First, Glaeser draws attention to what we might call a Kleimanian, and of course Beckerian, insight on containing riots:

My colleague Christopher Stone has argued that there is another lesson about fighting riots to be learned from the incidents in the Paris suburbs in 2005, and the violence that didn’t happen during the Republican National Convention in New York City in 2004. In France, the police initially arrested relatively few people, but sought serious criminal penalties for those they did arrest. The New York Police Department arrested more than 1,000 people and let them go. The New York strategy protected the city; the French strategy wasn’t as effective.

The lesson: Light penalties widely applied and serious penalties applied to a few can both deter unlawful behavior. This is a central conclusion of Gary Becker’s path-breaking economic analysis of crime and punishment. But in the case of riots, it is awfully hard to actually prove wrongdoing and extremely important to clear the streets. Arresting widely and temporarily can be far more effective.

And just as a number of scholars — Boldrin and Swamidass and, separately, Carl Schramm — have called for focusing the FDA on its safety mission, rather than the thornier efficacy question, Glaeser has written a column calling for the FAA to focus exclusively on accident prevention and safety:

[U]nlike today’s FAA, a safety-only agency would not subsidize airports or flying. The current budget requests over $3.5 billion in grants to individual airports. That’s unwise; let airports charge their users enough to pay their own costs. Furthermore, a safety-dedicated agency would not punish airlines for flight delays. If we want to punish airlines for bad service, let some other arm of the Department of Transportation handle that. Nor would this agency help design so-called “Aerotropolises’’ – big commercial clusters around major airports. Today, the FAA does this by helping to connect highways and airports. Let local authorities handle such planning.

The beauty of this kind of mission clarification is that it will allow the FAA to focus on discrete, legible goals for which we have reasonably good metrics. That’s good for almost everyone involved.