AUTOMOBILES GO FASTER BECAUSE THEY HAVE BRAKES.

That observation, which I believe originated with George Stigler, also provoked research into the unintended consequences of crashworthiness standards.  Much of the early work was by Professor Stigler's colleague Sam Peltzman, thus any reference to more injuries and deaths accompanying tightened safety standards becomes a Peltzman Effect.

His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, Emeritus, invoked a Peltzman Effect accompanying the more widespread distribution of condoms in Africa.  For his observation, the oh-so-trendy made, and the Milwaukee Art Center displayed, a work of transgressive art.

The transgressives get their art.  The Pope, and Professor Peltzman, get the deep word.

Science, represented by the church, won.

The faith, in this case, was ideological, ridiculing Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI for saying that distribution of condoms had not stemmed the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa and had actually made it worse. The science, brilliantly summarized by Dr. Christine Zainer, consisted of detailed empirical studies and opinions from public health experts showing that condom distribution had in fact failed to stem the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa; and had, indeed, contributed to spreading HIV/AIDS.

Because of the public health phenomenon known as "risk compensation," condom distribution makes people think sex with condoms is safer than it is. They therefore engage in high-risk sexual activity that they would otherwise refrain from, resulting in transmission of HIV/AIDS to people who would not otherwise contract it. Because no condom is 100% effective, and many fall far short of that (especially if they are re-used), the false sense of security generated by condom distribution leads to HIV/AIDS infections that would not otherwise have occurred.

In short, as explained by Edward C. Green, a senior research fellow at the Harvard University School of Public Health and a self-described liberal and pro-contraceptionist, "The pope was right." Benedict's statement was not the mindless assertion of religious dogma over science-based health care that "Eggs Benedict" falsely portrayed it as being. It was, rather, a courageous witness to human dignity based on religious faith but solidly backed by well-informed scientific opinion and empirical data. It was the artist, Niki Johnson, not the pontiff, who ignored the relevant science.

Bet on the side of the Law of Unintended Consequences, particularly where a safety appliance changes the incentives to live more dangerously.

And how fun is it to call for a privilege check from the avant-garde.

The more important point, however, is not the work's insulting falsification of Benedict's position but its flippant disregard of the risk compensation effect and the danger of HIV/AIDS contagion it entails. By recklessly ridiculing information essential to saving African lives, the artist joined a long line of western elitists in viewing an African tragedy through the prism of affluent, First World privilege, without the real world perspective that the church's thousands of HIV/AIDS treatment centers in Africa give it. Like many past efforts, the result is a position that is subjectively sincere, earnest and well-meaning — and objectively racist. MAM was complicit with the artist in demonstrating, once again, that with the possible exception of handguns and tequila, the most dangerous combination on Earth is passion and ignorance.

A car with good brakes comes in a distant third.

IS THERE NOT A MISSING "NOT"? There's a new Virginia School of economics (the old being associated with Ronald Coase.) This is George Mason's Robin Hanson, in the Virginia School article.

“Economics as a discipline is really the only social science where normative claims, about what should happen, are part of the standard literature. Most other social sciences, you can read between the lines and see their agenda.”

The article goes on to caricature competing normative claims.

Adjunct professor Arnold Kling offered a terser précis of the GMU way. “My simple way of describing it is that at Chicago they say, ‘Markets work; let’s use markets.’ At Harvard and MIT they say, ‘Markets fail; let’s use government.’ And at George Mason, we say, ‘Markets fail; let’s use markets.’” This seeming paradox means, that GMU sees plenty of deviations from the “perfect neoclassical paradigm,” which requires “perfect information, perfect competition,” but that unlike Harvard or MIT, they do not automatically “ring a bell and say, ‘We need more government.’ Markets come up with solutions to problems of information.”

"Caricature is not a pejorative here: there is enough truth in the generalization that it doesn't mislead, but there are a lot of subtleties in doing economics. Another economist, Peter Leeson, explains.

Milton Friedman’s observation that “in the end there’s just good economics and bad economics.” But Leeson wasn’t ready to give up entirely on “interesting” economics: “If my mom finds a paper interesting, that’s an indicator to me that I’m on the right path, that people outside of the small group of academics actually see some value in what we might be doing.”

But can economics be too interesting? “Results that are quirky make it difficult to persuade people that your conclusions are true. So there’s a sort of optimal amount of weirdness that you want to have. You don’t want to be so far off the deep end that nobody will listen to you, that you’ll be dismissed out of hand. But you want to be novel enough that you’re doing something interesting.”

