“The Little Carefree Car”
It’s August 1978 in Elkhart County, Indiana, and three teenage girls stop at a gas station to fill up the tank of their car. Upon departing the station, the girl who fills up the tank forgets to replace the gas cap, leaving it on the roof of the car. At some point, the cap falls onto the road; realizing this, the driver stops the car, presumably to find the cap. Because this particular road has no shoulder to pull onto, the car stops in a traffic lane. Trailing behind the girls in a Chevrolet van is 21-year-old Robert Duggar who, instead of looking at the road, is attempting to retrieve a dropped cigarette; he strikes the rear of the girls’ car at approximately 50 mph and the gas tank explodes. 16-year-old Lyn Ulrich and her cousin, 18-year-old Donna May Ulrich, are trapped inside the car and burn to death at the scene; the driver, 18-year-old Judy Ulrich, is found outside of the car when emergency crews arrive, and later dies in hospital.
Earlier that year – in February 1978 – a court in Orange County, California decided on a personal injury tort involving another rear-end collision, ordering the largest punitive damage judgment in a product liability case on record: 125 million dollars. The accident occurred in 1972, when Lily Gray’s car stalled on the highway, and was rear-ended at 28 mph. This collision also resulted in an exploding gas tank, and like the Ulrich girls, Gray burned to death inside of her vehicle. The passenger – 13-year-old Richard Grimshaw – survived but suffered third-degree burns to most of his body; undergoing more than 90 surgeries, he was left to endure chronic pain and permanent disfigurement. Grimshaw was the plaintiff; after the appeals process, he ended up receiving 3.5 million in punitive damages, and 2.5 million in compensatory damages.
Two rear-end collisions and two erupting gas tanks turned the struck vehicles into firetraps, with tragic and horrifying outcomes for the passengers. Both of these accidents would lead to landmark legal cases: the aforementioned Grimshaw case making civil law history by setting a punitive damage record for product liability, and the accident involving the Ulrich girls setting a precedent in the history of criminal law.
The other relevant link between these two cases? The defendant: Ford Motor Company. Lily Gray and Judy Ulrich were each driving the notorious Ford Pinto; model years 1972 and 1973 respectively. The car that Ford marketed as “the little carefree car” would lead to the automotive giant being the first corporation in American history to be charged criminally for a defective product.
Like the hot coffee case, these cases involving the Ford Pinto would set off a media frenzy, with misinformation being key to the central narrative. Unlike the hot coffee case, however, where the media targeted the “twice burned” plaintiff, this time they had the corporate defendant squarely in their sights.
The media would see to it that Ford felt the burn.
Safety Doesn’t Sell
Due to a number of factors, including rising oil prices, inflation, and both European and Japanese automakers entering the U.S. car market at scale, the late ‘60s and early ‘70s saw a rise in demand for subcompact cars, a newly applied category for car models where smaller size, lower maintenance, and fuel economy drove the design ethic. By 1970, Honda had arrived on the scene with the N600 model, and the Volkswagen Beetle had established itself as a cultural icon, in part due to a brilliant marketing campaign encouraging its potential customers to “think small”, and its popularity among, and accessibility to, younger drivers. The AMC Gremlin and Chevrolet Vega were among the first American made subcompacts to hit the market. The Gremlin in particular was marketed as “the first European car manufactured in America”, referencing its European inspired compact design, and it was also pushed as the cheapest and lowest maintenance car on the market, at slightly under $2000 (around $18,000 today). One ad proclaimed: “if you can afford a car you can afford two Gremlins” and another promised a “problem-free relationship” between car and owner.
Lee Iacocca, who would become the president of Ford in 1970, saw this trend and, eager to get in on the action, got the board to approve the production of the Pinto in 1968. To position Ford to compete with the import market, Iacocca put a rush on production, demanding that the Pinto hit showrooms in 25 months, which was about half of the time it usually took to get a new car model designed, produced and out to market. To further complicate the design and production process, Iacocca stipulated his “limits of 2000”: the Pinto had to weigh less than 2000lbs and cost less than $2000.
