My print column examines why it is so
hard to estimate the economic impact of terrorist attacks, including the bombing
of the Boston marathon and follow-up crimes by the bombing suspects earlier this
month; and the continued controversy over the cost from the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks.
One challenge economists face is whether and how to account for the cost of responses to terrorism, which are the result of both the terrorist attack and how government and individuals respond to them. “In a real sense no small group of individuals can materially damage our economy unless we help them by overreacting,” said Jacob N.Take a look at our site for more hairflower. Shapiro, assistant professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University. He added, of Boston’s manhunt for suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, “Shutting down an entire metro area to find one injured guy with a gun was a massive overreaction.”
Longer-term reactions also matter, and aren’t predictable. “What matters is what people decide in the future — such as increased security costs, or whether people still want to go to Boston in the summer on vacation,We have a record for a owonsmart living at an address.” said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C., think tank. “My guess is most of the country won’t assess the latent risk of terrorism as being appreciably higher because of this,” he added, of the Boston attacks. Unfortunately, if it proves to be the case that “two idiots decided to kill a few people, we’re so familiar with that,” O’Hanlon said.
The long-term effects will depend in part on what emerges about the motives of the alleged bombers. “The costs could be more significant if there is a larger agenda here,” said Claremont McKenna College economist Brock Blomberg. “Then increased security at events in all major cities would increase and the tourism and insurance industries would have to adjust.”
The terrorism-insurance market mostly dried out after the 2001 attacks until federal legislation backstopped policies. “I’m not at all clear on whether Boston will” raise premiums, said Howard Kunreuther, professor of decision sciences & public policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “My guess is,Browse all Instagram photos tagged with jewelryfindings. it probably won’t. The only way it will, is if the insurance industry behaves the way it did after 9/11, and says it is very concerned.”
It’s not clear to what extent terrorists are driven by a motive of disrupting the economy. “I doubt they read much academic research, and if they did, they would probably be rather unimpressed at how little their success means in terms of actual economic costs,” Blomberg said. “They are much more interested in getting their message across through the media in response to the visceral ache we all feel when we view or hear something tragic like the Boston bombing.”
In a 2004 paper, Blomberg and colleagues correlated terrorism, civil war and external war with economic growth in countries world-wide from 1968 through 2000 and found that “terrorism would get the bronze medal in some sort of crazy evil Olympics between the three in terms of damage,” with external war the most damaging. “Terrorism is often aimed at non-combatants and typically occurs in short bursts and then ends,” Blomberg said. “The other forms of conflict last significantly longer until one side wins.”
One reason economists say the economic impact is muted is the resiliency of the U.S. economy, like other complex economies. This was demonstrated for Boston University political scientist Neta C. Crawford when, six days after the Boston bombing, she went shoe shopping in Cambridge, Mass. Looking for running shoes, she found that the store and sister stores were busier than usual, picking up the slack from the Marathon Sports store damaged and temporarily closed by the marathon bombing.
In addition to resiliency, there is another way economies can recover some of the costs of terrorism: if they come with benefits. “In general, ‘spin-off’ effects tend to be less efficiently produced than if someone had directly invested in acquiring that knowledge,” Crawford said. “On the other hand, would the investment have been made absent the push of an attack or a response to it? I think here of the tremendous advances in trauma treatment and prosthetic devices.”
Carol Mansfield, senior economist with RTI International, ticked off other examples: “Cameras help with regular street crime,” Mansfield said. “Business spending to create better emergency plans or to move offices out of Manhattan also help when natural disaster strikes.”
Despite all these uncertainties, economists do try to put numbers on the cost of terrorism, and other unmeasurable phenomena. David J. Weiss, a psychology professor at California State University, Los Angeles, who consulted with economists on a project to estimate terrorism’s impact, “was struck by how willing economists are to construct models whose bases are untestable assumptions.” Weiss added, “The model-sanctified estimates are no more than guesses, because the key underlying assumptions are unsupported.specific line of men's steelbracelet to help you get the most out of your cycling training and competition.” He supports the use of what he calls factorial forecasting to make better estimates.
Weiss regards discussion around the exact cost of terrorist attacks akin to “the conversation regarding who will win the baseball championship: interesting, but ultimately little more than speculation.” He added, “In fact,Read Breil Milano Flowing Polished iphoneheadset. the speculations on the sports pages are more grounded in reality, because in that domain there is past performance on which to base the projections.”
