Comment by MarkusWandel
7 months ago
Is there some generalized law (yet) about unintended consequences? For example:
Increase fuel economy -> Introduce fuel economy standards -> Economic cars practically phased out in favour of guzzling "trucks" that are exempt from fuel economy standards -> Worse fuel economy.
or
Protect the children -> Criminalize activites that might in any way cause an increase in risk to children -> Best to just keep them indoors playing with electronic gadgets -> Increased rates of obesity/depression etc -> Children worse off.
As the article itself says: Hold big tech accountable -> Introduce rules so hard to comply with that only big tech will be able to comply -> Big tech goes on, but indie tech forced offline.
> Introduce rules so hard to comply with that only big tech will be able to comply
When intentional, this is Regulatory Capture. Per https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regulatory-capture.asp :
> Regulation inherently tends to raise the cost of entry into a regulated market because new entrants have to bear not just the costs of entering the market but also of complying with the regulations. Oftentimes regulations explicitly impose barriers to entry, such as licenses, permits, and certificates of need, without which one may not legally operate in a market or industry. Incumbent firms may even receive legacy consideration by regulators, meaning that only new entrants are subject to certain regulations.
A system with no regulation can be equally bad for consumers, though; there's a fine line between too little and too much regulation. The devil, as always, is in the details.
Maybe one way to do it is to exempt smaller operations from regulation. eg less than say 20,000 users, no regulations.
The UK had a rule that gave small employers a £4,000 discount on national insurance.
Sketchy large employers like G4S responded by setting up tens of thousands of "Mini umbrella companies" [1] with directors in the Philippines, each company employing only a handful of people - allowing G4S to benefit from the £4,000 discount tens of thousands of times.
Sadly, exempting small operations from regulation isn't a simple matter.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57021128
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It can't be "no regulations", but yes, in general every law that requires compliance infrastructure should include a minimum size to ensure it only applies where it is relevant. In this case though, I believe the intent of the UK law is to ban all online communication that is not subject to safety scanning and the like. It's fundamentally a draconian law.
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This is eminently sensible, should happen everywhere.
It almost always doesn't, because the big guys have lobbyists and the small guys don't.
The big guys would rather not have to comply with these rules, but typically their take is, well, if we're going to have to anyway, let's at least make it an opportunity to drive out some of the scrappy competition and claim the whole pie for ourselves.
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I've always wondered why regulators don't bear all the costs induced by their regulations.
How would they pay the costs when they don't bear any of the profits from their regulated industries?
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It's called "Perverse incentive" and Wikipedia runs an illustrative set of examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
This one is marvelous: In 2021, the US Congress enacted stringent requirements to prevent sesame, a potential allergen, from cross-contaminating other foods. Many companies found it simpler and less expensive to instead add sesame directly to their product as an ingredient, exempting them from complying with the law.
There's the Cobra Effect popularized by Freakonomics
Too many cobras > bounty for slain cobras > people start breeding them for the bounty > law is revoked > people release their cobras > even more cobras around
The Freakonomics coverage was based on the book The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt by Michael G. Vann.
He was recently interviewed about that book on the New Books Network:
<https://newbooksnetwork.com/michael-g-vann-the-great-hanoi-r...>
Audio: <https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT1560680456.mp3> (mp3)
(Episode begins at 1:30.)
Among the interesting revelations: the rat problem was concentrated in the French Quarter of Hanoi, as that's where the sewerage system was developed. What drained away filth also provided an express subway for rats. Which had been brought to Vietnam by steamship-powered trade, for what it's worth.
(That's only a few minutes into the interview. The whole episode is great listening, and includes a few details on the Freakonomics experience.)
Correction: Both the Freakonomics coverage and the book named above were based on an earlier paper, though both that and the book were by Vann.
The Cobra Effect is an example of a Perverse Incentive, which is where an attempt to incentivize a behavior ends up incentivizing the opposite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
I think most of the examples fit this, but a few don't.
This also sounds similar to Goodhart's Law which states that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
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Why do people foolishly claim these are unintended consequences?
