Social systems of any type can exist unchanged only until enough people figure out a way to game them. If you have a simple barter system where a sheep haunch costs a bushel of wheat, you’re just fine…until the bushels get smaller. Or, the farmer figures out he can put rocks in the bottom of the bushel basket. The next step is to develop rules to prevent or regulate these practices. It then becomes a rules race.
It’s really not much more complicated than this.
I was taking a class on the history of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the FDA. The instructor said something that’s always stuck with me: “In our world, regulations are written in blood. Usually the blood of children.”
So yeah, that’s why there’s more laws, a lot of the time. A business does something shady, and a bunch of people die (usually children, as they’re the most vulnerable).
Not really. At least not usually. You will definitely have requests for a signal, or for more stop signs, or for flashing lights on the stop signs because people keep running them. But if you slap up traffic signs and signals for no reason, you decrease safety rather than increasing it. There are “warrants” for every traffic device, with “warrants” being requirements that should be met before the device is installed. Warrants are measurable things like average daily traffic volume, number of collisions, wait times to cross an intersection, etc.
If a signal goes up suddenly after a collision, it’s because the collision caused a reanalysis of the warrants at the intersection and the traffic volume is now high enough, or the collision rate for the last year, or the last five years, is now high enough, or some other warrant has changed and has now been met. Usually.
I’ve run across instances where traffic devices were ordered to be installed by a city council even though the report from the traffic engineering section (or a hired traffic engineer) recommended against it; but the instances I’ve run across installed stop signs or yield signs. Signalizing an intersection is not cheap.
It is completely true that fatal collisions, especially ones involving children or high school students, will cause a flurry of requests or demands from the public for stop signs, or signals, or “something”. But the warrants do need to be met.
It was a metaphor. I didn’t mean that laws actually cost human lives. We’re simply drowning in them.
Not only were there no fatalies, but in addition, there were only two lost-time accidents, and one of them was on the ground.
1938’s Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act was enacted after “Elixir of Sulfanilamide”, which should have been a wonder drug (it was the first really effective antibiotic) killed at least 107 people, most of them children, because it was diluted with diethylene glycol, which tasted good but was also highly toxic to the liver and kidneys, and is basically antifreeze.
All they could do to the Massengill Company was fine them $100 or so for misbranding, because elixirs must have a certain percentage of alcohol, and this preparation did not contain alcohol. The chemist who approved it committed suicide.
Perhaps continuing to use metaphors of dying when talking about laws that, quite literally, prevent people from dying isn’t the best way to get your point across.
New technology and new scientific discoveries create a need for new laws. After Henry Ford made the motor car relatively cheap and affordable, you need a whole lot of new laws to make driving safe. As computers became more common you need new laws to prevent computer crimes, and to protect people’s privacy. Asbestos was once a really great building material, then medical science proved it to be extremely unhealthy. You need new laws to restrict its use. And so on.
Declining numbers of deaths of working-age people due to other causes (specifically, disease and warfare), which made deaths due to industrial accidents less acceptable. If in a given year one million working-age people die of disease, 100,000 in warfare, and 10,000 in industrial accidents, society tends not to focus on the 10,000. Cut the first two causes of death by 90%+ and attitudes change.
Better technology, which allows better identification of risk factors, and production and enforcement of detailed measures to reduce them. When laws had to be drafted by hand and enforced by people who traveled by horseback, you weren’t going to see thousands of pages of regulations. Ten pages, maybe. Add manual typewriters and railroads, and you could get to hundreds of pages. Add word processors, airplanes, interstate highways, telephones, and computers, and now for the first time production and enforcement of thousands of pages becomes practical.
Nor is this only a matter of expanded government; the ability of private insurers to assess (via computers), monitor (via inexpensive travel) and price (via workers compensation and liability insurance) industrial risk has been a powerful driver toward improved safety as well.
In my opinion, part of it is simple: laws don’t go away. Problems also don’t go away just because you pass some laws, especially if those laws are taking time to be properly implemented, are insufficiently enforced, or even are being effective but will take a long time to actually resolve the problem they’re aimed at.
