Freedom, seatbelt laws, and self-enforcing mechanisms
I have always found seatbelt laws, helmet laws, "no swimming" laws at inherently dangerous beaches, and other such restrictions to be incredibly odd, simply as behavioral experiments. Perhaps my weakness is that I was trained as an economist, and not a psychologist, and that as an undergraduate I was handed a set of analytical tools that included "rationality" and "self-interest". A rationalist would ask why it is necessary to tell people "buckle up" if they are so self-interested since, after all, law or no law, there already exists a very strong deterrence mechanism, namely a higher risk of death. If we are all rational, then anyone who wasn't convinced by the heightened risk of death will most likely not "buckle up" over a $50 fine. If we have better information about our own preferences than does an outside agent (this is always true), we will be able to make the correct decision about whether or not we should wear a seatbelt.
It is a well-known fact in the history of seatbelts that people were originally quite averse to driving with them. If we assume that people are, in fact, rational and self-interested, then the problem must lie with information. Either they do not believe that seatbelts will save their lives (insufficient information about seatbelts), or they believe that they will not get into an accident (insufficient information about reality), or they are simply uninformed about the effectiveness of seatbelts.
The next line of questioning (similar, but different) asks why anyone would care to pass a seatbelt law if the only people who incurred the costs were those who would have broken the law anyway. In other words, observability aside, if we allow people to smoke, overeat, and have unprotected sex, why must we then forbid them from driving without a seatbelt? All these things are arguably socially costly: i.e., one justification for seatbelt laws is that, if a certain fraction of all medical costs are always borne publicly, and since the medical expense incurred for someone in an accident not wearing a seatbelt is higher on average than the medical expense incurred for someone in an accident who was wearing a seatbelt, seatbelt laws represent a reduction in the public fiscal burden. But other legal things are socially costly, too--increases in general overall obesity and smoking increase my health insurance premiums, though I am neither obese nor a smoker. To be consistent, we could consider passing obesity laws and a nation-wide smoking ban, and these could be quite effective, but the obvious sacrifice would be our own personal freedom, and would be conceding that the government informed to make important decisions for us on intimately personal matters--something I am not ready to agree to!
In short, my feeling is that either (a) people are not as rational as we would like, in the sense that they are unable to correctly perceive catastrophic risk, or (b) we do not value our own lives as much as we value the lives of others. My wife noted that we generally blame catastrophic outcomes on the authorities--for instance, when someone drowns in a lake where there is a "swim at your own risk" sign, society will tend to feel obligated to forbid swimming in lakes where there is no lifeguard, in order to protect its citizens from their own stupidity. Arguably this is because of our unreasonable expectations, our desire to offer a solution to every problem, even if that solution does not help at all...
It is a well-known fact in the history of seatbelts that people were originally quite averse to driving with them. If we assume that people are, in fact, rational and self-interested, then the problem must lie with information. Either they do not believe that seatbelts will save their lives (insufficient information about seatbelts), or they believe that they will not get into an accident (insufficient information about reality), or they are simply uninformed about the effectiveness of seatbelts.
The next line of questioning (similar, but different) asks why anyone would care to pass a seatbelt law if the only people who incurred the costs were those who would have broken the law anyway. In other words, observability aside, if we allow people to smoke, overeat, and have unprotected sex, why must we then forbid them from driving without a seatbelt? All these things are arguably socially costly: i.e., one justification for seatbelt laws is that, if a certain fraction of all medical costs are always borne publicly, and since the medical expense incurred for someone in an accident not wearing a seatbelt is higher on average than the medical expense incurred for someone in an accident who was wearing a seatbelt, seatbelt laws represent a reduction in the public fiscal burden. But other legal things are socially costly, too--increases in general overall obesity and smoking increase my health insurance premiums, though I am neither obese nor a smoker. To be consistent, we could consider passing obesity laws and a nation-wide smoking ban, and these could be quite effective, but the obvious sacrifice would be our own personal freedom, and would be conceding that the government informed to make important decisions for us on intimately personal matters--something I am not ready to agree to!
In short, my feeling is that either (a) people are not as rational as we would like, in the sense that they are unable to correctly perceive catastrophic risk, or (b) we do not value our own lives as much as we value the lives of others. My wife noted that we generally blame catastrophic outcomes on the authorities--for instance, when someone drowns in a lake where there is a "swim at your own risk" sign, society will tend to feel obligated to forbid swimming in lakes where there is no lifeguard, in order to protect its citizens from their own stupidity. Arguably this is because of our unreasonable expectations, our desire to offer a solution to every problem, even if that solution does not help at all...
posted by Thăng-Long at 8:13 AM
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