A Stitch in Haste

In what is apparently considered "news," some "experts" inform us that "perfect" implies "expensive" --

With solid concrete walls and roofs and laminated glass windows protected by storm shutters, a house can be built to withstand nearly any hurricane. But very few are.

Even in the most vulnerable U.S. coastal areas, virtually no one builds homes or buildings to survive a Category 5 hurricane -- a monster storm with winds higher than 155 miles per hour (250 km per hour) that can crush ordinary houses.

It costs too much.

Gee, you think?

This is, of course, nothing new. You can build a perfectly safe car -- but it would be a tank and cost a million dollars. You can design a perfectly crack-proof egg carton -- but eggs would cost $10 each. You can reduce pollution to perfectly zero -- but it would require that we live like cavemen.

One would hope that such subjects are covered in an introductory economics class. We could think in terms of "units of safety," in which case each "unit" would cost ever more money -- as in the Law of Increasing Marginal Cost. Or we can think in money terms -- each additional dollar yields an ever-diminishing level of added "safety" -- as in the Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns. Or we can think of how useful additional "units of safety" become as the calamity that they anticipate become ever more remote -- as in the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility. Or we could think in terms of when it makes more sense just to spend money on insurance rather than disaster-proofing -- as in the Law of Increasing Opportunity Cost.

What would have been a more useful news story is how the government disrupts all these economic laws and interferes in these economic decisions by subsidizing potential disaster zones. Why bother deciding how much "safety" to buy, or how much insurance, when the government (i.e., everybody else) will pay for your disaster after the fact? Whether it's FEMA, flood insurance, presidential disaster declarations or plain old pork barrel spending, when the government subsidizes an activity, you get more of it, including disaster damage. That should also be a topic in introductory economics -- hopefully.

Since astronomy is in the news, let's revisit my meteorite example from a previous post. If one meteorite smashes through my living room window, the federal government would do absolutely nothing about it. I would be told, quite properly, "too bad so sad."

Yet if a meteor shower were to rain down and smash 100,000 living room windows, then suddenly it becomes a "disaster" and the government would be expected to "do something" to help the "victims."

That simply cannot be right.

And it would be even less right if I and my neighbors chose to live in an area known to suffer from meteor showers. We should have been expected to figure out how much "meteorite safety" (or private meteorite insurance) to buy and take our chances.

So too with areas prone to hurricanes, or earthquakes or floods or forest fires or blizzards or locusts or whatever. You know, or should have known, the risks (i.e., the costs) of living where you do. Plan accordingly. Build accordingly. Insure accordingly.

That would be an inexpensive kind of "perfection."