Some thoughts on the economic irrationality and political demagoguery of the phrase:
The problem with the “if it saves just one life” standard, other than being outlandishly stupid, is that it fails to take into account scarcity, which is fundamental to the human condition. Are 200 lives worth $2 billion? Of course they are; life is priceless. But scarcity is real. There are very good reasons that we do not require, for example, that all of the safety features found on the $100,000 Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedan be made mandatory on all vehicles. Would doing save even one life? Yes, it probably would save many lives: While President Obama attempts to derive political benefit from fear-mongering about violent crime, which has been in a long and steady decline, automotive deaths are a much more significant problem. Reducing automotive deaths by one-third would save as many lives as eliminating all murders involving firearms.
If you want to follow that line of thought a little farther down the rabbit hole, consider that the number of children killed in back-over accidents annually is less than the number of people struck by subway cars in New York City in a typical year. Should we retrofit the nation’s metros with barriers? It would save lives.
Someone should write a book about this sort of trade off.
In addition to the other critique, it’s also worth pointing out the ever-present hypocrisy of the Left. Banning abortion would save not just a single life, but millions of lives per year. What’s stopping them?
My favorite is when some over-bearing parent suggests that seat belts need to be installed on school buses to save the lives of children.
Until you get to the fact that fewer than a dozen children a year die inside school buses. Billions of dollars to save maybe 6 of those 12 children each year? How about spending some of that on advertising to get more parents to send their kids to school on a bus, instead of transporting them on their own, since over ten times as many children die each year being transported by their parents in personal vehicles?
Just think of all the new voters they would have in their camp… however I part company from the Religious Right on this issue. We have to learn to set it aside so we can cooperate in crushing the authoritarians.
Shouldn’t people be required to wear helmets while driving? Wouldn’t that save lives? Probably more than seat belts. A cracked rib isn’t going to kill you. A crushed skull will.
I remember when there was no seat belt law in AZ. I still never wear them. I got stopped last month for not stopping at a stop sign. The officer said he would not give me a ticket for that, but would for not wearing my seat belt. I told him, “no way. I’ll take the ticket for not stopping.”
So I didn’t get a ticket for no seat belt. $97.05 is what it cost me ($30 for the actual ticket plus 3 different surcharges that make me think they’re the real criminals.) They would have tacked on $20 more if I waited for payday, so I borrowed the money. We only have five cops in this little town. They’re basically good guys, but always looking for a way to bring in revenue. Do not do 26 in a 25 zone in this town.
I remember when there was no seat belt law in AZ. I still never wear them.
With all respect, that’s not very smart.
Perhaps, but it is my choice.
I didn’t say it wasn’t. I said what I said.
Think of a seat belt as your car hugging you. Your car loves you and wants a hug.
Your life, your choice. No one plans on having an accident but they happen. Last week, my boss was making a left turn when a wrecker ran a red light and hit him nearly head on. Luckily, he was in a loaner F-350 instead of his Ford Escort. Also, he was wearing his seatbelt. He was walking stiffly this week but he was walking. Without his seatbelt, he probably would be dead or severely messed up. Excrement occurs, an often very quickly. But it’s your life and your choice.
But, people also die, who otherwise would have lived, i.e., are killed, by the diversion of resources to less efficient processes and means of production.
You can never achieve zero deaths, just minimal numbers. Do not immanentize the eschaton.
What’s stopping them is that they don’t think the lives being destroyed are human. And in some (indefinite and arguable) proportion of cases I agree with that proposition. Is a foetus in the process of natural birth human? Certainly yes. Is a newly-fertilised single-cell human derived zygote human? IMHO certainly not. Somewhere in the middle, a change occurs – and that proposition is what the entire debate is about.
Let’s get really silly here, and make another proposition. You want to save the largest possible number of lives? Fine. Ban the sale and use of bleach. When you pour bleach down the toilet, you kill billions of living organisms.
Yup, the argument is when something becomes human and when it is a clump of cells but science shows us that becoming human happens far earlier than abortion fans like.
Science also shows us, repeatedly, that its conclusions get softer the farther their studies go beyond Newton’s naked-eye observations. Defining when a human life begins is a trick question because the fetus is formed from living cells — but defining when personhood begins is, and ought to be understood as, philosophy.
…and I need to fix the email address in this form or ALL of my comments today will go to moderation.
If “liberals” were actually interested in saving lives, they wouldn’t be such lockstep members of the Cult of the State, the bloodiest gunslinger of them all.
