In a piece that's been descibed as "creepy" (by Ed Felten) and "witty" (by Ernest Miller, blogging with a heavy dose of sarcasm), Slate's Steven Landsburg continues his quest to give economists an even worse name with a cost-benefit proposal to execute virus-writers. His reasoning: viruses do $50 billlion a year in damage. If we could deter a fifth of one percent of that with a well-chosen execution, that'd be worth as much as the ten statistical lives each death penalty execution currently probably saves.
Where, oh where, to begin? (Continues inside . . . )
First, a death penalty for virus writers would create terrible marginal incentives. After all, if you can be executed for writing a sufficiently bad worm, and you're going to write a bad worm anyway, why not try to write one that will bring down the entire Internet? After all, they can't do anything worse to you.
Second, those damage numbers are total bunk. No one has any good idea how much damage viruses do. What we do know is that the figures we see are supplied by organizations with strong incentives to overstate damage, since no one has yet made the link that suffering damage from viruses is a tacit admission of poor security practices.
Third, we just don't know whether or how these guys are deterrable. Landsburg kind of admits this one, but botches the reasoning:
There's one exception to this reasoning: Maybe there's an alternative and less drastic punishment that is highly effective against vermiscripters and not against murderers. If we can effectively deter malicious hackers by cutting off their supply of Twinkies or crippling their EverQuest avatars, then there's no need to fry them. Whether that would work is an empirical question.
It doesn't matter whether the punishment is effective against murderers; all that matters is whether it's effective against hackers. A good economist, faced with an "empircal question," would try to, I don't know, get some data. But Landsburg, though he may be an economist, is the bad sort of economist, the one whose office doesn't have pads of paper, only the backs of envelopes.
And finally, the morality. Landsburg:
Some might argue that capital punishment has moral costs and benefits beyond its practical consequences in terms of lives lost and lives saved. Those who make such arguments will want to modify a lot of the calculations in this column. . . . Any policymaker who won't do this kind of arithmetic is fundamentally unserious about policy.
But executing someone--indeed, imposing any sort of criminal punishment on them--transcends an easy weighing of costs. That's because however much you or I may value the life of a virus-writer, the virus-writer himself presumably values it much more highly. Rigging your calculation to override that subjective valuation means discarding one individual's preferences as not worth taking into account.
But you can't do that within pure microeconomic theory: as soon as you do it, you've introduced the sort of policy value--it's worthwhile overriding the preferences of wrongdoers because of the good it does for others--that the abstracted economic analysis is supposedly there to help us avoid.
Treating the killing of the virus-writer merely as an economic cost blinds Landsburg in another way, too. However right or wrong his math may be, it doesn't line up with the moral intuitions of almost everyone. In a casual, everyday sense, the way that we get over our squeamishness at having government do bad things to people for the common good is to say that those people were bad, or did bad things, and therefore deserve what we do to them.
But bringing in this notion of desert brings in all sorts of conceptual baggage: it suddenly becomes inappropriate to use a punishment if, for some reason, the sense of disgust we feel at the crime doesn't correlate with the severity of the punishment. It just seems morally disproportionate to punish virus-writers more than rapists, say. Rape seems like such a worse crime--more degrading to its victims, more contemptuous of civilization and society, more violent--that we think it should be punished more severely.
Executing virus writers would be morally offensive, not just to legislators, but to most citizens, even those who favor greatly expanded use of the death penalty. As I read him, Landsburg seems to be suggesting that government should ignore the moral intuitions of the majority, in favor of of a straightforward cost-benefit analysis that values lives roughly equally. But c'mon, Steven, even if you think those moral intuions are wrong, doesn't it affect you at all that they're so widely held? And if you start overriding mass preferences in the name of centrally-calculated "efficiency," isn't that getting a lot like that awful "central planning" you wild and crazy economists are always going on about?
Maybe some day we'll feel that virus-writers should be tortured and killed. We're part of the way down that path when it comes to spammers. But we're not there yet. Not even close.