Tag Archives: innovation

Ford’s MyEnergi Lifestyle

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Lynne Kiesling

You may know that the annual Consumer Electronics Show has been going on this week in Las Vegas (CES2013). CES is the venue for displaying the latest, greatest, wonderful electronic gadgets that will enrich your life, improve your productivity, reduce your stress, and make your breath minty fresh.

And, increasingly, ways to save energy and reduce energy waste. The most ambitious proposition to come out of CES2013 is Ford’s MyEnergi Lifestyle, as described in a Wired magazine article from the show:

Here at CES 2013, the automaker announced MyEnergi Lifestyle, a sweeping collaboration with appliance giant Whirlpool, smart-meter supplier Infineon, Internet-connected thermostat company Nest Labs and, for a green-energy slant, solar-tech provider SunPower. The goal is to help people understand how the “time-flexible” EV charging model can more cheaply power home appliances, and how combining an EV, connected appliances and the data they generate can help them better manage their energy consumption and avoid paying for power at high rates. …

Appliances are getting smarter, too. Some of the most power-hungry appliances, such as a water heater and the ice maker in your freezer, can now schedule their most energy-intensive activities at night. Nest’s Internet-connected thermostat can help homeowners save energy while their [sic] away. While some of the appliances and devices within MyEnergi Lifestyle launch early this year, others are available now, Tinskey said.

One reason why I think this initiative is promising is its involvement of Whirlpool and Nest, two very different companies that are both focused on ways to combine digital technology and elegant design to make energy efficiency in the home appealing, attractive, and easy to implement.

The value proposition is largely a cloud-based data one — gather data on the electricity use in the home in real time, program in some consumer-focused triggers, such as price thresholds, and manage the electricity use in the home with the objective of minimizing cost and emissions. Gee, I think I’ve heard that one here before …

New areas for innovation push back against “the great stagnation”

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Lynne Kiesling

Happy New Year! Here’s a little dose of technology optimism to start your year off: 2012 was a good, solid year for innovation, and there’s room and opportunity for even more. This TechCrunch article describes some burgeoning innovation opportunities in health care, education, transportation, and entertainment.

Here’s one thing to bear in mind if you despair about innovation and economic growth, along the lines of Tyler Cowen’s “great stagnation” or Robert Gordon’s argument that innovation is slowing inexorably:

There was no “next big thing” to speak of, meaning there was no new big company to take attention away from Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. That’s ok, though, because there were plenty of companies that looked at what we do on a daily basis, and found new and cool ways to make it more fun or less time consuming. That’s innovation, too.

That’s a crucial point. Innovation is more than just the massively disruptive, Schumpeterian discrete change that breaks us out of our existing patterns. The microinventions, the small tweaks, the ways to make the mundane less mundane or at least less costly, all add up, and over time and in aggregate they can have a substantial impact on how we live our lives, on productivity, and on economic growth. It’s just that they sneak up on you rather than bashing you over the head.

The LIFX lightbulb: Bringing the Internet of things to electricity

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Lynne Kiesling

The LIFX lightbulb is one of the most exciting things I’ve seen in a while, even in a period of substantial innovation affecting many areas of our lives. It’s a Kickstarter project, not coming from an established company like GE or Philips, not coming from within the electricity industry. Go watch the intro video, and then come back … you back? So how cool is that? Wifi enabled for automation and remote control from your smartphone. Automation of electricity consumption at the bulb level. You can set your nightstand bulb to dim and brighten according to your sleep cycle. It’s an LED bulb, so it can change colors, any combination in the Pantone scale, from your phone, anywhere. And, as an LED bulb, you get all of these automation and aesthetic features in a low-energy, low-carbon package.

This discussion of their project provides insight into the entrepreneurial future of consumer-facing energy technology — it’s not about the hardware, it’s about the software:

The LIFX app is one of our favorite aspects of the entire project, and we’ve spent countless hours thinking about how you can interact with your lights. We have mapped out a very smooth configuration UX from the app to the LIFX master bulb. In essence you place your LIFX smartbulb into a light socket, turn the switch on and then launch the app. You will be guided through a process of choosing your home network from a list and then entering your password. The LIFX master bulb will then auto configure itself to your router and all the slave bulbs will auto connect to the master. If you add more slave bulbs down the track  these will also auto connect.

Regarding security: LIFX will be as secure as your WiFi network. eg. without the WiFi network password you can’t control the smartbulbs.

We’re aware that while the hardware is the most visible and interesting part of this project our software is the soul.