This is a way to regulate political speech and create a weapon to silence free speech online. It's what opponents to these measures have been saying forever. Why do we have to pretend those enacting them didn't listen, are naive, or are innocent well intentioned actors? They know what this is and what it does. The purpose of a system is what it does.
Related to this, and one version of a label for this type of silencing particularly as potentially weaponized by arbitrary people not just politicians is Heckler's veto. Just stir up a storm and cite this convenient regulation to shut down a site you don't like. It's useful to those enacting these laws that they don't even themselves have to point the finger, disgruntled users or whoever will do it for them.
Politicians should take a mandatory one-week training in:
- very basic macro economics
- very basic game theory
- very basic statistics
Come to think of it, kids should learn this in high school
I think you’re being overly charitable in thinking this happens because they don’t understand these things. The main thing is that they don’t care. The purpose of passing legislation to protect the children isn’t to protect the children, it’s to get reelected.
If we can get the voters to understand the things you mention, then maybe we’d have a chance.
It’s more than just politicians not caring: Big Tech firms hite people on millions of dollars per year to lobby and co-operate with governments, in order to ensure that processes like this result in favourable outcomes to them. See e.g. Nick Clegg.
Lawmakers also make and pass laws because it's their job, not because a new law is needed. They feel it's literally their job to come up with new bills to pass, for no reason other than "it's my job".
Imagine a society so stable it doesn't need new laws or rules. All the elected representatives would just sit around all day and twiddle their thumbs. A bad look in their eyes.
This is how it should be of course.
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> protect the children isn’t to protect the children, it’s to get reelected
The next UK general election is ~5 years away so this makes no sense.
The more likely reason is that it's simply good policy. We have enough research now that shows that (a) social media use is harmful for children and (b) social media companies like Meta, TikTok etc have done a wilfully poor job at protecting them.
It is bizarre to me how many people here seem willing to defend them.
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I think you're being underly charitable. The vast majority of congress critters are pretty smart people, and by Jeff Jackson's account, even the ones who yell the loudest are generally reasonable behind closed doors due to incentives.
The problem is that the real problems are very hard, and their job is to simplify it to their constituents well enough to keep their jobs, which may or may not line up with doing the right thing.
This is a truly hard problem. CSAM is a real problem, and those who engage in its distribution are experts in subverting the system. So is freedom of expression. So is the onerous imposition of regulations.
And any such issue (whether it be transnational migration, or infrastructure, or EPA regulations in America, or whatever issue you want to bring up) is going to have some very complex tradeoffs and even if you have a set of Ph.Ds in the room with no political pressure, you are going to have uncomfortable tradeoffs.
What if the regulations are bad because the problem is so hard we can't make good ones, even with the best and brightest?
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They want to protect their political control, so they break any way for the opposition to effectively organize. Things like unlimited immigration, Net Zero 2050, and dekulakization of the agricultural sector are widely unpopular, so they just have to get everyone who has anything to say against these programs to be politically powerless.
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> it’s to get reelected.
I doubt this. Legislation is written by committee and passed by democracy. Most of the voting public don't look up the voting records which are available to them. Most of the voting public can't name a third of the members of parliament.
If there is a conspiratorial take, the one about regulatory capture is more believable.
Politicians forced to learn statistics -> Politicians better prepared to understand consequences of their actions -> Politicians exploit economy better -> Everyone worse off -> Law to educate politicians is abolished -> Politicians exploit economy nevertheless
Seriously, the problem is not politicians being clueless about all the above, but having too much power which makes them think they need to solve everything.
This is the accurate scenario unfortunately.
I'd give you 100 upvotes if I could.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his re-election depends on him not understanding it.
Except the gas guzzling large trucks seems to be a uniquely north american problem - because of the "work vehicle" loophole.
Plenty of European countries have a work vehicle loophole, though it's not as big as the US one.
Generally it's something along the lines of "a truck or van registered to a business is assumed to be a work vehicle, so pays less tax than a passenger car".
Of course you need to have a business to take advantage of that loophole, but it doesn't need to be a business that actually has any use for the truck- it could be a one-person IT consultancy.