I wonder if Leeson thinks “interesting economics” biases the scholar towards the counterintuitive. “It depends on the audience we’re talking about,” he said, “It needs to be counterintuitive to somebody, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be counterintuitive to the profession, although it probably helps if it is.” He cited a paper by a friend on moral hazard in NASCAR, specifically how safer cars led to more crashes. That, he said, is counterintuitive to the layman but not to the economist.

(The paper extends arguments of some thirty years' seniority on the Peltzman Effect.) The Peltzman Effect, however, does not bring with it a normative claim, either in favor or in opposition to tighter crashworthiness standards for cars.

INCOME AND SUBSTITUTION EFFECTS.

Or perhaps it's the Peltzman effect, or it goes back to George Stigler's "automobiles travel faster because they have brakes."

Put simply: increased availability of contraception might lead to fewer pregnancies (the income effect) and to more people having sex (the substitution effect.)  New Study Shows ’90s Era Condom Programs Increased Teen Fertility Rates.  It's economics research out of Notre Dame.

The study is very rigorous. The authors identified 22 school districts in twelve states that launched condom-distribution programs during the 1990s. Some of these school districts are among the largest in the country including New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Overall, the study analyzes teen-fertility data from 396 high-population counties over a span of 19 years. A range of demographic and economic factors are held constant. It finds that if 100 percent of high-school students attended a school with a condom-distribution program, the teen-fertility rate would increase anywhere from 10 to 12 percent. Furthermore, this finding was fairly consistent across school districts with condom-distribution programs.

Caffeinated Thoughts isn't surprised. "Twenty years of youth ministry experience tells me that free condoms led to increased sexual behavior."  And the kiddie corps at Vox starts to grow up.  "But it does call into question some of the unintentional side effects of making the contraceptive more freely available."

Bet on the side of the Law of Unintended Consequences.  Plus sound economics.

CIVILIZATION, LOST.

Derek Thompson asks, "If America's So Rich, How'd It Get So Sad?"  My parents were born in the era of Coolidge Prosperity popularly known as the "Roaring Twenties," which perhaps were even better because the likes of William Shirer and George Gershwin thought the times so benighted they lit off for the Continent.  This century has featured what he, with an assist from Sam Peltzman (yes, he of the Peltzman Effect), calls the "Tragic Twenties."

Peltzman’s analysis is not a lonely voice; there is a veritable chorus of gloomy sentiment. This week, the Federal Reserve’s measure of US worker satisfaction fell to its lowest level since the survey began in 2014. One week prior, consumer sentiment had fallen to the lowest level ever recorded in the 70-year history of the University of Michigan economic survey. Once again, the index plunged around 2020 and, like a hiker on the far side of a mountain, continues down step by step. Americans are telling pollsters that they are more depressed about this economy than they were during the depths of the Great Recession or the painful stagflationary years of the 1970s.

His essay continues by suggesting that there's more than a little crying with your mouth full in that response.

But the moral might be more important than the material.

In the last 40 years, Americans have come to expect and prize affordability without even having to think about it. But in the last five years, prices for all sorts of things, including housing, have increased about three times faster than the rate Americans are used to; meanwhile, full employment has put upward pressure on the cost of services. The US public has responded by not only screaming at pollsters about their misery but also by rushing to the polls to vote out every incumbent who failed to do something about the “affordability” crisis of the 2020s. And Americans are not alone.

If civilization advances by expanding the set of things people can do without having to think about it, when that set shrinks, we might be looking at one civilization being lost, or perhaps at the saecular order fracturing.

It’s not just that Americans have lost trust in august, faraway institutions. Their faith in one another has suffered even more dramatic declines. For decades, the General Social Survey has asked Americans the same basic question: “Do you think most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance, or would they try to be fair?” In the 1970s and 1980s, Americans overwhelmingly agreed that other people are more or less trustworthy. That confidence in strangers has plummeted since 2020, according to Peltzman. The share of respondents who say other people are “fair” has declined by even more than overall happiness.

Those grey swans are circling.

