N.H.L and fuel-economy
Surowiecki starts by describing a very important observation made by Thomas Schelling about the N.H.L:
“At the time, players were allowed, but not required, to wear helmets, and most players chose to go helmet-less, despite the risk of severe head trauma. But when they were asked in secret ballots most players also said that the league should require them to wear helmets. The reason for this conflict, Schelling explained, was that not wearing a helmet conferred a slight advantage on the ice; crucially, it gave the player better peripheral vision, and it also made him look fearless. The players wanted to have their heads protected, but as individuals they couldn’t afford to jeopardize their effectiveness on the ice. Making helmets compulsory eliminated the dilemma: the players could protect their heads without suffering a competitive disadvantage. Without the rule, the players’ individually rational decisions added up to a collectively irrational result. With the rule, the outcome was closer to what players really wanted.”
In the rest of the article, Surowiecki tries to make the case that we all feel the same about cars with higher fuel-economy — and that we want to be forced into this situation.
I am not sure I agree. There are clearly situations where we want to be forced into a better social equilibrium (for example, I want other people to drive safer), but this strikes me more as a situation that we want others to start driving more fuel efficient cars and less about a social coordination.
What do you think?
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I don’t believe that it is a valid analogy. The problem with fuel prices is that we in America heavily subsidize the energy market in order to provide cheap power. Thus the problem lies in the market.
We do not properly capture the cost of driving in pricing cars and fuel. We don’t take into account the air pollution and green house gas emissions, nor the effects highways, parking lots and driveways have on the land. This doesn’t even begin to include the price of, say, a war in the Middle East where one of the driving factors was the stability of the US energy supply.
With cheap fuel people want large powerful cars, so Detroit builds them. Since the energy market can change faster than vehicle production, when costs go up Detroit suffers.
The hockey analogy *could* apply to the size of American cars. I have a couple of friends who are considering large vehicles strictly for safety reasons. If a large portion of people are out driving 2 ton cars, it helps to also be in a 2 ton car when there is an accident.
But the difference would be that the hockey players wanted helmets. Most people I know in the rural south like their big cars and trucks.
I believe Surowiecki originally used this analogy in the context of car size, which is a reasonable analogy as it relates to overall safety.
Hockey players do not have to pay extra to wear helmets, so it is essentially a costless action.
For gas taxes, everyone is forced to pay more to drive, so only people that are less sensitive to gas prices should want a gas tax to keep people who are more sensitive to gas prices off the road.
I would encourage anyone who is interested in this sort of “hockey helmet” theory to read Robert Frank, who has made a living off of these sorts of topics.
We elect people and pay them big bucks to make serious decisions. How mucn to tax, what to tax what police powers are needed, corporate powers, setting and enforcing a policy.
The hockey helmet analogy applies to our elected officials. If they vote for fuel tax increases, they are seen as wimps. Or worse, as corageous. We all know that courage loses elections.
However, there isn’t a trump card to play to get elected officials thinking along the lines of paying the external costs of CO2.
A U.S. Representative represents about 700,000 people. Fewer than half show up to vote. The incumbent wins with a 70/30 split. So the 210,000 who elect the incumbent are fairly confident in the status quo. Then there is an outcry for term limits from the people that didn’t vote.
The Onion covered transportation likes and dislikes when they reported that 95% of the people in the United States preffered rail for someone else to ride.
We can thank Jerry Curry and Diane Steed for the heavyweight belchfires we call SUVs.
From time to time OPEC offers a teaser increase in price to entice alternate forms of energy. Then when the suckers take the bait, OPEC pulls the rug out from under them and lowers the price. Do this often enough and no one will want to go into projects to replace oil.
So OPEC has a policy and the United States has “me too” leadership.
@Justin
“Hockey players do not have to pay extra to wear helmets, so it is essentially a costless action.”
The costs for the hockey player are: no longer looking fearless, and the loss of peripheral vision.
The hockey situation is a good example of what von Neumann called an incentive trap: a situation where rational behavior by each individual results in an outcome nobody wants. The “tragedy of the commons” story is another, better known example.
The original poster seems to be saying that a free market in driving is a similar incentive trap, because the ill effects of driving (smog, collision deaths, and arguably wars over oil) outweigh its benefits. As far as I’m concerned that is complete and total balderdash.
