Texting while driving part II: this time it's nuanced...

Perhaps I was too rash in my post about the texting-while-driving regulation.

This article is frightening in suggesting how much of this goes on, drawing particular attention to blue-collar folk tethered to a dashboard-mounted dispatch computer while driving massive trucks. This seems like an amazingly bad idea for a whole host of reasons and one that even I would concede might benefit from some regulation. (Though the cynic in me notes that in that last article, about the executive order, there were already complications raised about extending the ban to interstate drivers because of "industry concerns" aka: I paid good money to install that computer to tell my jackass drivers where to go, don't you dare say they can't use it!)

I standby my determination that texting (or emailing or watching youtube or reading dispatches or whatever) while driving is so self-evidently stupid as leave me mind-boggled that it happens at all.

The reasons I underestimated the extent of the problem are probably twofold:

a) I cannot conceive of caring so much about my job (or, he adds quickly lest you think he doesn't care about his job, any job, for that matter) that I would endanger my life or the lives of others(fn1) for it.

b) I represent an extreme case of the one-track mindedness the article notes:

The reason, researchers say, is that the brain can effectively perform only one difficult task at a time.

I find it almost literally impossible to focus on more than one thing at a time, even if neither thing is particularly engaging or important. If I'm reading a book or watching television or doing whatever I get so focused that it is near impossible for me to even maintain conversation, a fact noted on numerous occasions by both my girlfriend and my mother.

fn1: Well, I say not the lives of others. Maybe I wouldn't mind endangering the lives of others so long as I got to choose the others. I kid! I kid! I kid b/c I have a warped and disturbing sense of humor.

Bad Decisions: Not Just For Poor Folk!

I've pointed out in previous posts that nearly every article I read about people in horrible financial straits contains obvious hints -- if not outright confirmation -- that colossally bad decision making underlies the problems.

I get the sense, sometimes, that people think I'm picking on poor folk when I do this. That somehow, poor folk are forced into making bad decisions by the immutable facts of their lives and it is somehow bad form to point out that if they had made better decisions, they would have had a better outcome.

Well, today I saw an article in the NY Times written by one of their economics writers about how he has descended into a pit of debt. Reading the article one sees, as always, that his situation is the result of terrifically poor decision making. Perhaps because he is not a middle-class writer trying to tug heart strings about the plight of the poor but rather confessing his own problems, these bad decisions are not concealed and glossed-over the way they tend to be in sob-stories focusing on the poor.

At any rate, I thought I'd just take the moment to point out that if you repeatedly make bad decisions, they will lead you to penury just as surely whether you make $120,000 a year (as the author of this piece does) or $30,000 per year (as the unfortunates in one of my previous posts on the subject did). Sure, you'll probably get to the poorhouse faster on $30K but the fall will seem much more calamitous from $120K.

The other thing to note is the perhaps obvious point that people who make $120,000 are probably less likely to make enough bad decisions to ruin their lives. If they were the types who were relatively incapable of logically forecasting the results of their actions, after all, it's unlikely they would make it through the requirements to get jobs at $120,000. (Education, working-your-way-up, etc.)

I came to the article through Megan McArdle, one of the professional bloggers at The Atlantic. In her post she acknowledges the courage it must take for a professional economics journalist to admit to having fallen into the state he's in and then goes on to talk about how difficult it is to make ends meet as a journalist, particularly b/c you tend to be well-educated and friends with upwardly mobile professionals in industries that pay much better and probably aren't teetering on the verge of extinction.

Of course, she also points out that she finds it "obvious, unembarrassing, and uncontroversial" to admit that her household (with her and her unemployed journalist boyfriend) must cut back. Here we have an example of good decision making. This is why she is unlikely to fall into the truly dire straits in which the NY Times fellow finds himself. If, on the other hand, she found it unremarkable to live on credit card debt while maintaining a lifestyle that neither she nor her boyfriend could afford, then disaster would follow as surely as night follows day. And it would not be the choice of poorly-paying career -- or rather not primarily that choice -- that led them there. It would be the logical end result of the repeated bad decision to not live within their means.

