Bromleyisms

In 1959 Ralph Nader published an article in Nation called, "The Safe Car You Cannot Buy." Based on research into safety improvements conducted by an industry-sponsored lab at Cornell, Nader claimed that American manufacturers had purposefully neglected those advances for profits. No one was listening to little Ralph at the time, although there were plenty enough other safety advocates out screaming bloody Detroit murder, such as the director of the "Association for the Aid of Crippled Children" who in 1960 wailed that the nation's children were being slaughtered by "functionless fins or high hoods and by windshields designed for esthetic rather than optical qualities."

Meanwhile, the plain, most clearly understood, and effective lifesaver was steadily making its way into cars, pushed by the auto industry -- and over strong cultural resistance to it. The same year Nader's Nation article was published, the Cornell group rather presciently claimed that this device could save 19,000 lives a year. Introduced into the common lexicon by the aviation industry during the 1930s, the "safety" or "lap" belt joined mass market automobiles starting with Ford's 1956 line as an option. By 1959 it was offered by all American makes, and by 1964 it was standard equipment across the domestic industry. All this despite consumers who didn't want it and prevalent notions that the belts were unsafe. Dealers were reluctant to sell them, as many people thought it was better to be thrown from a car, convertibles, especially, than to be trapped in a crash. Belts were also seen as causing accidents by confining driver movement. Detroit pushed the belts anyway, led on by the Cornell research that showed their tremendous benefit.

Just as the industry was fully pushing seatbelts onto its clients, Ralph Nader worked to overturn the very concept of automobile safety. For Nader and a viciously destructive group of his allies in the trial lawyers, safety was to be a measure of design entirely absent use. By this theory, which came of the "crashworthiness doctrine" that was developed in 1955 in a Harvard Law Review article, automobiles should protect users no matter the circumstance, and auto makers were fully liable for the effects of all crashes. The so-called "second collision," that of passengers against the laws of physics and the windshield, dashboard, or pavement following initial vehicle impact, proved all too alluring to courts, juries -- and trial attorneys.

For the attorneys, the courtroom tactics yielded justice in cash. In 1965 a lawyer told the Trial Lawyers convention [insert lawyer joke here] that when the next year's models arrived with improved safety features makers should be sued for not having had them in earlier cars. (I kid you not.) When combined with the class action suit a few years later, liability and the common law were turned on their heads.

[See the ATLA website for crowing about how they have saved Americans from greedy corporate pushers of defective products; at that same 1965 convention the lawyers discussed how to go after small plane manufacturers. They very well killed off that industry.]

For Nader it wasn't the money. It was political revolution.

Both Nader and the trial attorneys turned auto safety into a matter of corporate mal-intention and illicit profits. The trial attorneys wrapped their greed in civic duty, but nobody was fooled. Nader, though, operated outside the plain cash motive. His was an attempted coup of capitalism itself. He plotted a consumerist democracy free of greed and harm, and he was going to remake industry, especially Detroit. In admitting of corporations and industrialism, while loathing it as a necessary evil, Nader's vision was but that of the old progressive era game of pitting the people against big business and conquering business by joining it with government. As with the progressives, Nader would fix the "big" to business and government both, and marry 'em in the name of regulation.

In November of 1965 Nader's book Unsafe At Any Speed was published. An indictment of profit-based capitalism that used automobile safety as the catalyst and not its primary concern, Nader conceived the book as launching a new democratic order. Among the fantastical outcomes of Nader's new order would be safe cars that even the stupidest motorist couldn't make dangerous.

Like the early 20th century muckrake socialist, Upton Sinclair, and his The Jungle, Nader's book is not remembered for its ultimate purpose. Nader's purpose was "consumer democracy." Sinclair was after the worker's paradise. For both, then and now, those goals were lost behind the immediate outrage each used to draw attention to the movement. The Jungle was meant to launch a socialist wonderland. Instead, Sinclair upset America's stomach. Sinclair had meant to exploit awful labor conditions and tainted meat products in and from the meatpacking industry in order to convince Americans that socialism would bring about happy workplaces, safe food, and general bliss, domestic and national. (Sinclair's hook was a reference to workers falling into and becoming part of vats of lard and, thus, part of the national diet; that those men might have been blacks was especially appalling to his readers.)

