The other day, while I was driving to the gym, a guy in an Acura cut me off. I rolled down the window and lifted my palm in a WTF gesture. He rolled down his window and gave me the finger. If we were Greek, I would have given him the moutsa.
People who tail me on the highway and flash their lights piss me off the most. When that happens, I pull up adjacent to the car in the slow lane and match my speed with it. The more the guy behind me waggles his high beam and honks, the more my dopamine receptors grok.
It’s even better if the guy has New Jersey plates.
An older man, an authority figure for me when I was young, once said, ‘I get downright belligerent when I get behind the wheel’. My first boss, a role model for me and many other young people, used to pull across three lanes of Brooklyn traffic and scream ‘Asshole!’ to make a left turn.
Driving cars is not just a sport. It is a contact sport, with real consequences. In 2021, 46,980 people died in motor vehicle crashes in the United States. In 2020, 42,338 died. In 2019, 39,107 died. That is a large and growing number, and does not include non-lethal vehicle-related injuries and property damage.
Driving brings out the worst in us and kills people. So – why do we do it?
We do it for the utils.
Utilitarianism is a school of thought that originated in its modern form with Jeremy Bentham. It was refined by, inter alios, John Stuart Mill, Henry Sedgwick, R. M. Hare, and Peter Singer. Utilitarians prescribe actions that maximize utility for all sentient beings. Utility is, generally, happiness.[1] Some thinkers have tried to quantify happiness into units called utils. Don’t ask me how much happiness a util represents, what a util weighs, and whether it is pink, orange, or green. If you squint too hard, the concept is difficult to pin down. But it is useful as a type of short-hand.
Utilitarianism is consequentialist. To a utilitarian, the only standard that one should use to judge the rightness or wrongness of an action is its consequences. If an action maximizes utility, it is right. If it does not, it is wrong.
Utilitarian is, also, common sense. Happiness, broadly defined, is good. We should maximize it. Everything else is bunk.
Even though utilitarians aim to maximize happiness, utilitarian calculus gets ugly quickly. This is because, when you calculate net utility, there are often losers as well as winners. For example, in 1998, when the Australian navy ship HMAS Westralia caught fire, the captain was forced to flood the ship’s engine room with carbon dioxide to stop the fire from spreading to the rest of the ship and possibly killing all ninety crew members on board. This action saved tens of lives but it caused the death of four sailors who were in the engine room at the time. I have pondered what it would be like to be that captain when he had to inform the families of those four sailors of their fate. He made the right decision – he sacrificed four lives to save ninety – but giving that news to a grieving mother would be heartbreaking.
When legislatures developed the doctrines of contributory negligence and limited liability for corporations in the first half of the nineteenth century, they weighed the utility that would be created by commercial risk-taking against losses by tort and contract plaintiffs. Many tort cases of this era involved children who were injured when they played on railroad switches. The utility to society as a whole of having the country developed and the western frontier settled by use of the railroad lines, the thinking went, was greater than the loss to the children injured by the railroads and their families.
We drive cars because they maximize utility. Thousands of people die each year from car accidents. More are injured. Billions of dollars are lost in fender-benders and crackups. However, we have decided that the utility that we get as a society from the use of cars outweighs the suffering that they cause. We are willing to sacrifice forty-six thousand people a year, plus injuries and property damage, for the utility that we get from driving.
If you are not a utilitarian, stop driving your car.
(Before I go on, I should note that, since utility is subjective, equal amounts of an objective measure, like money, can create different amounts of utility for differently-situated people. Generally, the more money you have, the less utility each new dollar gives you. So a thousand dollars that, for example, a mobile home park resident needs to pay her lot rent and car payment is more valuable to that resident than it would be to the park owner, who will use it to light a cigar or buy T-bonds. At cocktail parties, that is called the decreasing marginal utility of money.)
In a recent article in the New York Times, Michael Friedrich bemoans a recent trend among landlords to speak flippantly about evictions on TikTok. In one of these videos, a good-looking young guy named Tom Cruise says, “[T]here’s nobody protected in my portfolio. The elderly, the disabled, the single moms.” If he doesn’t evict, he reasons, renters won’t respect him, “as a landlord or an investor.” In another, a landlord describes what happens to residents who are evicted. Another walks through an apartment that was trashed by a resident who had to leave. Another shows a guy dancing in some wreckage. Effectively, Friedrich says that (i) people suffer during evictions and (ii) these people are assholes.
