People With Status And DignitariesPeople With Status And Dignitaries. E-book. Formato EPUB - 9791222479156

An interesting question still lingers: How big was the actual impact of that event? How many more accidents have occurred because of safety regulations since the 1960s? Here's an attention-grabbing way to ask the question: Regulations tend to reduce driver deaths by increasing the likelihood of surviving accidents. Likewise, regulations tend to increase driver deaths by encouraging reckless driving attitudes. Which impact will be greater? Is the net effect of the laws to reduce or increase the number of deaths?
This question cannot be answered by pure logic alone. We have to look at the actual numbers. In the mid-1970s, Sam Peltzman of the University of Chicago did just that. He found that the two effects were equivalent, and therefore, they were mutually exclusive. The number of accidents increased and the number of deaths per accident decreased, but the total number of driver deaths remained essentially unchanged. An interesting side effect is that the number of pedestrian casualties has increased; After all, pedestrians don't benefit from padded dashboards.
I discovered that when I told non-economists about Peltzman's results, they couldn't believe that people drove more recklessly simply because their cars were safer. But economists - who have learned to respect the principle that "people will respond to rewards and punishments" - do not encounter this difficulty.