| ▲ | bradley13 2 days ago |
| Wow, talk about the law of unintended effects! Without going into the specifics of car seats, I do think we overemphasize safety. The article mentions saving 57 children. How much are 57 lives worth? The answer is not infinite - a life has a numeric value, ask any insurance company. Every safety regulation ought to pass a cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis. Few of them do. |
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| ▲ | rickdeckard 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Every safety regulation ought to pass a cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis. Few of them do. I think that's the already the ultimate test for any regulation to pass, as it's up against a huge industry trying to prevent costs of compliance. Of course, the calculation is not to put a price on a human and then compare this against the cost provided by e.g. a car-company. When you've lost someone in a car-accident it's not much condolence to know that e.g. an airbag could have saved him/her but "back in 2026 it was deregulated because the car-companies have proven that there's no economic benefit to include them" I know the economy is always important, but human society also shouldn't be taken for granted. |
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| ▲ | nucleardog 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > When you've lost someone in a car-accident it's not much condolence to know that e.g. an airbag could have saved him/her but "back in 2026 it was deregulated because the car-companies have proven that there's no economic benefit to include them" We live in a society, etc, etc. I think it's worthwhile, or even _more_ important, to look at how these impact other people. In some hypothetical deregulated world, I can choose to buy a car without seatbelts, air bags, ABS/TCS, reverse camera, etc and take that risk on. My neighbour doesn't get to choose whether or not they want to take on the risk of me backing over their child. The other people on the road don't get to choose whether they take on the risk of me losing control of my vehicle and slamming into them. The value question isn't purely economic. Regulations that force a general societal care and consideration over selfish individual choices have value in _allowing us to have a society_. | |
| ▲ | cucumber3732842 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | >I think that's the already the ultimate test for any regulation to pass, as it's up against a huge industry trying to prevent costs of compliance. I think it mostly cancels out since the pro regulation side is inevitably bolstered by those who'll sell more shit if alternative goods get worse for the money and those who make a buck on the compliance process. >When you've lost someone in a car-accident it's not much condolence to know that e.g. an airbag could have saved him/her but "back in 2026 it was deregulated because the car-companies have proven that there's no economic benefit to include them" What if it turns out that at the societal level that letting airbags, abs, traction control, etc, etc, etc, be optional is actually better because it puts more people into cheaper newer cars that benefit from other safety engineering even if they don't have airbags and all the expensive electronic stuff? This sort of stuff wherein one tries to anchor the discussion around whole lives (or some other easy to measure thing that makes for good appeals to emotion) and hand wave away anything else is a huge part of the problem. | | |
| ▲ | rickdeckard 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I agree, that's exactly the societal question: The core purpose of regulation is to create better lives for society as a whole. Human lives being lost is usually considered negative for a society, but just a number in economics for insurances, car-companies, etc. It's an annoying hindrance for companies to be forced into contributing to the well-being of society, they prefer to decide on that by themselves. Meanwhile, governments suck at communication with their citizens, and their message is drowned by companies who do marketing every day. So the growing assumption also fueled by companies is that we could have much better stuff if the market wouldn't be regulated. And yeah, there is surely regulation which should be reviewed, but I don't believe this should be done by putting a price on a human life. I don't think we would have bike helmets on the street and seatbelts in cars if they wouldn't have been required by regulation, driving down the cost of development and production and making them available for everybody.
Even vice-versa: If I'm involved in a car-accident, I would also want the OTHER party to have a seatbelt or a helmet. Looking how "disruptive companies" find ways to do stupid shit because it's not properly regulated (e.g. skipping mechanical door-handles in car-backseats, creating "digital markets" without equal competition,...) tells me that ESPECIALLY these days empowering regulators to make good decisions and communicate better on them would be more important than having "cheaper newer cars". But that's just my view... | | |
| ▲ | bombcar a day ago | parent [-] | | We’re also incredibly adaptable - seatbelts and helmets have become so standard that many feel “naked” if they don’t use them. It’s likely if we required 5 point harnesses and head-and-neck-devices (HAND) like the race cars do we’d get used to it relatively quickly. But each of those things has a real cost, one that is borne by each and every individual, whereas the cost of NOT having them is only borne by the unfortunate. |
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| ▲ | nradov 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Actually most federal agencies do conduct a cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis when considering new safety regulations. The statistical value of a human life is around $10M. The problem is that they don't consider second-order effects as a "cost" within that framework. And realistically there's no way for regulators to estimate those effects. https://journalistsresource.org/economics/value-statistical-... |
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| ▲ | computably 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Without going into the specifics of car seats, I do think we overemphasize safety. The article mentions saving 57 children. How much are 57 lives worth? The answer is not infinite - a life has a numeric value, ask any insurance company. Sure, the value of 57 lives isn't infinite, but this particular comparison is a totally absurd one to make. Births and deaths are completely morally independent, it's not as if those 57 lives could be substituted using the surplus of births. > Every safety regulation ought to pass a cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis. Few of them do. Actually I'm pretty sure that is in fact how safety regulations work. Nonetheless, the concept of a "cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis" is paradoxical. Values are intrinsically subjective, hence we have democracy. |
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| ▲ | cucumber3732842 2 days ago | parent [-] | | >Actually I'm pretty sure that is in fact how safety regulations work. Of course the number "check out". Industry regulations are typically ghost written by some combination of industry groups, lobbying groups and academia. Who funds those? The industry either being regulated or industry that stands to benefit if some other industry is regulated. 80-100yr ago if you were inclined to screech about fire safety you'd have been citing numbers funded by the.... wait for it.... asbestos industry. >hence we have democracy. Democracy is a system for ensuring stable-ish power transfers by giving the people some semblance of control over the process and little more. |
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| ▲ | m000 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Every safety regulation ought to pass a cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis. Few of them do. This probably won't happen (at least in open) because there's a risk people will start asking for a cost/benefit analysis for everything. Laws that enable mass surveillance, immigration regulations, military spending, wars, political system. |
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| ▲ | MrBuddyCasino 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It is a mixture of misguided moralizing and math illiteracy as numbers become big. Same category: trying to get to zero traffic deaths. |
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| ▲ | thefaux 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis is an abdication of moral reasoning and responsibility. There is no such thing as an abstract life, only concrete realizations. What if the victim of an avoidable fatality is the one person who had they survived had the skills/insight/vision to literally save humanity from extinction? I can accept an argument that there are societal tradeoffs that we must make that involve the sacrifice of human lives (obviously we should not try to remove risk to the extent that we live in sterile protective bubbles), but we should be honest about what we are doing and not hide behind some phony numbers that mask the fact that money, and hence numerical value, isn't an imaginary construct and that lives are fungible under this value system. I further think that if we have an honest conversation instead of hiding behind quantitative analysis, we may actually have a productive dialogue about risk tradeoff and accountability. Perhaps if there is a wide gap between the bean counters and the bleeding hearts, there is a third possibility that needs to be explored. |
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| ▲ | 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
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