If you think women and blacks have more lobbying power than men and whites, you’re insane.
It is interesting.
Does it also bother the OP that health insurance rates for women of childbearing age are significantly higher than the rates for men?
In thinking about it, I’m not bothered that ALL young men are considered a higher-risk driving population than some other population samples, but if someone tried to then go and break it down further - say between upper-income men vs lower-income, or black men vs hispanic men, then I’d get a little upset.
I don’t know if that’s because I’m used to thinking about insurance as a risk-based business, where sometimes you get shafted for being in a high-risk population, and sometimes you luck out.
I don’t know if there is any “magical system” where the sample populations would perfectly represent reality. In contrast, I don’t think the insurance agencies are intentionally discriminating against men - they’re just looking at the numbers.
IMO if you don’t think so you’re insane.
I think there are a couple differences between men v.s woman and black vs. white. First, and the biggest, is that in the shoplifting example I do not believe the additional shoplifting in poor areas is caused by race but rather education and economic status. In other words, it isn’t that someone is a minority, it is that they are poor and less likely to have an education. Why poor areas have larger percentage of minorities is a different discussion.
Second, contrary to what the KKK and other like minded idiots believe, there is no innate difference between the races. There is, however, an innate difference between men and women. Men and women, in general, behave in different ways. This is not to say one is better or more valuable than the other but simple to state that men and women are different. Men, in general, take more risks. Men, in high stress states are more likely to fight. Link. Men are also more aggressive, which when dealing with tasks like driving, is most likely going to lead to more dangerous behavior. Note, the accident rates may be similar but I’d bet men have more serious accidents. Just did a google search and found this.
From that link:
Assuming that study is accurate (not sure why the article states it is controversial) men cause more serious accidents.
A side note, I do not believe as** Le Jacquelope** states in his OP that charging more for young male drivers is using the same logic as racism. There is strong evidence that males behave differently than females and studies that show male and female brains process things like stress differently. There are no reputable studies showing a difference between the races.
Slee
Hence the contradiction.
I had no tickets or accidents from 16-25. My step son had 5 tickets and 3 accidents and he is only 20, yet during my youth, I was placed in the same statistical group as he is now. So which is it? Penalize the individual or the group?
Let’s put it this way, let’s say for some reason, black women 16-25 have the same accident rate as men 16-25. Would it be acceptable for a woman to pay a different amount based on their race. Before you answer, IIRC California outlawed redlining - the practice of charging different insurance premiums based on your zip code. The insurance companies said certain zip codes had higher incidences of car theft and vandalism and that was true and they decided to charge more in areas of higher risk in the name of fairness. People noticed that those zip codes corresponded to high concentrations of minorities and therefore redlining was discrimination.
I agree. It would be sexism if they did it just because they are males, which is not the case, they are doing it because they did studies and found that males are the ones that have higher accident rates. If it had been females they would have gotten the higher rates, but its based on the statistics not the gender.
And they have found (no need for studies) that females are the ones that have the monopoly on pregnancy, so they are paid less. If males could get pregnant they would have been paid less, but it’s based on the statistics, not the gender.
I fail to see the distinction. A car insurer is not saying to John Smith, male age 20, that HE PERSONALLY will get drunk and smash up his car. He is saying that males age 20 LIKE John Smith are statistically more likely to do so than Jane Smith and they set their prices accordingly.
Similarly, the gift shop owner is not accusing every black customer of shoplifting, but simply assigning his spoilage costs based upon the race of the purchasers in accordance with that prospective race’s shoplifting propensity. As it is now, the price for both races is around $2.00.
Auto insurance companies could do the same thing by raising female premiums and lowering male premiums.
You haven’t heard of redlining, have you? Plus, in health insurance (which is covered by the EU ruling), racial differences do matter. For instance sickle cell anemia and all that.
Insurance risks correlate significantly between gender differences, just as there are correlations between risks and age, credit scores, where you live, and a litany of other factors. For example, seat belt use is lower among male teen drivers than male adults, while the difference between female teen drivers and female adult drivers was negligible. And seat belt use is lower for male drivers in general.