There are very good reasons that we do not require, for example, that all of the safety features found on the $100,000 Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedan be made mandatory on all vehicles
Are those reasons actually very good? There are a lot of lives to be saved by making safer (ideally self-driving) cars, and just because the technology involved currently costs $100k doesn’t necessarily imply a poor cost/benefit ratio. Ramping up the production of those technologies would bring down the costs dramatically. Car companies used to argue that seat belts and then air bags weren’t worth the cost, but car deaths since they became mandatory are way down, and costs have proven manageable.
It’s worth actually computing the cost of each saved life (or, better yet, each quality adjusted life year), before concluding that a policy change is too expensive.
But yes, the author is right that “if it saves one life” rhetoric is a poor guide to public policy. It’s a naked appeal to emotion in place of reason, which is presumably why it’s so often successful.
Are those reasons actually very good?
Yes. For the very simple reason that there currently exist cheaper and more effective solutions. Not -classier-. You might look silly wearing a helmet, but the whole craze to mandate “100% helmets on bicycles” is aimed at the wrong darn vehicle.
Filling the car with foam peanuts is also silly. But it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than $100,000.
The second reason is the typical “I can’t see it because I’m a totalitarian” portion. If you mandate a “Safety” level – some set of tests for Buster-the-dummy to ‘survive’, then you get more different solutions to the problem. You can look at them, see the actual ‘in the wild’ “Safety level” of the better solutions, and raise the bar again.
But, for safety reasons we’ve mandated a very sturdy (can’t have it -break-!) and large (need the torque for loss-of-power-steering!) wheel practically right in the driver’s face. The airbag had to be invented practically solely because the large chunk of steel was the number one source of injuries to drivers. It’s -still- up there last time I checked the statistics.
This extends through the entire car. The strength of the seat itself, the strength of the attachment, etc. But the whole point is to dissipate the energy of the accident. Having the seat undergo a slow breakaway from the mounting could drain a whole lot of energy into sheering non-body material. But there’s no point in exploring that area – because it’s already set.
Yes, there’s always the “We could lobby Congress for a change!” route. But in a “Mandate the details!” framework no one’s even thinking vaguely along wild lines. Because in change would need to convince: Bosses, boss’s boss, fellow engineers, the marketing, the executives … and then Congress. By which point your competitors have either said “Excellent, here’s an application of that they didn’t patent”, or they’ve started truthfully telling Congress “Unproven in the field!”
If you don’t think there are dumb mandates, explain how there’s not a single exterior keyhole on the new VW bugs. But if you pry pieces off (Labeled “Emergency!”) of the steering column there’s a keyhole.
When my boss had his accident last week, his biggest injuries were caused by the steering wheel airbag. My wife is short so she has to drive sitting close to the steering wheel. She’s likely to be seriously injured or even killed by the technology that’s supposed to save her.
…and is required by law/regulation.
Meaning even a lawsuit won’t be helping fix the problem for the next batch of people either.
You could easily price most people out of the car market which would be disasterous for the auto industry and for the economy at large but I guess when you put irrational ideology before the freedoms of everyone else the effects don’t matter. And hey, leftists don’t want people driving cars anyway so they wouldn’t even see it as a problem.
Someone should write a book about this sort of tradeoff.
Someone should publish a book about this sort of tradeoff…
Funny you should mention that. I’m going to send a PDF off to the printer for a proof copy this weekend.
“It’s a naked appeal to emotion in place of reason.”
Admiral Gerrib says: “Jim, I’m disappointed in you! You write as if appealling to emotion in place of reason is a BAD thing! Are you not feeling well?”
If “liberals” didn’t appeal to emotion over reason (as in the “Argument from Pity,” one of their preferred fallacies), they’d pretty much have nothing to say.
Some claim that you can’t put a value on a human life but we do it all the time. Would we spend $100,000 to save a child’s life? Sure. How about $1 million? 10 million? A billion? At some point, the answer becomes no. At that point, we’ve put a value on that life.
You can mandate additional safety technology for cars, planes, etc. but that doesn’t necessarily improve safety. Antilock brakes are a wonderful technology but rear end collisions keep happening, perhaps because people tailgate more. Want to save lives? Cut the speed limit to 10 MPH. Or, as one cynic put it, mount a knife blade on the steering wheel pointing at the driver’s chest to encourage safer driving.
Or subsidize (and eliminate legal obstacles to) the development of robot cars. Human drivers are the weak link, and fortunately we can now do better.
Why subsidize? Just get government regulations out of the way and let the free market find the solution it is already working on.
