Authors libby rittenberg 52
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Chapter 2
Confronting Scarcity: Choices in Production
Start Up: Tightening Security at the World’s
Airports
Do you want safer air travel or not? While that question is seldom asked so
bluntly, any person who travels by air can tell you that our collective
answer has been “yes,” and it has been accompanied by increases in
security and its associated costs at airports all over the world. Why? In
short, “9/11.” Terrorists hijacked four U.S. commercial airliners on
September 11, 2001, and the tragic results that followed led to a sharp
tightening in airport security.
In an effort to prevent similar disasters, airport security officials scrutinize
luggage and passengers more carefully than ever before. In the months
following 9/11, delays of as much as three hours were common as agents
tried to assure that no weapons or bombs could be smuggled onto another
plane.
“What to produce?” is a fundamental economic question. Every economy
must answer this question. Should it produce more education, better
health care, improved transportation, a cleaner environment? There are
limits to what a nation can produce; deciding to produce more of one thing
inevitably means producing less of something else. Individuals in much of
the world, after the tragedy of 9/11, clearly were willing to give up time,
and a fair amount of individual privacy, in an effort to obtain greater
security. Nations and individual cities also devoted additional resources to
Attributed to Libby Rittenberg and Timothy Tregarthen
Saylor URL: />
Saylor.org
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