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>That's like saying car manufacturers need to be charged for offloading automotive deaths on society. Devil's advocate but why shouldn't they? At the end of th

>That's like saying car manufacturers need to be charged for offloading automotive deaths on society. Devil's advocate but why shouldn't they? At the end of the day _someone_ has to bear that cost, why should we force society at large to deal with issues that arise as a result of a small group of people finding a new way to enrich themselves?

phobosanomaly 6y ago
On man, if an economist saw this they would be rubbing their hands together like Sylvester the Cat finding Tweety bound-and-gagged and covered in BBQ sauce. You'd have to flee before they locked the door and started pulling out chalk and graphs and a STATA license code from their economist's trenchcoat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem "A collective action problem or social dilemma is a situation in which all individuals would be better off cooperating but fail to do so because of conflicting interests between individuals that discourage joint action. The collective action problem has been addressed in political philosophy for centuries, but was most clearly established in 1965 in Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action. Problems arise when too many group members choose to pursue individual profit and immediate satisfaction rather than behave in the group's best long-term interests. Social dilemmas can take many forms and are studied across disciplines such as psychology, economics, and political science. Examples of phenomena that can be explained using social dilemmas include resource depletion, low voter turnout, and overpopulation. The collective action problem can be understood through the analysis of game theory and the free-rider problem, which results from the provision of public goods. Additionally, the collective problem can be applied to numerous public policy concerns that countries across the world currently face." The part of the wiki that deals with this specific problem (vehicles) is unfortunately broken for some reason, but, eh, we get the point.
- katmannthree 6y ago
  Terrific read, thank you. I'd be interested in seeing an economist's take on the viability and effectiveness of forcing industries to deal with their own externalities.
  - phobosanomaly 6y ago
    If you run across anything, I would be super interested to take a look as well.
cgriswald 6y ago
> Devil's advocate but why shouldn't they? Because they aren't making the choices that result in the deaths. If you force the industry to pay for the negative externalities of the industry, the fixes/costs can be baked into the product (e.g., safety equipment, emissions standards). If you force the industry to pay for things that are the result of government (e.g. overly-permissive licensing standards, building large suburbs that require vehicles) or consumer behavior (e.g., driving drunk, reckless driving), you'll either: (1) destroy the industry or (2) create strong incentives for the industry to lobby government to make such behavior impossible (say by passing an amendment to ban the consumption of alcohol). You also either create a situation where victims can double-dip, getting paid both from the industry and from the individual consumer—who has already paid in aggregate by paying the industry; or a situation where the consumer has no direct responsibility, which will likely have the effect of riskier behavior; at least until the industry successfully lobbies the government.
- katmannthree 6y ago
  In practical terms I absolutely do agree with you. People collectively respond to whatever incentives they're allowed to, you _do_ get riskier behavior when you reduce individual responsibility for actions. If you'll forgive me for going on a wide ranting tangent though, consider the following: >Because they aren't making the choices that result in the deaths. I've yet to see compelling evidence that "free will" actually exists, I think it's just a convenient moral abstraction we've developed to grease the wheels of the world. Supposing it doesn't exist, how could we make a just high-functioning society? One that recognizes my hypothesis regarding the illlegitimacy of absolute individual responsibility while also resulting in equal or better collective behavior? Going back towards the car example, I don't think hammer manufacturers should bear responsibility for the apocryphal homicidal misuse of their tools since removing a hammer from a toolbox just means the crime would be committed with a knife or rocks in a sock. This argument gets blurrier when you consider firearms manufacturers where the explicit intent of the tool is often to kill. You can make a solid argument either way there. So what about cars? They are involved in roughly 100 fatalities a day in the united states. Were cars designed to kill? No (although we do have the case where a manufacturer decided it was cheaper to keep selling unsafe cars and just pay out lawsuits rather than fix their screwup). Manufacturers generally do what they can to make them safer with each passing year. Despite that though, society still has to bear the cost of tens of thousands of deaths per year and two orders of magnitude more injuries. Those injuries, fatal and nonfatal, would _not_ have happened in a world without cars. A portion of them would not have happened without car ads and popular culture that makes driving fast and irresponsibly look cool. It's convenient, sure, to place absolute blame on the people who don't think just watch cool car go zoom in tv then buy cool car on credit and go zoom into building. Doing what we do now and removing those people from society at that point is a viable solution, but what if we put more effort into not letting industrial psychologists develop good little consumers like that in the first place? The US is the "land of the free" with high levels of individual responsibility and we've got astronomical household debt and the world's highest proportion of our population incarcerated to show for it. I think we can do better.