Just get government regulations out of the way
Indeed, the cars exist because we already subsidized their creation. We don’t need more subsidies to build something we already built. The reason they are not on the road is government regulations. Also many human drivers are better than robot drivers, but I’m sure Jim was just talking about himself. I bet you he won’t give up his driver’s license despite his professed weakness.
hehe.. what makes you say that? An uber-nerd at Google?
Automated cars will give you automated driving. Expect people to be cursing at their cars for doing inexplicably stupid things as much as they curse at their PCs. The law suits are going to be hilarious.
Probably the biggest obstacle to self drinking cars is legal liability. Even Google doesn’t have deep enough pockets to defend against the inevitable lawsuits and Democrats are bought and paid for by the trial lawyers.
No amount of testing is sufficient to prove complex software is completely free of bugs. The best you can do is have the system fail gracefully and with enough warning for the driver to take control, assuming he isn’t asleep or drunk. Airline pilots perform automatic landings fairly routinely, especially in the worst instrument conditions. However, both pilots are closely monitoring the approach at all times. Driving a car is a more precise thing than an instrument approach and it can go on for hours. Humans aren’t well suited to monitoring systems for hours on end and even airline pilots have been known to fall asleep from boredom and fatigue.
[…]self drinking cars[…]
Wait, what? Now they’re to go to bars and drink for us, too? Now that’s just one step too far!!!
Google isn’t the only one working on self-driving cars, and some of the groups who are car manufacturers have actually made self-driving cars that look almost no different than any other model on the outside.
BMW, however, calls it “highly automated” driving, and still *gasp* expects the driver to be willing and able to take control of the vehicle in case of a system failure. Whatta concept…
Robot cars will never work because both the NSA and foreign governments have huge cyber warfare programs to conduct sabotage, and a robotic car is inherently going to be hackable. If thirty million Americans were zipping along at 70 mph in robotic cars, some clandestine group in Central Asia could probably kill most of them in a cyber attack without leaving much of a trace. That would be equivalent to a terrorist nuclear (with full up H-bombs) on a bunch of major cities.
The left want robot cars for the same reason they want to force everyone onto public transport. So they can control them.
I can get in my car and drive wherever I want. Those robot cars will be fitted with a kill switch (for safety reasons, obviously, not because they’re totalitarian thugs) so they can stop me traveling at any time.
As Marx put it, the goal is ‘centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.’ Taking control of transport out of the hands of the owner is just another step toward that end.
The part that’s amusing is they’re most likely going to be “for it … before they were against it” on this.
Because once you feel you have a competent grasp on an automotive autopilot these jobs become at risk: Bus Driver, Truck Driver, Taxi Driver, Garbageman, ….
And if we had state subsidized state-developed robotic cars, the leftists in DC would argue that Americans need to be limited to X miles per week of travel (to reduce carbon emissions) and put mileage rationing in place in 3, 2, 1…
“Or subsidize ……. the development of robot cars.”
Spoken like a true Statist Thug.
If they need subsidy then they are not ready for the market. Or wanted by the market. Or both.
Again why do you want to *force* your desires upon the rest of the nation? Who do you think you are?
If you want robot cars why don’t you go design and build them? Stand or fall on your own. Of course then you’ll be told that you didn’t build that…
Have you learned NOTHING from the Spanish subsidy of the wind mill market?
Have you learned nothing about the corruption opportunities when big donors like Solyndra get big Federal dollars and promptly go under?
You have learned nothing…..
To the Left, history began yesterday and any history that doesn’t agree with The Concept is automatically Koch-funded propaganda. Witness Obamacare, the continuing bailout cycle, amnesty, Socialism, gun control…
Why stop with safer cars? House arrest for everybody.
The only safe car is a dead car!
A big problem with this attitude is that it is completely ignorant of opportunity costs. A classic example is the vastly inflated costs of medical technologies due to regulation in the developed world. Sure, there are diminishing returns on some of the more common classes of medical technologies such as pharmaceuticals (even a perfect drug machine, giving you exactly the right combination of chemicals at the right times for your entire life from the moment of inception, only gets you so far), but it costs several hundred million dollars per successful drug in R&D (keep in mind that there are a lot of unsuccessful drugs). Most of that is just due to the high costs of complying with regulation.
How much do those kinds of immense costs harm us? We’ll probably never know (at least until drug development moves to places that aren’t so regulated), but you can bet that the regulators care only about the people harmed by testing (and that, probably only for a pretext for regulation) rather than the people harmed by the absence of medical development (which happen to be all of us).