This. This is the right thing to do, from my perspective, from both economic and environmental perspectives. And while I think Kevin Tofel at Greentech is right that there’s a network architecture issue here (separate control systems vs. a single server capturing and implementing your automation decisions throughout the house), a system like LIFX’s seems to me to be flexible enough to be incorporated into a whole-house energy management setup. And, given how enthusiastically consumers have adopted wireless mobile technologies, that seems to be a good place to start to get consumers comfortable with this degree of automation and functionality. Transactive capabilities and dynamic pricing are next! Unless our electricity network is transactive it’s not smart, and intelligent end-use devices (and the connectivity to network them for automation) create value for consumers from that intelligence.

Note also the implications of software like LIFX’s for having electricity enter the Internet of Things. As sensors and the connectivity among them become ubiquitous, we can automate our consumption decisions much more deeply, at a much more granular level (down to the bulb, here), in ways that do not inconvenience us. We can use the technology to make ourselves better off by automating our choices in response to variables we care about, which eventually will include variables like the retail price of electricity and the carbon content of the fuel used to generate it. The Internet of Things reflects Alfred North Whitehead’s observation that “civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.”

The Internet of Things enables mass customization and the ability of each individual to choose a bundle, a set of features, a price contract that they expect to bring them the most net benefits. This is a dramatic technological and cultural break from the century-long custom and regulatory practice of uniform products, uniform quality, uniform pricing as a matter of social policy. The public interest ethic of uniformity ties us to mediocrity, to the extent that it constrains what features and pricing people can bundle and consume with technologies like these.

Another Internet of Things implication here is that, with each bulb having a unique sensor and identifier, we will generate very detailed, granular data about how the connected, sensing devices operate. Such “big data” can help us use less energy, save money, do more with less, and lots of other things I can’t imagine but some other entrepreneur will, and will bring to market, if regulation doesn’t stifle it, and with clear stipulations of consumer privacy and property rights in their data.

You can also tell that this is an interesting topic when I am not the first economist to write about it! I love seeing my colleagues interested in electricity-related technologies. Mark Perry shares my enthusiasm about the application of human creativity to generate such a product. Josh Gans shares my enthusiasm for the networking, the interoperability, and the open architecture. And Felix Salmon offers a worthy note of caution about the ability of LIFX to deliver on its promised features and timeline, given the time delays experienced in other Kickstarter projects.

Is wireless charging finally going to take off?

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Lynne Kiesling

Since the pioneering research of Nikola Tesla (have you contributed to his museum yet?) we’ve dreamed of wireless transmission of electricity, including wireless charging of devices. Tesla’s magnetic induction experiments gave us proof of concept almost 140 years ago, so where are the wireless chargers? We were promised wireless charging!

Jessical Leber at Technology Review suggests that it’s not a lack of supply, but rather slow consumer adoption that’s the reason why we don’t have ubiquitous wireless charging.

Why hasn’t cord-free charging—where a device gets charged when you place it on a charging surface—caught on? It’s not due to a shortage of products, nor from a shortage of companies that want to sell them. More than 125 businesses have joined the Wireless Power Consortium, formed in late 2008 to create a global charging standard. While the consortium hopes the technology will one day become as common as Bluetooth in most devices and, like Wi-Fi, available in many public spaces, wireless charging has been slow to take off.

I think a common, open standard, like we have for Bluetooth and USB, will reduce adoption hurdles, although she does discuss toward the end of the article the current set of two competing standards. History tells us, though, from rail gauges to DVD formats, convergence eventually occurs.

This article is full of valuable and interesting information about the technical hurdles of getting induction receivers in devices, investing in charging mats for public places, and so on, but it’s frustratingly oblique in its answer to the question in the quote above. Leber doesn’t offer any specific answers to the question of why consumers have been slow to adopt wireless charging, although she implies two reasons: non-binding power requirement constraints and the coordination-complementarity bottleneck between devices and charging pads. As more consumers bump up against the constraints of battery capacity, wireless charging will become more attractive. The article also mentions the potential inclusion of charging mats in cars, and the investment involvement of automobile manufacturers in wireless charging companies.

Note here the interaction of three different innovation processes — device, battery, and charging pad. Devices are becoming more functional, requiring more power, draining batteries faster. Batteries have become more robust and longer-lived, but have been outpaced by the power demands of the increased functionality of mobile devices. Layer that on top of the innovation process in charging pads and you have quite a moving target, technologically and economically.

