At the risk of being downvoted, I would like to raise a topic for deliberation-
Why are some acts (driving and polluting) penalized, but other acts that also cause harm (especially to children) are not penalized?
Driving and pollution are low hanging fruit, but what about polluting water supplies? Trash, sewage, dumping, antibiotics and pesticides in food sources....
Surely all of these things are dangerous to everyones health, especially children.
Should we have facial recognition software for people walking around with bags near water sources at certain hours of the day?
This is called "Whataboutism" and when you bounce to it you have already given up on your main argument.
Some acts are penalized before others because the negative externality is easy to identify, some are penalized before other problems because the agent of negative externality is easy to identify and tax, and some are penalized before other problems because those pushing for the penalty have a better PR machine or more political muscle.
None of these conditions means that there are not other negative externalities that need to be prevented or taxed/penalized, nor does it mean that some contrived dystopian solution is a likely consequence of our desire to prevent these other negative externalities.
That's fine, I agree with your assessment, even though you are implying that by raising a question, I have somehow lost an argument :)
You say that "those pushing for the penalty have better PR/political muscle", and you imply that they have more muscle than groups pushing for other penalties, or maybe even against penalties.
What I would like to point out is, we are assuming that the majority of citizens of Stockholm or Singapore or etc have clearly voted in favor of this execution of public policy, because if they didn't, they would just leave or rebel or something.
But in reality, I dare say that all over the globe, small elite groups of people are paid exorbitant sums of money to come up with these laws and carry them out. They then use cherry-picked statistics to justify the existence of the program (and then attack any naysayers as wanting to live in polluted dystopian hell holes like some stereotypical example of a Chinese city).
Would you agree then, that certain groups being able to penalize other people for the supposed "crime of driving" is not the most optimal and equitable way to balance negative externalities?
Perhaps it should be the burden of other people to deal with the negative externalities of something reasonable to expect in city living, like air pollution?
> That's fine, I agree with your assessment, even though you are implying that by raising a question, I have somehow lost an argument :)
I am not implying it, I am stating it outright. Your "argument" here is so tissue-paper thin as to boggle the mind and it is not even worth wasting time doing a point-by-point refutation.
It is the burden of "other people" to deal with the negative externalities of driving, specifically those "other people" who decide to get in a car and drive. Don't like it? Drive somewhere else.
For a very long time after cars were invented, the burden was actually the reverse of what you describe.
It used to be, "you don't like cars driving near you? Live somewhere else."
And it seems most people were fine with that, choosing to move to rural areas, where there were still cars, just less of them.
This localized tax is palatable to me because it is local and not national. But, it is still worth pointing out that the people who penalize behavior by taxing certain daily activities... may more so be in it for the money than for the social good.
If you disagree, that's fine. But when people are dying and having negative quality of living for so many more serious reasons, taxing congestion with a complex technological system is, in my opinion, deck chairs on the Titanic.
I hope that those who are greatly affected by it choose to move and bring their value elsewhere that welcomes them. Maybe Stockholm will feel their absence, maybe not.
But dumping, and polluting water supplies are illegal in every developed nation I know of. Things like pesticides, antibiotics, trash and sewage are also heavily regulated to minimize environmental harm. The government has been going after these things as much as reasonably possible.
And yet it still happens, and I am sure the rate at which it happens will continue to grow.
Cars are regulated at the manufacturer level and the consumer level.
Dumping is illegal, as it should be, but it is enforced in varying and ineffective ways. Some of the smallest offenders are vigorously prosecuted, while some of the largest offenders are slapped with small token fines that don't cover the cost of the problem, if ever!
I would say my greater point is, a lot of this "penalizing bad behavior" is analogous to security theatre... the smallest offenders pay in money and sanity... the largest offenders laugh at their joke fines [ since they run the world ;) ]
Just for the record, the Stockholm congestion tax is only one - actually one of the least advanced - ERP systems implemented around the world, probably the Singapore one being the most advanced (and soon to be replaced by a "second generation" system):
It is very advanced at dealing with the negative externalities its own system creates ;)
The gantries cause drivers to congest other roads, to stop in the middle of the road near the turn of the hour to try to lower the fee required... I'm sure there's billing errors.
In Singapore, we call it "Every Road- Pay".