Speaking of Bad Decisions...

All this talk of food assistance programs put me in mind of a an article on the struggle of the poor to get enough food that appeared on NPR last summer. The economic problem then was the high gas prices, I'd imagine things are worse now. It stuck in the memory because the family they used to illustrate this struggle to get enough to eat -- a photograph of whom appeared with the piece -- were morbidly obese. Perhaps not the ideal family to use as a set-piece when talking about the hungry in America, though it does provide a nice illustration of the point raised in the article that Salty Girl linked to about the link between food programs and obesity.

As a side note, it seems that in very nearly every article on these types of issues -- the struggle of poverty -- the families used to illustrate the piece have made many conspicuously bad choices. I have to believe that the reporters are generally trying to find the most sympathetic stories -- that is the ones that best show how the problems of poverty are deep and about being unlucky and the rest -- but it's striking how there is always some egregiously bad decision making that appears in the article as well.

For example, the morbidly obese family is stuck in a town some distance from Toledo. There are few to no jobs in that town and without a car there is no way for them to get to work. Tragic. It also mentions that the family's current adult generation was raised middle class. So clearly, this kind of thing could happen to anyone, right? Well, maybe, but the matron of the family is also described as having "never worked" and having "no high school degree". And they talk about the bad luck of how a car accident "17 years ago" left her "depressed and and disabled" and "incapable of getting a job". But she's 40, so the car accident happened when she was 23. I'm sure it was debilitating and awful but why hadn't she finished high school or had any kind of job by the time she was 23? And given that she had no degree and no job, why was she having kids? Perhaps she missed the part of high school where they explain how babies are made...

And I don't mean to just pick on this one family in this one article. The NY Times ran a heart-string-tugging article some weeks ago describing the tough times faced by four families as they go through foreclosure and other economic-crash related problems. The story was written as sympathetically as possible so you had to kind of pick up the scattered details and reconstruct them for yourself to get a good picture of what went wrong for these people but in every case the way they had structured their lives prior to the crash was not going to work. In some of the cases it might have worked if everything had gone perfectly but that's not planning, that's gambling.

The one detail from that article that sticks most clearly in my mind was the story of the family who has one income of $30,000 now. In happier times, they had two incomes totalling about $60,000. And they bought a house which went up in value so they refinanced and took all of the new equity out of the house. The article didn't specify what they did with all of it but did mention that among their belongings in storage was an $8,000 4 piece mahogany and marble bedroom set that they had purchased just after taking the loan.

I make considerably more by myself than this family does as a whole at the best of times. And I don't have a family to support. And I live with someone who by herself makes considerably more than this whole family at the best of times. And we wouldn't dream of spending $8,000 on a bedroom set. Or, for that matter, anything else. If you're raising a family with 4 kids on $60K of dual income, it might be better to stick to Ikea than treating yourself to extravagant bedroom sets with money taken out of your home.

Now, of course, it's their life, if they want to throw away their security on home furnishings, that's their prerogative. But it does somewhat diminish the power of their story as a "tragedy". If you're hit by a bus while carefully crossing the street, that's a tragedy. If you're hit by a bus because you decided to practice your break-dancing on the median of a busy street while blind-folded that's less of a tragedy.

Now, of course, in a society as rich as ours we should have a safety net to prevent the worst of human suffering, even if self-caused. But we do need to be aware that not all human-suffering is inflicted by random chance and to the extent that you alleviate suffering caused by bad-decision making you are inviting more bad decision making.

This is what's known as "moral hazard" in insurance: the danger that if you remove the cost of recklessness you will get more recklessness. It's why there are things like deductibles and co-insurance, to make sure that just because you've got insurance on your car doesn't mean you feel no need to avoid running into things because it's all free to you.

Relatedly, it's also one of the best arguments against all the bailouts we've seen in the financial world this past year. Which is not to say that there weren't compelling arguments for them as well but it is why the government has been trying to work a little pain into the agreements along with all the cash.