Three years before Iacocca’s Pinto decree, Ralph Nader’s book Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile - in which he highlighted the automotive industry’s deemphasis on safety in favor of styling and technology, and its focus on manufacturing techniques to get cars to market cheaper and faster - was a best-seller in 1966. It was the right book at the right time in terms of changing the public’s view on automotive safety. As hard as it might be to believe, safety regulations for cars were virtually non-existent prior to the mid-1960s. This is another area of American society where personal responsibility was the prime concept. Car manufacturers were expected to provide a product that worked for its intended purpose – facilitating mobility – which meant that cars just had to work under normal driving conditions; accidents were not considered “normal conditions”. The reasoning was that car accidents were the result of negligent drivers, and it therefore wasn’t the carmaker’s responsibility to design cars to withstand serious collisions. In such a paradigm, crash test standards were secondary considerations if they were considered at all.
Mounting public pressure led to the passing of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, where the federal government would create the first series of laws governing automotive safety. These rules would be administered by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The Ford Pinto was being rushed into production during this period, and so the circumstances surrounding its creation were subject to what was, at the time, the standard deemphasis on safety in favor of other considerations. When Ford’s internal crash testing of the Pinto revealed a vulnerability of the gas tank, based on where it was located on the vehicle, Ford made the unfortunate decision to not make any changes; production was underway, and changing the Pinto’s tooling at this stage would delay its release and add to its costs; two things that undermined Iacocca’s design directives. Ford and other car manufacturers had tried the safety angle in the past in the marketing of certain cars, and those initiatives were mostly unsuccessful, whereas style changes and iterating in mostly superficial ways on car models year after year kept people buying, which reinforced the prevailing wisdom of deemphasizing safety.
Incredibly, Iacocca can be heard telling Richard Nixon himself that “safety doesn’t sell” on one of the tapes produced as part of the Watergate scandal. You can’t make this stuff up.
Ford rushing the Pinto to market, a number of highly publicized accidents, the formation of NHTSA, and changing cultural attitudes towards the auto industry and, post-Watergate, government and corporate trustworthiness, would be the tinder for the media firestorm that was to come.
Memos, Madness and Mother Jones
An article published in Mother Jones Magazine in September of 1977 called “Pinto Madness” was the tip of the spear in a media campaign that would amount to nothing less than a public relations, legal, and regulatory disaster for Ford.
The author, Mark Dowie, and his team at Mother Jones conducted a six-month investigation of the Pinto, using the facts of the then in-progress Grimshaw case as a jumping off point. The central question Dowie was looking to answer was why the Pinto’s gas tank was so vulnerable to leakages in rear-end collisions, particularly in the context of increased regulation by NHTSA, who were also a central target of the article.
The core argument was as follows: after reviewing hundreds of documents and reports about rear end collisions with the Pinto, Dowie claimed that a rear impact at “around 20 mph” would cause the back of the car to “buckle like an accordion”, resulting in gas spilling out onto the road surrounding the car and causing the gas tank to be pressed up against four bolts located on the rear axle; those bolts would penetrate the tank, causing more spillage and gas vapors, which would be easily ignited in the scraping metal wreckage. Further, impacts at higher speeds could cause the doors to jam, creating a firetrap for passengers.
Dowie also claimed that he was in possession of internal Ford documents, showing that Ford’s engineering department was aware of the issue, having crash-tested the car at a top-secret location, and finding that the tank failed in every instance where the impact was greater than 25 mph. The documents also showed that prior to the Pinto leaving the assembly line, three cars survived impacts at or around 31 mph; each of the three cars were modified in the following ways: one car had a plastic baffle placed between the tank and the four bolts on the rear axle; one had a steel plate placed between the tank and the axle; and one had a gas tank lined with a rubber bladder.
If Ford was aware of the flaw, and had managed to find three different fixes for the problem, why was nothing done? The answer provided by the article was damning.
Seeing that government regulation into safety standards for the auto industry was going to be an inevitability, lobbyists for automakers began what Dowie calls “the education of the new federal auto safety bureaucrats”. A key part of this “education”, the article claims, was the auto industry convincing safety regulators to adopt a “cost-benefit” standard, which is the idea that if the cost of a measure exceeds its benefit, it should be abandoned. Dowie writes:
“Ford had gotten the federal regulators to agree to talk auto safety in terms of cost-benefit analysis. But in order to be able to argue that various safety costs were greater than their benefits, Ford needed to have a dollar value figure for the “benefit.” Rather than be so uncouth as to come up with such a price tag itself, the auto industry pressured the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to do so. And in a 1972 report the agency decided a human life was worth $200,725.”