Nader's design was to change the nature of the American democracy and its economic system. Instead, he scared Americans away from a rather innovative and excellent automobile, the Corvair, and into a series of laws passed by their Congress that nearly killed off its maker and did kill two of its competitors, Studebaker-Packard and American Motors (see note*)

Nader very cleverly used (and uses) the word "competition" to disguise his rather plain non-competitive schemes. In 1972 he published a book, one well forgotten since it lacked vats of lard or flying, rear-engined Chevrolets, on the failures of federal anti-trust law, saying that the government had abdicated its responsibilities to control big business. By the rather fabulous commentary on the book in the New York Times by Arthur Allen Leff (pdf copy of book review here) the book was a 400 page bore. Whatever a read, as theory it was a self-defeating waste.

As the New York Times editors put it years and years before,

control of business by the Government would mean the control of Government by business
(editorial, 1912)

Think it over. Nader wouldn't understand it. Leff sure did:

the manipulation of anti-trust laws is not the only governmental fiddling with free enterprise.

And this:

the problem in the case of Nader and the Naderites is one of the oldest in reform and revolution: how do you successfully bureaucratize charisma (or charismatize bureaucracy)?

The system of Big Business that so offended Nader was created by Big Government itself. In the early 1900s, monopolies were easily defeated by simple application anti-trust law. Enter government regulation, and monopoly not only gets government sanction, it gets government protection. Government rules are inherently anti-competitive, and they inherently reward big over small business. Nader walks around the word "competition" by calling for "socially beneficial forms of competition" (from his own webite). Clouding this fascism in tones of friendliness and protection, he calls for a "consumer-side" over the "seller-sovereign" economy, a system led by consumer needs, and free of corporate "abuses." It reads like this:

A seller-sovereign economy includes sellers who are monopolistic or oligopolistic without being confronted by the ultimate consumers who are organized in monopsonistic (a single buyer) or ologopsonistic (a few buyers) modes. It is an economy where enormous skill, artifice, and resources are used in getting consumers to buy what the sellers want to sell, notwithstanding the availability of more efficient, safe, economical, durable and effective alternatives, including that of buying nothing at all.
(from http://www.nader.org/ecm.html)

He really ought to have stuck with unintended flights of Corvairs: who really needs "monopsonistic"? Lord help us from that and "ologopsonistic" -- which Nader's own webpage misspells. (It's oligopsonistic; what an asshole of a word, no matter how spelled.) Thankfully those words haven't had "-ism" attached to them, but only because, I can only imagine, they're just a pain in the ass. Nader didn't invent them, but they are the core to his crusade against reality.

So here's the translation to the above passage: the American consumer is a twit who gets led around by crafty and abusive corporate sellers who dump useless, backwards products on a population of idiots. Naderite competition is that which leads only to consumer choice that he believes is good. Applying this scheme to automobiles, Nader's movement nearly killed off the American builders. Government rules, going "from bumper to bumper," detailed what the safety establishment decided that the consumer needed as opposed to what the consumer chose. The classic cases are airbags, "interlock" seatbelts, which halted ignition if front seatbelts were unfastened, and other forms of "passive" restraints, such as gliding belts. (The simple evasion to the interlock belt, mandated for 1974 cars, was to join the belts, then sit on top of 'em; Americans were so outraged by this Orwellian command that Congress rescinded the order by direct legislation, a rare event.)

It was all further complicated by environmental rules which arrived wedded to the safety movement. Engines would be cleaner, or they would be smaller. Cars would be safer, or they would be lighter. Gasoline would be free of polluting additives, or it would have additives to make it less polluting. Consumers jumped into small cars when gas became scarce. When supplies eased, back they went to larger cars. At the same time, price controls -- the source of gasoline scarcity throughout the 1970s -- by shielding consumer from actual costs, prompted higher consumption. Consumers and builders were caught between self-defeating public policies of regulatory mandates for smaller cars, supply shortages born of gasoline price-protection, and artificially-protected demand for larger cars in those same price-protections (see note**)

Back to today. And to seatbelts. The Naderite safety establishment's very own legacy, NHTSA, estimates that from 1966, the year of Nader's triumph in federal law, to 1980, mandated "vehicle safety technologies" saved all of 4,000 lives. That's twenty-eight and a half human lives per year over those fourteen years: 28½ lives a year!. Drunk drivers took some 15,000 to 25,000 lives a year during that period, depending on whose stats you wanna believe. I'll go with 15,000, which is well under even current annual estimates. And look what we get: all that money and heartburn and loss of market share and jobs and profits and all those shitty cars of the 1970s directly saved 4,000 lives -- during which time, and I'm guessing low, 210,000 people died from mixing alcohol with gasoline. How many lawsuits went to Detroit when drunks caused the accidents? How many drunks drove drunk because of the judicial/legal/social climate of blame-the-manufacturer that Nader inspired? That is, how many people did Ralph Nader kill?

