6 ms·

> Therefore, if the rate is higher for some people, it's either insufficiently disincentivizing poorer people from speeding, or excessively disincentivizing ric

> Therefore, if the rate is higher for some people, it's either insufficiently disincentivizing poorer people from speeding, or excessively disincentivizing richer people. I don't understand how you reached this conclusion. > Speeding has a constant negative effect on society. It doesn't vary based on how wealthy the speeder is. The point of a speeding ticket isn't to make things right or to make amends for the bad effects of irresponsible driving. That would be impossible, since people die. The point of a speeding ticket is to serve as a carrot, or to be "pigovian" to use the term that you just made me look up. Since you understand that well enough to apply the word, I don't see why you could possibly argue that they should be constant, since 1% of people or so can (and do) just straight up ignore the law otherwise. A frequently reposted thread explains the reasoning well - https://i.imgur.com/3OeKrA2.jpg https://i.imgur.com/3OeKrA2.jpg

ikeboy 7y ago
Yes, if you value doing something more than the negative value to society, you should be permitted to do it. This is the entire point of pigovian taxes.
- davidgay 7y ago
  The trick here is to apply the golden rule and adjust the negative-value (an average-stranger's death) to the equivalent value applied to you (apparently-rich-stranger's death). Then you'll realise the cost of the fine needs to increase proportionally to your wealth (no, I'm not actually a fan of valuing people by their wealth, but you seem to be implicitly arguing for that).
  - ikeboy 7y ago
    No, because a wealthier person is not more likely to harm a wealthy person while speeding. Again, the harm is constant and does not depend on the speeder's wealth.
- john-radio 7y ago
  Oh, I see what you're saying. Then no, taxes like this are not pigovian if pigovian means (wiki:) to "correct an undesirable or inefficient market outcome, and [to do so] by being set equal to the social cost of the negative externalities". Again, that goal is impossible with speeding tickets. The "negative externality" in this case is literally that someone dies. Someone (a lot of someones) lose their kid, their life partner, their parent. Can you apply relatively simple financial analysis to assign a dollar value to that? Sure, but fuck the kind of person that wants to do that; that is not acceptable for any so-called "justice system." The point of the tax is not to "correct the undesirable outcome" but rather to avert it as much as possible using reasonable techniques. And no, the rich absolutely should not be allowed to do it more.
  - ikeboy 7y ago
    Pigovian taxes are applied to mortal situations all the time. The most famous example is probably a carbon tax. >The point of the tax is not to "correct the undesirable outcome" but rather to avert it as much as possible using reasonable techniques. If you want to avert it as much as possible, set a million dollar fine for everyone. Why is that unreasonable in your view? If you don't think that would be a good idea, you're implicitly valuing it at less than a million dollars.
    - john-radio 7y ago
      Well, I don't have a million dollars, so I wouldn't be able to pay that fine. It does not make sense to try to implement an unsupportable system. I did not say a good objective was to avert people from speeding "as much as possible" (or I would simply destroy all cars). I said "as much as possible using reasonable techniques." I am not trying to revolutionize the field of public policy economics, here; I am just arguing against a system that assumes that a dollar means the same thing to me that it does to Steve Jobs; it does not, and some adjustment is appropriate.
      - ikeboy 7y ago
        You're definitely arguing with various premises of public policy economics. Although you believe monetary fines are appropriate, you also claim to think we can't trade-off sacred values such as avoiding crime against mundane values like money. The beauty of a Pigovian system is it doesn't require any assumptions as to how much money is worth to different people, or for that matter how much actions are worth. It just calculates the harm to society of the action and sets a fine accordingly. This is very much standard economics, see https://www.jstor.org/stable/725557 https://www.jstor.org/stable/725557 with 300 citations.
ikeboy 7y ago
>I don't understand how you reached this conclusion. Set X= negative value to society of an action we want to discourage, and Y= probability of getting caught. If a fine is set at X/Y, then the expected cost of doing this action is X (fine times probability), and so it will be done if the value of doing it is above X and won't be done if the value is below X, which is efficient. Any value other than X/Y is inefficient.
- lelandbatey 7y ago
  The model you've presented doesn't account for a lot of other effects which we want as a collective want to account for. Let's break it down. We can't assume perfect humans, so we must assume that sometimes, some of the people will act irrationally or make mistakes. Introducing this "error rate" into our actors means there's an un-removable noise floor of cases where we issue fines to our actors for breaking the law. This noise-floor of mistakes leads to some very unfortunate side effects when we use constant fine pricing. Assuming an income distribution like what we have in reality, this means that a certain percentage of our population will have so little income that the fine will ruin their life, making them less effective and thus our population less effective. And there's no way we can remove this by adjusting the price of our constant fine. If we remove the fine, then everyone speeds. Even at the best sweet spot, we'll have a system where some people will always speed, and some people will never rationally choose to speed but will be economically "killed" by the fine anyway. These two inefficiencies are what variable fine pricing are meant to address. By scaling price with actor income, we are able to maintain a similar relative (dis)incentive across income levels, and we remove the cases where we are sentencing a portion of the population to economic "death".
  - ikeboy 7y ago
    >By scaling price with actor income, we are able to maintain a similar relative (dis)incentive across income levels This is manifestly untrue, as I showed above. If you're concerned over extremely poor people being unable to pay the cost, you can waive that or subsidize it. That's far from sufficient to justify scaling.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
Cerium 7y ago
I think the argument is over whether the fine must be denominated in currency units. As I understand it the Finnish system chooses to price their speeding crimes in days of spending money. If you don't mind paying the fine in those units, you can just as well ignore the law.