The “smoking gun” piece of evidence presented in the Mother Jones article was an internal Ford memorandum, which was attached to a petition document Ford had submitted to NHTSA called “Fatalities Associated with Crash-Induced Fuel Leakage and Fires.” Within that memo, it is stated that an $11 change to a vehicle preventing 180 burn deaths and 180 serious burn injuries would result in a cost of $137 million, and a benefit of $49.5 million. In Dowie’s words, this “in effect says it is acceptable to kill 180 people and burn another 180 every year” because it would cost them close to $90 million less to do so.
Crash Tests and a Criminal Trial
One of the major claims made in the Mother Jones article was that NHTSA allowed Ford to stall for several years with regards to the Pinto complying with Standard 301, which regulated fuel system integrity. Initially, Standard 301, which was enacted in 1967, covered the front-end of the vehicle, but was expanded to rear-end collisions in 1969, well into the development of the Pinto. What resulted was a back and forth between Ford and NHTSA, negotiating the standard; this consisted of proposals responded to with objections from Ford, on the basis of claims which NHTSA would have to investigate, and this process carried on for several years. Dowie’s assertion was that this was an intentional tactic by Ford to drag out the process for as long as possible, because it meant that they would sell millions of Pintos over the course of those years, before having to make major changes to the design on future models:
“For more than eight years afterwards, Ford successfully lobbied, with extraordinary vigor and some blatant lies, against a key government safety standard that would have forced the company to change the Pinto’s fire-prone gas tank. By conservative estimates Pinto crashes have caused 500 burn deaths to people who would not have been seriously injured if the car had not burst into flames. The figure could be as high as 900.”
The impact of this article cannot be overstated. “Pinto Madness” landed Dowie a Pulitzer Prize.
Shortly after its publication, the news program 60 Minutes devoted an episode to the story, accusing Ford of buying “2,000 deaths and 10,000 injuries” to make a profit. Both the 60 Minutes episode and the Mother Jones article encouraged the public to speak out; Dowie even held a press conference with Ralph Nader in August of 1977 to get the media’s wheels in motion. NHTSA, under the pressure of public scrutiny, announced that they would launch an investigation into the Pinto gas tank.
Crash tests were arranged during this investigation under “special conditions” stipulated by NHTSA engineers, which meant non-standard conditions would be used. The justification for these conditions was to cover the worst case potential scenarios in real-world accidents; they would include using a larger car to crash into the test cars, instead of moving barriers; weighing down the front of the cars used to hit the rear of the tested cars to cause it to slide under the impacted car, thereby increasing the odds of contact with the fuel tank; turning on the headlights of the ramming car and the brake lights of the impacted car; and finally, using actual gasoline in both cars instead of the mineral spirit solutions typically used in crash tests.
The timing of the tests and “special conditions” used were clearly motivated more by public relations than they were out of concern for public safety, and the tests yielded results sufficient for NHTSA to label the gas tanks in Pinto models from 1971-1976 as “defective”. Despite Ford’s objections to the testing, they also opted for public relations points, and issued a voluntary recall of all Ford Pintos from 1971-1976. They had begun placing plastic shields around the gas tank and an improved filler pipe in the 1977 model, and all recalled ’71-’76 models would be fitted with the same. This was the largest automotive recall on record at the time.
This brings us forward to 1978; with the record Grimshaw settlement and the grizzly deaths of the Ulrich girls, the state of Indiana decided to get in on the action, and Ford was indicted for criminal recklessness and reckless homicide in the deaths of Judy Ulrich, Donna Ray Ulrich and Lyn Ulrich; the first case of its kind, since no corporation had ever been charged criminally in a product liability case. Pursuit of the criminal case was limited due to reckless homicide laws not existing in Indiana prior to 1977. This meant that the prosecution’s case was restricted to the 1977 to September of 1978 timeframe, the latter being the date of the indictment. In order to win its case, the prosecution would have to establish that Ford failed to warn about or repair the issues with Pinto gas tanks within that timeframe. If you recall, the burden of proof for a civil trial – preponderance of evidence – is much less stringent than the standard for a criminal trial – beyond a reasonable doubt –, so as counterintuitive as it may seem, the massive Grimshaw settlement, and the numerous other smaller settlements on Pinto cases, had no relevance to the criminal case. And because of the timeframe restrictions, the original design of the Pinto, and all of the internal documents mentioned in the Mother Jones article were also irrelevant, and therefore all evidence associated with those elements was rendered inadmissible.
