Comment by 323
4 years ago
> I assume based on this comment that you would be happy to personally explain to parents of someone killed due to an allergic reaction, why their death was an acceptable trade-off for "social efficiency"
What would you say to the parent of a child killed by a drunk driver? According to this line of thinking alchool should be banned because some drink and drive and kill innocent people.
Or driving cars should be banned because sometimes people fall asleep at the wheel.
Said otherwise: accidents do happen, trying to make them illegal will have massive "social efficiency" costs, which will affect the ones the banning tried to protect.
Just like here - introduce strong anti-allergy laws and now you get even more allergenic food.
> What would you say to the parent of a child killed by a drunk driver? According to this line of thinking alchool should be banned because some drink and drive and kill innocent people.
Drink driving is banned in most of the world, and most of the world doesn’t suffer from the US drink driving problem because other countries don’t force everyone to own a car and driver everywhere.
Additionally investments in public transport and active transport produce huge positive externalities for societies, and produce positive returns to governments once reduced road maintenance, reduced health costs, improved productivity and social mobility caused by public transport are considered.
So to answer your question directly, I would console for their loss and acknowledge that more work needs to be done to prevent needless automotive deaths. Plenty of cities and countries around the world have made tremendous progress towards zero road deaths, and have reaped substantial economic benefits along the way. To believe that eradicating automotive deaths can only be achieved by banning alcohol or car just demonstrates a lack of imagination.
> Just like here - introduce strong anti-allergy laws and now you get even more allergenic food.
I don’t have strong fews on the specific policies in the article. I’m only taking issue with idea that “social efficiency” is a metric we should be optimising for, above all else.