Steven Lansburg is an economist who writes a monthly column for Slate. In his most recent column, Professor Lansburg addresses the controversy over racial profiling of airline passengers and Annie Jacobsen’s recent article in WomensWallStreet about her harrowing experience on a Northwest flight from Detroit to Los Angeles in June.
Jacobsen’s fellow passengers included 14 Syrians, most of whom boarded separately. Once the plane was in the air, Ms. Jacobson contends that the men began gesturing to each other and congregating in large groups near the lavatories. Once there, the men took turns entering the lavatories, sometimes with packages. At one point, seven of the 14 men stood up in unison and all made for the lavatory simultaneously.
Ms. Jacobsen asserts that she, other passengers, and the flight attendants were alarmed by the bizarre behavior of this group. In fact, the men turned out to be a group of Syrian musicians en route to an engagement in San Diego. Nevertheless, U.S. government agencies have issued recent warnings about teams of terrorists conducting dry runs to determine whether they could build bombs in flight from components that they carry on separately.
Accordingly, Ms. Jacobsen asks the very reasonable question: “Since the [the Transportation Security Administration] issued a warning to the airline industry to be wary of groups of five men on a plane who might be trying to build bombs in the bathroom, shouldn’t a group of 14 Middle Eastern men be screened before boarding a flight?”
Professor Landsburg first takes stock of the typical responses:
The government frowns on ethnic profiling for airline passengers, but Jacobsen and the 12 bazillion bloggers who have linked to her story think the feds and the airlines should throw political correctness to the winds and adopt a policy of full-fledged ethnic profiling. Meanwhile, roughly another 12 bazillion bloggers have warned that profiling Arab men will seriously undermine civil liberties.
So, how would an economist resolve the problem? Professor Landsburg answers:
First, detaining 14 Middle Eastern men is neither more nor less an infringement of civil liberties than detaining 14 passengers chosen at random. Either way, 14 people have their liberty infringed.
Is it worth detaining 14 people (or an entire planeload of people) on every flight to see what’s in their McDonald’s bags or to question them closely about their reasons for traveling? I honestly don’t know. But this I’m sure of: If you’re going to detain 14 people, they should at least be the 14 people who are statistically most likely to be worth detaining.
Second, just because you detain particular people, it doesn’t follow that you’ve got to treat them unfairly. Being detained and questioned is a burden; it’s inconvenient and it’s demeaning. But there’s no reason that burden has to be borne entirely by the detainees. To spread the burden, all the airlines have to do is give each detainee a $100 bill for his trouble. If Northwest had had a policy like that on Annie Jacobsen’s flight, it would have paid out $1,400 to the 14 Syrians. Assuming there were another 200 passengers on that board, they could have covered that cost with a $7 hike in ticket prices.
Professor Landsburg then argues persuasively that the economics of such a policy are quite realistic:
I am guessing that Annie Jacobsen would have been thrilled to pay a $7 surcharge for the comfort of knowing that her Syrian co-passengers had been thoroughly vetted before takeoff. The Syrian musicians, in turn, would have picked up a hundred bucks apiece in exchange for, oh, 15 minutes or so of answering questions. How many musicians do you know who would turn down a gig at that hourly rate?
Professor Landsburg points out that his proposed system is similar to the one used in compensating passengers that are bumped from overbooked flights. However, it has zilch chance of ever being proposed politically, much less tried.
Hat tip to Professor Sauer over at the Sports Economist for the link to this article.
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