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Click, Clack, and Car TalkNPR's Tappet brothers are wrong about the societal costs of car phones.

By Steven E. Landsburg
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2002, at 4:12 PM ET
Illustration by Robert Neubecker

Click and Clack, the Tappet brothers of NPR's Car Talk, have declared war on drivers with cell phones. Their weapon is moral suasion, in the form of bumper stickers that say, "Drive Now, Talk Later." (The Tappets claim that NPR's management vetoed their first choice: "Would You Drive Better If I Crammed That Cell Phone Up Your Keister?") The bumper stickers are aimed not just at drivers but at legislators. The Tappet brothers want a ban on cell phone use by drivers in all 50 states. So far, they've met their goal in exactly zero out of 50.

Talking while driving is deadly. Of this there is much evidence and little doubt. Cell phone use increases your accident risk by almost 400 percent. But so what? It's a big and unwarranted leap from "talking while driving is deadly" to "talking while driving is bad." After all, lots of things are deadly without being bad. Take driving itself, for example. Just getting behind the wheel (as opposed to staying home in bed) multiplies your accident risk by far more than 400 percent, but so far the Tappets have not proposed to outlaw driving.

Presumably that's because they recognize that the benefits of driving exceed the costs, even though the costs include tens of thousands of fatalities every year. In other words, the Tappets implicitly recognize that cost-benefit analysis is a legitimate basis for public policy. So you might think they'd welcome a cost-benefit analysis of cell phone use by drivers, at least as a starting point for a discussion. Instead, when just such an analysis came along, the Tappets responded with vitriol, lies, and slander.

The analysis is courtesy of Robert Hahn, Paul Tetlock, and Jason Burnett of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies. They conclude that drivers' cell phones are indeed deadly but nevertheless (on net) a good thing. On their Web page, the Tappet brothers describe that work thusly: "Here's an economic analysis that shows the enormous value to the economy of driving and talking. (As long as we don't factor in the injuries, lost lives, pain and suffering of all those accidents, that is!)"

That description is a slanderous lie. The AEI-Brookings study is all about factoring in the injuries, lost lives, pain and suffering of cell phone-related accidents. The researchers estimate that in 1999, driver use of cell phones caused about 300 fatalities, 38,000 nonfatal injuries, and 200,000 damaged vehicles.

In a 1999 letter to the New York Times, the Tappet brothers refer to one of those 300 fatalities—a 2-and-a-half-year-old girl named Morgan Lee—and ask, "What price has Mr. Hahn plugged into his nice, clean economic model to account for the misery and tears that such outright selfishness has wrought?" If they'd bothered to read the research they're so quick to criticize, they'd have found the answer: The price is $6.6 million, a widely used standard based on Harvard law professor Kip Viscusi's analysis of how much people are willing to pay to preserve lives in a variety of contexts.

Pricing out the fatalities at $6.6 million each, and adding in the costs of injuries and vehicle damage, Mr. Hahn and his colleagues estimate that in 1999, cell phone use by drivers caused $4.6 billion worth of damage. That's the cost of letting drivers use cell phones. But to prove something is bad, it's not enough to calculate the cost. You've got to also calculate the benefit and see which is bigger.

Here's how Hahn and his colleagues do that: They figure the value of a call is equal to what you're willing to pay for it minus what you actually pay for it. They estimate willingness to pay from demand studies and actual charges from real-life cell phone bills. They factor in the truism that some calls are more valuable than others and conclude that the cell phone calls made by drivers in 1999 had a total value of $25 billion. That $25 billion benefit beats the $4.6 billion cost, so cell phones for drivers are on net a good thing.

Actually, I don't buy it, and here's why: Drivers make a lot of calls that could easily wait for the next rest stop. Those calls shouldn't count as benefits of legalized talking-while-driving because they'd get made even if talking-while-driving were banned. So—as Hahn et al. acknowledge in a note near the end of their paper—the true benefit of talking-while-driving is probably far less than $25 billion. They still believe it's well over $4.6 billion, though. For the sake of argument, let's suppose it's $10 billion.

Then what would the Tappets' cherished ban accomplish? Drivers would give up $10 billion in benefits to prevent 300 deaths (plus some injuries and property damage). That's a lousy deal. The same $10 billion invested in, say, firefighting equipment would save substantially more than 300 lives—conceivably (using Viscusi's numbers) about five times as many. Instead of taking away drivers' cell phones, we could confiscate $10 billion, use it to buy fire trucks, and do the world a lot more good.

