I am not sure how $150k is a remotely relevant number. I tried Googling a couple vaguely-similar things:
Googling ‘asbestos liability’ turned up this page claiming
The average asbestos settlement amount is typically between $1 million and $2 million, as Mealey’s latest findings show. The average mesothelioma verdict amounts are between $5 million and $11.4 million.
and asbestos exposure is to my understanding usually not immediately lethal.
Googling ‘J&J talcum powder’ turns up a lot of results like this one:
After 8 hours of deliberations Thursday, a St. Louis jury awarded $4.69 billion to 22 women who sued pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson alleging their ovarian cancer was caused by using its powder as a part of their daily feminine hygiene routine.
The jury award includes $550 million in compensatory damages and $4.14 billion in punitive damages.
which works out to $25M/death even if we entirely ignore the punitive damages portion, and even if we assume that all 22 victims immediately died.
It doesn’t seem at all uncommon for liabilities to work out to well upwards of $10M/victim, even in cases with much less collateral damage, much less certain chains of causation, much less press coverage, and victims not actually immediately dying.
$12.5M/victim would be $37.5B, which is still less than Boeing’s market cap today (though comparable to what Boeing’s market cap was in 2001). This also ignores all other costs of 9/11: Googling shows 6,000 injuries, plus I think a fairly large amount of property damage (edited to add: quick Googling turns up a claim of $16 billion in property damage to businesses).
You can argue the exact numbers, I guess, but I nevertheless think that, as a matter of legal realism if nothing else, imposing liability for 9/11 on Boeing would have ended up bankrupting it.
I just chose a number that seems plausibly related, and determined by market pricing rather than public choice. If we do want to put our faith in the public choice process, looking more closely at wrongful death lawsuits tables from Lawlinq (a lawyer referral website), and various accident attorney websites rather than abnormally large suits seen in the news, they say on average wrongful death suits can range from $250k to $3M+, so about within an order of magnitude of what I said. We can talk about whether that’s too high/low, but it is a lot lower than $25M/death.
It also seems likely a lot of the cost seen in the stock market was from peoples’ reactions to the event, not the event itself. Seems strange to hold Boeing responsible for those reactions.
The $35B number seems reasonable, given the article Ryan Greenblatt linked below. In such a case, hopefully Boeing would have prepared well for such a disaster.
You can argue the exact numbers, I guess, but I nevertheless think that, as a matter of legal realism if nothing else, imposing liability for 9/11 on Boeing would have ended up bankrupting it.
It does seem reasonable to me to argue the numbers, because the post is saying “if you get the numbers right, then good things will happen, so we should implement this policy”. The claim that we will predictably get the numbers wrong, and so if we try to implement the policy bad things will happen seems very different from giving examples of where the economics described in the post seems to break down. In the former scenario we may want to advocate for a modified version of the policy, which consistently gets the numbers right (like Hanson’s foom insurance scheme). In the latter, we want to figure out why the economics don’t work as advertised, and modify our policy to deal with a more complex world than the standard economic model.
I am not sure how $150k is a remotely relevant number. I tried Googling a couple vaguely-similar things:
Googling ‘asbestos liability’ turned up this page claiming
and asbestos exposure is to my understanding usually not immediately lethal.
Googling ‘J&J talcum powder’ turns up a lot of results like this one:
which works out to $25M/death even if we entirely ignore the punitive damages portion, and even if we assume that all 22 victims immediately died.
faul_sname, below, links:
It doesn’t seem at all uncommon for liabilities to work out to well upwards of $10M/victim, even in cases with much less collateral damage, much less certain chains of causation, much less press coverage, and victims not actually immediately dying.
$12.5M/victim would be $37.5B, which is still less than Boeing’s market cap today (though comparable to what Boeing’s market cap was in 2001). This also ignores all other costs of 9/11: Googling shows 6,000 injuries, plus I think a fairly large amount of property damage (edited to add: quick Googling turns up a claim of $16 billion in property damage to businesses).
And our legal system is not always shy about adding new types of liability—pain and suffering of victims’ families? Disruption of work? Securities fraud (apparently the stock market dropped $1.4 trillion of value off 9/11)?
You can argue the exact numbers, I guess, but I nevertheless think that, as a matter of legal realism if nothing else, imposing liability for 9/11 on Boeing would have ended up bankrupting it.
I just chose a number that seems plausibly related, and determined by market pricing rather than public choice. If we do want to put our faith in the public choice process, looking more closely at wrongful death lawsuits tables from Lawlinq (a lawyer referral website), and various accident attorney websites rather than abnormally large suits seen in the news, they say on average wrongful death suits can range from $250k to $3M+, so about within an order of magnitude of what I said. We can talk about whether that’s too high/low, but it is a lot lower than $25M/death.
It also seems likely a lot of the cost seen in the stock market was from peoples’ reactions to the event, not the event itself. Seems strange to hold Boeing responsible for those reactions.
The $35B number seems reasonable, given the article Ryan Greenblatt linked below. In such a case, hopefully Boeing would have prepared well for such a disaster.
It does seem reasonable to me to argue the numbers, because the post is saying “if you get the numbers right, then good things will happen, so we should implement this policy”. The claim that we will predictably get the numbers wrong, and so if we try to implement the policy bad things will happen seems very different from giving examples of where the economics described in the post seems to break down. In the former scenario we may want to advocate for a modified version of the policy, which consistently gets the numbers right (like Hanson’s foom insurance scheme). In the latter, we want to figure out why the economics don’t work as advertised, and modify our policy to deal with a more complex world than the standard economic model.