[This is all without mention of roads, which are the next biggest savers of lives along with seatbelts and sobriety. For more on the economic and general welfare cost of regulations see "Further Reading (Required)" below.]

On top of the direct cost of seatbelt-less and drunk driving deaths, those enormous regulatory burdens to builders and consumers don't just flit away into the economy. Those are very real dollars that don't get spent on bettering lives. They represent direct and viciously limiting denial of the consumer choice that is core to individual happiness and welfare. Think inflation. Think fewer choices. Think fifty bucks a month less on car payments times millions of cars. The "opportunity cost" of the regulatory state far exceeds its benefits.

NHTSA claims that "lives saved by vehicle safety technologies" since 1980 have gone from 4,359 that year upwards to 24,561 in 2002. The claims are dubious even while the credit taken is clear: NHTSA likes to think that its mission has saved 295,876 lives from1980 to 2002. Even though its own study credits better brakes, collapsible steering columns, side-impact beams, better visibility, improved door locks, child seats, airbags, etc. for but half those lives saved, by NHTSA's own analysis seatbelt use is the by far dominant factor in lives saved. Seatbelts!

[For a note on the danger of airbags see this footnote below, see note***]

There is absolutely no proof that all those "safety technologies" cited by the NHTSA study would not have been adopted by the auto industry without NHTSA rules. Worse, there can be no proof that the industry wouldn't have done better without those rules. The 1968 Vega-- an otherwise horrible car -- had some of the best side-beams in the industry. GM marketed the car with it. Of course safety sells. That's why those side beams were there. While perhaps Nader's movement pushed GM to consider those side beams, GM did it without a government mandate, and without jacking up prices along with its competitors while legitimately blaming it on government rules. Ralph might have done great public service by publicizing the issue of design-driven safety. Instead, he socialized market and democratic pressure in a regulatory state that left the automotive market in a state of very, very expensive atrophy.

Only Nader believes that safety buys, and doesn't sell. But forget him. With government standards the profit incentive becomes to meet and not to surpass those standards, and to load the costs upon them. Economists call it rent-seeking, and Ralph Nader taught Detroit how to do it.

Now we get this article from an insurance group, published in the Washington Post:

Study Credits Vehicles, but Not Drivers, for Better Road Safety
By MATTHEW L. WALD WASHINGTON, Aug. 9 —
Cars are becoming safer, but the people who drive them are not, a study by an insurance industry research group has found. In fact, without design changes that have made vehicles safer, including the growing prevalence of air bags, the death toll on the nation’s roads would be higher by about 5,000 people annually, more than 11 percent of last year’s total, according to the study.

The study is flawed top to bottom, but I won't bore you with it. If you read it (from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety), you'll see that the data and extrapolations are self-fulfilling. (see note****)

So let's look at one element alone: the study notes that per miles highway deaths have receded since 1966. While claiming that roads were factored out as a cause, the authors fail to note a primary reason for this statistic in the Interstate Highway System. The split, four-lane highway system replaced the dominant two-lane, two-way traffic rural highway, which remains the deadliest of roads. That not only saved lives it increased highway use exponentially. But none of this matters, for it's all just to run interference for lobbying for raised speed limits. Auto design has saved lives, the study says, but the human factor remains uncontrolled. Humans and their cell phones, speeding, alcohol, and seatbelts must be moderated. The people are killing themselves, that is.

That can't be good news over at the Trial Attorneys association. Who you gonna sue if its just an idiot driving like an idiot in a perfectly safe car? Back to 1959 we go: it's the driver that really matters But by the Nader theory, we can't ask consumers to choose for themselves. Since the biggest problem with seatbelts is getting people to use them, there has to be someone else to blame.