Friedrich found the Tiktok landlords on a Twitter thread called #abolish landlords. That hashtag is indicative of what I believe is an unspoken corollary to Friedrich’s two conclusions, i.e. that we should privatize rental property and liquidate the kulaks. Since the corollary is unspoken, it is difficult to outline Friedrich’s specific policy proposals, [2] but I believe that a softer version would be that we should not collectivize rental property entirely, but we should take away from owners an important property right, i.e. the right to exclude people who are illegally resident on an owner’s property.
This is rhetorical sleight-of-hand, and any park owner can tell you that it does not maximize utility.
In psychology, ‘salience‘ is the property by which an item that is perceived sticks out from its surroundings. Pink hair, black-and-yellow lettering, a bosun’s whistle, a snake moving under your pillow. These are all items with high salience. In contexts that require what Kahneman and Tversky call ‘fast thinking’, salience is your cognitive friend. That is because salient items tend to be things that require immediate attention. For example, our ability to foreground items like a lion’s roar, a snake’s rattle or the screech of a carbon monoxide detector help us survive in situations that require fast action. However, in contexts which require what Kahneman and Tversky call ‘slow thinking’, i.e. methodical, analytic thought, salience causes cognitive fallacies because salient items divert our attention from other items that may be important, but that are not painted in large black and yellow type font. Magicians have understood salience for a long time. Sleight-of-hand tricks work by drawing the audience’s attention toward items that are salient but irrelevant and away from items that are relevant but not salient.
Utilitarian calculus tends to be ugly because losers are more salient than winners. Who can turn away from a child whose arm has been mangled in a railroad switch? Surely not me. But hundreds of thousands of children were fed by food and cured by medical supplies brought to them by the railroads during the nineteenth century. I would hate to be the captain delivering bad news to the mother of one of the four sailors who died in the engine room of the HMAS Westralia – but I would hate more to be the commodore who would have to deliver similar news to the families of the ninety people who were serving on the ship, had that captain not acted correctly. A bad car accident is painful to witness – but we continue to drive cars.
Mobile home park evictions are horrific for the people who are evicted. They are no fun for property owners, either. They are expensive and time consuming, and unless you are a chatbot, they take up emotional bandwidth. That said, they are the only remedy that park owners have when dealing with recalcitrant tenants. By the time a resident is taken to court in an eviction proceeding, she will have engaged in behavior that significantly reduces utility for her neighbors. Failure to pay lot rent, garbage on the lawn, loud music, dangerous breed dogs, meth labs – these behaviors increase utility for the resident engaging in them, but they decrease utility for the old lady or the young family with small children who live next door, or the single mother who damages her car when she drives over potholes that the owner can’t afford to patch.[3] Focusing only on the salient actor, as Friedrich does, distorts the utilitarian arithmetic.
Is there a solution to the suffering that evictions cause? I think there is. For better or worse, market incentives are a better way of allocating social resources than any alternative we have found yet. Collectivizing apartment buildings and mobile home parks and sending people like me to the Gulag has not turned out well so far. A better solution would be to keep owners’ rights intact but draft rent regulation that accounts for market values, inflation rates and capital expenditures, create a public rental insurance fund, and create efficient remedies for owners short of eviction. But that would require slow thinking. The #abolish landlords crowd seems more interested in tossing red meat to the lions in the Colosseum.[4]
[1] ‘Happiness’ does not only mean short-term pleasure. It also means, among other things, joy, fulfillment, satisfaction, benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, and the prevention of pain or unhappiness, as these affect everyone. Peter Singer includes animals in the definition of ‘everyone’. I agree with him in theory, but I still eat meat.
[2] Friedrich’s message is similar to that of Esther Sullivan, in her book Manufactured Insecurity. When Sullivan attends park-owner events, her response is, ‘Ick’. As I have said before, ‘ick’ is not a policy position.
[3] This issue is more important in manufactured housing communities than in apartments. This is because most residents of manufactured housing communities own their homes. If a resident finds himself living next to, say, a meth lab or a pitbull breeder, the value of his biggest asset will take a hit. Since park residents tend not be rich, this loss of value will result in a greater loss of utility than a decrease in value of a home owned by a higher-net worth individual.
[4] …and, yes, #Tom Cruise is a putz. Don’t invite him to your daughter’s bat mitzvah. But don’t let your gag reflex dictate policy.