Sure we have low income taxes, but this is a less than desirable way to make up for it.
Apart from the political issues, I want to point out that air pollution can be objectively measured, but the connection with childhood asthma can only be conjecture for lack of rigorous scientific controls -- it's a correlation, not an established cause/effect relationship.
I point this out because of the depressing regularity with which I see a raw correlation presented as though it represents a linked cause/effect relationship without the source meeting his scientific burden of evidence.
There is essentially zero doubt about the causative link at this point. Some studies will never be run because they would be deeply unethical, so we satisfy significance through a preponderance of correlation:
> There is essentially zero doubt about the causative link at this point.
Science isn't based on hand-waving -- falsifiable empirical evidence is required. Any number of assumptions like this have fallen by the wayside over the decades, undermined by overlooked correlations that weren't included in the original analysis.
The scientific bottom line is easy to state -- is the assumption falsifiable using empirical evidence? If this condition cannot be met, it's not science.
> Some studies will never be run because they would be deeply unethical ...
That cannot be offered as an argument to justify dispensing with scientific discipline. It's as simple as that.
> ... so we satisfy significance through a preponderance of correlation ...
Yes, but that is not science, it's politics or numerology. Using the method you just described, I can prove that there's a connection -- a "link" -- between sour cream sales and motorbike accidents:
But, as is often said, correlation is not causation.
Does this mean I can claim there's no connection (or a poor connection) between childhood asthma and air pollution? No, for the same reason that you cannot say there is -- it's not scientific.
I ask that you think about your position. If we allow public policy to be guided by the kind of pseudoscience you're advocating, if we dispense with the falsifiability criterion, then religious beliefs can substitute for science, and Creationism can be taught as science in public-school science classrooms.
Can you name one source of pollution suspected of causing health issues, that meets the criterion of falsifiability from evidence? It seems to me that as soon as behaviour X is suspected of killing people, it becomes unethical to do a controlled study that forces some people to live under X. So we're always at the mercy of spurious correlations.
Consider cigarettes --- has there been a 40-year controlled study on smoking? Yet, at some point, the observational evidence starts to pile up and one has to make decisions based on that.
> Can you name one source of pollution suspected of causing health issues, that meets the criterion of falsifiability from evidence?
Certainly -- I can name a dozen, each of them demonstrated using scientific methods. Asbestos. Ionizing radiation. Sunlight. Tobacco. And so forth. Each of these can be shown to cause health issues in vitro as well as in vivo -- using properly designed, scientific animal studies.
> So we're always at the mercy of spurious correlations.
Not for a scientifically educated population, which -- if it existed -- would reject this sort of pseudoscience.
A recent example of a shaky correlation that will doubtless shape public policy is this one:
Title: "Shootings in U.S. schools are linked to increased unemployment"
Quote: "A rigorous Northwestern University study of a quarter-century of data has found that economic insecurity is related to the rate of gun violence at K-12 and postsecondary schools in the United States. When it becomes more difficult for people coming out of school to find jobs, the rate of gun violence at schools increases." (Emphasis added.)
Note the terms/phrases "linked", "is related to" and the tendentious final sentence that tries to nail a nonexistent cause-effect relationship.
Obviously the original study cannot support this conclusion -- it reports a correlation, not a link, not a cause followed by an effect.
This is a practice called "data mining" -- underemployed researchers look for correlations between things, then publish papers describing the correlations, usually but not always with appropriate disclaimers ("Correlation is not causation, much more research is needed"), but irresponsible journalists then turn correlations into cause-effect relationships, as in this case.
In popular articles like this one, the word "linked" is often used to magically turn a correlation into a cause-effect relationship, because it means two things are bound together and move as one. Coincidences become pseudoscience.
> Consider cigarettes ...
Not a good example for your viewpoint. Rigorous, double-blind falsifiable animal studies demonstrate the carcinogenic properties of cigarettes.
> Yet, at some point, the observational evidence starts to pile up and one has to make decisions based on that.
Are you arguing that we should do without science? Without the benefit of science, the U.S. concluded that Eastern Europeans were less intelligent than others, and a resulting changed immigration policy condemned a huge number of Jews and others to death during the Nazi era. Later, more objective intelligence tests came to the opposite conclusion, and Mr. Yerkes, the responsible psychologist, wrote a confessional mea culpa that nearly no one read. This is just one example, there are many.