So what's NHTSA to do? Get this: replace the driver. I'm not kidding:

The Next Great Safety Advance
(Business Week by Les Jackson, August 1, 2006)
ESC, or Electronic Stability Control, is a device that makes skilled drivers out of everyday operators of motor vehicles—and in the U.S. reduces the incidence of crashes by 35%

The seat belt -- a simple, inexpensive piece of equipment -- has saved huge numbers of lives and limited serious injuries in crashes since they were mandated in all passenger vehicles in the mid-60s. Since 1975, when only about 20% of people used them, seat belts have been documented by NHTSA (the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) to have saved over 135,000 lives and prevented countless serious injuries. It has been only recently that seat belt use reached the 80% level -- an impressive statistic, nonetheless.

Now poised to enter into automotive history as what most experts consider the second most beneficial safety device: ESC, or Electronic Stability Control, is a device that makes skilled drivers out of everyday operators of motor vehicles .... The effectiveness of ESC in helping the driver maintain control of the car has been confirmed by many studies in the U.S. and internationally. In the fall of 2004, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) released results of a field study on the effectiveness of ESC in America. NHTSA concluded that ESC reduces the incidence of crashes by 35%. In addition, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) states that up to 10,000 fatal crashes could be avoided annually if all vehicles were equipped with ESC.

Here we go again: NHTSA to the rescue! And at a cost "from $300 to $800 per vehicle." Yeah, right. At a cost to all of us. Why not use the money to buy everyone a DSL line so they don't have to drive anywhere anymore?

Forget it NHTSA. People are gonna always find a way to kill themselves and each other. Too bad our regulatory state can't admit of that simple truth. Then, maybe, just maybe, then they'd let the people figure it out for themselves. Forty years of Naderism brought more harm than good. Give it up, NHTSA. Ralphy ain't a hero.

Yes, there is a cost to safety.

And sometimes it's just too damned expensive.

* update 8/27/06: See this NYTimes article on the Ford Company's reluctance to deal with fires caused by something...

Unraveling the Mystery of Ford’s Fire-Prone Switches
By Jeremy W. Peters NY Times)
JUST two inches long, the Texas Instruments Model 9F924 speed control deactivation switch does not look like a menacing device. But a sporadic malfunction in the switch that sparked engine fires stumped engineers at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for two years.

Read on if you will, but the lesson I get from this is not Ford's reluctance to deal with the problem but its' rather learned ability to use NHTSA as a dodge:

The simplest solution would have been to tell Ford to recall all 12.5 million vehicles with switches that always had power. But the agency did not yet understand the cause of the problem, and it cannot order a recall without making a solid case. “The burden of proof in a defect investigation is on the government,” Mr. Boyd said. “So at the end of the day, if we went to Ford and said we want you to recall 12 million vehicles, Ford would say, ‘Oh, really?’ ”

Thanks, Ralph.

Further reading (required):

Mortality risks induced by the costs of regulations
by Ralph L. Keeney
(Journal Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Vol. 8, No. 1, Jan, 1994)
Abstract:
Regulatory costs are ultimately paid for by the individuals in our society. The reduction in disposable income can lead to changes in purchasing, such as for safety and health care; stress, such as from job loss; and behavior, such as smoking or alcohol consumption. On average, these changes induce greater mortality risks and lead to premature deaths. This paper examines cases in which regulatory costs are primarily placed either on the general public or on individuals in a specific industry. Several policy issues concerning the mortality risks of regulatory costs are addressed. Neglecting the consideration of the fatalities induced by regulatory costs in the setting of regulations will lead to unnecessary deaths of Americans.

Click It or Ticket: The Immorality of Mandated Seatbelt Usage
by Walter Williams (6/15/2005)
Excerpt:
Each year, obesity claims the lives of 300,000 Americans and adds over $100 billion to health care costs. Should government enforce a 2,000-calorie intake limit per day? There's absolutely no dietary reason to add salt to our meals. Salt can lead to hypertension-induced heart attacks that kill thousands. Should government outlaw salt consumption? Sedentary lifestyles have been shown to lead to shorter and less healthy lives. Should there be government-mandated exercise programs?

The justifications used for "Click It or Ticket" can easily provide the template for government control of our diets and other lifestyle features. Maybe I'm a bit out of touch with today's Americans. With the silence in the face of attacks on Burger King and McDonald's, alleging they cause obesity, maybe Americans are pining for more government control over their lives -- and "Click It or Ticket" is just softening up the rest of us for what lies ahead in the future.