American sadness this decade has been forged by the fact of, and the feeling of, a permanent unrelenting economic crisis, amplified by a uniquely negative news and media environment, and exacerbated by the rise of solitude and the declining centrality of trusted institutions. Inflation has made today’s life harder to afford, while the ambient awareness of other people’s triumphs on social media had made tomorrow’s success feel harder to achieve. The ongoing collapse of confidence in the establishment has made Americans feel unusually adrift and dissatisfied with institutions outside of their control, while the chosen self-isolation of modern life has demolished communal trust, as we increasingly experience other people’s minds through the toxic surreality of our screens rather than through the embodied reality of strangers who are, for the most part, just as nice as we are.

Will that saecular entropy be reversed?  Fourth Turning types say no.  If not, what comes first, ekpyrosis or the return of the twelfth imam, or perhaps Barbarossa's beard winding around the table?

SAFETY APPLIANCES MAKE DRIVERS LESS VIGILANT.

That's a corollary to "Automobiles go faster because they have brakes."

That observation, which I believe originated with George Stigler, also provoked research into the unintended consequences of crashworthiness standards.  Much of the early work was by Professor Stigler's colleague Sam Peltzman, thus any reference to more injuries and deaths accompanying tightened safety standards becomes a Peltzman Effect.

Put ever better autopilots in automobiles, and watch the drivers disengage.  "Tesla has the deadliest cars on the road today. According to a new study from iSeeCars, Tesla vehicles have the highest fatal crash rate among all vehicle brands in the United States."

Jalopnik contributor Andy Kalmowitz calls the roll of the motor vehicles operated most recklessly.

The study, conducted on 2018-2022 model year vehicles, looked at crashes between 2017 and 2022 that resulted in at least one of the occupants’ death. It found that Teslas have a fatal crash rate of 5.6 per billion miles driven.  Kia came in second with a rate of 5.5, followed by Buick at 4.8, Dodge at 4.4 and Hyundai at 3.9. For reference, iSeeCars says the overall average was 2.8, meaning the average Tesla crash is twice as deadly as average.

The study looked into more than just automakers, though. It also broke vehicles down by individual model. It still wasn’t pretty for Tesla. The Tesla Model Y had a 10.6 fatal crash rate. That’s nearly five times the average for SUVs, and it was the sixth worth score overall. (The Hyundai Venue,  Chevy Corvette, Mitsubishi Mirage, Porsche 911 and Honda CR-V Hybrid were above it). The Model S’s score came in at 5.8, two times the average.

To be fair to Tesla, these numbers don’t automatically mean its cars are unsafe for occupants. It has a lot more to do with how people drive these cars.

It could be, as Mr Kalmowitz suggests, that Tesla owners "tend to drive like goons," and surely there are a lot of cars in that list that figure in the same sort of slanging matches that accompany the big pickup trucks.  Streetsblog's Blake Aued, however, notes "That likely has to do with inattentive or impaired drivers overly relying on its automated features."

Professors Peltzman and Stigler would approve of the inference.

THE REPLAY REVIEW DETRACTS FROM THE GAME.

It makes the referees less accurate and it annoys the fans.  Time for college basketball to do less of it?  Lexington, Kentucky sports scribe Mark Story shares my judgement.  "While I have no way to prove this other than the eyeball test, I believe the reliance on replay has led to a decline in the quality of officiating across sports."  He might not have heard of the Peltzman Effect.  I have.

College basketball poobahs might want to simplify the men's game by awarding the defense the ball on a held ball (alternating possessions after the opening tip only) and eliminating the five- and ten-second violations.  They also want to go to four quarters the way the women have, without going to four quarters.  It's also odd that the poobahs want to limit times out under two minutes.  In the women's game, a time out in the last minute of the game sometimes gives the offense an out-of-bounds play at mid-court.  Read the rules yourself.  Thus, you often see coaches conserving their times out so as to be able to call a play for the half-court with the outcome in doubt.

Let's see what takes effect come November.

THE PELTZMAN EFFECT, AT ONE REMOVE.

Automobiles go faster because they have brakes.  "Bet on the side of the Law of Unintended Consequences, particularly where a safety appliance changes the incentives to live more dangerously."

What happens, though, when the person using the safety appliance is not the person living more dangerously?  "Motorists Punish Helmet-Wearing Cyclists With Close Passes, Confirms Data Recrunch."  A University of Bath psychologist called Ian Walker apparently made himself a human subject, and took notes.

Half the time he wore a bicycle helmet and half the time he didn’t. The results showed motorists tended to pass him more closely when he rode wearing a helmet. Such “punishment passes” can also lead to collisions, collisions which can result in injury and death – and not to those guilty of the dangerous overtakes.

