[extropy-chat] Psychology of investments in infrastructure

[spike]

> bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Samantha Atkins

Spike wrote:

> >...  One could argue that this is an indirect fear of
> > terrorism: it is a fear of economic failure because of public fear of
terrorism.
> 
> You did bring up terrorism first as your reason.
... 
> - samantha


We may have a good test case coming up that will illustrate or disprove my
notion.  Consider the French effort to build a new monster plane, the A380
with 555 seats:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A380

The Booeing 737 has a seating capacity of around 200 in typical
configurations.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737

Booeing doesn't seem to be concentrating on coming up with a new successor
to the 400+ passenger 747, but they are continuously modernizing the 737.
So the French are going for big, the Booeing boys going for more and smaller
planes.

Nowthen, let us do some estimating.  For order of magnitude BOTECs, I would
estimate a typical big city airport has a plane leaving every few minutes,
so it might amount to about 100 flights out a day, and there are perhaps 100
airports like that one in the US, and a typical commercial flight might
average 100 proles, so thats about a million passenger flights a day.

The number of terrorist attacks on planes really depends on how you count
them.  The 9-11 attacks for instance might count as 19, but I suggest we
count that as 4, since we don't know for sure the other 15 besides the
pilots knew they were about to perish.  Richard Reid the shoe bomber might
count for half, since he was unsuccessful, and some cases are ambiguous like
El-Batouty's piloting the EgyptAir 990 into the ground, so that might count
as half.  Since this is very inexact work, we might estimate that a
terrorist attack on a plane averages out to about every two or three years,
with the last few years being particularly unlucky.  

So about every 1000 days on the average, with a million passenger miles per
day suggests that any given occupied commercial airline seat has perhaps a
one in a billion chance of containing the buns of someone who will try to
destroy that aircraft by whatever means.

Nowthen, by that reasoning, an A380 would have over twice the risk of being
attacked as a B737, since it has over twice the seats.  I recognize that
this might be circular reasoning, or probability theory abuse, so I am open
to countersuggestion.  

Another line of reasoning would have it that anyone who wishes to attack an
aircraft really really doesn't like people, and would therefore wish to slay
as many proles as possible in their final act, so the big A380 would be a
preferable target.  Given that line of reasoning, the A380 might be even
more than twice as attractive as a B737.  

By that reasoning, proles might try to avoid riding aboard the really big
guys, leading to the decline and perhaps eventual failure of the French
company, resulting in a wild prosperity for the Booeing boys.  Or the proles
might conjecture as I did that Airbus is a bad buy, because other proles
like themselves are likely to avoid riding aboard the largest planes out of
fear of terrorism.  We have nothing to fear but fear itself.  

So here is the punchline: I am on with my life, I still get on planes every
two to three weeks.  But if I were buying airline manufacturing stock today,
I would buy Booeing and not Airbus.  (I find both companies most
distasteful, however I do not let that get in the way of the prime directive
of maximizing my personal level of filthy lucre.)  

Let us watch to see if this notion proves itself in the airline biz.  

spike