Tiny brain: We should punish Zuckerberg for speeding! That'll show him!
Normal brain: Wait a minute. Increasing fines for the 1% can solve at most 1% of the speeding problem. Okay, the 1% number is polemical, but any solution to the problem of speeding must fall mostly on poorer people, because they are the majority.
Glowing brain: Why do we talk about speeding as a crime? Any economist would tell you that the optimal amount of speeding is nonzero, so it should be solved with a Pigovian tax equal to the negative externality. Since a rich speeding person does as much potential damage as a poor speeding person, the fine shouldn't depend on how rich you are. If you want a safety net, build a safety net, don't muck around with speeding fines.
Galactic brain: Is speeding that much of an externality though? If you go fast and cause a crash, you bear about half of the cost. If you don't cause a crash, no one bears the cost. It's not like pollution where the polluter bears a millionth of the cost. So it seems like selfish decision making, with average human level of loss aversion, should already deal with the problem of speeding. Why isn't that happening?
Buddha brain: People know the cost of a crash. Speeding happens because people misjudge the risk of a crash. So perceived risk, not cost, is the right variable to tweak if you want to fix speeding. Make enforcement of fines much more fast and certain, and you can solve speeding while lowering fines. The whole article about billionaires was a distraction from a distraction from a distraction.
"Make enforcement of fines much more fast and certain, and you can solve speeding while lowering fines."
If "solve" means legitimize it, yes, you've solved it.
Google for "daycare fine study" and notice that adding a small but significant fine to a behaviour you wish to discourage increased that behaviour rather than decreasing it.
The fine shouldn't be that low. Here's the best formula I could figure out.
Let's say R1 = actual risk of harm to yourself and others, M1 = magnitude of harm to yourself and others, R2 = your perceived risk of harm to yourself, M2 = magnitude of harm to yourself. Both M1 and M2 should be based on market price of QALY (about 50K dollars?) without overvaluing you specifically. Then the fine should be set at R1⋅M1-R2⋅M2.
That's a generalization of Pigovian tax to a spectrum of behaviors: pollution (R1=R2, M1>M2), skipping medical checkups (R1>R2, M1=M2), speeding (R1>R2, M1>M2). Does that make sense?
"Increasing fines for the 1% can solve at most 1% of the speeding problem."
Incorrect. 1% on the income distribution is not necessarily 1% on the speed offenders pool. But I guess that is, nevertheless, an accurate thought model for "normal brain" :)
This seems like backdoor civil asset forfeiture but it would allow them to take assets that aren't even present and/or involved at the time of the "offense".
Can you see a particularly cash-strapped town telling officers to skip the Toyota Camrys and instead pull over the BMWs? It seems ideal for abuse, selective law enforcement, and likely other bad behaviors.
Oddly enough, this would likely go away with self-driving cars as high income people switch to vehicles who "can't" break the law.
Not as much as poor people, sure, but keep in mind that even rich people are much less powerful than governments or even large amounts of people.
I mean, obviously a completely different scenario, but, how many times have revolutions killed all the rich/powerful people? They don't have infinite protection just cause they're rich.
It will put strong pressure to align the law with implementation. If the implementation treads into injustice, it (the law) is explicitly designed to be against those who can shrug it off, rather than drown.
> Can you see a particularly cash-strapped town telling officers to skip the Toyota Camrys and instead pull over the BMWs?
No I see a world where neither Toyotas nor BMWs are speeding. But if both are speeding, then owners of both should feel equal amount of pain. And equal amount of pain won't come from equal amount absolute fines (300$ is a drop in the bucket for a billionaire, significant for a poor person).
I think I'd take the other approach than exorbitant fines for the rich. Perhaps they should grow (a $3,000 fine for a billionaire isn't unreasonable), but the more important part IMO is here:
"For people living on the economic margins, even minor offenses can impose crushing financial obligations, trapping them in a cycle of debt and incarceration for nonpayment."
I think it is reasonable that a speeding ticket for someone earning minimum wage could have a lower (say $50 instead of $150) penalty. The fines are made to disincentivize behavior, not put people in debt.
The laws should obviously apply equally.
Exactly for that reason, fines should not be the same for someone who earns $15/hr and $1500/hr.
A fine of $150 is 10 hours of work for one person, and 6 minutes for the other. How is that equal application of the law?
