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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24828 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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Anything that expands the scope of things that one individual can sue another for is laundering costs.

This statement is often not true. Lawsuits are often a more efficient and transparent way of allocating costs.

Let's say society is worried about accidents caused by self-driving cars and wants to allocate some amount of resources to fixing the problem. There are two straightforward ways to structure the resource allocation:

  1. Pass a law specifying that victims of accidents caused by self-driving cars can sue the manufacturer for damages, or;

  2. Pass a set of safety regulations that self driving car companies have to comply with, and if a compliant self-driving car nevertheless causes an accident, the government compensates the victim.

In scenario 1 we are causing the cost of accidents to be carried by the car company, who is in the best position to figure out how to prevent accidents. So we have given them a monetary incentive to devote a rational amount of resources to fixing or improving the problem. This is the opposite of a reverse lottery because the car company is in the best position out of anyone to try to predict and prevent accidents.

Scenario 2 creates a situation where car companies are only encouraged to comply with regulations, rather than try to figure out the best way to prevent accidents. The regulator is in a much worse position to know what regulations will actually be effective at preventing accidents, and the regulator has no direct monetary incentive to care about preventing accidents. Simultaneously, they also have no monetary incentive to care about over-preventing accidents either. So we will almost necessarily get an inefficient set of regulations that devote an incorrect amount of resources to the problem.

Anything that expands the scope of things that one individual can sue another for is laundering costs.

This statement is often not true. Lawsuits are often a more efficient and transparent way of allocating costs.

I'm gonna stick by my statement. I don't think the example you give really contradicts it. The actual world we live in has a mix of both systems where the American government gets to flip a coin "heads I win, tails you lose". They regulate the industries, and allow those industries to be sued by individuals. From what I understand this is actually a little strange by international standards. Russia (for traffic stuff) goes more down the route of sue anyone but very loose regulations. And most of Europe goes down the route of strict regulations, but you can't sue (for a bunch of business regulations).

In general, I think in cases of death or serious bodily injury it makes sense to have a court involved. In cases of money or social interaction its a bad idea to have courts involved. I'm not suggesting entirely doing away with courts. But courts are a terrible place for solving economic distribution questions. They are simply far too expensive (judges and lawyers are generally smart and capable people).

But people can already sue for bodily injury or death, so when I say an expansion of what you can sue for is laundering costs, I mean that generally any new thing that you can sue for. (and there are some old things you can sue for that I also think are bullshit, but I specifically listed those things.)

In cases of money or social interaction its a bad idea to have courts involved.

How would you have contract disputes resolved? Inheritance disputes?

Much of these are solved through private arbitration, with courts as a resolver of last resort. The reason they are a last resort is that lawyers will eat up most of the money in the case. Which kind of defeats the purpose of a dispute over money. Courts are mainly avenues of Justice. As in you want the person who screwed you over monetarily not just to pay you back but to suffer.

Lawyers are used in arbitration as well, and unlike a judge you have to pay the arbitrator. I'm not sure why you think that's a cheaper option that litigation.

Courts are mainly avenues of Justice. As in you want the person who screwed you over monetarily not just to pay you back but to suffer.

Where are you getting this idea? Usually courts are limited to awarding actual damages; punitive damages are the exception.

Unfortunately, if manufacturers of self-driving cars can be sued for all accidents in which self-driving cars are involved (the "caused" part doesn't come into play until the lawsuit is underway), self-driving cars are essentially banned. The cost of covering that liability is staggering.

Do you think the cost of self-driving car insurance would be higher than human-driven car insurance? If so, would that cost be spurious or would it reflect genuine harms?

Ideally it should be fine, but I don't trust that the ideal case would happen.

Do you think the cost of self-driving car insurance would be higher than human-driven car insurance?

Human-driven liability insurance doesn't cover everything. Losses are limited. If you start a chain-reaction collision and kill a whole bunch of people, your insurance company will pay our to your maximum, and you'll lose everything you have and have to declare bankruptcy. Maybe you'll go to jail or commit suicide, but either way your victims ain't getting anything more. If a self-driving car does the same, the losses are limited to the value of the self-driving car company, which is likely far greater than any individual. And the company has far more exposure. And the plaintiffs and juries know the self-driving car company has much deeper pockets than an insured driver, so I expect you'd see more lawsuits per incident and higher judgements.

self-driving cars are essentially banned.

I don't see why that's a problem, to be honest.

There has to be some sort of consequence for the manufacturer when self-driving cars cause an accident, same as how human drivers pay fines or go to jail. What's your preferred liability structure?

To the owner of the self-driving car would be another option, maybe? This seems like it would better work with cars that have a full self-driving mode, but could also be driven ordinarily.

I'm not convinced that self-driving cars would be banned, instead of just way more expensive. It would depend on how much liability they would tend to have.