The personal car is man’s greatest enabling technology. Anyone who doubts this should try living without one for a year or two, as I have: not only are you forced to do a huge amount of unnecessary physical work (walking) in addition to your job just to put food on the table, but nearly all your free time disappears, spent riding the bus or train. (Move closer? For most of us, that’s not an option, largely due to the same urban-planning “industry” (scam) that is now trying to force us all to drive less.)
The real incentive traps we *should* be looking at, and which I hope we can eliminate, are those which effectively force individual legislators to want to bring home “pork” (thus making everyone poorer through huge amounts of mostly hidden taxation) and to be seen by the media as always “doing something” (about phony emergencies the media invents whenever there’s a slow news day).
90%+ of government as we know it, especially the federal government, is a complete waste of the money and man-hours it consumes. It should never be seen as our friend, but as a colossal parasite that has its mouths stuck in everyone’s bloodstream. And no one in his right mind wants it to be anywhere near that big, but it is because of those incentive traps.
I urge everyone to write his Congressman and Senators and let them know, loudly and often, that we *don’t* expect them to bring pork home or to constantly “do something” about phony crises. The less government does, the better it will be for everyone.
Let me add: the EPA fuel-economy requirement is a great example of a federal program that is a total waste of time and effort. Here’s why: the ultimate point of wanting to reduce pollution is to save *lives*. But the main effect of the fuel-economy requirement in the 20 years we’ve had it is to force drivers into smaller, lighter, less crash-survivable cars — thus killing thousands of people a year.
So unless the greens can demonstrate that the resulting reduction in pollution saves a greater number of people, it is simply not possible for any rational person to support even the present CAFE law, much less the more severe version the Greens propose.
To the extent that large cars are a demonstration of social status, there is an arms race towards larger cars that can only be stopped by effectively banning them.
So the analogy is reasonable, although not indirect. People buy large cars because to buy a small one would be to send a signal that you are poor and of low social status. i.e. the cost is personal, but the benefit (reduced GHG emissions) is universal.
It’s another example of ‘The tragedy of the commons’).
I think to ignore the resource depletion that occurs with fuel-inefficient cars is exactly the kind of single-mindedness Hardin was speaking of in The Commons. At the same time, the savings of fuel efficiency hasn’t caught up with the savings of a mass-produced, technologically-the-same-as-cars-produced-35-years-ago vehicle. I think people do want more efficient cars; but I think they’d rather not pay for it up front. Much like the farmers in Hardin’s article–they’d rather have a lifelong income, but they’re afraid of losing out on profits right now.
I think the analogy is fair, but not exactly apt.
I’d like to add to Tom’s comment about cars and social status. Social status was the hockey players chief concern: if they wore a helmet they would look weak.
A similar analogy for cars can be made based on observations from Mom’s meeting the school bus in my neighborhood.
In prior years the Moms all drove the cars to wait at the bus stop for their kids. The cars were a status symbol. This year, mothers walk to the bus stop as no one wants to be sun driving the short distance from the driveway to the bus stop and being perceived as wasteful. (I live in a climate where weather conditions usually permit standing outside and/or walking.)
Decisions based on the smart use of money just aren’t as inherent to our DNA as decisions based on status.
The driving problem is too complicated for simple answers: urban planning (or suburban planning), safety (fear), social status, convenience, economics of entrenched habits, tragedy of the commons, etc. I live in a city (Singapore) that has excellent public transportation and large economic disincentives for driving. So I have not driven in years and it works fine for me most of the time. When I lived in LA I also rode a bike for transportation. But this will not work for the majority of Americans because of a long history of events that few individuals are able to overcome. I don’t think the analogy is robust enough to cover everything. Making driving more expensive will disadvantage the poor unless large amounts of money are first spend improving public transportation.
The real “tragedy of the commons” is that when certain bills reach the floor of Congress or the state legislature, many representatives are afraid to vote against a “bad” bill, because their “no” vote could be used against them in the next campaign. The best example is Senator Cleland of Georgia, a triple-amputee Vietnam veteran who voted against the first Security bill after 9/11, and was charged with being “soft on terrorism” by his opponent and defeated in the next senatorial election.
The fuel economy is rapidly changing, and so are the prices. It’s best to stick with quality oil products you can trust, these days.
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