Most people in public policy do not understand complex systems. They really don’t understand social science models either. As a result, the idea that a policy based on good intentions could actually make things worse is beyond their comprehension. Take health policies designed for low-income patients. Through our insistence on pushing low-income families into...
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I had earlier posted about the SNAFUed boondoggle also known as the Eastern span of the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge (here and here), but the bad news just keeps rolling in. Yesterday it was revealed that the tower supporting the entire self-anchored suspension bridge rests on bolts that are likely to fail, causing the...
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I have written before about the amazing saga of the new span for the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge, now 24 years and $6.4 billion in the making...with no end in sight. A full account of its background can be found here. The “signature design” never before built and of dubious seismic stability in one...
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A rancher* friend of ours—fancying himself a free man, self-sufficient, and disinclined to outsiders’ meddling—was stopped in airport security not too long ago, caught carrying a fancy pocketknife: the Mini Leatherman at right, in fact, a handy all-in-one tool just right for a working man. Not taking kindly to the suggestion that he give...
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The Spring 2013 issue of The Independent Review—the Independent Institute’s flagship scholarly journal, edited by Robert Higgs—is hot off the press. Below you’ll find links to articles and book reviews that address a host of intriguing questions: Why have domestic police agencies across the United States resorted increasingly to “no-knock” raids and other military-type...
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Everyone keeps harping on how the Israelis have licked their security problems through effective profiling of airline passengers, so the TSA decided it would give it a whirl—but it turns out TSA “Behavior Detection Officers” can’t do that well, either. Internal whistleblowers claim they’re engaging in racism, prompting “retraining,” according to this CNN report....
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For a former community organizer, President Obama certainly seems to support anti-democratic activity with zeal—from his disproportionate use of Executive Orders, to this most recent action: According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, At approximately 11:30 am EDT [Thursday], the White House removed a petition about the TSA airport screening procedures from the White...
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If airports had barn doors, TSA certainly would have closed the one in Newark, with great certitude and force, on Sunday. As it is, they simply shut down the entire airport, resulting in the delay of 65 flights and cancellation of another 100—after an unidentified suspicious woman had not only already boarded her flight...
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In the days following 9/11, we heard many poignant recordings of phone messages between victims caught up in the terrorist attacks and their families. Perhaps the most stirring was that from the mother of Mark Bingham, informing her son aboard United Flight 93 that planes were being used as weapons and urging him to...
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The elevated freeway that collapsed during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in Oakland had long been known to be non-seismically-sound. Engineering students at nearby University of California, Berkeley were directed to the structure as a case-study in negative harmonics, and we who drove on it regularly were well familiar with the almost seasickening wavy...
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