And Australian.
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You are assuming they work for the good of the country, but in reality they work for big corporations. These regulations are designed to weed out small players that are a nuisance for the rich.
This is why we have direct democracy here in Switzerland. Just skip the middlemen.
You have it backwards.
Politicians can be very very good at those things, when they have a reason to be.
So you are assuming politicians graduate high school? Not in my country.
What good would that do? Look who elects them!
There also is a very simple, uncontrived effect. You put pressure to a thing, the thing is quashed and ceased to exist.
Many things in a society exist on thin margins, not only monetary, but also of attention, free time, care and interest, etc. You put a burden, such as a regulation, saying that people have to either comply or cease the activity, and people just cease it, like in the post. What used to be a piece of flourishing (or festering, depending on your POV) complexity gets reduced to a plain, compliant nothing.
Maybe that was the plan all along.
> Is there some generalized law (yet) about unintended consequences?
These are not unintended consequences. All media legislation of late has been to eliminate all but the companies that are largest and closest to government. Clegg works at Facebook now, they'd all be happy to keep government offices on the premises to ensure compliance; they'd even pay for them.
Western governments are encouraging monopolies in media (through legal pressure) in order to suppress speech through the voluntary cooperation of the companies who don't want to be destroyed. Those companies are not only threatened with the stick, but are given the carrots of becoming government contractors. There's a revolving door between their c-suites and government agencies. Their kids go to the same schools and sleep with each other.
Sociologist Robert K. Merton coined the term "unintended consequences" (amongst numerous others), and developed an existing notion of manifest vs. latent functions and dysfunctions.
In particular, Merton notes:
Discovery of latent functions represents significant increments in sociological knowledge .... It is precisely the latent functions of a practice or belief which are not common knowledge, for these are unintended and generally unrecognized social and psychological consequences.
Robert K. Merton, "Manifest and Latent Functions", in Wesley Longhofer, Daniel Winchester (eds) Social Theory Re-Wired, Routledge (2016).
<https://www.worldcat.org/title/social-theory-re-wired-new-co...>
More on Merton:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_K._Merton#Unanticipated...>
Unintended consequences:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences#Robert...>
Manifest and latent functions:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_and_latent_functions_...>
This is what Javier Milei means when he says that everything politicians touch turns to shit and therefor government should be minimal.
Isn’t that a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Many regulations serve to protect individuals and the environment, both of which might otherwise be overlooked in favor of corporate profits fighting in the free market. I'm afraid that when advocates of minimal government push their agenda, they often envision a level of reduction far beyond what most people would find acceptable. In situations like the one under discussion, I believe improving the regulation would be a better approach than eliminating it entirely.
While I agree with your general sentiment I think that there is a possible type of government where we are no-longer forced to vote for individual humans (or indeed groups of humans: political parties) but can instead vote on the actual ideas/policies.
It might even be possible now to combine nuanced perspectives/responses to proposed policies from millions of people together!? I think it's not that unreasonable to suggest that kind of thing nowadays, I think there's precedent for it too even though stuff like how-wikipedia-works isn't really ideal, (even though it's somewhat an example of the main idea!).
This way, the public servants (including politicians) can mainly just take care of making sure the ideas that the people vote-for get implemented! (like all the lower tiers of government currently do - just extend it to the top level too!) I don't think we should give individuals that power any more!
The main problem is overwhelming voters, for a vote to be meaningful the voter has to understand the propositions that they vote for. Given the amount of legislation passed it is quite unreasonable to expect everyone to do the due diligence for every vote.
What might make such a system work in practice is to only let a small randomly selected group of people vote for each issue. You still get a similar representation as a full vote, but with each person having much fewer votes to attend to it isn't overwhelming.
Cynical viewpoint, downvote if you must: It is the dream of right wing populists everywhere to demolish government bloat, leaving just the bits that are actually useful.
But: https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/seoc2/1996_1997/ad...