The trial concluded in March of 1980; Ford was found not guilty.
Sorting Through the Wreckage
“The release to production of the Pinto was the most reprehensible decision in the history of American engineering” - Dr. Leslie Ball
Since the Pinto memo was crucial to the moral argument presented in “Pinto Madness”, further context for why it was written is necessary. As mentioned, the memo was part of a response to a proposed revision of Standard 301, which included a 30 mph rear-end collision threshold, and a separate revision to the rollover standard. The attachment containing the now infamous cost-benefit calculation wasn’t referencing the 30-mph rear-impact standard; Ford had actually accepted that. What they were disputing was the proposed rollover standard, and that was the context for the memo.
What makes this more egregious is the report explicitly states that the attached cost-benefit analysis pertained to the rollover standard only, a fact which is conspicuously absent from the Mother Jones article. Further, the analysis was meant for NHTSA regulators, not Ford engineers or any other Ford employees; the memo was not distributed internally at Ford and, seeing as how it was written in 1973, had nothing to do with the initial design decisions behind the Pinto. In fact, the memo didn’t mention the Pinto or its gas tank at all. The 11 million car and 1.5 million truck figures quoted in the analysis were clearly not in reference to 11 million Pintos, nor did it even refer to 11 million Ford vehicles; the figures reflected the total number of all brand new American made cars and trucks sold annually, which meant that the cost-benefit calculation wasn’t about the costs Ford itself would incur hypothetically, but the costs that would be shared among American car manufacturers.
And the $200,000 value of life that so incensed the public? That wasn’t a number based on lawsuit settlements; it was the number used by NHTSA internally as a standard to apply when sorting out proposals. It was never meant for public consumption, nor was it used as any sort of standard for product liability payouts. It certainly wasn’t about people being burned to death in Pintos.
According to a paper by Gary Schwartz in Rutgers Law Review:
“Several significant misconceptions surround the public’s understanding of the case. Given the cumulative force of these misconceptions, the case can probably be referred to as mythical.”
How dangerous was the Pinto in reality, then? Remember, Dowie claimed that the Pinto was responsible for at least 500 preventable burn deaths, and that the number could be as high as 900; 60 Minutes claimed 2000 deaths. Like the cost-benefit memo, which was about rollovers industry-wide and was misconstrued as being about the Pinto, these numbers were also based on NHTSA industry-wide rollover data; they were not the number of burn deaths caused by the Pinto’s exploding gas tank.
According to NHTSA data, between 1971 and 1977 there were 37 rear-end collisions involving Pintos that resulted in gas leakage fires, with 27 burn fatalities. That’s 27 deaths over several years and more than 2 million Pintos produced. 27 deaths means 27 tragedies and they are not at all trivial in that sense, but 27 isn’t 500-900.
The Pinto actually fared better than the AMC Gremlin in rear-end collisions causing fire; it fared worse than all the other subcompacts, and below the subcompact average, but it wasn’t the worst, and was not really that dangerous overall. According to Schwartz:
“as for safety the Pinto was a car that was neither admirable nor despicable. Its overall fatality rate was roughly in the middle of the subcompact range; its record was better than the subcompact average with respect to fatalities-with-fire; yet for the quite small category of fatalities with rear-end-fire, its design features apparently gave it a worse than-average record.”
None of this completely exonerates Ford. The Pinto was flawed and rushed to market, designed with a clear emphasis on form, function, price, and time-to-market above and beyond considerations of safety. They recognized a potentially dangerous problem with the Pinto gas tank, but they were on the clock and on a budget. Regardless, it’s clear that Ford’s “little carefree car” was made into a scapegoat for automotive regulation, and the narrative about the Pinto has endured, both in the consciousness of those old enough to remember the debacle, and as a case study in business and engineering ethics.
It’s amazing how a car that fared roughly average in terms of safety in its class and category could be perceived as “the most reprehensible decision in the history of American engineering” by an expert in the field, despite the lack of evidence justifying such a claim.
Never underestimate the media’s power to shape the dominant narrative of any story.
