No, it has nothing to do with intelligence or godlike control over anything. It’s basic rationality: when the risk of something that’s otherwise beneficial goes down, rational people are liable to do more of it.
If people were really completely insensitive to changes in risk, they wouldn’t have changed their behavior in response to mandatory seat-belt laws in the first place.
Actually, that argument makes sense in some ways, since someone who is a crappy (or drunken) driver might get into a major accident in his twenties. If he didn’t have a seatbelt on, he’d die, but since he belts up all the time, he manages to survive and subject the rest of humanity to decades more of crappy/drunken driving.
I don’t think the belts prompt people to drive carelessly, just that they let careless drivers live long enough to get into multiple accidents over their lifetimes instead of being killed off early, Darwin-style.
What we need is a safety system that only protects you if you deserve it.
Imagine it the other way around: if you were driving ina car full of volitile chemicals that would explode if you got in even a tiny accident, wouldn’t you drive with a little more care? Well, it works the other way around as well.
Everyone has this fantasy that they (and other people like them) are “good drivers” as if there were some acheivement level they had reached on this score. But the reality is, they are on a continuum of care and effort that can always be more or less careful if the situation warrants it.
Seatbelts DO drive people to drive more carelessly. So do airbags. The question is: how MUCH more carelessly: what is the NET effect in safety outcomes.
It’s the exact same situation with health care, to the endless consternation of public health officials. The better we make treatments for various conditions that are brought on by pleasureable behavior (like eating fatty foods), the more people will engage in that behavior, because it’s less risky, and there’s a better safety net.
Your hyperbolic paraphrasing of Apos’s post creates a straw man – the conscious and unconscious tendencies for people to risk compensate are such widely received notions that I’m surprised that an educated person like you hasn’t already come across them.
I just don’t see any evidence of unconscious tendencies at work, and I’m naturally suspicious of any argument that uses the word “unconscious” (i.e. “you say you disagree with me, but I know that unconsciously, you actually support my position”). Have drivers become more reckless in states where seatbelt laws are enforced?
Dare I request a cite?
Even if it recklessness was increased (a tenuous premise at best), just looking at death stats shows a drop when seatbelts are used.
Sam Peltzman did the most widely acknowledged gruntwork here: you can find his work in the Journal of Political Economy, circa 1975.
The argument is not hard to grasp. Having mandatory usage of better safety measures to prevent harm in a crash lowers the COST of driving recklessly. As with all goods, people are apt to consume more of it.
Unconcious is probably the wrong word for it. It’s rational, not subrational, to be less afraid of death in a small car accident when it is, in reality, less likely. Thus, one is more likely to spend a few more seconds fiddling with the radio, a few more milliseconds gazing at a pretty girl in another car, etc.
What’s unconsious, perhaps, is whether to call it “driving more recklessly.” What people want is not recklessness for its own sake per se, but to drive a little bit faster, to enjoy things around them a little more, and to not have to focus so much energy on concentrating on driving. These are goods. The risk of death or serious injury in a crash is a bad. These two things are linked: and when the price of one goes down (possibility of death or injury), people can and will consume more of the other (driving faster, paying less attention).
To borrow a common example, imagine that all cars, instead of seatbelts, were outfitted with a giant spike sticking out of the steering wheel. This spike would make death almost CERTAIN even in minor crashes. But, would the death rate in crashes go up or down? The reality is, we don’t know. It all depends on what the size of the effect is of people’s response to a change in their incentives. We can argue about how small or how large that response will be, but it’s silly to argue that they WONT respond to changes in their incentives.
As I said: If people were perfectly risk averse, they wouldn’t drive at all. If they were insensitive to changes in risk, then there would be no point in ticketing people for violating the law to change their behavior. That’s because ticketing works in exactly the opposite way: it raises the price of driving more recklessly.
I think that seat belt laws are completly understandable. I mean there is the off chance that you could be ejected from your car and hurt some one else. Or at least be ejected like in this case, http://abclocal.go.com/wls/news/012803_ns_highwiresave.html
Is it really that hard to wear a seatbelt.
Off chance is right. That’s a one in a billion scenerio with that schmuck being thrown into the powerlines and surviving. They’re crap laws, if I want to be stupid and not wear my seatbelt and get splattered all over the interstate, it’s my right! It’s not like the law’s going to stop people from driving without a seatbelt. They’ll just pay the ticket and bitch about it. The only thing that’ll make folks wear a seatbelt is to design a car which won’t operate unless the seatbelt’s being used. That’ll sell well :rolleyes:.
Well than I see nothing wrong with a tax on the stupid.
I like you Bryan Ekers, you ask very pertinent questions impertinently.
A cite for risk compensation? Nah! – It’s such a well received fact you as the minority dissenter should do any “leg-work” required. ( Not hard, google for “risk compensation” (add “seat-belts” if it pleases))
Here’s one for starters.
The question you raise about death rates: these people suggest no-one except car occupants have benefitted.
It can even be argued that the trends in pedestrian deaths are biased downwards exactly because pedestrians themselves are risk-compensating – this is clear to anyone who went to school in the UK in the '60s or '70s, when just about everyone walked to school, this now seems to be by far the minority behaviour.
I think it would be simply better if we kept them from breeding.
Well, the fact that Scott Geller (the writer of the first linked article) admit the concept seems at first odd (actually, he said “extremely repugnant”) makes me feel better about my initial challenge.
Sure: it seems odd and even repugnant because we are used to broad sweeping distinctions: either you are a “safe” driver, or a “reckless” driver. But in reality, there’s a whole continuum, and changes in risk lead to compensatory changes in people’s behavior. Simple as that.
People get all snooty about the idea that THEY would drive more recklessly just because driving was safer, as if they are being accused of being bad people. But the changes are on the margin, both in terms of the population and in terms of individual people’s very particular driving habits.
Folks, the debate here misses the point to the laws entirely.
Seatbelt laws are passed so that we as a society can feel we are doing something about needless deaths. This fits into our current governmental mantra that responsibility no longer should be personal, but institutional. A person dies from failing to buckle-up. Society cries over the needless death, and feels bad that it didn’t save the person from his/her own unwillingness to buckle-up. Society then passes a law mandating the use of seat belts, thereby criminalizing the unsafe behaviour. Effort to enforce this new mandate is expended. Fewer people die. Society gets to feel vindicated, and looks around for more ways to save people from their own unwillingness to avoid bad results.
Is this bad? If it is, it isn’t because the states are trying to make money (they are, by the way, only passing the laws because the federal government is requiring them to do so to continue receiving federal highway funds). It is because it furthers a view of government that continues to take away the ability to choose to be less “safe”, “wise” or risk-averse than the rest of society thinks one should be. No one involved in this policy is truly weighing the risk of promoting risky driving against the value of reducing the cost of automobile insurance, no matter how much those two issues really should be at the crux of the debate.