Safety and Wealth
by Thomas Sowell (1/11/1998)
Excerpt:
In short, wealth is a great factor in improved safety. This is too often completely overlooked by safety zealots who make grandiloquent pronouncements that “whatever it costs, it is worth it if it saves just one human life.” Sacrificing wealth means sacrificing safety and ultimately lives. Whether particular regulations save more lives directly than they cost indirectly by sacrificing or inhibiting the production of wealth is an empirical question. But it is a question that is seldom asked.

Relative Prices: Automobiles' Were Driven by Regulation
by Craig S. Marxsen
Abstract
Prices of numerous manufactured goods have scarcely increased since the early 1970s. The contrastingly extraordinary price increases for automobiles appear plausibly linked, in part, to greater regulation. Research has consistently found a pervasive productivity growth-stifling impact of regulation throughout manufacturing, although the effect seems to have been smaller than would be needed to explain the relative shift in automobile prices. This paper argues that rent seekers may have augmented idealists’ efforts to propel automobile design interventions that contributed to automobile price inflation, both measured and hidden, far in excess of levels seen for other goods such as lawnmowers, window air conditioners, sewing machines, washing machines, lawn tractors, or even bicycle

back to article

Notes:

* That Studebaker was on the way out by 1965 is certain, however, any hope for restitution was denied by the new government safety and pollution standards that increased the cost of building cars, thereby disabling the smaller makers. (return to text).

** As for why this all didn't also hurt the Japanese (it hurt Volkswagen), it's because the Japanese accidentally arrived at the right time with the right products. Their 1960s cars were wrong for the 1960s, but perfect for the 1970s. Had they arrived in the 1980s, Japan Inc would never have been heard.
(return to text)

*** I'm no anti-airbag freak. I think airbags have their place in automotive safety, and one may or may not have helped me walk away from a collision. (Definitively the seatbelt saved my ass and face -- and windshield). I think the mandates for them are, forgive my boudoir, fucked up, as was the history that led to them. (Thank you Jill Claybrook, you Naderite boob.) BUT, airbags can and are dangerous. If we're so freaked out over technologies that saved 28-½ people a year for the first 14 years of the safety regime, then where's the outrage at airbags which are known killers. The numbers of deaths are disputed, but airbags kill, and at least, on average, 28-½ people a year. And again, no mention of the cost of these mandates. That money costs lives. Don't believe me? See here:

My daughter is short. And starting to drive. What do I do, then, about somehow getting her to sit ten inches from the standardized explosive device that she puts herself up against when she drives? See this from the Boston Globe:

Let's set the record straight: The NHTSA advises that the steering wheel should be aimed at your breastbone, positioned at least 10 inches away and tilted away from your head. But watch out, as a low-slung wheel prompts one-armed driving with the hand draped over the top of the wheel; in a collision, the air bag can shatter that arm from below. Remember to keep your hands on the wheel at the 9 o'clock and 3 o'clock positions, with the seatback upright and the wheel 10 inches from your chest. It might not be comfortable at first, but you'll get used to it -- and some day it could save your life.

[And check out this Straight Dope article on airbags: fair and damning of Nader for it.]
(return to text)

**** Quickly here's the problem with the study: they looked at vehicles over time, with the assumption that new technologies introduced every year could be measured against accident statistics in aging cars, thus revealing the benefits of newer designs. What's missing here, besides the inherent flaw in the assumption that that cars are constantly getting better really has any effect, is who drives older and newer cars. The demographics alone would yield higher accident rates for older cars, if based on seatbelt use. But more importantly is the value of new cars on behavior. It's not the aging car that impacts safety, it's the driver.

Anyway, here's the explanation of the methodology in their own words:

The researchers computed death rates for vehicle models that didn't change in design over three model years — 1996-98 models during 1999, for example. This eliminated the effects of any design changes on the death rate because there were no such changes. Computing the rates for several model year groups without design changes during individual calendar years, the researchers found that, on average, the death rate per registered vehicle increased 1 to 5 percent in each year of the first 7 years on the road.

Then the researchers separated out vehicle design effects on death rates by following the same vehicles over time. The rates still were affected by vehicle aging so, having already estimated the age effects, the researchers factored them out too. This is when the data revealed that the downward trend in death rates would have ended in the early 1990s. An upward trend would have begun if not for the changes in vehicle designs.

(return to text)

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