One challenge economists face is whether and how to account for the cost of responses to terrorism, which are the result of both the terrorist attack and how government and individuals respond to them. “In a real sense no small group of individuals can materially damage our economy unless we help them by overreacting,” said Jacob N.Take a look at our site for more hairflower. Shapiro, assistant professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University. He added, of Boston’s manhunt for suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, “Shutting down an entire metro area to find one injured guy with a gun was a massive overreaction.”
Longer-term reactions also matter, and aren’t predictable. “What matters is what people decide in the future — such as increased security costs, or whether people still want to go to Boston in the summer on vacation,We have a record for a owonsmart living at an address.” said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C., think tank. “My guess is most of the country won’t assess the latent risk of terrorism as being appreciably higher because of this,” he added, of the Boston attacks. Unfortunately, if it proves to be the case that “two idiots decided to kill a few people, we’re so familiar with that,” O’Hanlon said.
The long-term effects will depend in part on what emerges about the motives of the alleged bombers. “The costs could be more significant if there is a larger agenda here,” said Claremont McKenna College economist Brock Blomberg. “Then increased security at events in all major cities would increase and the tourism and insurance industries would have to adjust.”
The terrorism-insurance market mostly dried out after the 2001 attacks until federal legislation backstopped policies. “I’m not at all clear on whether Boston will” raise premiums, said Howard Kunreuther, professor of decision sciences & public policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “My guess is,Browse all Instagram photos tagged with jewelryfindings. it probably won’t. The only way it will, is if the insurance industry behaves the way it did after 9/11, and says it is very concerned.”
It’s not clear to what extent terrorists are driven by a motive of disrupting the economy. “I doubt they read much academic research, and if they did, they would probably be rather unimpressed at how little their success means in terms of actual economic costs,” Blomberg said. “They are much more interested in getting their message across through the media in response to the visceral ache we all feel when we view or hear something tragic like the Boston bombing.”
In a 2004 paper, Blomberg and colleagues correlated terrorism, civil war and external war with economic growth in countries world-wide from 1968 through 2000 and found that “terrorism would get the bronze medal in some sort of crazy evil Olympics between the three in terms of damage,” with external war the most damaging. “Terrorism is often aimed at non-combatants and typically occurs in short bursts and then ends,” Blomberg said. “The other forms of conflict last significantly longer until one side wins.”
One reason economists say the economic impact is muted is the resiliency of the U.S. economy, like other complex economies. This was demonstrated for Boston University political scientist Neta C. Crawford when, six days after the Boston bombing, she went shoe shopping in Cambridge, Mass. Looking for running shoes, she found that the store and sister stores were busier than usual, picking up the slack from the Marathon Sports store damaged and temporarily closed by the marathon bombing.
In addition to resiliency, there is another way economies can recover some of the costs of terrorism: if they come with benefits. “In general, ‘spin-off’ effects tend to be less efficiently produced than if someone had directly invested in acquiring that knowledge,” Crawford said. “On the other hand, would the investment have been made absent the push of an attack or a response to it? I think here of the tremendous advances in trauma treatment and prosthetic devices.”
Carol Mansfield, senior economist with RTI International, ticked off other examples: “Cameras help with regular street crime,” Mansfield said. “Business spending to create better emergency plans or to move offices out of Manhattan also help when natural disaster strikes.”
Despite all these uncertainties, economists do try to put numbers on the cost of terrorism, and other unmeasurable phenomena. David J. Weiss, a psychology professor at California State University, Los Angeles, who consulted with economists on a project to estimate terrorism’s impact, “was struck by how willing economists are to construct models whose bases are untestable assumptions.” Weiss added, “The model-sanctified estimates are no more than guesses, because the key underlying assumptions are unsupported.specific line of men's steelbracelet to help you get the most out of your cycling training and competition.” He supports the use of what he calls factorial forecasting to make better estimates.
Weiss regards discussion around the exact cost of terrorist attacks akin to “the conversation regarding who will win the baseball championship: interesting, but ultimately little more than speculation.” He added, “In fact,Read Breil Milano Flowing Polished iphoneheadset. the speculations on the sports pages are more grounded in reality, because in that domain there is past performance on which to base the projections.”
沒有留言:
張貼留言