Walker suggested that drivers believe cyclists who wear helmets are more serious, experienced and predictable than those who ride without, and motorists, therefore, overtake them with less care. Drivers may also wrongly assume that cycle helmets – usually made from expanded-polystyrene – are forms of armor that will protect cyclists in any impact from motor vehicles. Cycle helmets are not designed for such collisions (they do not even protect against concussions.)

Jake Olivier and Scott Walter of the University of New South Wales took Walker’s original data and recrunched it, claiming in 2013 that “bicycle helmet wearing is not associated with close motor vehicle passing.”

The things people will do for Minimal Publishable Units.  I suspect the now somewhat old article got another mention on infrastructure Twitter was for the opportunity to deplorable-shame those "punishment passers" (if they even exist).  It's worth reminding people that the point of doing research is to get some sort of handle both on the truth and on the margin of error.  "Whether or not bicycle helmets offer whole-population safety benefits is a surprisingly fractious debate among academics – there is no settled science on the matter."

REFEREES ARE LESS ACCURATE BECAUSE THEY HAVE REPLAY REVIEW.

The why isn't that hard to explain.

The games go on long enough, and a factoid that I saw someplace earlier this week noted that "only 37%" of calls that were challenged were reversed on review.

Put another way, almost four of ten calls that prompt a review are incorrect calls.  Yes, the referees' union argues that the referees are evaluated for accuracy.  All the same, I can't help but suspect that in the absence of replay review, there would be fewer controversial calls because the opportunity to make a decision and have it clarified on appeal would no longer be present.  Think of it as a corollary to the Peltzman effect.

Rather than work on improving the officiating, the go-to for a system that is not robust against mistakes is to make it less robust.

Colts owner Jim Irsay wants to see the NFL make a drastic rule change after watching his team lose a controversial game to the Browns on Sunday.

According to Irsay, the NFL admitted this week that the officiating crew botched two key calls that both went against the Colts in the final 50 seconds of the game. To keep that from happening again, Irsay is proposing a rule that would make ALL CALLS reviewable in the final two minutes.

"The NFL admits and understands that they did not make the correct calls at end of Sunday's Colts/Browns Game," Irsay wrote on the social media site formerly known as Twitter. "I believe we need to institute Instant Replay for all calls, including Penalties, in the last two minutes of All Games."

It appears as though Mr Irsay belongs to the Donald Trump school of Random Capitalization on social media.  He's also lobbying for making the concluding hour of professional football games less watchable than it was years ago.  Between the coaches taking time out, the quarterbacks spiking the ball, the station breaks at the two minute warning and each time out, and New York buzzing in with a review on the calls they currently review, it's the better part of an hour to get from the two minute warning to the final gun.

REFEREES ARE LESS ACCURATE BECAUSE THEY HAVE REPLAY REVIEW.

Over the weekend, the Los Angeles Rams survived the conference title game in New Orleans, aided, it would seem, by a penalty not called.

Drew Brees' third-down pass to Tommylee Lewis fell incomplete with less than two minutes remaining in regulation, but only because Nickell Robey-Coleman committed obvious pass interference. However, the officials did not throw a flag, and the Saints were forced to settle for a field goal.

In the afterwards, defensive back Robey-Coleman noted that he was looking around in fear for a penalty flag, and the National Football League office advised Saints head coach Sean Payton that the referees missed the call.

That, of course, has provoked a lot of discussion about expanding the set of plays that are subject to challenge, or that might be subject to review by the High Priests of the Clickers late in the game.

Please, anything but additional opportunities for further review.  The games go on long enough, and a factoid that I saw someplace earlier this week noted that "only 37%" of calls that were challenged were reversed on review.

Put another way, almost four of ten calls that prompt a review are incorrect calls.  Yes, the referees' union argues that the referees are evaluated for accuracy.  All the same, I can't help but suspect that in the absence of replay review, there would be fewer controversial calls because the opportunity to make a decision and have it clarified on appeal would no longer be present.  Think of it as a corollary to the Peltzman effect.

I WENT TO THIS BOXING MATCH AND A HOCKEY GAME BROKE OUT. Knowledge Problem proposes an extension of the Peltzman Effect to ice hockey. Any such research would have to look for self-selection among hockey fans. I remember some Detroit Red Wings games in which great plays drew only polite applause, but the fights got the fans out of their seats. Nyekulturni.

DO SEATBELTS KILL? Newmark's Door looks for unstated biases in the DeLong family's investigation of the Peltzman Effect.