Hybrid Cars - Economics In One Lesson

Lots of stories in the legacy media (e.g., FOXNews and The Wall Street Journal) this week on the problems the blind have with hybrid cars. (Thank the National Federation for the Blind for the media storm; here is there blog - Voice of the Nation's Blind - with multiple posts on the subject.)

The complaint is that the blind navigate by using their hearing to a greater extent. This means that hybrid cars pose higher safety risks for the blind because they are quieter.

Yet another example of Henry Hazlitt's Economics In One Lesson: decisions have consequences; consequences matter; tracing out all consequences is economics.

So, let's be irreverent.

How many blind people is it OK to kill to save the environment?

My guess is that if we had to throw them into a volcano to appease the environmental gods that the answer would be zero.

But, we don't have to that. Instead, we permit folks to buy hybrids on the basis of motivation, and then allow them to avoid measuring consequences.

Permit me to do so. There are about 5,000 pedestrian deaths due to motor vehicles each year. About 1 in 280 Americans is blind (or visually impaired).  The blind are overrepresented among pedestrians. Let's suppose that there are 20 blind pedestrians killed each year. Realistically, it would be hard to argue that hybrids are likely to increase the average number of deaths per year by more than one or so. A ballpark figure from forensic economics for the value of a human life is $3 million. This puts a price tag on this cost of hybrids at $3 million. Then the question becomes whether the dollar benefit to society from the use of hybrids is larger or smaller than this. About 100K hybrids are sold each year, and they each stay on the road for (say) 5 years, which works out to a threshold of about $6 per car.

I'm gonna' stick my neck out and claim that a hybrid reduces environmental damage by more than $6, making them OK when we restrict ourselves to this issue.

But, how likely is the family of dead blind pedestrian to accept this argument? And, are there any hybrid owners out there who actually thought about this consequence before acting on their motivations?

UPDATE: Ethicists will note that this is a version of the Fat Man problem of Judith Jarvis Norton, a variation on the trolley problem of Phillipa Foot. I had to go to class, and posted first. After class I found my colleague Art Porter who directed me to the name of this dilemma.