Landslide costs

Christchurch Council and the government will buy out some Christchurch properties at high risk of landslide. Here's Chris Hutching at NBR:

The government and Christchurch City Council will buy 16 Port Hills properties.

"The latest council-commissioned GNS Science reports show 37 green-zoned homes are in areas where the risk to life from mass movement (sometimes called landslide) is considered intolerable,” according to a council media statement.

An intolerable risk is defined when “the risk to life from mass movement in any one year is equal to or greater than one in 10,000.”

Geonet identified 37 at risk properties in total.

Ok. Recall that the value of a statistical life for policy purposes in New Zealand, or at least the one used by MoT for transport planning and subsequently adopted elsewhere in policy, is $3.85 million per fatality.

Let's work out whether the policy here makes sense.

The median 4-bedroom house in Redcliffs/Sumner, where most of this kind of risk obtains, is $690 per week. Let's take that as the value of housing services over and above the value of services that would be provided by a park in the same spot: the rental costs understate the value of housing services of owner-occupied properties, but parks provide some value too. Let's be safe and call it $500/week extra value. For a year, let's round that down to $25,000 per year. We want an annual figure because the 1/10,000 risk is annualised. Alternatively, we could take the value of the house and the lifetime risk of landslide for that house's life.

If a house has an intolerable risk at a 1/10,000 risk of landslide death, and if that risk is sufficient for buying out the home-owner and taking that property out of housing use, then we're willing to forego $25,000 per year in housing services to avoid a 1/10,000 risk of landslide death.

Now let's suppose that a 4-bedroom house, our valuation basis here, has 5 people in it.

$25,000 * 10,000 = $250,000,000.

$250,000,000 / 5 = $50,000,000

The Ministry of Transport is willing to spend up to about $3.85 million to save a life by roading improvements that prevent deaths.

The government here is spending at least $50 million per (ballpark) statistical life saved.

I'm not sure that this makes a lot of sense where there are other projects that, for the same total cost, could save more expected statistical lives.

Unless we think that dying in a landslide is about thirteen times worse than dying in a car accident. I'm really rather sure I'd rather die in a car accident than in a landslide. Suppose a genie came to me and said, "Eric, you and your family, I know with certainty, have a 10% chance of dying in a bad car accident next year. It'll be quick though. Would you like to trade that for a 0.8% chance of your family dying in a landslide? It'll be pretty terrible."

If you were given that choice, and you'd take the deal to get the landslide instead, then the government's buyout doesn't make sense. If you prefer the car accident, then the buyout can make sense.

Update: Note too that there's an important difference between houses and roading investments. The government, in the latter case, makes investments to mitigate risk of death and accident for anyone using that road. While there may be some roads that risk-averse drivers avoid because they're too terrifying, we all have reasonable expectations of safety on government-owned roads. If I choose to buy a house at the bottom of a very unstable hillside, I have demonstrated that I'm comfortable with that risk. While it's true that the earthquakes reveal more about the actual risk and that some owners may have erred, that could be an argument for an insurance payout for the amount of capital loss, not for buying the owners out and barring future residential use. All we then need is the one-time compensation, plus a great big highlighted section at the front of the property's LIM report noting the substantial landslide risk present at the property. If some prefer taking that risk for a lower-cost house, why should that be illegal?

Deterrence or encouragement

One reason it's tough to identify deterrence effects of the death penalty: the long and variable lags between sentence and execution can be under conditions more pleasant than those in the general prison population.

AS AN ORANGE COUNTY jury debated in 2009 whether the white supremacist Billy Joe Johnson should live or die for murdering a fellow gang member, he asked to be sent to death row. Not because he felt any sudden remorse for the five people he’d killed over the years—“I commit crimes when people piss me off,” he once explained, matter-of-factly—but because Johnson believed he’d have better living conditions, including liberal phone privileges, a bigger cell, and daily human interaction, at San Quentin’s death row than he would at Pelican Bay, one of the state’s toughest maximum-security prisons, where he was serving a 46-year-to-life sentence, primarily in solitary confinement.

He also knew that the odds were good that he might never be executed. Bogged down by constitutional challenges and appeals, California’s system takes an average of 20 years to move a prisoner from conviction to execution.

Experts on both sides of the death-penalty debate have long agreed that California’s system is the nation’s costliest and least efficient. This June, a landmark report by Paula M. Mitchell, a professor at Loyola Law School, and Arthur L. Alarcón, a senior judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, unearthed new data that reveal just how bad the system is.

Their report showed that since the current death-penalty statute was enacted in 1978, taxpayers have spent more than $4 billion on only 13 executions, or roughly $308 million per execution. As of 2009, prosecuting death-penalty cases cost upwards of $184 million more each year than life-without-parole cases. Housing, health care, and legal representation for California’s current death-row population of 714—the largest in the country—account for $144 million in annual extra costs. If juries continue to send an average of 20 convicts to San Quentin’s death row each year, and executions continue at the present rate, by 2030 the ranks of the condemned will have swelled to more than 1,000, and California’s taxpayers will have spent $9 billion to execute a total of 23 inmates.

I'd want to see that as a per-case excess cost rather than as an aggregate. But it's hard to see how the system makes sense.

Of death and blogging

I'm no Stoic. And of the things in death that give me pause, not being able to blog or tweet doesn't make the top five. But I don't blog nearly as well as Justin E.H. Smith.

I often find that the idea of my own death is simply too hard to grasp. It may be that I am more Stoic than Nagelian: what concern is the world of mine, if the world will no longer have me? I expect my loved ones will absorb the loss; I have no large estate that will need worrying about, no mythology of transmitting my legacy through a healthy son weighing upon me; I am more than content to transfer my teaching load to someone else; and so on. I think I can even imagine my own body decaying in its coffin without being too troubled (I shiver a bit, but this is more a titillation arising from a taste for the macabre than it is a horror). But here is the thought that makes death formidable again: it is the moment after which I will never post to my blog again, after which I will never write another Facebook status update, I will never again tweet. My soul cries out: “But I can’t live without doing these things!” And death answers back: “No. But you can die.”

This is to say that my life is wrapped up with an activity from which I will have to leave off at death. But it is also the activity, I am increasingly coming to think, of actively constructing my self, and this activity, when it leaves off in death, will leave an accurate and vivid trace of a life. My online activity is, as I already put it, both mask and gravestone at once.

Many thanks to Xavier Marquez for the repeated pointers from his shared items feed. A few notable Smith hits:

• Ending the Death Penalty
• Seriously, What About Cousin Marriage?
• On The Internet
• Conversations with DHS Agents