Any bureaucracy evolves, ultimately, to serve and protect itself. So the populist boss snips at the easy, but actually useful parts: Social safety nets, environmental regulations, etc. Whereas the core bureaucracy, the one that should really be snipped, has gotten so good at protecting itself that it remains untouchable. So in the end the percentage of useless administratium is actually up, and the government, as a whole, still bloated but even less functional. Just another "unintended consequences" example.
We'll see if Argentina can do better than this.
In my locale, every time there are budget cuts or cost increases it is the popular and the visible government functions which get the axe. I.e. The parks department has four layers of management and manages a ton of no-bid contracts, but swimming pools will be closed rather than building cheaper in-house expertise. I guess it's better than deferring essential maintenance, but somehow I suspect maintenance is also already being overly deferred. One wishes they would take an axe to Parkinson's law of growth instead.
The concept of Rule Beating from Systems Thinking seems apt. You have some goal so you introduce a rule, but if you choose a bad rule, it ends up making things worse. The solution is to recognize that it was a bad rule, repeal it, and find a better one.
It is also that big business can influence legislators, and small business cannot, so big business can influence regulation to their own advantage.
There's a whole YouTube playlist about that sort of thing: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBuns9Evn1w9XhnH7vVh_7C...
I've heard it called "law of unintended consequences" and "cobra effect".
I don't think these consequences are unintended.
I recall some laws in the US (or california?) were based on the size of the company (in revenue $$)
Too bad this isn't the case here.
Even when the fines or other punishments for non-compliance are relative to size/income/profit/etc, there are usually costs of compliance that do not similarly scale. Bigger companies can swallow them, independents can not, so regulatory capture can still be in effect.
IN the EU we have many of those and it's not a good thing.
Laws are meant to be dynamic. So you iterate on them as you get feedback from their implementation
> Laws are meant to be dynamic.
The US Supreme Court disagrees. https://www.dentons.com/en/insights/articles/2024/july/3/-/m...
The Supreme Court hasn’t and can’t say anything against laws being updated and changed. What they have prevented is those we have elected to make laws delegating that very authority to others.
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For the time being the US Supreme Court has no jurisdiction over the UK online safety act
I mean, that’s what I call “rules lawyering” in game parlance. When someone utilizes the rules in such a way as to cause legal harm in service of their own interests, regardless of the intent of said rules in preventing harm.
It’s why when a law/rule/standard has a carveout for its first edge case, it quickly becomes nothing but edge cases all the way down. And because language is ever-changing, rules lawyering is always possible - and governments must be ever-resistant to attempts to rules lawyer by bad actors.
Modern regulations are sorely needed, but we’ve gone so long without meaningful reform that the powers that be have captured any potential regulation before it’s ever begun. I would think most common-sense reforms would say that these rules should be more specific in intent and targeting only those institutions clearing a specific revenue threshold or user count, but even that could be exploited by companies with vast legal teams creating new LLCs for every thin sliver of services offered to wiggle around such guardrails, or scriptkiddies creating millions of bot accounts with a zero-day to trigger compliance requirements.
Regulation is a never-ending game. The only reason we “lost” is because our opponent convinced us that any regulation is bad. This law is awful and nakedly assaults indietech while protecting big tech, but we shouldn’t give up trying to untangle this mess and regulate it properly.
> I would think most common-sense reforms would say that these rules should be more specific in intent and targeting only those institutions clearing a specific revenue threshold or user count, but even that could be exploited by companies with vast legal teams creating new LLCs for every thin sliver of services offered to wiggle around such guardrails, or scriptkiddies creating millions of bot accounts with a zero-day to trigger compliance requirements.
This is what judges are for. A human judge can understand that the threshold is intended to apply across the parent company when there is shared ownership, and that bot accounts aren't real users. You only have to go back and fix it if they get it wrong.
> The only reason we “lost” is because our opponent convinced us that any regulation is bad. This law is awful and nakedly assaults indietech while protecting big tech, but we shouldn’t give up trying to untangle this mess and regulate it properly.
The people who passed this law didn't do so by arguing that any regulation is bad. The reason you lost is that your regulators are captured by the incumbents, and when that's the case any regulation is bad, because any regulation that passes under that circumstance will be the one that benefits the incumbents.
