Jeff Mosenkis, a freelance producer with Freakonomics Radio, holds a Ph.D. in psychology and comparative human development.
Government Safety Regulation: Kind Mother or Big Brother?
By Jeff Mosenkis
On the same day last week, news stories broke about two different parts of government demonstrating two different ideological approaches to regulating consumer safety. In the first, the FDA came out with rules standardizing the labeling of sunscreen, after 33 years of deliberation.
(Stockbyte)
Presumably, the reasoning behind making sure the claims on sunscreens are clear and uniform across different products (like the standardized nutrition information on food packaging) is to allow consumers to make better decisions for themselves. Let’s call this the Kind Mother approach.We are given information that strongly hints at which is the right choice, but ultimately are still able to decide for ourselves.
At the same time, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has directed its staff to draft regulations governing the safety of table saws. An estimated 40,000 people are injured every year when hands, fingers or other body parts find their way into the path of a table saw blade. Inventor Stephen Gass has come up with a technology he calls SawStop, which senses if the spinning blade is starting to contact human skin and slams the blade to a halt within a few thousandths of a second. Gass even puts his finger into the path of the blade to demonstrate. See the video here.
The CPSC is apparently considering requiring that all new table saws come equipped with the SawStop technology, thus increasing the price of the product. This falls into the Big Brother approach, where government decides what’s best for us, and leaves us no choice in the matter. In the case of table saws, the industry argues that the status quo serves the market well – Gass has a company which has sold SawStop-equipped table saws to thousands, while those who don’t want it are free to buy others.
So for sunscreen, the requirements are to label in a uniform way so consumers can understand how best to protect themselves, but for table saws, the CPSC is considering making the SawStop mandatory, in the same way that seatbelts went from being optional to required.
While there are differences between the cases, the question of the general approach remains: should government be intervening to keep people safe, or just providing information to allow consumers to make their own decisions?
One example of the disappointing results of the informational approach are the calorie counts required in New York for many chain restaurant menus. Studies have found that providing this information doesn’t seem to change fast food eating patterns. (Although it did make a small difference at Starbucks. Paper here.)
Broad requirement approaches to regulation can also have negative consequences. The FAA still allows infants on airplanes to ride in their parents’ laps rather than in their own safety seats because the added expense of requiring families to buy another ticket would push more families into driving, which is still more dangerous.
So do we just need information and freedom to choose, or a benevolent power deciding what’s good for us?
Neither approach is best for all situations, so in which domains can we be trusted to make the right choice given full information, and in which are we better off having the best option chosen for us? And lastly, when is it still our right to be able to make the “wrong” choice if we so choose?
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The stopsaw should be mandatory to avoid the emergency room expenses of treating wounded limbs. Surely the preventative cost outweighs the latter cost.
I think most people would be happier with your comment if it was a little broader.
I.e. Technology like the stop saw should be mandatory, especially if the cost of health care to the 40,000 a year injured is large. At the very least table saw equipment likely to be used by the young and inexperienced should require this technology.
Then again maybe they just think government shouldnt intervene in a product which can be operated safely if only user error can cause a problem.
By the way, I’m not sure I buy the SawStop technology. It works when your finger is inched towards it ever so slowly so that the blade can stop on time. But what if you are using it as most people do and moving your hands fairly quickly around the blade? Seems like you might still get a pretty gnarly gash. I’m sure it’s safer than a regular saw, but I’m not sure it is what the video purports it to be.
1. You may be right.
2. I believe a lot of injuries are caused as people slowly inch material through the machine
3. I agree its unlikely to operate well at very high movement speed but I’m sure it’s effective with faster movement as well.
I would be more concerned with how it operates while it is cutting wood and hits your hand. In most shop accidents there is wood in the saw when your hand hits. It is less common for you hand to be the only thing in contact with the saw.*
*I lost part of 3 fingers in a joiner from the late 1800s at HS when I was 14.
If a patented technology is deemed so critical to public safety that it be mandated for all, the patent should be voided.
Anyone who talks about the “disappointing results of the informational approach” is revealing a clear bias for the “Big Brother” approach. The point of requiring clear information, whether it’s on sunscreen or restaurant menus, isn’t to goad the public into “choosing” what Big Brother wants them to choose. The point is to give consumers the information they need to make informed decisions, EVEN WHEN those decisions are the opposite of what Big Brother would choose for us. Calorie requirements on restaurant menus are a success if consumers are more informed, whether or not they change their behavior as a result of that information.
Isn’t the critical question of whether the government should impose safety restrictions really just one of economics. That is to say, that when the government is going to be potentially burdened by a consumer injury that the government has a right to impose reasonable safety restriction on that activity.
It all seems a negative externality / moral hazard issue to me. How much is a state / SSA required to pay a worker who has cut his / her hand off while using a table saw. If that’s a sufficient amount, (i.e. more than the cost to the user to outfit the saws with the safety technology) it’s simply more efficient and better because it’s better to burden the actor who is causing the negative externality than the public at large.
We should be free to make the wrong choice, only when the public at large is not going to be the party that has to “pay for” our wrong choice, and no more often than that.
I can’t think of a single situation where the Big Brother approach is good. Unless you are counting preventing felonies, which I don’t think you are.
We don’t allow people to own tanks or nuclear weapons. That seems like a good decision.
Seat belts.
Cass Sunstein is the new regulatory czar. He’s into Behavioral Economics and the Law. Instead of using behavioral economics for predictions, he has advocated using regulations to incentivize people to either follow the law or change behavior. Google: “Debiasing and the Law.” Frankly, I’d rather have the gov’t telling me what to do, than be manipulated into doing something the gov’t wants. Not all people are susceptible to this kind of debiasing.
Whatever happened to freedom?