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> Er, yes? You might have heard of this whole "healthcare" thing that is war on diseases, for one. I heard about rising prices of healthcare and how much of a

> Er, yes? You might have heard of this whole "healthcare" thing that is war on diseases, for one. I heard about rising prices of healthcare and how much of a business it is in the US. "war on diseases" would never be how it's qualified, it's more like a "diseases business" at this point. On cars, the math should not be limited to deaths, any accident that results in a disability would enter the count. I wouldn't try to do such complex calculation, and look at countries that have similar geography but a history of actually caring about the human cost: Canada's average mileage per driver is short of 10 000 miles [0], that's 25% less than US drivers, and Canada already has 25% less cars per capita [1]. The US is at least that far from the equilibrum, with little political will to do something about it. [0] https://www.mychoice.ca/blog/whats-the-average-mileage-driven-per-year-in-canada/ https://www.mychoice.ca/blog/whats-the-average-mileage-drive... [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/registered-vehicles-per-1000-people https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/registered-vehicles-per-1...

jojobas 3y ago
There are some 1.2 million car-crash-disabled people in the US, let's say they've accumulated over last 20 years on average, basically we need to triple the road toll and add for maintaining the disabled, so maybe cars need to save people 20 minutes per day. Still an easy win for cars. Reducing car use and other measures to reduce car fatalities i.e. speed limits are only meaningful in this "productive man-years" dimension if you don't end up stealing more time from people's lives waiting for buses and driving 40kph. In terms of fighting diseases that reduce productive man-years over say last 80 years, it's a very successful war, and there's little surprise that business is the best way to do it, just like many other things. Looking at age-at-death, all causes plots for the US [0], where most people die past productive age, one can reasonably guess that the war on disease is in some sort of diminishing returns equilibrium, where saving an extra man-year costs more than one man-year, go figure. [0] https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/life-expectancy-and-inequality-life-expectancy-united-states https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/life-ex...

jojobas 3y ago

There are some 1.2 million car-crash-disabled people in the US, let's say they've accumulated over last 20 years on average, basically we need to triple the road toll and add for maintaining the disabled, so maybe cars need to save people 20 minutes per day. Still an easy win for cars. Reducing car use and other measures to reduce car fatalities i.e. speed limits are only meaningful in this "productive man-years" dimension if you don't end up stealing more time from people's lives waiting for buses and driving 40kph. In terms of fighting diseases that reduce productive man-years over say last 80 years, it's a very successful war, and there's little surprise that business is the best way to do it, just like many other things. Looking at age-at-death, all causes plots for the US [0], where most people die past productive age, one can reasonably guess that the war on disease is in some sort of diminishing returns equilibrium, where saving an extra man-year costs more than one man-year, go figure. [0] https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/life-expectancy-and-inequality-life-expectancy-united-states https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/life-ex...