You can beat the charge but you can't beat the ride.
>Protect the children -> Criminalize activites that might in any way cause an increase in risk to children -> Best to just keep them indoors playing with electronic gadgets -> Increased rates of obesity/depression etc -> Children worse off.
Not sure how keeping kids off the internet keeps them indoors? Surely the opposite is true?
In the US at least, we’re at a point where letting your kids play in your yard is enough to get arrested and jailed with child endangerment. Within the last 30 days, a woman has been arrested and charged with child endangerment for the crime of… letting her child walk to the store [1] and others have been jailed for letting their child play outside [2].
So what do you do to entertain children? Use what you have. Dunk them on the internet via YouTube first and then let them free range because you’re tired and can’t give a fuck anymore.
^1 https://abcnews.go.com/amp/GMA/Family/mom-arrested-after-son... ^2 https://www.aol.com/news/2015-12-03-woman-gets-arrested-for-...
My wife and I had CPS called on us (in Texas, no less) because I had some construction leftovers inside my fence, waiting to be taken to the dump, and my neighbor was concerned that my kids would be hurt playing around it.
We were interviewed, they found there were no issues, and the case was dropped. Very stressful experience, though.
And for what? I grew up on a farm in Nebraska. We had endless fields and roads around us to explore. The only off-limits area was an abandoned hog confinement, which to be fair, absolutely could have killed us (by falling into the open trench of porcine waste) – naturally, we still went there.
I know that reeks of survivor bias, but given the length of time Homo sapiens have survived, I think it’s a reasonably safe assumption that kids, when left to their own devices, are unlikely to be seriously injured or killed. Though, that’s probably only true if they’ve been exposed to it gradually over time, and are aware of the risks.
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Thanks, I needed that. In a thread full of people criticising UK law, I am very happy to have a crazy US example to make me feel better.
Reading that article, it seems that the mom was arrested because the cops wanted to. Someone called the cops for a child walking down the highway by themselves, and then the cops showed up and arrested her. Cops can arrest people for any reason practically, a lot of times because they just don't like you. I was thrown up against the back of a patrol car and searched when ordering chinese food late at night once. I don't see that she was charged by the prosecutor, or that the child was taken away.
The other link you have is neighbors that obviously dislike each other, and they told the cops the kid was in danger.
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Are kids in the US even able to go to school on their own like ours still do in europe?
You don't think there is some half way point between forcing them to stay inside and letting a 4 year old, wander 40m away with no supervision.
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No mention in that example of internet. If I had to think of specifics, he's probably talking about the things that fall under the category of "free range kids" but also result in parents being criminally prosecuted.
This is a discussion about the UK online safety act! That is about the internet isn't it?
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Your first example is a case of lawmakers not willing to finish the job moreso than of regulation being bad.
That is like saying "when we write software there are bugs, so rather than fix them, we should never write software again".
Your second example is ascribing to regulation something that goes way beyond regulation.
No, what he says is "when we write software there are bugs, so we should write less software".
As opposed to "we should fix the bugs we find".
I don't think anyone believe that the "think of the children" argument leads to "unintended" consequences. They are thoroughly intended. It doesn't look like that, but policy makers do analyze potential impact and this is a problem you understand if you are more than 5 minutes into the topic.
Although I do think they overlook that their legislation is restricted to their domestic market though, so any potential positive effect is more or less immediately negated. That is especially true for English speaking countries.
These can not be unintended consequences. Obviously the UK government is aware of what they are doing and are using whatever language they can.
Modern fanatics don't care. They are eager to destroy everything for the sake of "protecting children".
Behold the failure to consider second order consequences when legislating rules.
Why are gas-guzzling trucks exempt from fuel standards? (Genuine question)
They were supposedly commercial vehicles with real need for size and towing capacity.
Because no one would fork over stupid amounts of money for a f*k off big truck if they didn't have a real need. Right?
Because they were a large fraction of cars manufactured by US companies, so not excluding them would have put the entire US auto industry out of business.