Or maybe not. The AEI-Brookings study is hardly the last word on the matter. Maybe a more thorough study, with more precise numbers, will show that a cell phone ban does make sense. Or maybe the next study will confirm what Hahn and his colleagues believe. Either way, Click and Clack won't trouble themselves to read the next study. Their minds are already made up.

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Steven E. Landsburg is the author, most recently, of More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics. You can e-mail him at .
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.
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Notes From The Fray Editor:

Oh, you didn't agree then? Really? God of Wine says it has nothing to do with economics or cell phones, but only to do with good and bad drivers. But that's not what we were looking for: we wanted Fray posts that challenged the article on its own terms. Ananda Gupta was one of the few who took issue with the Car Talk boys--he said they shouldn't claim any expertise in public policy, starting a nice thread which included Captain Ron Voyage replying: "Still, there's a great multiplier effect. By using their status, the Brothers give business opportunities to guys like Landsburg." Most other posters were arguing with Mr Landsburg's thesis. Let us count the ways.


Reader Comments From The Fray:


If enough people drink enough booze to ring up a collective $50 billion bar tab in the course of a year, does it offset the lives lost due to drunk driving?

--Chadwick

(TO find or answer this post, click here.)


The crux of the matter is [Stephen Landsburg's] "let's say" discussion of the $10 billion "benefit" of cell phones. If I am reading him correctly, he is saying that 40% of all driver cell phone calls are necessary. I don't accept that analysis for one second, and I certainly don't want us to "let's say" that assumption is correct. In fact, I find it very hard to believe that there is a $10 billion benefit, and I'll say why.

On virtually every commercial jet plane in America, it is possible to make phone calls while in flight--all you have to do is be willing to pay fairly high rates. Planes are full of business people (me included--I regularly fly 100,000 miles annually) who have plenty of important business to conduct while flying. And yet, I never see--and never hear from others--that people are willing to pay those rates, which, while admittedly high compared to calling from the ground, aren't so high that they would outweigh the benefits of staying in touch while 2-5 hours go by in the air.

So my conclusion is that there simply aren't that many important calls for which a driver couldn't pull over; if there were, we'd be seeing a lot more calls in the air.

So I reject the $10 billion benefit, in true Car Talk fashion, as bogus.

--Howard Litwak

(To find or answer this post, click here.)


Kip Viscusi's work is important and reminds us of an important truth--we can't spend infinite amounts of money saving every life. There are limits. Thus, it is perfectly appropriate for an automaker to argue its product isn't defective because it wouldn't make sense to increase the price of the car $3,000, putting the car's price out of reach of many buyers, to save 10 lives a year. The FAA makes this sort of a call when they permit parents to keep 2 year old kids on their laps during flight--it isn't really safe for the kids, but if you require them to have a separate ticket, many parents won't be able to afford to fly at all.

But at the same time, there is a strong argument against utilizing that kind of analysis with respect to minor impositions on conduct. It really isn't asking all that much for people not to use their cell phones while driving a moving automobile. It's certainly not the same thing as making them unable to afford a car or a plane ticket. It's a minor imposition on human freedom / the operation of a motor vehicle of the kind that legislatures often engage in when trying to save human lives. Do they do a cost-benefit analysis before putting up every stop sign? Speed bumps in front of a school? It may be academically interesting to talk about how inefficient it is, but the fact of the matter is, there's nothing wrong with inefficiently saving some lives in this situation. So long as the imposition is minor, it is really rather silly to insist on a strict cost-benefit metric.

--Dilan Esper

(To find or answer this post, click here.)


A total ban on cell phones while driving, or a total disregard for public safety are not the only two choices. It seems to me that economics would provide an answer: if the "cost" of driving while talking on a cell phone was higher, people would only do it for the "really important" calls, which are the ones that generally have the most economic benefit anyhow.

What am I saying? I am advocating a Tax on Talking and Driving. The new E911 capabilities that are being built into all new phones by FCC mandate is the exact same technology that can be used to tell if the phone in use is stationary or in a moving vehicle. If it is, apply a tax. There are certain situations where this won't be totally fair (e.g. a passenger in a car is talking on a phone, not the driver), but then again, innocent people being killed by inattentive drivers aren't in a fair position either.


--Mfbenson

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

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