The Demand for Justice
There’s a famous quote that most of you have probably heard before, usually attributed to Joseph Stalin:
“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”
This is an uncomfortable idea. Like most uncomfortable ideas, the source of the discomfort is in the recognition of some degree of truth, or at least, something resembling truth that makes intuitive sense to us. In this case, the truth or intuition has to do with the personalization and proximity of death. We may take the moral or conceptual position that all lives are equally valuable, but we don’t react the same way to a stranger’s death that we do to the death of a loved one, because of our existing bond with the latter. There is simply no way to know or feel close to a million different people. We can’t even process the idea of a million people in any way that makes sense: it’s an abstraction.
That’s not much of a problem in and of itself. Putting numbers aside, if we actually felt for strangers the way we felt for the people closest to us, life would be unbearable; instead, we have our inner circles, then we have moral and legal codes constituting our sense of justice for everyone else. Reflecting this sense of justice is the recognition that, while we can’t personally care for every individual in the way we care for “our own”, every person should have inalienable rights and inherent value as a human being, the protection of which is a shared responsibility of communities and institutions at large.
In other words, that single death is a personal tragedy, and the million deaths is not, but that does not mean that we have no stake in the latter. On the contrary, part of our fear of an unjust world is the acknowledgment that our limitations as individuals make us unable to deal with those million deaths, but it also gives us a sense that something must be done about them. Hence our demand for justice.
As societies become more secure and affluent, this demand for justice increases. In an environment of real or perceived scarcity, our instinct will be to take care of ourselves and our loved ones first; you will steal that loaf of bread to feed your hungry child; it’s not that you’re okay with someone else starving at your expense, but just as we can’t care about strangers the way we care for friends and family, moral and ethical quandaries will rarely if ever subjugate our survival instincts.
However, if your personal needs are met, and you feel relatively secure, moral and ethical considerations can take center stage. America in the 1960s very much reflected this. After two decades of unprecedented prosperity, not just in the history of America, but of the entire world, civil rights movements rose to prominence, and the public began taking a more critical look at those institutions it now relied on for continued prosperity. The social upheaval in the ‘60s and ‘70s was, in effect, not a symptom of a culture in decay, but a biproduct of its success.
Within this context, it’s easier to understand the zeal behind “Pinto Madness” and the scapegoating of the Ford Pinto. More specifically, we can see how the investigation could be motivated by the seeming callousness of applying a cost-benefit analysis that includes a $200,000 appraisal of human life; this cuts right to the heart of that cognitive dissonance we feel weighing personal tragedy against statistical realities that our emotional hardware is ill-equipped to handle. You can’t help but apply that figure to your own life or to the lives of the people you care most about, and in doing so, it makes the very idea of a cost-benefit calculation in service of profits over safety seem blatantly evil.
To the extent that cost-benefit calculations can be perceived as evil, they are, unfortunately, a necessary evil.
The Value of Life and the Cost of Death
According to the World Health Organization, car accidents constitute the number one cause of death worldwide among people aged 5-29: approximately 1.19 million fatalities per year, with an additional 20,000 to 50,000 non-fatal injuries, including those resulting in permanent disability.
Whether you knew about these stats or not, you did know driving was among the more dangerous day-to-day activities that the average person engages in. There is a sort of cost-benefit analysis that we’ve done as a society, where the benefits of the automobile are so great that we’re willing to absorb all of the tremendous costs associated with driving cars, from the loss of life to the costs of healthcare and road infrastructure, not to mention the environmental impact. The centrality of cars to our way of life in North America is reflected in the fact that the grid layouts of our cities were designed to accommodate them from the ground up, and that there are around 1.6 cars per household; as such, it’s not hard to understand why most people don’t think twice about jumping into the car with their kids on a daily basis, despite the ever-present dangers of driving.
Both the design and regulatory processes associated with automobiles do not exist in a social vacuum. If you recall, Ford rushed the Pinto to market as a response to consumer demand for subcompact cars. Balancing form and function – making a car that is compact with trunk space, in a design that would be aesthetically appealing to customers – was an engineering challenge, entered into in order to make a product that would sell. The gas tank was placed in the spot it was to accommodate design directives informed by market forces.