The original idea was that they needed big engines and bad aerodynamics to be able to perform their functions of hauling bulky loads and towing heavy trailers. Few people who didn't actually have those needs would want to drive one because they were unwieldy to drive and uncomfortable to be in relative to cars, so such an exemption surely wouldn't be widely exploited.
Google "chicken tax". The chain of unintended consequences goes back even further
Oppositional Defiance Disorder?
>Increase fuel economy -> Introduce fuel economy standards -> Economic cars practically phased out in favour of guzzling "trucks" that are exempt from fuel economy standards -> Worse fuel economy.
tl;dr: This is a myth.
There is no incentive to the consumer to purchase a vehicle with worse fuel economy.
There USED to be an incentive, 30-40 years ago.
It is not 1985 anymore.
The gas guzzler tax covers a range of fuel economies from 12.5 to 22.5 mpg.
It is practically impossible to design a car that gets less than 22.5 mpg.
The Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170, with an 6.2 L 8 cylinder engine making ONE THOUSAND AND TWENTY FIVE horsepower is officially rated for 13 mpg but that's bullshit, it's Dodge juicing the numbers just so buyers can say "I paid fifty-four hundred bucks gas guzzler tax BAYBEE" and in real-world usage the Demon 170 is getting 25 mpg. Other examples of cars that cannot achieve 22.5 mpg are the BMW M2/M3/M4/M8, the Cadillac CT5, high-performance sports sedans for which the gas guzzler tax is a <5% price increase. ($5400 is 5% of the Demon 170 price, but 2-3% of what dealers are actually charging for it.)
The three most popular vehicles by sales volume in the United States are: 1. The Ford F-150, 2. The Chevy Silverado, and 3. The Dodge Ram 1500.
The most popular engine configuration for these vehicles is the ~3L V6. Not a V8. A V6.
Less than 1/4th of all pickup trucks are sold equipped with a V8.
According to fueleconomy.gov every single Ford, Chevrolet, and Ram full-size pickup with a V6 would pay no gas guzzler tax.
Most V8s would be close, perhaps an ECU flash away, to paying no gas guzzler tax. The only pickups that would qualify for a gas guzzler tax are the high-performance models-- single-digit percentages of the overall sales volume and at those prices the gas guzzler tax would not even factor into a buyer's decision.
People buy trucks, SUVs, and compact SUVs because they want them and can afford them.
Not because auto manufacturers phased out cars due to fuel economy standards. Not because consumers were "tricked" or "coerced". And certainly not because "the gubmint" messed things up.
They buy them because they WANT them.
The Toyota RAV4 is the 4th most popular car in the US. The Corolla is the 13th most popular. They are built on the same platform and dimensionally, the Corolla is actually very slightly larger except for height. They both come with the same general ballpark choices in engines. The gas guzzler tax only applies to the Corolla, but that doesn't matter because they both would be exempt. People don't freely choose the RAV4 over the Corolla because of fuel economy they buy it because the Corolla has 13 cubic feet of cargo capacity and the RAV4 has 70 cubic feet.
And before anyone says that the gas guzzler tax made passenger cars more expensive, passenger cars can be purchased for the same price adjusted for inflation they could be 50 years ago, but people don't want a Mitsubishi Mirage, which is the same price as a vintage VW Beetle (perennial cheapest new car from the 1960s) and better in every quantifiable metric, they want an SUV.
What may be true is that there is a national policy to keep fuel prices as low as possible, for a myriad of reasons, with one side effect of that policy being that it has enabled people to buy larger less fuel-efficient cars.
I do not believe it is auto manufacturers who are pushing for this policy. I believe it is the freight and logistic market. The auto market is valued at $4 billion, the freight and logistics market is $1,300 billion. GM and Ford are insignificant specks compared to the diesel and gasoline consumers of the freight and logistics firms (who have several powerful lobbies).
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2017/08/v8-market-share-ju...
https://www.fueleconomy.gov
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f6197.pdf (gas guzzler worksheet)
Per https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/61b7e040e90e0... the average UK car MPG is ~50mpg, so even allowing for the difference in US and UK gallons a 22.5mpg vehicle is colloquially a "gas guzzler" by our standards.
