Shut Up and Quit Driving
Landsburg, Steven E.
"Shut Up and Quit Driving" LIKE THAT BY STEVEN E. LANDSBURG Click and Clack. the Tappet Brothers of National Public Radio's popular weekly show Car Talk, have declared war on drivers...
...MARCH/APRIL 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 31...
...The goal of their paper is to weigh those costs against the benefits to drivers of using their phones...
...To figure out whether it's bad, you've got to weigh the costs against the benefits...
...So you might think they'd welcome a cost-benefit analysis of cell phone use by drivers, at least as a starting point for a discussion...
...The AEI-Brookings study is all about factoring in the injuries, lost lives and pain and suffering from cellphone-related accidents...
...What price has Mr...
...damaged vehicles...
...That's a lousy deal...
...but so far the Tappets have not proposed to outlaw driving...
...And you subtract...
...Sup-pose, for example, that after reworking Hahn's argument, we were to discover that the cost of a ban is, oh, say, $10 billion.Then what would the Tappets' cherished ban accomplish...
...No matter who you are, there is a limit to what you're willing to spend to save lives...
...Instead, when just such an analysis came along, the Tappets responded with vitriol, lies and slander...
...Actually, I don't buy it, for a variety of reasons...
...Person-ally, I'm unconvinced, for reasons I'll get to...
...acknowledge in a note near the end of their paper—the true benefit of talking-while-driving is probably far less than $25 billion...
...The analysis is courtesy of some economists at AEI-Brookings—Robert Hahn, Paul Tetlock and Jason Burnett—who reckon that drivers' cell phones are indeed deadly but nevertheless (on net) a good thing...
...In that case, the ban's a good idea...
...Cell phone use increases your accident risk by almost 400 percent...
...On their Web page, wwwcartalk.corn, the Tappets dismiss the Brookings study thusly: "Here's an economic analysis that shows the enormous value to the economy of driving and talking...
...Drivers would give up $10 billion in benefits to prevent 300 deaths (plus some injuries and property damage...
...Here's how you measure the relevant benefits:You figure that the value of a cell phone call is equal to what you're willing to pay for it, minus what you actually pay for it...
...But so what...
...As long as we don't factor in the injuries, lost lives, pain and suffering of all those accidents, that isl)" That description is a slanderous lie...
...The Tappet Brothers, however, are offended by the very notion that anyone would attempt to think about such matters...
...lots of things are sleadlti- without being bad Take driving itself...
...In a 1999 letter to iiic Neu( }0th 1 hues...
...On the other hand, maybe the cost of a ban is only $1 billion...
...Instead of taking away drivers' cell phones, we could confiscate $10 billion, use it to buy fire trucks and do the world a lot more good...
...Now pricing out the fatalities at $6.6 mil-lion each, and adding in the costs of injuries and vehicle damage, Mr...
...So—as Hahn et al...
...But Click and Clack won't be reading those studies.Their minds are made up...
...but they failed to account for the inconvenience to people who choose not to drive because cell phones have made driving more dangerous.Those people aren't killed or injured, so they don't show up in statistics, but they are bearing real costs...
...After all...
...Tired of High Commissions...
...It's a big and unwarranted leap from "talking while drivSteven E. Landsburg teaches economics at the University of Rochester and is author of The Armchair Economist...
...Presumably, that's because they recognize that the benefits of driving exceed the costs, even though the costs include tens of thousands of fatalities every year (and even though the costs are not borne by the same people who reap the benefits...
...So it's well worthwhile for someone to get these numbers right...
...the only question is whether you're willing to think honestly about what that limit is.Viscusi thought hard not about his own limit, but about how to measure other peoples limits through observations of their behavior.That's where the $6.6 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • MARCH/APRIL 2002 million comes front—it's an estimate of what real people in real situations are willing to pay to save a life...
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...Those calls shouldn't count as benefits of talkingwhile-driving, because they'd get made even if talking-while-driving were banned...
...Moreover, Jonah Burke of the Wharton School of Business has pointed out that Hahn et al...
...In other words, the Tappets implicitly recognize that cost-benefit analysis is a legitimate basis for public policy...
...If putting a dollar value on human lives strikes you as coldhearted, grow up...
...It's a pretty big cost...
...Hahn and his col-leagues estimate that in 1999 cell phone use by drivers caused $4.6 billion worth of damage.That's the cost of letting drivers use cell phones...
...You estimate willingness to pay from demand studies (factoring in the truism that some calls are worth more than others).You estimate actual charges from real-life cell phone bills...
...they counted property damage...
...mg is deadly to ..talking while driving is hard...
...You implicitly put a dollar value on human lives every time you buy a candy bar with funds that could have been donated instead to the local fire department...
...So I have no idea whether talking-whiledriving is, on net, a good thing or a bad thing...
...they counted injuries...
...If they'd bothered to read the research they're so quick to criticize and they're both MIT grads, so it shouldn't be beyond them—they'd have found the answer: The price is $6.6 million, a widely used standard based on Harvard Law Professor KipViscusi's analysis of how much people are willing to pay to pre-serve lives in a variety of contexts...
...First, drivers make a lot of calls that could easily wait for the next rest stop...
...Tired of High Prices...
...So far, they've met their goal in exactly zero (though New York recently enacted a "hands-free" law...
...missed a potentially important factor on the cost side:They counted fatalities...
...The same $10 billion invested in, say, fire-fighting equipment would save substantially more than 300 lives—conceivably (usingViscusi's numbers) about five times as many...
...the Tappet Brothers (real names: Tom & Ray Magliozzi) want a ban on cell phone use by drivers in all 50 states...
...Of this there is much evidence and little doubt...
...Talking while driving is deadly...
...Hahn and his colleagues have at least made a foray in that direction, and one hopes that more careful studies will follow...
...But not every-thing that's costly is bad...
...But at least these guys have made a serious attempt to analyze adifficult problem...
...38,000 nonfatal injuries and 2) i...
...Unlike the Tappet Brothers, however, I'd want to think about that question before enacting legislation...
...the Tappet Brothers refer to one of those 311( ) fatalities—a two-and-ahalf-year-old girl named Morgan Lee and ask...
...For example._ Just getting behind the wheel (as opposed to staying home in bed) multiplies your accident risk by far more than 400 percent...
...the Tappet Brothers of National Public Radio's popular weekly show Car Talk, have declared war on drivers with cell phones.Their weapon is moral suasion, enforced by bumper stickers that say "Drive Now Talk Later"Their target is not just drivers, but also legislators...
...They still believe it's well over $4.6 billion, but at this point they're guessing...
...And the numbers really do matter...
...From that kind of calculation, Hahn and his colleagues conclude that in 1999 cell phone calls made by drivers had a total value of $25 billion.That $25 billion benefit beats the $4.6 billion cost,so cell phones are, net, a good thing...
...The researchers estimate that in 1999, driver use of cell phones caused about 30(1 tatalities...
...Hahn plugged into his nice, clean economic model to account for the misery and tears that such outright selfishness has wrought...
...SHUT UP AND QUIT DRIVING OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT BY STEVEN E. LANDSBURG Click and Clack...
Vol. 35 • March 2002 • No. 2