Ford deprioritized safety, but they did so in a social and market climate where the customer they were catering to also seemed unconcerned with safety. The market for subcompacts was driven by fuel economy, low maintenance and convenience at entry-level pricing; the young adult who needed transportation because they were going to an out of state college was also the kid riding in the back of their parent’s flatbed truck, without a seatbelt; they were likely going to choose what car to buy based on lifestyle and budget concerns, because they were inured to the risks of driving cars.
The point here isn’t to assign blame to either automakers or consumers. Individuals and companies – which are simply organizations comprised of individuals – respond to incentives; placing blame or responsibility entirely on one side or the other obscures the bigger picture. Institutions and regulatory bodies are also subject to these broader social contexts, and their policymaking must be responsive on that basis.
This is where cost-benefit analysis comes in. As mentioned, we already do a sort of rough cost-benefit calculation which is reflected in how integrated cars are in our everyday life. Actual cost-benefit analyses, complete with assigning a value to human life, are done anywhere and everywhere there are policy decisions to be made with regards to distributing resources (usually money).
Ford, or any other automaker, could design cars with armored bodies that could withstand serious collisions, significantly reducing the amount of crash related fatalities, but these tanked-up cars would be prohibitively expensive to purchase and maintain, as well as inconvenient for day-to-day use, not to mention highly dangerous in other ways, like tearing up roads as well as pedestrians. There is simply a limit to how much people will pay to improve their safety, or how much any business or institution can spend to reduce risks. No moral argument about the sanctity of life will change the reality of limited resources.
Policymakers, therefore, have to place a monetary value on life as a benchmark in order to figure out which policies are worth prioritizing and pursuing; businesses have to do the same, and the insurance industry is quite explicitly in the business of putting a monetary value on human life. Economists use the phrase “value of life” as a shortened form of “value of statistical life”, which is a commonly used model for coming up with a dollar figure to be used in cost-benefit analyses.
Related to the question of how much people are willing to pay to mitigate the risk of death, the “value of statistical life” (VSL) model is one way in which the tradeoff between the costs of safety and what people are willing to spend are calculated. The current VSL in the United States is around $10 million. A simplified example of how this is calculated is as follows: if the inhabitants of a city with a population of 1,000,000 were each willing to pay, let’s say $10 a year for some measure that would save a single life, that would get you to a $10 million VSL. If it was $10 to save two lives, that would knock the VSL down to $5 million, and so on.
There are other ways in which the value of a life is calculated, such as on the basis of lost future earnings. This was how payouts in the 9/11 victim compensation fund were calculated, for example. Whether the victim was a stockbroker, a waiter, or a firefighter, family members were compensated based on a projection of what the deceased person would have earned over their lifetime. There are obvious problems with this, but congress gave lawyers discretion to negotiate, and attempts were made to bridge these earning gaps. Where a corporate executive’s family might be offered 1/3 of his projected $30 million in lifetime earnings, the family of a busboy in one of the WTC restaurants might be offered $1.2 million instead of his $750,000 in projected lifetime earnings.
Word choices are very important in the way our minds conceptualize things, and many economists and policymakers have taken to referring to the “cost of death” instead of the “value of life”, which seems to be a more effective way to encapsulate the purpose of assigning a dollar value to human life.
A single death that is personal and in close proximity to us being assigned a dollar value in order to assess what is fair from a compensatory standpoint, feels like an anathema. We saw that in both Liebeck v. McDonald’s and Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Co., massive punitive damage awards were ordered, and this isn’t uncommon in larger tort cases. In both cases, these amounts were lowered substantially on appeal, but the reason they were ordered in the first place was to send a message to McDonald’s and Ford, respectively. The very idea of punitive damage gets to the core of the problem: money is a hollow substitute for human life and is, at best, a band-aid for suffering. The realities of resource distribution necessitate cost-benefit analyses, but you simply can’t square that with the emotions involved with loss and suffering.
In the Mother Jones article, outrage was levied at the $200,000 burn death figure, and you could argue that this was the main thrust of Dowie’s entire argument, but the figure itself actually doesn’t matter. You could swap out $200,000 with $2,000,000 or $20,000,000 and the effect would’ve been the same. If the argument is that human life is priceless, then no figure would’ve been considered right or fair, so to attack Ford and/or NHTSA on that basis is to argue in bad faith. It misconstrues the point of assigning a dollar value to human life: assessing the material cost of death and establishing some non-arbitrary basis for distributing resources. By doing so, the argument works against its own purposes because it creates a perverse incentive for companies and institutions to set the value as low as possible when facing arbitration. If a company like Ford knows that punitive damages are inevitable, why would they come in valuing a life any higher than they have to?
