Phoneslaughter
posted by Frank Pasquale
My past few posts on cell phones have focused on their potential to annoy. But when we move from public to private transit, their influence can be deadly. Consider this story from law prof Lisa Heinzerling and economist Frank Ackerman:
Right up to the day they died, Russian immigrants Mariya Diment and Liya Murkes loved to take long walks together along the oceanfront near the senior residence where they lived in Santa Monica. One summer day in the year 2000, [a driver], reportedly talking on a cell phone while driving her Mercedes-Benz, plowed into Diment and Murkes while they were strolling, killing them both. What happened to Mariya Diment and Liya Murkes is not unusual, and almost certainly will become less so; as many as 1,000 people a year now die in car accidents caused by what some are calling “phoneslaughter.”
Why are these risks tolerated?
Heinzerling and Ackerman claim that misuses of economic analysis are the key explanation:
Most states, and many cities and towns, are deciding whether to do something to prevent these accidents. Some places have banned cell phone use while driving. Others have used laws already on the books — even homicide laws — to try to get at the problem.
Some of the country’s most influential economists, however — based on research conducted with the help of generous funding from wireless providers — have concluded these restrictions are a bad idea. Why? Because the people who are talking while driving are willing to pay a lot to talk on the phone — more than many people who face deadly risks are willing to pay to avoid the risk of being killed. What these researchers have done is compare the price of phone calls made while driving with the “price” of deadly risks. Since risk is not, like cell phones and calling plans, directly bought and sold in the marketplace, economists have tried to find places where it is sold indirectly. (emphasis added)
By comparing the price of cell phone use with [an imputed] “price” of risky work, economists have concluded that banning cell phone use in cars makes no economic sense. The technique of translating lives into dollars is complex, but the bottom line of the cell phone studies is simple to state: the Cheryl Chadwicks of the world can go on talking into their cell phones while driving their Mercedes-Benzes, even though it means that quite a few of the Mariya Diments and Liya Murkeses of the world end up in the morgue. All based, amazingly enough, on the price of someone else’s phone call.
I don’t know if this is one of the studies (I can’t find any acknowledgment of industry funding in the document), but I have a sense it gives the flavor of the genre. Heinzerling and Ackerman raise several broad challenges to cost-benefit analysis in general and its prevalence in the cell-phone discourse in particular. I agree with their moral objection to permitting the buying power of cell phone users to outweigh poorer individuals’ interests in life. Perhaps “groups of workers doing dangerous jobs are paid, on average, a total of about $5–6 million more, per work-related death”–but my guess is that most of us would need to be compensated much more for accepting a similar risk of death via the negligence of a cell phone user. The first figure is based on work, which one needs to do to earn a living; the second is a risk that can easily be avoided.
Admittedly, some countries have overestimated the risks of cell phone use based on rumors that the gadgets “fry your brain.” But it appears that we have a regulatory system that systematically biases us against reasonable precautions via highly artificial assessments of risk.
November 6, 2007 at 8:42 am
Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law
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Responses (3)
Al Anon - November 7, 2007 at 4:01 pm
This is an interesting question. One problem I have with these studies is that it’s almost impossible to isolate the cell phone use as a contributing cause to the accident. In other words, in what percentage of these accidents is the cell phone use the “but-for cause”? A similar problem arises in the context of drunk driving accidents. In any instance where a driver has a BAC above the legal limit, the statisticians record it as a drunk driving accident. This must certainly overstate the number of accidents deemed to be caused by drunk drivers.
3L - November 7, 2007 at 9:51 pm
I fail to see the utility in isolating the contributing cause in any individual accident. If you have a significant enough population of events which consider all significant variables, the risky behavior should produce a measurable uptick in wrecks, deaths, injuries, whatever data point interests you.
Beyond that, if we’re willing to tolerate the tens of thousands of deaths which result from the use of automobiles at all, why not extend a death allowance to cell phone use in cars? The logic is identical, the moral problem is simply intuited differently. On the other hand, perhaps we’re simply more familiar with, and therefore more tolerant of, more traditional methods of car related death. How many people die every year because someone was changing the radio station instead of watching the road? Nobody’s screaming about that.
I’m more interested in exploring Prof. Pasquale’s point over the cost benefit analysis employed, and differentiating between higher payouts for the death of workers in dangerous jobs, versus death by negligence. Is the conclusion that one method of death should be more expensive than another? Or another facet, voluntariness – that we want a premium when someone else chooses how we die?
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