fundamentally unserious about policy." [lets overlook the poor grammar - 'unserious'?] what he seems to mean is - if you're not listening to him in awe, doing thigns the way he says is important, then you cannot be serious about policy [something] ...


it has occurred to me that mr landsberg might have meant his article to be ironic - and anti-capital punishment. but i'm not convinced. [however, this article could be used for a tutorial on how (at least some) economists think.]

our man l makes the following frank admission:

When we say that a human life is worth $10 million, we mean nothing more or less than this: A typical person, faced with a 1–in-10-million chance of death, seems to be willing to pay about a dollar to eliminate that risk. We know this not from theory but from observation—by looking, for example, at the size of the pay cuts people are willing to take to move into safer jobs. On this basis, Harvard professor Kip Viscusi estimates the value of a life at $4.5 million overall, $7 million for a blue-collar male and $8.5 million for a blue collar female. (Viscusi acknowledges that it's puzzling for a blue-collar life to be worth more than a white-collar life, but that's what the data show.)

i'm still amazed that economists have a hard time reconciling the idea that a person who actually produces something in a capitalist economy just might be 'worth more' than someone who either owns the capital (and therefore the profits of that other person's labour) or someone who gets to fuck about with numbers and papers all day. [not that i grumble at being paid well to be one of those paper-shufflers, when i get the chance.]

i'm not sure how we get to equate "the pay cut for security" with the "amout paid for extra security". trading somethign tangible for something we can experience directly is one thing, trading it for some ephemeral possibility is another. few people really understand probability at all, let alone well enough to have an informed and considered appreciation of the value of reducing a 1-10,000,000 chance.

i am firmly of the opinion that economics/accountancy/commerce/management students should all be required to undertake undergraduate experimental microbiology as a compulsory strand through their whole degrees. most micro undergraduates have a far better grasp of the basics of cost and benefit, supply and demand, and competition for/over resources than practically any economics monkey i've ever met.

but then, we were never deluded in thinking we were studying the 'science' of 'satisfying' 'unlimited' demands with 'limited' resources.