Experimentation, Jim Manzi, and regulation/deregulation

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Lynne Kiesling

Think consciously about a decision you contemplated recently. As you were weighing your options, how much did you really know that you could bring to bear, definitively, on your decision? Was the outcome pre-determined, or was it unknown to you? For most of the decision-making situations we confront regularly, we don’t have full information about all of the inputs, causal factors, and consequent outcomes. Whether it’s due to costly information, imperfect foresight, the substantial role of tacit knowledge, the inability to predict the actions of others, or other cognitive or environmental factors, our empirical knowledge has significant limits. And yet we make decisions ranging from the color of socks to wear today to whether or not to bail out Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers. But we do so despite these significant limits of our empirical knowledge.

We build, test, and apply models to try to reduce this knowledge constraint. Models hypothesize causal relationships, and in social science we test those models largely using quantitative data and statistical tests. But when we build formal models, we make simplifying assumptions to make sure that the model is mathematically tractable, and we test those models for causality using incomplete data because we can’t capture or quantify all potentially causal factors. Sometimes these simplifying assumptions and omitted variables are innocuous, but then how useful will such models be in helping us to understand and predict outcomes in complex systems? Complex systems are characterized by interdependence and interaction among decisions of agents in ways that are non-deterministic, and specific outcomes in complex systems are typically not predictable (although analyses of complex phenomena like networks can reveal patterns of interactions or patterns of outcomes).

One person who’s been thinking carefully through these questions is Jim Manzi, whose new book Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society is generating a lot of discussion (and is on my summer reading list). On EconTalk this week he and Russ Roberts talked about the ideas in the book, and their implications for “business, politics, and society”. Russ summarizes the books focus as

Manzi argues that unlike science, which can produce useful results using controlled experiments, social science typically involves complex systems where system-wide experiments are rare and statistical tools are limited in their ability to isolate causal relations. Because of the complexity of social environments, even narrow experiments are unlikely to have the wide application that can be found in the laws uncovered by experiments in the physical sciences. Manzi advocates a trial-and-error approach using randomized field trials to verify the usefulness of many policy proposals. And he argues for humility and lowered expectations when it comes to understanding causal effects in social settings related to public policy.

Experimentation in complex social environments is a theme on which I am writing this summer, with application to competition and deregulation in retail electricity markets. Manzi’s ideas certainly flesh out the argument for experimentation as an approach to implementing institutional change that can identify unintended consequences and head costly design choices off at the pass before they become costly or disruptive. I made similar arguments in an article in Electricity Journal in 2005 for using economic experiments to test electricity policy institutional designs, and Mike and I discussed those issues here and here. In broad brushstroke, traditional cost-based economic regulation typically stifles experimentation, because to implement it the regulator has to define the characteristics of the product, define the boundaries of the market, and erect a legal entry barrier to create a monopoly in that market. Experimentation occurs predominantly through entry, by product differentiation that consequently changes the market boundaries. To the extent that experimentation does occur in regulated industries, it’s very project-based, with preferred vendor partners and strict limits on what the regulated firm can and cannot do. So even when regulation doesn’t stifle experimentation, it does narrow and truncate it.

Recently Manzi wrote some guest posts at Megan McArdle’s blog at The Atlantic, including this one summarizing his book and providing an interesting case study to illustrate it. His summary of the book’s ideas is relevant and worth considering:

  1. Nonexperimental social science currently is not capable of making useful, reliable, and nonobvious predictions for the effects of most proposed policy interventions.
  2. Social science very likely can improve its practical utility by conducting many more experiments, and should do so.
  3. Even with such improvement, it will not be able to adjudicate most important policy debates.
  4. Recognition of this uncertainty calls for a heavy reliance on unstructured trial-and-error progress.
  5. The limits to the use of trial and error are established predominantly by the need for strategy and long-term vision.

That post is rich with ideas, and I suspect Mike and I will want to pursue them here as we delve into the book.

Honeywell vs. Nest, continued

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Michael Giberson

Slate‘s technology columnist Farhad Manjoo examines Honeywell vs. Nest from a tech consumer’s point of view.

