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 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.