I don't know. All I know is the consequences. Once the cars become popular enough, a self-driving car company is basically going to be mostly a legal company, defending (or settling) lawsuits in all 50 states involving its cars. And that's even if its cars are perfect and never cause accidents, especially since the car company is going to look like "deep pockets" to plaintiff's attorneys and juries. The cost of all this legal defense is going to increase the cost of the cars by a ridiculous amount, and the more cars there are the more of a chance of a "reverse lottery" where a self-driving car is involved in an accident that kills a busful of kindergartners and is found liable for more than Alex Jones even was. As long as there's a fairly small number of cars they can play the odds, but a liability regime which involves a car manufacturer in every major accident one of their cars is involved in will kill the whole thing.

An imperfect analogy already exists with commercial vehicles, where the company that owns them and their insurance company is held liable for any damages caused by the driver.

The usual demands are so high as to be called the ‘ghetto lottery’.

You're assuming the car companies are the ones footing the bill. They buy insurance for things like this, and the premiums reflect the risk and the average settlement value. This is how every company manages risk, including the car companies, who already get sued in product liability actions. Unless the risks are so high that they effectively become uninsurable, the cost of the insurance will just be reflected in the price of the vehicle. And if they are uninsurable, then self-driving cars are probably too dangerous to be marketed as such anyway. I would mention that I say this as someone who is skeptical that full self driving will be available in his lifetime.

Insurance helps individual drivers because they can pool their risk with all the other drivers. A self-driving car company selling a sufficient number cars may as well self-insure. And yes, the expected cost of liability would be baked into the cars in either case, but I expect if they got it right, self-driving cars would be prohibitively expensive. If they got it wrong they'd go bankrupt when they big verdict came up.

As a products liability lawyer, I can tell you that insurance coverage is a lot more complicated than that. Any hypothetical policy would base the premiums on the number of vehicles sold. If there's a defect that results in injury, only a small percentage of the affected vehicles are going to result in claims, and only a small percentage of the total claims are going to involve huge losses. Huge verdicts only result when the insurance companies are adamant that there is no liability and are looking to get out from under it. Once it's clear there's liability (and often not even then), they'll settle claims at standard rates. You may get a couple of eye popping verdicts but these won't become a normal thing. No Plaintiff's lawyer is going to spend 100k+ taking a contingency case to trial chasing a verdict that's likely to bankrupt the company and leave him and his client waiting 5 years in the unsecured creditor line in a Chapter 11 hoping they can recover a percentage of the original verdict. Better to take the cash now.

If Ford was fully liable for any accident in which a driver of a Ford vehicle was found at fault, but this did not apply to any other vehicles, how much more do you think Ford vehicles would cost than all those other vehicles to cover that liability? I expect it would be at least an order of magnitude; being involved in an accident with a Ford vehicle would be a potential lottery-winner (regardless of who was at fault, and that's often muddy). And I think that's true even if from some nonexistent objective observer's POV, the Ford driver was never actually at fault.

The part you're forgetting is that if Ford has to insure against all those accidents then the driver doesn't. The up front cost to the consumer may be more, but it's effectively prepaying an insurance policy that lasts the life of the vehicle. Whether or not you're actually coming out ahead depends on specific numbers, but as long as they're somewhere in the ballpark of what you'd spend on insurance then it's a question of how much you value self-driving capability, which is already enough of an advantage that people would be willing to pay a steep premium.

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The big downside of self-insuring for a company is probably political. If you've got a policy from Lloyd's any effort to bankrupt you through insurance payout lawfare is going to get a lot of very important people upset on your behalf.
If musk self-insured there's nothing stopping Some Judge In New York from ordering 70 billion dollar payouts every time a Tesla is involved in a fender-bender.

You need to smear the money around for self defense, and pay off enough of the Party that they at least can't unify in looting you.

Yes this is a trivial problem to solve. We already have a massive auto insurance industry. Everything looks like self-driving cars will be safer than human drivers.

You either add it to the costs of the car as essentially pre-bought insurance for the purchaser (which should be cheaper than current policies) or work out some long-term payment plan on the buyer for yearly insurance (with some kind of termination in time after so many years etc).

Yes this is a trivial problem to solve. We already have a massive auto insurance industry. Everything looks like self-driving cars will be safer than human drivers.

The auto insurance industry works because there's a relatively low cap on liability per accident (after which they stop paying out and the driver is on the hook, but the driver is an individual who likely doesn't have much). Once the manufacturer is on the hook, that cap is irrelevant.

Commercial vehicle owners have such a high to nonexistent liability cap that there are entire sections of the insurance industry specializing in suing them, and somehow they manage.

Ok fair enough. Average human low liability but big corporate gets $30 million a life.

Though I guess solutions can be found when it’s necessary.

Liability also doesn't come into play until the suit is underway. It's trivially true that anyone can file suit for anything, but the plaintiff isn't going to recover any money unless they have evidence of causation and damages.

Also, my thought experiment notwithstanding, it's already totally possible to sue self-driving car manufacturers for causing accidents, yet these companies are not only in business but doing better than ever.

Liability also doesn't come into play until the suit is underway.

The expenses start immediately.

And yes, I predict that if actual self-driving cars become more common, either we will see limits on liability or the companies will be driven out of the market or out of business.

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