Driving While Elderly
posted by Frank Pasquale
According to Jane Gross, the growing population of elderly drivers is forcing some difficult conversations in families:
Thirty-six percent of adult children polled by the Web site Caring.com and the National Safety Council said that talking to their parents about the need to stop driving would be harder than discussing funeral plans (29 percent) or selling the family home (18 percent).
Though framed as an aid to the elderly themselves, the “car key conversation” is about saving others, too. The discussion reminds me of some empirical work done by Margaret Brinig and colleagues on the “public choice of driving regulations.” Their work
evaluates state driving rules, obtained from laws, regulations, and driver’s manuals, tests, based upon Department of Transportation data, whether the type of laws affects driving and accident rates for those over 64 and suggests a uniform scheme combining self-reporting of driving problems, on-the-road tests of drivers who fall below safe driving standards, and individualized restrictions where these can enable drivers to safely operate vehicles.
In the course of the paper, they mention an alternative, market-based “solution” to the problem.
Not surprisingly, one of the first applications of economics to driver’s licensing of the elderly belongs to Richard Posner. In his Aging and Old Age, Posner notes . . . the increasing factors that make driving difficult for elderly people. Consistent with his general “pragmatic” philosophy, he suggests that insurance markets and the elderly themselves will most efficiently regulate elderly driving. If older people are not compensating their loss of functions well enough with their caution and experience, their insurance rates will increase or they will just be sensible and leave driving to others.
Once again, rising rates of inequality render an already suboptimal approach barely worth mentioning. The market “solution” here will predictably overdeter the poor elderly from driving and underdeter the wealthy elderly. Market “signals” are quite noisy for the poor, and may barely be heard at all by those insulated by enough money. Fortunately Brinig et al. suggest an approach that gets to the root of the problem, rather than complacency in the face of a “solution” that will all-too-often confuse real loss of acuity with mere lack of money. Of course, given Posner’s past failure to account for inequality, his work here is unsurprising.
UPDATE: Very nice response from Scott H. Greenfield Simple Justice:
Financial incentives apply unevenly. We look to external solutions because we have such terrible difficulty dealing with the problem on a personal level. Try telling your mother, who carried you for nine months, who stays up with you at night when you were sick, who bandaged your wounds, that she’s too old to drive anymore.
Similar concerns make the inevitably familial nature of financial decisions about health care a bad matter for purely private resolution.
July 3, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law, Empirical Analysis of Law, Family Law
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Responses (6)
TJ - July 3, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Frank, I don’t think you are being fair to Posner here. There is no failure to account for inequality. In economic analysis, the point is not to get older drivers off the road. It is to charge them for the damage they cause, or get them off the road if they can’t afford it. If an older driver routinely destroys $40,000 BMWs through reckless driving, but he is a billionaire who can pay for all of the damage he causes, there is no problem keeping him on the road. The poor driver won’t be able to afford this. The rich driver will, but he will be paying a lot for that privilege.
The complication is that our tort system is undercompensatory for at least some types of personal injury. Compensating for destroying a BMW is easy, compensating for killing a pedestrian is hard. From an economic perspective, however, that is a problem of quantitation, and has nothing to do with inequality.
Ace - July 3, 2008 at 2:56 pm
TJ,
You miss an important factor that an elderly driver may consider. A deterrent effect imposed by the market after a crash is less effective than it should because of the significant likelihood that the elderly driver will not survive the crash. His insurance rates will not be going up and he has no need to buy a new BMW. If he has few true assets to pass on to heirs (for example, he has reversed mortgaged his house, lives off of a pension/lifetime annuity, plans to pass on wealth to his children through a life insurance payout to his kids, deeded his house away and only owns a life estate) he has to rationally consider his diminished likelihood to survive the crash, and thus, avoid compensating the victims for their losses.
KipEsquire - July 3, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Posner’s analysis ignores the fact that being tortiously harmed, and then compensated, is NOT the same as never being harmed in the first place. Just ask the plaintiffs in a wrongful death lawsuit.
Insisting that one has “adequate” or “properly priced” insurance is as irrelevant as it is insolent. There is simply no such thing as a “right to drive incompetently.” All else is sophistry.
TJ - July 3, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Ace, the deterrant effect is imposed prior to the crash, if the insurance companies are doing their jobs properly, through the payment of insurance premiums. If the insurance company thinks you are going to crash-and-die, so to speak, it will bump up your premium before that happens.
Moreover, my point is that this is less about deterrance per se than Frank indicated. A driver that destroys someone else’s $40,000 BMW and dies himself in the process imposes no harm on anyone else, as long as his estate pays $40,000 to the owner of the BMW. The objections that (1) the driver might not have $40,000 left in his estate, and (2) it is harder to quantify human life (if he kills a pedestrian, for example) than a BMW go to the problem that the tort system is undercompensatory. That is not, however, the problem of inequality that Frank pointed out.
Cathy - July 3, 2008 at 5:31 pm
The market “solution” here will predictably overdeter the poor elderly from driving and underdeter the wealthy elderly.
I’m not so sure. Just last weekend I was talking to my grandmother, who has significant assets. She’s not happy about the lifestyle change of being kept from driving, but she was finally convinced of its necessity when it was explained to her that in case of an accident, even one not her fault, someone could sue her “for every penny I’ve got.”
Her decision may have been more based on a perhaps-skewed perception of how the American legal system works than insurance, but nonetheless it was a market-based decision that deterred a wealthy elderly driver from driving.
memomachine - July 5, 2008 at 9:04 am
Hmmmm.
But how does the impact of elderly lobbying affect this?
I know from personal experience how skewed things can be for drivers of various ages. For young drivers driving is privilege. For elderly drivers it’s a sanctioned right.
Years ago I knew an elderly driver who was only able to find her car because she memorized the license plate. She would walk up and down the rows of parked cars until she found the right one.
Eye test? She memorized the charts and was able to successfully determine which chart was being used when given eye tests.
But she was blind as a bat.
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