The Honeywell v. Nest lawsuit is being justifiably criticized as another black mark on our broken patent system. If Honeywell invented all these cool features, why didn’t it make something of them? …

Honeywell seems to have patented a bunch of great ideas in order to just sit on them. The sad thing is that if it tried, Honeywell seems capable of building a thermostat that’s every bit as wonderful as the Nest. From my testing, I found that Honeywell really does make great home heating and cooling equipment. If it competed in the marketplace rather than in the courts, I suspect it could really turn up the heat on Nest. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

When I compared the Nest and the Prestige, I found that feature for feature, Honeywell’s thermostat is more capable. …

On the other hand, you don’t need a one-page dossier, two installers, and an hour-and-a-half briefing to describe and install the Nest. That’s Honeywell’s greatest problem….

Manjoo concludes Honeywell has the technology, but not the consumer design nor the business model to get consumers clamoring for their product.

But Nest isn’t unstoppable. Honeywell has been in the thermostat business forever, and it’s got a lot of engineering and distribution advantages. It also, clearly, has a lot of innovative ideas. From what I’ve seen of its gear, Honeywell seems quite capable of creating a consumer-friendly version of the Prestige, one that works as easily and stylishly as the Nest. Now that Nest has paved the way, Honeywell would likely earn a lot of press coverage, too.

If I can summarize that last paragraph, he’s suggesting that rather than suing Nest for copying Honeywell technology, Honeywell ought to be copying some of Nest’s consumer-oriented design and marketing attitudes. (Fortunately for Honeywell, you can’t patent attitudes.)

A secret to Chipotle’s good-food-fast innovations

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Michael Giberson

At Slate, Matthew Yglesias tells the story of a business that is booming: Chipotle’s Mexican Grill, “a company that shows there’s clearly room for growth and innovation in even the most basic sectors of the economy.”

The chain has been expanding rapidly, Chipotle’s stock has risen 500 percent over 5 years, and yet:

… the food service industry can’t seem to get any respect. Politicians don’t name-drop burrito innovators as examples of the kind of entrepreneurs they want to encourage, and despite food’s ubiquity in our lives, culinary progress is slighted as a source of human progress.

Chipotle’s growth since its 2006 IPO should be seen as a great American success story. There’s nothing new about fast food, of course. But it’s not as if Steve Jobs invented the cellphone.

Yglesias follows with, “In many ways, the Chipotle burrito is very similar to the iPhone.” Maybe that analogy is a little strained, but it doesn’t matter, we get a peak at some of Chipotle’s key innovations. The article usefully reminds us that not all innovations are high tech or high science.

(The article gives a brief shout out to burger chain Five Guys, also a family favorite.)

MORE: Another story of entrepreneurial insight in action: Risk and stealth paid off in Eagle Ford shale.

WIRED UK profiles inventor James Dyson

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Michael Giberson

Inventor James Dyson is a fan of Thomas Edison and making lots of mistakes. From the November 2011 WIRED UK:

Thomas Edison, the American inventor, is synonymous with trial-and-error innovating. He would build a prototype, test it, watch it go wrong, tweak the design and build another. Over and over again. … Dyson has volumes about Edison on his bookshelves at Dodington Park, his country house in Gloucestershire, and, over a century later, swears by his approach. (In the 1980s, Dyson’s Ahab-like quest to find out how to make a bagless vacuum cleaner involved 5,126 failures.) “At school, you’re not allowed to fail; the wrong answer is a bad thing,” Dyson says. “But all failures are valuable because they all teach you something. I have lots of them every day.” His company would later use this monomaniacal process to give heater manufacturing a shot in the arm.

One way Dyson tries to promote innovation is to avoid the well-educated industrial designer. As Dyson put it, “A non-hardened engineer is probably more likely to do ridiculous experiments,” and sometimes that is a very useful thing. More:

To calibrate the business to tackle design problems, Dyson has imposed a clearly defined corporate philosophy. Its core function is to encourage “outrageous suggestions”. Take recruiting. “I like naïvety,” he says. “We try to choose people without experience. And we don’t employ any [pure] industrial designers at all.” It means that his staff aren’t polluted by received wisdom, he says, helping them to think afresh. There are also a few artists, even furniture designers — people with no formal engineering training at all. Like Dyson himself.

“If you don’t understand why the sums don’t add up, and you make a suggestion, most of the time you’ll be wrong,” he says. “But just occasionally you’ll be suggesting something quite unusual. And a non-hardened engineer is probably more likely to do ridiculous experiments.”

Ridiculous can prove lucrative. In 2004 Dyson was working on a product that never saw the light of day. He won’t say exactly what it was, in case his company develops it in the future, but it involved water and powerful slivers of air. One day an engineer attempted to dry his wet hands with the airflow. “We all noticed, and suddenly said together, ‘Hand drier’.” In 2006 the company launched it as the Airblade, which uses cold air and dries hands in ten seconds, consuming, Dyson claims, 80 per cent less energy than a warm-air equivalent.