Then it could be a percentage of total assets - that would be equal, no? I do think fines are stupid though. Making people sit a day through a speed awareness course seems a better punishment to me.
Why not just do away with fines all together rather than trying to come up with a complex system to try to make them fair. Perhaps instead of fines a more appropriate punishment should be that you're forced to sit in your car for an hour making you late to whatever you were in a rush for.
This is actually a very good idea. Time is the one asset we all have. Community service is also a good idea, but it lacks the immediacy of both fines and your suggestion.
At least where I live, a speeding ticket knocks off a couple of your license's 12hp, and they take like a year to regenerate. Maybe that alone should be enough, or maybe you should also have to sit there one extra minute for every mph over the limit you were going.
Yeah, the fine is never the reason I get upset about being pulled over for speeding. It was always the points on the license and the time spent waiting for the ticket.
I'm from Finland where we have this kind of "relative fines". While I generally agree with the concept, it should better take into account the household's total income & wealth.
E.g. I could get a fine of 1/2 of my monthly net income for driving 140 km/h (87 mph) on highway, which would hit hard our household (three kids, low income spouse, no savings), although no real harm or risk was caused to anyone.
Well, I drive 2.5 hours three times per week, so 10 minute saving per day translates to 30 extra hours spent with family per year (several workdays!).
Highways are generally super safe compared to anything else and speed alone is almost never a cause for an accident (I'm strict about keeping safe distance etc).
The highway speed limit in a country like Romania is 130 kph, but you only risk getting fined if you exceed 140. As such, I usually do 130-135 kph on the highway in my small 1.4 l hatchback and I don’t feel unsafe at all. I feel much more unsafe on 2-lane national roads with lots of curbs and where you risk getting a horse-drawn carriage in front of you out of nowhere, even though on those roads people usually drive much slower (the limit is 90, I stick to 80-90 most of the times unless I have clear visibility for like one km, in which case I push it to 100). Point is that it’s not the speed that kills you, it’s NOT adapting the speed to the road’s conditions that does it. As such, imposing draconian speed limits on highways (like in Finland) is very counter-productive and frustrating, because those highways are actually built to “support” higher speeds (just look at Germany).
I guess my main point was that in some cases, like in my example, arguably harmless offence can result to relatively high punishment, because personal income doesn't often translate directly to disposable money. Of course irrational speed limits are also to blame.
In exreme cases this can result to absurdly high fines, e.g. as a real-world example from Finland, overspeeding at 82 km/h in 60 km/h area have resulted to 34,000 eur fine.
> But the United States doesn’t need to go that far.
I see reasons to go even further, if the goal is a fair level of deterrence. If for a significant part of the population, the total wealth is less than or in the same order of magnitude as the money they earned that month, while for others, income is a relatively tiny portion of it, fines based on income alone will deter the former much more than the latter. The more fair option would be to fine based on wealth, not income.
Then, yet further, if you all you have is $500 and lose half of what you own, that'll likely have a devastating effect, possibly resulting in homelessness. For a billionaire, losing half your wealth leaves you with $500M. You won't exactly be panhandling to make ends meet. Again, the deterrence is disproportionate.
I'm not sure how to address it. Possibly by not using fines at all, but some amount of hours of social work that has to be completed in some short but manageable span of time, with the definition of "manageable" based on individual circumstances.
On some of Italy's highways, they calculate the speeding ticket from gate to gate:)
Meaning that if you entered the highway at 12:00 and you exited at 13:00 at a gate 120 miles ahead, you get a fine.
Sometimes, I see people who like to speed, just sit it out at a parking cafe next to their exit.
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Normal brain: Wait a minute. Increasing fines for the 1% can solve at most 1% of the speeding problem. Okay, the 1% number is polemical, but any solution to the problem of speeding must fall mostly on poorer people, because they are the majority.
Glowing brain: Why do we talk about speeding as a crime? Any economist would tell you that the optimal amount of speeding is nonzero, so it should be solved with a Pigovian tax equal to the negative externality. Since a rich speeding person does as much potential damage as a poor speeding person, the fine shouldn't depend on how rich you are. If you want a safety net, build a safety net, don't muck around with speeding fines.
