Far from being a dismal science, I’ve always thought economics had a certain gimlet-eyed appeal. More often than not, economics is to ideology what the pin is to the balloon — the first, of course, being that which deflates the second. But economics is an equal-opportunity deflator, as I discovered a few days ago.

The background: I’ve long taken a perverse glee at the conclusions about climate change issued by the Copenhagen Consensus, the gathering of top economists who debate which global problems can be most efficiently addressed by throwing money at them. The current prescription for addressing global warming by reducing carbon emissions shows up at the bottom of the list. In the economists’ judgment, the cost of implementing carbon-reduction plans like those recently proposed by Al Gore would be far higher than the economic return. It would be akin to spending $50,000 to repair a 1992 Plymouth with a quarter-million miles on the odometer. No matter how much money you throw at it, you’re still gonna have a hooptie. (I’m not a global warming skeptic, by the way — at least not much of one — but I’m profoundly skeptical of the cures being proposed. Focus on that distinction, my progressive friends.)

But what comfort the economists giveth, they taketh away. Turns out they think defensive measures against terrorism are likewise a waste of money for what we’re getting.

I learned that on Monday, when I read this piece in the Wall Street Journal. The Copenhagen Consensus has put ten topics on the table for its 2008 discussion, and one of them is terrorism. The economists’ judgment is that counter-terrorism measures tend to only prompt a shift in tactics by the bad guys: Beef up embassy security, for instance, and terrorists will focus on other targets. Furthermore, transnational terrorists kill relatively few people, in reality. As the economists noted:

Increasing defensive measures world-wide by 25% would cost at least $75 billion over five years. In the extremely unlikely scenario that attacks dropped by 25%, the world would save about $21 billion. That figure is reached by adding up the economic damage caused by terrorists, and by putting a high economic value on the lives lost.

But even in this best-case scenario, the costs will be at least three times higher than the benefits. Put another way, each extra dollar spent increasing defensive measures will generate — at most — about 30 cents of return.

We could save about 105 lives a year, globally. There are few areas where we would consider spending so much to do so little. To put this into context, 30,000 lives are lost annually on U.S. highways.

See what I mean? Economics has way of biting the butts of liberals and conservatives alike.

Add this one to the Be Careful What You Ask For file: allowing reader comments on anything you post online.

The News & Observer recently tweaked its web site to allow readers to comment on stories appearing there (an established practice elsewhere that took a mystifyingly long time to be put in place at the N&O, but that’s a topic for another day). On Monday, I noticed a particularly intense flurry of comments attached to one of the news stories about the melee at a local mall over the weekend. The more I read, the more raw the comments became. It was like reviewing a core sample of opinion from a sociological group that is, shall we say, happily unreconstructed.

Then, suddenly, all the comments were gone. Curious, I sent this note to the fellow who supervises the N&O’s online report:

What happened to the reader comments on the Triangle Town Center brawl story? When I looked earlier this afternoon, there were dozens. I just looked again, and there are perhaps four. And the earlier version of today’s story has none. Are reader comments wiped away when a story is updated, or was this a situation in which the comments were deemed to be too raw?

His reply:

I took down the forum on the earlier story because it had degenerated into an exchange of obscenities, for the most part. We were moderating the forum for a while, but very few of the comments were worthy of posting on our site, so I disabled it.

Then on Tuesday, one of the N&O’s top editors posted a more detailed explanation on the web site, saying in part:

The comments viewed were what one would expect to find on a Ku Klux Klan or Nazi site. The comment function no longer served any purpose other than to allow certain people to anonymously vent their racism, thus the decision to shut it down.

That’s largely accurate. But interestingly, the editor who posted that last explanation was mentioned by name in at least one of the offending comments I saw before they were deleted. As I recall, the comment was clearly disparaging of her performance, but not overtly racist. My point?

Let me just say, with envy, that in my 14 years at the N&O I was never granted the power to erase an unflattering reader comment about me from public view.

I spent a lot of time in the car over the weekend, and as a result heard much radio commentary about Barack Obama’s recently concluded trip to the Middle East and Europe. After getting home, a friend called Sunday evening to chat. In the course of that conversation he asked, “Are you gonna vote for Obama? Is it possible we’ll vote for the same guy this time?”

I’m not part of Obama’s natural constituency, partly because my political inclinations run in other directions but also because I’m instinctively uncomfortable with personality-based movements of any kind, political or otherwise. But frankly, I don’t think my vote will matter. This election is a foregone conclusion. Obama took his global victory lap last week.

It’s hard to imagine any circumstance in which Obama doesn’t win the presidency. The economy went into the tank at a moment most beneficial to him, the media — whose favor John McCain once had to himself — has given Obama a free pass on things like his visits to “57 states,” and his flip-flops are generally accepted to be a sign of pragmatism and realism, rather than political pandering (which is what flip-flops are when performed by, say, Hillary Clinton). In short, nothing sticks to Obama: His flag lapel pin comes off, then reappears. He doesn’t want us in Iraq, but wants a surge in Afghanistan (which has none of the strategic importance of Iraq and twice the difficulty). He couldn’t condemn his controversial minister, then he shunned him. Obama could have taught Ronald Reagan a thing or two about teflon coatings.

None of that bothers me much. I don’t expect spiritual nourishment from political leaders. I want somebody who’s going to run things well, look for opportunities to spend less, and let citizens live their lives as they see fit without nanny-state supervision. Will Obama do those things? Beats the hell out of me. But it sure looks like we’re gonna find out.