Confirmation of your Fears
In the hot coffee case, the media told a story about the decline of personal responsibility; about an individual burning themselves with coffee and demanding that a corporation pay for their negligence. In the Ford Pinto case, we got a story about corporate greed and negligence quite literally burning people to death. There are elements of truth to both narratives. The court did, in fact, find that Liebeck was partially responsible for the third-degree burns she suffered, just as Ford took risks with their design of the Pinto, resulting in a few catastrophic incidents that might have been avoided had different choices been made. The issue isn’t about whether you agree with the outcomes of these cases or not. After hearing all the facts of the hot coffee case, you may still walk away thinking that Liebeck was responsible for burning herself, just as you may still find cost-benefit analyses to be a reprehensible way to decide on what safety standards should be imposed on vehicle manufacturers.
The real story is in the construction of the narratives themselves; in the power that the media has to shape the views of the public, including those members of the public who you would expect to be able to sort through the facts and arguments more effectively: lawyers, judges, politicians, doctors, lobbyists and engineers, among others.
Instead, false narratives endure because they are convenient; confirmation bias takes hold, and the stories proliferate. Real life is messy; laws, government regulations, trials, evidence, argumentation, technical expertise – all of these things are complicated and often inaccessible to the general public, and that’s in situations where that information is available. Often, information itself is obscured, made inaccessible, or simply doesn’t exist, and so in addition to reality being complicated and messy, often the truth is unknowable. It’s one thing to acquire data; it’s something entirely different to know how to interpret it.
If you lament what you perceive to be the erosion of personal responsibility, or if you have the preexisting belief that the legal system has been corrupted by frivolous lawsuits, the common narrative about Liebeck and her hot coffee payday will comport with your worldview. You will hear the misinformed media report on the radio, shake your head in disgust, then go into work and tell your co-workers the ludicrous story of the opportunistic old lady who scammed McDonald’s out of millions. Similarly, if you believe that there is no line that corporations won’t cross to make a profit, and that they’d readily sacrifice the lives of three teenage girls to save $11 on a modification to one of their cars, then Mother Jones and 60 Minutes are the only sources you need on the story.
The reason the McDonald’s case and the Ford case make for an interesting comparison is that they each broadly represent a different side of the political divide. On the one hand, you have the desire for free enterprise, personal accountability, legal reform, and deregulation; on the other, you have the demand for government intervention to crack down on corporate greed and protect the public. It’s not about one side of the political divide controlling the narrative through the media: BOTH sides are being fed narrative fuel for their positions in the culture war, and it’s often the media controlling the narrative and not one side of the political aisle or the other controlling the media, as is often claimed.
This is not to say that the media is inherently corrupt or malicious. Like the government organizations, corporations, and individuals we’ve been discussing here, the media is just another collection of people responding to incentives. Their function in composing the first rough drafts of history, and all of the constraints and pressures that come with that responsibility are in play; the allure of a great story, and the temptation to use fear and anger to bait people into engaging with the content, creates a minefield of confirmation bias both on the content creation and content consumption side of things.
The algorithms currently used by the major tech platforms are exacerbating all of this. Your biases are being used against you; the things that most scare you or anger you are being shown to you deliberately. It’s natural for us to hyperfocus on negativity because our minds are looking for threats in our environment. You train the algorithm through your natural browsing habits, which in turn drives content creators to make more of that content. And considering that we live in a time where a 15-year-old with a social media account can become an influential content creator, interpreting the mountains of data we are exposed to on a daily basis, and weeding out the misinformation and disinformation becomes impossible.
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At the risk of pushing a personal responsibility narrative, it’s becoming increasingly important for all of us to be more self-aware about the interplay between our biases and the media content we consume. Ask yourself why you believe the things you believe, or why you spend so much time engaging with things that make you angry or sad or fearful. Decades ago, the catchphrase for getting to the bottom of some conspiracy or corrupt enterprise was “follow the money”; now, you should follow the incentives.
Without some degree of self-awareness and media literacy, the world itself will change shape, taking on all the contours and details of your deepest fears. When it comes to your media consumption, maybe a little cost-benefit calculation is in order.