ikeboy 7y ago

Yes, if you value doing something more than the negative value to society, you should be permitted to do it. This is the entire point of pigovian taxes.

davidgay 7y ago
The trick here is to apply the golden rule and adjust the negative-value (an average-stranger's death) to the equivalent value applied to you (apparently-rich-stranger's death). Then you'll realise the cost of the fine needs to increase proportionally to your wealth (no, I'm not actually a fan of valuing people by their wealth, but you seem to be implicitly arguing for that).
- ikeboy 7y ago
  No, because a wealthier person is not more likely to harm a wealthy person while speeding. Again, the harm is constant and does not depend on the speeder's wealth.
john-radio 7y ago
Oh, I see what you're saying. Then no, taxes like this are not pigovian if pigovian means (wiki:) to "correct an undesirable or inefficient market outcome, and [to do so] by being set equal to the social cost of the negative externalities". Again, that goal is impossible with speeding tickets. The "negative externality" in this case is literally that someone dies. Someone (a lot of someones) lose their kid, their life partner, their parent. Can you apply relatively simple financial analysis to assign a dollar value to that? Sure, but fuck the kind of person that wants to do that; that is not acceptable for any so-called "justice system." The point of the tax is not to "correct the undesirable outcome" but rather to avert it as much as possible using reasonable techniques. And no, the rich absolutely should not be allowed to do it more.
- ikeboy 7y ago
  Pigovian taxes are applied to mortal situations all the time. The most famous example is probably a carbon tax. >The point of the tax is not to "correct the undesirable outcome" but rather to avert it as much as possible using reasonable techniques. If you want to avert it as much as possible, set a million dollar fine for everyone. Why is that unreasonable in your view? If you don't think that would be a good idea, you're implicitly valuing it at less than a million dollars.
  - john-radio 7y ago
    Well, I don't have a million dollars, so I wouldn't be able to pay that fine. It does not make sense to try to implement an unsupportable system. I did not say a good objective was to avert people from speeding "as much as possible" (or I would simply destroy all cars). I said "as much as possible using reasonable techniques." I am not trying to revolutionize the field of public policy economics, here; I am just arguing against a system that assumes that a dollar means the same thing to me that it does to Steve Jobs; it does not, and some adjustment is appropriate.
    - ikeboy 7y ago
      You're definitely arguing with various premises of public policy economics. Although you believe monetary fines are appropriate, you also claim to think we can't trade-off sacred values such as avoiding crime against mundane values like money. The beauty of a Pigovian system is it doesn't require any assumptions as to how much money is worth to different people, or for that matter how much actions are worth. It just calculates the harm to society of the action and sets a fine accordingly. This is very much standard economics, see https://www.jstor.org/stable/725557 https://www.jstor.org/stable/725557 with 300 citations.

ikeboy 7y ago

>I don't understand how you reached this conclusion. Set X= negative value to society of an action we want to discourage, and Y= probability of getting caught. If a fine is set at X/Y, then the expected cost of doing this action is X (fine times probability), and so it will be done if the value of doing it is above X and won't be done if the value is below X, which is efficient. Any value other than X/Y is inefficient.

lelandbatey 7y ago
The model you've presented doesn't account for a lot of other effects which we want as a collective want to account for. Let's break it down. We can't assume perfect humans, so we must assume that sometimes, some of the people will act irrationally or make mistakes. Introducing this "error rate" into our actors means there's an un-removable noise floor of cases where we issue fines to our actors for breaking the law. This noise-floor of mistakes leads to some very unfortunate side effects when we use constant fine pricing. Assuming an income distribution like what we have in reality, this means that a certain percentage of our population will have so little income that the fine will ruin their life, making them less effective and thus our population less effective. And there's no way we can remove this by adjusting the price of our constant fine. If we remove the fine, then everyone speeds. Even at the best sweet spot, we'll have a system where some people will always speed, and some people will never rationally choose to speed but will be economically "killed" by the fine anyway. These two inefficiencies are what variable fine pricing are meant to address. By scaling price with actor income, we are able to maintain a similar relative (dis)incentive across income levels, and we remove the cases where we are sentencing a portion of the population to economic "death".
- ikeboy 7y ago
  >By scaling price with actor income, we are able to maintain a similar relative (dis)incentive across income levels This is manifestly untrue, as I showed above. If you're concerned over extremely poor people being unable to pay the cost, you can waive that or subsidize it. That's far from sufficient to justify scaling.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago

Cerium 7y ago

I think the argument is over whether the fine must be denominated in currency units. As I understand it the Finnish system chooses to price their speeding crimes in days of spending money. If you don't mind paying the fine in those units, you can just as well ignore the law.