TSA Pre-Check = Econ Train-Wreck?
I’m flying a lot at the moment. In fact, I’m somewhere over Wisconsin while I’m writing this. And there’s a reaction I’m getting used to when I show up for a flight, surrounded by my fellow road-warriors in the TSA Pre-Check security line.
Goes a little something like, “WTF.”
Variations include, “Whoa, this is the Pre-Check line?” and “Why did I pay for this again?” Today a flight attendant, as she merrily skipped past me, chirped, “Wow, I’ve never seen it THIS long.” (She was talking about the line—but thank you for going there.)
Alongside us road warriors there’s another, distinct set of reactions from a different, sweetly confused set of people in the Pre-Check line: “WHY AM I HERE?” (All caps; H/T James Stockdale.)
In the extra, unexpected time I had in line, it occurred to me that what we have here, aside from a nice opportunity to mingle with members of the Greatest Generation, is a good example of a half-baked economic policy.
Which, I guess, is what you might expect of any economic policy emanating from the Department of Homeland Security. Which, to be fair, probably never thought it was making economic policy in the first place.
Problem is, the rest of us did.
For those of you lucky enough to avoid the misery of weekly air travel: Pre-Check is a program rolled out in recent months by the TSA. You can pay an $85 fee, followed by a background check and a short interview. If you pass, you get to go in the special people’s security line where you don’t need to take out your laptop or liquids, or remove your shoes, jacket, belt, wallet. No Macarena-pose full-body scan; just a metal detector. And for a brief moment, while you breeze past the unwashed masses, you get to feel like you’re in the line for the next official transport to Elysium.
As a general matter, economists love programs like this. When you have a negative societal outcome you’d like to address—such as a crowded highway during rush-hour or unbreathable crap from smokestacks—you use the power of the Invisible Hand to allow people to self-sort. You set a price; ideally one you can adjust somewhat to achieve the balanced outcome you want. People willing to pay the price—for a FastPass to access the carpool lane, or permits to pollute—will do so. Others, following their own self-interest, won’t.
At first blush, Pre Check seems much like a FastPass freeway program. What's magical, at least straightforwardly so in the case of a FastPass freeway lane or something like TSA Pre-Check, is that both the payers and the non-payers are better off. The folks in the fast-lane are presumably getting their or their companies’ money’s worth (many of them might even have paid more). But the slow-lane moves faster too—and those people paid nothing. Yay for econ.
This, I think, is the thinking behind most Pre-Check sign-ups. We’re business travelers who do this week after week, losing large portions of our life to the process. It's benefits versus costs. We think we’re buying a FastPass.
Trouble is, no sooner did the TSA roll out Pre-Check than they stopped treating it like good economic policy and started treating it like… well, an airline security policy. Go figure. Via the airlines, Pre-Check is being routinely extended free-of-charge to anyone the TSA’s algorithms can determine is an extremely low security threat. And you know who those algorithms determine is extremely unlikely to try to outsmart a metal detector and blow up your plane?
In fact, I suspect the two most prominent factor in the TSA’s Pre-Check formula are 1) luggage with floral patterns and 2) not having any clue what Pre-Check is, or why the nice lady told them to get in this line.
Oh, I'm exaggerating a little. And this isn't about senior citizens, even though everyone knows it is funny to make jokes at their expense. The TSA algorithm could be bestowing Pre-Check on swimsuit models, and it wouldn’t change the basic issue: the line is crowded. In some cases, including my latest trip home from D.C., it is longer than the regular security line. On an already bleak Monday morning, the long, winding Pre-Check line at Minneapolis-St. Paul makes your heart sink. Knowingly or not, Homeland Security deployed economic forces, and immediately undercut them by liberally giving the same benefit away for free.
What’s the solution? One is to quit giving it away for free, and just lower the price. This would increase government revenues, and allow the government to calibrate the Pre-Check line at some level short of wrecking it for everybody. And it would put folks in the line who are prepared to be there, reinforcing the efficiency gains of the set up.
Another is to simply chill out on security all around. If all of these grandparents are considered a safe security risk, why not create a protocol in the “free” security line that takes that into account, but still preserves some value for those willing to pay for expedited security? In fact, the TSA is doing this very thing, by now allowing seniors to keep their shoes on in the regular security line. But it's a half-measure, and a large number of older folks are still being shunted over to the Pre-Check lines (where, go figure, they often take their shoes off because they're unfamiliar with the program).
The wrong response is to take a paid program—which by its nature aligns incentives based upon willingness-to-pay—and arbitrarily and widely start giving it away. Frequent travelers who might otherwise pay for Pre-Check won’t do so, seeing as those lines are just as long as the one they’d be leaving. TSA needs to figure out how to de-clutter Pre-Check before they smother an otherwise innovative, economic approach to airport security.
Got a Pre-Check or airline security story to share?