Insurance companies can spread these costs over people or time or both. They don’t print money so, other than correlating prices they charge against likely expenses to reflect actual losses and, while they are at it, incent less risky behavior, there is really little else they can do. Political realities prohibit them from using some criteria, even if they are truly predictive of risk, so you see different factors considered from state to state. Insurance companies are prohibited from using race as a factor in auto coverage so they don’t collect data on race, so they can’t tell you if there is a correlation with these risks.
Aside from what states allow, companies differ as well regarding what factors they use, how they weigh them and how finely tuned their predictive models are.
There are some folks who believe there should be no correlation between risks and what a person pays for insurance – in other words, charge everyone the same flat fee. But the reality is that such an approach would remove any incentive to mitigate risky behavior and that average price would skyrocket. Plus good drivers would foot the higher bill of bad drivers in the meantime.
In other words, if there was some controversial and hypothetical bill up for debate, and we imagine that, uniformly, whites are against it as compared to minorities, and men are against it as compared to women, and in equal and uniform measure, and we imagine that the only thing that determines whether it passes or not is the pressure exerted via lobbying, that bill passes? That’s how you think our society has been functioning?
I’m not sure what you mean by “lobbying”. If you mean only back-room lobbying, I don’t know. That’s a theoretical scenario that does not reflect reality. If you include public campaigns, then yes, women and minorities will generally carry the day.
There are any number of influential groups that rally support for things that are perceived to be favorable to women and minorities as a class. There are very few groups that rally support for things that are favorable to men or whites as a class, and they have very little influence.
It’s not even close.
So in a circumstance like insurance rates, where the concern is the class of women/minorities being favored or disfavored in some way, their concerns will have more attention and be given more weight than the parallel concerns of whites or men in the same situation.
IMHO, this is something that is not subject to serious debate.
Well, not necessarily. Age, race and gender aren’t behaviors. Leaving in incentives centered around risks based on the driver’s own behavior should take care of the problem, really.
Senior citizens are nearly as dangerous as teenagers, but their insurance rates aren’t commensurate with risk.
Absolutely. And I didn’t say age or gender or race are behaviors. But age and gender do correlate strongly with risk. As does credit scores and your credit score is certainly not a behavior. And if insurance companies aren’t able to set rates based on risks – whether or not they use correlating indicators to calibrate against those risks – then the market will respond in a very predictable and unhappy way. (By the way, I would not be so sure that elderly drivers’ rates are unaffected by the risks they pose.)
And to the OP, I don’t need no stinkin’ court to tell me that considering sex in any decision making process is, um, sexist. I am sexist because I only considered women as sexual partners and even married one because to me, without a doubt, women were categorically superior to men. Gender was the critical factor in my selection process for a mate. But you would have a tough time convincing me that form of discrimination was bad. It wasn’t for me, anyway.
And it appears your question is predicated on an assumption, perhaps mistaken, that all sexism is bad.
Maybe there are times – even if only a few – when the short answer is yes, it is sexist, and aren’t you glad?
It seems to me that it is an unavoidable consequence of this fact - this fact that can’t even be contested in good faith apparently - that every law which is passed must inevitably favor women and minorities over men and whites. Right?
Which means that minorities and women run the United States.
And what was the insurance company supposed to base your rates on, when you were 16-25? Your promise that you would never, ever be bad?
How much did your rates go down when you turned 25 and had an established driving record? Do you really think your stepson’s rates will drop to the same level?
You’ve never heard of the Republican Party?
I’ve always wondered if there was a business model where you’d sign a contract for an extremely cheap rate under the condition you also sign over significant collateral or agree to future payments in lieu of higher premiums should you make a claim.
IIRC, we’ve actually had a discussion on whether women could be charged higher health insurance rates due to the pregnancy issue.
Actually women have higher health care costs than men until about age 50, well past typical childbearing years.
“You’ve never heard of the Republican Party?”
While the face of the Republican party is largely male and white, that does not mean that the Republican party looks out for the interests of the group ‘white males’. Those groups overlap to be sure, but they are not the same group at all. I fit into the second category, but believe me, they are not working on my behalf.
Name one bill that was introduced and or passed that specifically and openly benefited only white males. One that is from the last century anyway. Can you?