So I often find myself trying to make the case that people are especially irrational when it comes to voting and other activities where the emotional content is large but individuals have little influence over the outcome or aren’t very affected by it but I’m stymied by a lack of a good example. I can point them at “The Myth of the Rational Voter” for good theoretical and empirical arguments but a good example is worth a lot. I ran across a good one today listening to the KQED discussion about the proposed golden gate suicide barrier. Now I think a suicide barrier is almost certainly unjustified at the cited cost for reasons I give below but what’s interesting/scary isn’t that people disagree with me. If you think there are substantial third party benefits from a suicide barrier or even just make different plausibility judgments from me in a way that consistently favors the barrier you could reasonably think it is a good idea. What’s both scary and interesting is the sorts of motivations people have for thinking a barrier is obviously a good idea and their failure to even indulge in the sort of cost/benefit analysis that would be appropriate for this kind of question.

During the debate the mental health professional opposing the barrier offered rational responses and citations pointing out the faulty reasoning used in arguments for the efficacy of the barrier those who wanted the barrier would call in to say something like, “you admit a barrier might save some people so how many lives is enough?” or, “If you just say we will always have suicides your saying we will always have poverty and…” and those callers at least were making cogent arguments. Many others simply related their personal knowledge of people who had tried to commit suicide and otherwise used emotional ploys (likely unconsciously) to frame the question as whether you were for or against suicide. One caller even went so far as to explicitly express her outraged amazement that someone in the mental health profession would be so cold and unfeeling as to not want to stop suicides.

What is notable about these remarks is that the guest opposing the barrier was arguing that it simply wouldn’t be effective and that we should put our resources into mental health services rather than barriers. The only role these arguments, or the anecdotes offered in the SF gate series promoting the barrier could have in the argument is to make people feel bad for not supporting the barrier. Indeed, despite the fact that at some point we must trade off cost against lives saved (a billion dollars would not be a cost effective price to pay to save one person) some of these arguments derive their force only by pushing the opponent to bite the bullet and admit that these lives aren’t worth X dollars.

To be fair, the callers opposing the barrier were no better. Their arguments seemed to be little more than thinly glossed resentment at being forced to accomodate suicidal individuals. Also the lady supporting the barrier did make reasonable points by citing several studies that on their face would seem to suggest a barrier would be effective. These studies were pretty much the same ones mentioned in this article and fairly easily rebutted. For instance, showing that survivors of one attempt have good prospects for survival is almost totally useless and may even work argue against the barrier. Not only do the survivors constitute a biased sample containing few of those most intent on killing themselves but this statistic, if valid, argues for ensuring that people first attempt suicide in a fashion that is likely to be prevented. Yet, unless you believe a large portion of people who jump off the golden gate bridge do so on impulse while crossing the bridge for unrelated reasons, you would expect that putting up a suicide barrier on the golden gate that is known to be nearly foolproof would drive people contemplating suicide to focus on another location that may not be so easily monitored. Moreover, making it impossible to jump off a particular bridge seems much more akin to taking a single gun off the street or blocking access to one type of barbiturate while leaving others on the market than the wholesale elimination of one convenient method of killing yourself, e.g., putting your head in a coal-gas stove. Not to mention the fact that a single historical data point about gas stoves is highly suspect, likely involves plenty of confounding factors and the rise in suicides 15 years hence is inconsistent with the supposed claim.

Still, even if you generously believe that the barrier will prevent a number of deaths approximately equal to the 34 confirmed suicides that occur some years this simply doesn’t get you to the conclusion that a suicide barrier is justified. For instance economic studies suggest that we implicitly trade off a single life for about 1.5 million dollars. Importantly even if our individual choices in terms of risks and rewards would place a higher dollar value on a statistical life it’s the choices implicit in government decisions that are really relevant since if we could use the 50 million that it will likely cost to build the barrier to save more lives some other way surely that would be preferable. Thus not even counting the loss of utility that might occur from a degradation of the bridge aesthetics nor the fact that the life of a suicidal person is likely to be less enjoyable and thus contribute less utility than an average member of society (suicidal people really do feel more unhappy than most of us) the barrier is a close call. With these factors considered it seems to me that the costs outweigh the benefits.

If you disagree that’s fine but it’s disturbing that people support these projects merely to avoid thinking of themselves as cold because they weigh the cost against the value of the lives lost. That doesn’t make you warm and caring, it makes you a moral monster. Deciding that someone’s life isn’t worth the amount of money it costs to save may seem cold but it’s not as horrific as letting people die because you wanted to feel warm and fuzzy so you couldn’t be bothered to balance the lives this money could save if used to improve road safety with those that might be saved via a suicide barrier.