Post-racial officials finding it's difficult to hold gains

Houston Chronicle article "Post-racial officials finding it's difficult to hold gains" (September 23rd, 2010) concludes that "black is black, white is white," and denotes the end of post-racial relations. Corrections suggests it gives little data for its conclusion.

A mere four years ago, for example, Americans celebrated the rise of two hope-filled post-racial stars: District of Columbia Mayor Adrian Fenty and Newark's Mayor Cory Booker. Each was touted as a young, energetic, post-civil-rights-era savior in the mold of then-Sen. Obama.

Multiracial coalitions of voters elected them both. Each managed to transcend race-based politics and make gains worthy of national praise regarding schools, crime, housing, economic developing and other issues that are either nonracial or should be.

Yet despite those successes, Fenty was voted out of office on Sept. 14. White voters still supported him almost two-to-one, but black voters in the majority-black city turned on him by a similarly wide margin.

What the article does not state is that Adrian Fenty lost to another black man, Vincent C. Gray. When one black man beats another black man in a Mayoral race, it's rather odd, without including more data, to conclude that skin color was a factor in the political race. Individual candidate race holds no predictive power in a simple regression (there is no variance in candidate race).

Starved watchdog

Houston Chronicle editorial "Starved watchdog" (December 16th, 2009) offers the unsupported asseveration that, in wake of several Houston-area industrial accidents, additional resources need to be given to the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board.

If only a few workers die in an industrial accident, we won't pry.

That seems to be the philosophy of the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB), the understaffed and underfunded independent federal agency charged with investigating plant and refinery mishaps.

Explosions at two Houston-area facilities within a single week have killed one, injured several more and alarmed thousands of residents near the Valero Energy Corp.'s Texas City oil refinery and the American Acryl facility in Seabrook.

Workers at these industrial facilities are free to move to other jobs. Houston-area industrial facilities are analogously free to put in higher and better safety regulations if the higher wage they have to pay to workers for taking the risk is greater than the cost of additional safety regulations.

But what if the additional safety regulations aren't worth the wage? Then we should see an increased number of deaths, and a higher wage. Corrections states, as a credenda, that individuals are able to decide what they prefer better than an ill-incentivized gallimaufry of their peers. Given a choice across multiple alternatives (one the market has an incentive to give if utility may be gained) a government intervention only hurts the very people they are ostensibly trying to protect.

Incidentally, this argument holds without a right-to-sue for a worker or their estate. A law allowing litigation for injuries or death ex post, rather than wages compensating the chance of injury or death ex ante only furthers the argument that government should not regulate as the Chronicle wishes.

Government panel can't put a price on human life

Houston Chronicle viewpoint "Government panel can't put a price on human life" (November 24th, 2009), while titularly correct, fails to realize that human life always has a price, whether the government explicitly acknowledges it or not.

If cost-benefit becomes a primary objective in government-run health care, then government would be in the business of putting a market value on human life, no different than a property appraiser values a home. We know Americans do not want this type of rationing, which would deprive our citizens of life-saving screenings just because they might not be worth the cost on the front end. You can't put a price on human life. [Emphasis added].

And,

We must reduce the costs of health care, but we should instead embrace a number of initiatives, such as electronic medical records, civil justice reform, insurance reform and disease prevention. One thing we can never mark down is the price of human life. It is absolutely priceless.

The fact of the matter is that everyone, including the government, puts a price on human life.  We all price human life--even our own lives--every time that we participate in a life-risking activity. In fact, anytime a person acts to change the inputs in the valuation of others, he provides economists with his shadow price for the lives of others (like deciding to drive 5 mph faster, so deciding to risk one more life per million, in order to clock-in a moment sooner at work).

Perhaps the point of the article is that the government should not put a price on human life, though we ourselves may. While a reasonable position, even then we must realize that at minimum, the government must make cost/benefit calculations about the value of human life in military affairs. It would be very astonishing indeed to find out that the government decided to invest all of tax-payers' money in arming the troops. At some point, we must decide when additional military spending is no longer worth spending. So long as we have government that spends money, it must have an implicit valuation of human life.

Maybe, though, the government doesn't extend such valuations to the civilian sector?  Of course not.  It seems, for example, that mandatory seat belt use laws cost $69 per life saved, while the introduction of an airbag saves $120,000 per life saved, and requiring back center seat belts save one life ever $360,000 spent because of the regulation. Finally, sickle cell screening for non-Black low risk newborns would cost $34,000,000,000 per life saved. Should the government mandate sickle cell screening?

Then perhaps it's the argument that government should never make an explicit valuation of human life. Let's say we get a moral benefit from having government that does not put an explicit value on human life. Even then, the moral benefit we gain might be able to be priced out. Would we be willing to put an explicit value on human life in order to save one hundred thousand lives? One million? Even the government's putting an explicit price on lives has its own value.

The article's proper phrase might be: the price of the government putting an explicit price on lives is too high. While we certainly may agree that the government has no place in healthcare or in setting prices on human lives in that respect, it is important to remember that the cost of the government not putting an explicit price in any realm will be inefficiency.  In this setting, inefficiency translates to a higher death toll.  Ideally, the government would discover an efficient price of life, and would prevent millions of deaths.  The real phrase for the article should have been: Prices are not the problem here, government is.