> What may be true is that there is a national policy to keep fuel prices as low as possible, for a myriad of reasons, with one side effect of that policy being that it has enabled people to buy larger less fuel-efficient cars.
Yes. Americans have always had cheap fuel and it's shaped the entire society around it.
In Britain, a Standard Imperial Gallon is 120% the size of a Standard US Gallon.
So while the fuel economy is higher in the UK, it isn't as high as it first appears.
People love to blame government regulations for consumer preferences that go against their own.
Consumers want larger vehicles, and manufactures bend the rules to allow for such vehicles to be more easily build. Manufactures write the laws, after all. CAFE allows for SUVs and other "light trucks" to get worse fuel economy than a car. Since fuel economy allowances are based on vehicle footprint, and its easier to make a car larger than it is to improve fuel economy.
But ... Why do they want to? I'm genuinely curious. Did this desire for larger vehicles exist latent in the human psyche? Is it an emergent property of a race to the bottom as everyone tries to have the safest car? Or to secure prestige via a positional good, leaving everyone worse off? Do you think marketing choices played a role in shaping our collective desires?
On big American roads it's easy to own big cars. Given that people have to drive a lot because it's so spread out, it's very convenient to be able to put lots of stuff and/or people in a vehicle. I theorise that your car is like another room in your house.
I know my wife likes storing things in the boot of our car and I'm not even American. It means they're always conveniently there - chairs for sitting in the park, shopping bags, groceries that she's going to take to a party or bought for someone else, kids sports equipment.
Humans have an instinct to seek status, like many (most?) other animals.
I agree that fuel cost and tax are not the reason trucks are so popular in the US. The main incentive for US manufacturers to have a large demand for light trucks because of the chicken tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
That does not make any sense to me. Vehicles can and are manufactured in the US.
Bigger vehicles are popular in the US because people want to be in a bigger vehicle and sit higher up than others, AND can afford to do so (ignoring their long term finances). I.e. the politically popular policy of low gas prices.
That's the long and short of it. Buyers rewarded the sellers that sold big and tall vehicles, so obviously sellers are going to sell big and tall vehicles.
There was no situation where buying a big and tall vehicle was cheaper than a smaller, more fuel efficient vehicle, so conclusively, people chose to spend more to get what they wanted. Of course, once someone else gets a bigger vehicle, then you are less safe, unless you get a bigger vehicle, and so on and so forth.
> There is no incentive to the consumer to purchase a vehicle with worse fuel economy.
Not true: Section 179 [0]. Luxury auto manufacturers are well-aware of this [1] and advertise it as a benefit. YouTube et al. are also littered with videos of people discussing how they're saving $X on some luxury vehicle.
> Not because consumers were "tricked" or "coerced". ... They buy them because they WANT them.
To be fair, they only want them because they've been made into extremely comfortable daily drivers. Anyone who's driven a truck from the 90s or earlier can attest that they were not designed with comfort in mind. They were utilitarian, with minimal passenger seating even with Crew Cab configurations. At some point – and I have no idea if this was driven by demand or not – trucks became, well, nice. I had a 2010 Honda Ridgeline until a few weeks ago, which is among the un-truck-iest of trucks, since it's unibody. That also means it's extremely comfortable, seats 5 with ease, and can still do what most people need a truck to do: carry bulky items home from Lowe's / Home Depot. Even in the 2010 model, it had niceties like heated seats. I just replaced it last week with a 2025 Ridgeline, and the new one is astonishingly nicer. Heated and ventilated seats, seat position memory, Android Auto / Apple CarPlay, adaptive cruise control, etc.
That's also not to say that modern trucks haven't progressed in their utility. A Ford F-350 from my youth could pull 20,000 lbs. on a gooseneck in the right configuration. The 2025 model can pull 40,000 lbs., and will do it in quiet luxury, getting better fuel economy.
[0]: https://www.irs.gov/publications/p946#idm140048254261728
[1]: https://www.landroveroflivermore.com/section-179.htm
"Gaming The Law"