phobosanomaly 6y ago

On man, if an economist saw this they would be rubbing their hands together like Sylvester the Cat finding Tweety bound-and-gagged and covered in BBQ sauce. You'd have to flee before they locked the door and started pulling out chalk and graphs and a STATA license code from their economist's trenchcoat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem "A collective action problem or social dilemma is a situation in which all individuals would be better off cooperating but fail to do so because of conflicting interests between individuals that discourage joint action. The collective action problem has been addressed in political philosophy for centuries, but was most clearly established in 1965 in Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action. Problems arise when too many group members choose to pursue individual profit and immediate satisfaction rather than behave in the group's best long-term interests. Social dilemmas can take many forms and are studied across disciplines such as psychology, economics, and political science. Examples of phenomena that can be explained using social dilemmas include resource depletion, low voter turnout, and overpopulation. The collective action problem can be understood through the analysis of game theory and the free-rider problem, which results from the provision of public goods. Additionally, the collective problem can be applied to numerous public policy concerns that countries across the world currently face." The part of the wiki that deals with this specific problem (vehicles) is unfortunately broken for some reason, but, eh, we get the point.

katmannthree 6y ago
Terrific read, thank you. I'd be interested in seeing an economist's take on the viability and effectiveness of forcing industries to deal with their own externalities.
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  If you run across anything, I would be super interested to take a look as well.

cgriswald 6y ago

> Devil's advocate but why shouldn't they? Because they aren't making the choices that result in the deaths. If you force the industry to pay for the negative externalities of the industry, the fixes/costs can be baked into the product (e.g., safety equipment, emissions standards). If you force the industry to pay for things that are the result of government (e.g. overly-permissive licensing standards, building large suburbs that require vehicles) or consumer behavior (e.g., driving drunk, reckless driving), you'll either: (1) destroy the industry or (2) create strong incentives for the industry to lobby government to make such behavior impossible (say by passing an amendment to ban the consumption of alcohol). You also either create a situation where victims can double-dip, getting paid both from the industry and from the individual consumer—who has already paid in aggregate by paying the industry; or a situation where the consumer has no direct responsibility, which will likely have the effect of riskier behavior; at least until the industry successfully lobbies the government.

katmannthree 6y ago
In practical terms I absolutely do agree with you. People collectively respond to whatever incentives they're allowed to, you _do_ get riskier behavior when you reduce individual responsibility for actions. If you'll forgive me for going on a wide ranting tangent though, consider the following: >Because they aren't making the choices that result in the deaths. I've yet to see compelling evidence that "free will" actually exists, I think it's just a convenient moral abstraction we've developed to grease the wheels of the world. Supposing it doesn't exist, how could we make a just high-functioning society? One that recognizes my hypothesis regarding the illlegitimacy of absolute individual responsibility while also resulting in equal or better collective behavior? Going back towards the car example, I don't think hammer manufacturers should bear responsibility for the apocryphal homicidal misuse of their tools since removing a hammer from a toolbox just means the crime would be committed with a knife or rocks in a sock. This argument gets blurrier when you consider firearms manufacturers where the explicit intent of the tool is often to kill. You can make a solid argument either way there. So what about cars? They are involved in roughly 100 fatalities a day in the united states. Were cars designed to kill? No (although we do have the case where a manufacturer decided it was cheaper to keep selling unsafe cars and just pay out lawsuits rather than fix their screwup). Manufacturers generally do what they can to make them safer with each passing year. Despite that though, society still has to bear the cost of tens of thousands of deaths per year and two orders of magnitude more injuries. Those injuries, fatal and nonfatal, would _not_ have happened in a world without cars. A portion of them would not have happened without car ads and popular culture that makes driving fast and irresponsibly look cool. It's convenient, sure, to place absolute blame on the people who don't think just watch cool car go zoom in tv then buy cool car on credit and go zoom into building. Doing what we do now and removing those people from society at that point is a viable solution, but what if we put more effort into not letting industrial psychologists develop good little consumers like that in the first place? The US is the "land of the free" with high levels of individual responsibility and we've got astronomical household debt and the world's highest proportion of our population incarcerated to show for it. I think we can do better.