Galactic brain: Is speeding that much of an externality though? If you go fast and cause a crash, you bear about half of the cost. If you don't cause a crash, no one bears the cost. It's not like pollution where the polluter bears a millionth of the cost. So it seems like selfish decision making, with average human level of loss aversion, should already deal with the problem of speeding. Why isn't that happening?
Buddha brain: People know the cost of a crash. Speeding happens because people misjudge the risk of a crash. So perceived risk, not cost, is the right variable to tweak if you want to fix speeding. Make enforcement of fines much more fast and certain, and you can solve speeding while lowering fines. The whole article about billionaires was a distraction from a distraction from a distraction.
If "solve" means legitimize it, yes, you've solved it.
Google for "daycare fine study" and notice that adding a small but significant fine to a behaviour you wish to discourage increased that behaviour rather than decreasing it.
Let's say R1 = actual risk of harm to yourself and others, M1 = magnitude of harm to yourself and others, R2 = your perceived risk of harm to yourself, M2 = magnitude of harm to yourself. Both M1 and M2 should be based on market price of QALY (about 50K dollars?) without overvaluing you specifically. Then the fine should be set at R1⋅M1-R2⋅M2.
That's a generalization of Pigovian tax to a spectrum of behaviors: pollution (R1=R2, M1>M2), skipping medical checkups (R1>R2, M1=M2), speeding (R1>R2, M1>M2). Does that make sense?
Deleted Comment
Incorrect. 1% on the income distribution is not necessarily 1% on the speed offenders pool. But I guess that is, nevertheless, an accurate thought model for "normal brain" :)
Already incorrect if that 1% of the population commits more than 1% of the speeding offenses because the fines are irrelevant to them.
Can you see a particularly cash-strapped town telling officers to skip the Toyota Camrys and instead pull over the BMWs? It seems ideal for abuse, selective law enforcement, and likely other bad behaviors.
Oddly enough, this would likely go away with self-driving cars as high income people switch to vehicles who "can't" break the law.
I mean, obviously a completely different scenario, but, how many times have revolutions killed all the rich/powerful people? They don't have infinite protection just cause they're rich.
One is proportional and happens on conviction while the other can be nuts.
Deleted Comment
No I see a world where neither Toyotas nor BMWs are speeding. But if both are speeding, then owners of both should feel equal amount of pain. And equal amount of pain won't come from equal amount absolute fines (300$ is a drop in the bucket for a billionaire, significant for a poor person).
"For people living on the economic margins, even minor offenses can impose crushing financial obligations, trapping them in a cycle of debt and incarceration for nonpayment."
I think it is reasonable that a speeding ticket for someone earning minimum wage could have a lower (say $50 instead of $150) penalty. The fines are made to disincentivize behavior, not put people in debt.
This sounds ridiculous to me because the idea of laws, and by extension fines, is that they apply uniformly, regardless of class, gender, whatever.
Dead Comment
At least where I live, a speeding ticket knocks off a couple of your license's 12hp, and they take like a year to regenerate. Maybe that alone should be enough, or maybe you should also have to sit there one extra minute for every mph over the limit you were going.
E.g. I could get a fine of 1/2 of my monthly net income for driving 140 km/h (87 mph) on highway, which would hit hard our household (three kids, low income spouse, no savings), although no real harm or risk was caused to anyone.
Highways are generally super safe compared to anything else and speed alone is almost never a cause for an accident (I'm strict about keeping safe distance etc).
In exreme cases this can result to absurdly high fines, e.g. as a real-world example from Finland, overspeeding at 82 km/h in 60 km/h area have resulted to 34,000 eur fine.
I see reasons to go even further, if the goal is a fair level of deterrence. If for a significant part of the population, the total wealth is less than or in the same order of magnitude as the money they earned that month, while for others, income is a relatively tiny portion of it, fines based on income alone will deter the former much more than the latter. The more fair option would be to fine based on wealth, not income.
Then, yet further, if you all you have is $500 and lose half of what you own, that'll likely have a devastating effect, possibly resulting in homelessness. For a billionaire, losing half your wealth leaves you with $500M. You won't exactly be panhandling to make ends meet. Again, the deterrence is disproportionate.
I'm not sure how to address it. Possibly by not using fines at all, but some amount of hours of social work that has to be completed in some short but manageable span of time, with the definition of "manageable" based on individual circumstances.
Sometimes, I see people who like to speed, just sit it out at a parking cafe next to their exit.