The smart grid and the regulatory barriers thereto

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Michael Giberson

Bob Jenks of Oregon’s Citizens’ Utility Board, writing at EnergyPulse, explains “Why Smart Grid Advocates Should Learn About Utility Regulation.”

Reading between the lines a bit, the reason smart grid advocates should learn about utility regulation seems to be so that they will understand that their talent, inventiveness, and desire to make the world a better place will be wasted unless they trim their vision to fit the established way of doing things. Therefore:

Although Smart Grid advocates have brought something new to the industry, progress for the sake of progress must be discouraged. Let us preserve what must be preserved, perfect what can be perfected, and prune practices that ought to be prohibited.

No, I’m sorry that is not right, somehow Jenks’s text got mixed in with Dolores Umbridge’s introductory speech to the assembled students of Hogwarts.

Actually, Jenks argues a long history of regulatory practice has resulted in a body of established ways of doing things – for example, managing utility incentives through manipulating the rate base, doctrines such as “use and useful” intended to protect ratepayers. If smart grid advocates want to engage with customers of a regulated electric utility, Jenks says they’ll need to work within the established system.

In essence, smart grid advocates, the advice is to realize that any regulated industry is part of the broader political industry:

Look, you need to participate in our system. You need to participate at a personal level, you need to participate at a corporate level.

No, once again I’ve mixed it up a bit. That is Google’s John Schmidt talking about his experience dealing with politicians in Washington, DC.

All snarkyness aside, I actually agree with a great deal of what Jenks says. If smart grid advocates want to make headway in a regulated business like exists for electric power for most of the United States, then they better learn the rules of the regulated game. You want to sell into a regulated utility market? Then you better trim your vision to fit the regulators’ ways of doing things. It just turns out that neither regulators nor the regulated industry do innovation very well, at least not the revolutionary kind of innovation like some smart grid advocates have in mind.

And in recognition of that well-established fact, I’d like to invite all smart grid advocates with revolutionary innovations in mind to come on down to Texas and check out the dynamic potential of the state’s competitive retail market.

Some economics of TSA policies

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Lynne Kiesling

As I’ve mentioned before, I am passionately and actively opposed to the TSA’s fear-based violations of the rights and dignity of individuals. But my opposition extends beyond the moral and philosophical into the economic … and some recent commentaries indicate that I am not the only one!

First let’s think about the cost of the scanners being installed at airports, most of which are x-ray scanners that bombard you with ionizing radiation that penetrates your skin and may increase your risk of skin cancer, particularly if you are already in a high-risk category, in addition to displaying a naked image of your body. Economically speaking, the U.S. government has already spent $80 million on these machines, with another $90 million request in for this year. Politically speaking, most of the x-ray scanner purchases, and therefore a big chunk of that $170 million, are from Rapiscan, a company that benefits from the lucrative relationships of its security advisor, former Department of Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff. Indeed, scanner companies employ many lobbyists, and 80% of the lobbyists for this industry are former Congress members or staffers.

But according to the GAO, the equipment purchase costs, while high, pale in comparison with the ongoing staffing costs that will have to ensue to use the whole-body imaging scanners, as reported in this Business Week article:

Staffing costs could add $2.4 billion to the overall expense of full-body scanners being deployed in airports in response to the attempted Christmas Day bombing, a congressional auditor said at a hearing today.

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration should figure out if the expense is worth it, said Stephen Lord, a director at the Government Accountability Office.

Lord also said it’s unclear if the machines would have detected an explosive device allegedly hidden in the underpants of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the suspect in the Dec. 25 bombing attempt on a commercial jet landing in Detroit.

“While GAO recognizes that TSA is attempting to address a vulnerability exposed by the December 2009 attempted attack, a cost-benefit analysis is important,” Lord said.

The added staffing cost is a consequence of the TSA more than doubling its planned acquisition of scanners to 1,800 from 878 after Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to blow up the Northwest Airlines flight, Lord told a panel of the House Homeland Security Committee.

Note that the TSA proposes, and Congress has so far rolled over and accepted, this expenditure and use of this technology for primary screening, despite the TSA’s known unwillingness and/or inability to perform any sort of meaningful benefit-cost analysis on these whole-body imaging x-ray machines. The TSA willfully refuses to provide a benefit estimate to evaluate against the $170 million of equipment costs plus the $2.4 billion in operating costs, plus the unseen and unestimated cost of the stripping of individuals of their rights and dignity.