Politicians, however, continue to feel pressured to do something about these problems that still exist. They find it very difficult to point at existing laws and say ‘this is dealing with that problem, there’s nothing more that can be done; it needs time to resolve’ because of course their opponent will go ‘congressman Bob isn’t DOING ANYTHING about problem X! I’ll do something!’ and the public will vote congressman Bob out and his opponent in. Furthermore, properly studying problem X and figuring out what the best thing to do about it can take years. Longer than Congressman Bob’s term in office. Can he afford to say ‘we’re studying the problem, and in eight years, when we have an understanding of what to do about it, we’ll pass some laws’? Usually not.
So laws get passed, and while some of them are good and effective, many of the laws are pointless, or the wrong thing to do, or perhaps even make things worse, or simply divert resources away from the ones that would be effective, if resources were focused on those. Not to say that the laws have made things worse in general; many things have improved…but they have done so inefficiently and at much greater cost than they could have if the politicians didn’t have constant pressure to DO SOMETHING about problems that are either still in need of study to decide what to do, or about problems that are already being resolved by existing laws and regulations, but slowly.
The only answer I could see to make things better in this regard would be to have a mandatory review of all laws every certain period of time (say, 25 years) and then require the legislators to re-affirm the law after receiving the report on its effectiveness; if the law doesn’t pass again, it is automatically repealed. This would require each generation of legislators to continue to re-affirm that this is a law they want to maintain. I think it would be both useful and important to keep re-examining laws for effectiveness…and also to make sure people really still want a thing to be the law. Forcing each generation of politicians to go on the record as re-affirming old laws, or refusing to do so, would be a good way to make sure they are constantly required to do things that show their constituents exactly where they stand on these issues.
I also wonder if it wouldn’t significantly reduce the effectiveness of lobbying/spending money on laws. Or at least, mitigate its harm. If each industry had to continually re-buy politicians to re-affirm the laws every 25 years or whatever, it might make it a little more difficult. And it would definitely make it more difficult for the public to simply forget about an issue after the law has passed.
Yeah, OSHA saves lives, but what about all the cool nicknames we’ve lost? I was a machinist in 1971, and a lot of the old timers had nicknames referring to lost body parts. We had Nine-Fingered Johnny, Bernie the Hook, and Tom Thumb.
We had one guy who had lost a finger in one accident, and then lost his whole hand in a second one. He was pretty pissed when he found out that they deducted the compensation award for the finger from the compensation award for the hand. They’d already paid for that finger once; you see? We have so many more laws now because we need them.
Both sides of this debate can be true. It may be that 70 years ago people’s attitudes towards workplace safety, product safety, and the environment seem shocking and almost subhuman. Laws grew up to improve those situations. But laws kept getting added, and some of those laws are pointless, redundant, outdated, or harmful.
And of course, more laws means it costs more to do anything, such as running a factory. Businesses look at the legal environment and see that all the legal mess in the USA raises the cost, pushing the cost/benefit balance in favor of moving their factories to third world countries. Hence more workers get crushed to death in Bangladesh, while Americans write editorials lamenting the absence of jobs for working class people.
And yet the economy hums along while the death toll drops.
Those who fund the push against regulations are those whose bottom line will be affected. And who don’t mind profiting from the injuries and deaths of their workers and customers.
Look at the tobacco companies. Look at the Sacklers.
I agree with this and what Jasmine said above. It is not just economics. It is strange how other than with morals laws, the idea used to be that if you did something harmful, then, bah, it’s life and shit happens.
Like we see the debate today about raising the smoking age to 21 because so many kids are getting addicted to cigarettes at a young age. Actually, teen smoking is at an all time low, but the attitude of the older generation would have been fuck 'em, if they smoke it’s their own damn fault, or if they don’t wear a seat belt and they crash through the windshield, then that’ll teach 'em. Or if a kid touched a non-grounded electrical wire, then maybe next time he’ll learn. Or die, but what the hell are we going to do, have a law for everything?
The idea would have been that we can’t have so many police officers that we police smoking, seat belts, electrical wiring in houses, or try to catch everyone on the road who had a few too many beers. Today’s attitude is that we can and we will. I think the answer lies in the middle of the two extremes.