Quantifying these benefits will be difficult, particularly when you take into account that most airline terrorism threats originate outside of the U.S. and that even this invasive technology can be fooled easily with some putty, or by concealing PETN (plastic explosive) in one’s mouth. Not only does the technology fail to accomplish what its supporters claim; to paraphrase Bruce Schneier, TSA’s strategic approach to passenger searches is too fear-based and too focused on things and not focused enough on behavior. I’d be very surprised if these expenditures, or even the whole TSA budget more generally, could pass even a window-dressing cost-benefit analysis.

According to an article from Dominic Tierney in the Atlantic, more individuals and policymakers are becoming more aware of this fact with respect to DHS in general, not just the TSA:

DHS is ripe for savings and efficiencies. The fruit isn’t just low hanging–it’s boxed and ready to ship. But Republicans have excluded Homeland Security from any cuts (along with defense, veterans affairs, Social Security, and Medicare).

Politics and ideology combine to curtail a rational debate about the Department of Homeland Security. Cutting DHS funding offers few votes. Quite the opposite: any politician who calls for reduced funding will face the wrath of special interests. And if a future terrorist attack could be linked–even tangentially–to earlier cuts, it might be career ending (this is an even bigger problem for Democrats who live in dread of being labeled “weak on terror”).

Tierney is challenging Republicans to be intellectually consistent in their quest to reduce government expenditure to tackle the $14 trillion government debt and the $1.3 trillion annual budget deficit, but regardless of partisan accusations, the evidence is mounting that the TSA (and DHS more generally) does not provide good value for money, does not give us a good return on the taxpayer and “airport security fee” payments to support their apparently dubious and ineffective activities.

Even the commenters on this post on the WSJ travel blog are quick to point out that the TSA is an ineffective and unresponsive bureaucracy, so when the post’s author muses on the lack of recent TSA complaint volume, there’s an avalanche of comments along the line of “why bother to file a comment with the TSA? They don’t respond. So I’m just going to stop flying until this Orwellian nightmare is finished.”

That point raises another unseen economic cost to the TSA’s intrusive procedures and unresponsive bureaucracy. What’s the economic cost of the foregone productive activity that doesn’t take place when people stop flying? Conference calls, web videos, and Skype are not perfect substitutes for face-to-face, interpersonal interaction, whether for work or leisure. Some estimate of that lost economic activity (just what you want when coming out of a recession!) would have to be added to the cost side of the cost-benefit analysis.

So when Matt Kibbe and Dick Armey ask what expenditures Congress should cut, as they did in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, here’s my top recommendation: Defund the $90 million request for additional x-ray scanner purchases. Pass a bill that picks up where H.R. 2200 did in the last Congress, by limiting the use of the x-ray scanners already purchased to secondary screening. Refocus the existing TSA budget on actually being able to deliver on actual cargo screening rather than passenger search policies that operate on the presumption that every person wanting to fly is a potential terrorist. Or, as Art Carden argued so eloquently in November, abolish the TSA, return the responsibility for airline security to the, you know, airlines, and direct those resources to some higher-value use, like paying down the $14 trillion national debt. With that kind of tradeoff, how can we afford not to do that?

But the invasive TSA policies and the widespread anger and aggravation they have generated have led to one piece of positive economic activity, although I think it technically still counts as a Bastiat-style broken window:

Elguji Software, LLC. released their second app for the iOS platform: TSAzr – Share Your TSA Experience.

TSAzr (pronounced “TAY-zer”), allows the flying public to share their TSA screening experience with the world.

Passengers can provide information such as if they went through a body scanner, received a pat down (and what the pat down experience was like), even if their “junk” was touched.

Now with the Apple iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch and the new TSAzr app, everyone can rate their experience with the TSA, airport by airport. Even post their TSA experience on their Facebook wall.

See which airports are performing the most body scans, which airports are doing the most pat downs, and which airports people are rating the highest and lowest. View real time data and graphics for each airport.

With a $14 trillion federal government debt, a $1.3 trillion annual federal government budget deficit, and government policies that are leading people to reduce their economically productive activity, we cannot afford the expensive and failed bureaucracy that the TSA provides. Nor can we afford to spend money on the TSA budget to cater to special interests peddling ineffectual and morally reprehensible technologies.

We cannot afford to maintain the TSA charade any longer, either economically or morally.