When we do without science, we should at least acknowledge that we're doing without science, and show an appropriate amount of skepticism about the conclusions we draw.
Certainly -- I can name a dozen, each of them demonstrated using scientific methods. Asbestos. Ionizing radiation. Sunlight. Tobacco. And so forth. Each of these can be shown to cause health issues in vitro as well as in vivo -- using properly designed, scientific animal studies.
Right, but then you're still assuming that whatever you've demonstrated on animals will hold on a human population. If that were always true, we would never bother doing studies on humans at all.
Science isn't based on hand-waving -- falsifiable empirical evidence is required. Any number of assumptions like this have fallen by the wayside over the decades, undermined by overlooked correlations that weren't included in the original analysis.
You have to make assumptions to reach a conclusion. "Humans are similar to animals" is one, and "There is no other cause that can reasonably explain this observational evidence" is another. I fully agree that observational data is often abused to reach sensational conclusions, but IMO when it is done correctly, it is a vital ingredient of modern science. Pearl's book on causality is basically devoted to this topic.
> You have to make assumptions to reach a conclusion.
Science isn't about assumptions, it's about evidence. People make assumptions every day, that's unavoidable, but we should be alert to the fact that it's not science, and be appropriately skeptical. We need to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. That's all I'm saying.
lutusp is referring to this study in particular. There are many variables that potentially should be corrected for that aren't mentioned in the article.
I get that, but we're not going to run a double-blind randomized study on whether car exhaust gives kids asthma. So our next best option is to take all of the relevant research, aggregate it as best possible, and make recommendations based on those results. There will be shortcomings, we might never get to a 99.9% significance, but in the mean time -- Kids will stop getting asthma from car exhaust.
> I get that, but we're not going to run a double-blind randomized study on whether car exhaust gives kids asthma.
Yes, but the point I have been trying to make is that, when we don't do science, we need to say we haven't done the science. Too much public information is pseudoscience without anyone saying to.
> ... but in the mean time -- Kids will stop getting asthma from car exhaust.
I understand that you're not getting this, but any number of times people have gone down the wrong path, let astray by pseudoscience, and calling it science all the while. As it happens, asthma is as likely to be caused by an overly clean environment as a polluted one -- observations support either conclusion.
Again, we cannot draw a conclusion without doing some science. My only point in bringing this to your attention is so you realize this issue is by no means settled, and no issue can be settled without science.
Environmental pollution is a serious problem, one I happen to think should be aggressively addressed. But if we offer a bogus reason, opponents in industry will use that bogus reason to fight a needed change.
Question to Libertarians... Is this statism? Or legitimate penalties for externalities? Kinda hard for all those parents of kids with asthma to sue all those drivers and manufacturers after the fact. Isn't this reported result a benefit that wouldn't have arisen in a purely anarcho capitalist society?
No, this is maximizing net freedom. Pollution infringes on the rights of others... a libertarian solution would have been more efficient and penalized the source on a consumption basis (gasoline tax), but the incentive would be similar.
I hope to erase a lot of extremist misunderstandings about freedom (as defined by the broadly interpretable nonaggression principle), because I think a lot of those on HN who currently identify with the Democratic Party would find they actually have more in common with independent, moderate libertarians (or even the LP) than they realize.
Sweden already has a high petrol and diesel tax. 1L of petrol is $1.61, compared to about $0.56 in the USA.
That tax doesn't take account of where the fuel is used. The pollution caused by a long journey through the countryside is less damaging than driving within a city.
Additionally, reducing congestion improves journey times for other road users. How much should that be worth?
I'm all for capturing externalities in the form of consumption-based incentives, but at some point you need to draw a line for added benefit/complexity. Yes, they do have relatively high gasoline taxes, but perhaps not high enough.
Theoretically, perhaps the cost should be such that the government can use the revenue to "undo" the damage (via carbon capture + ventilation infrastructure in congested areas, for example). If there was truly a compelling case that city congestion, per liter, is so much worse: just levy an additional city petrol gasoline tax. Similar to city vs state sales taxes.
Sweden is a large and sparsely populated country. In the north, many have 1h, 60 mile commutes. In Stockholm a commute might be 1h and 10 miles. There is pretty stiff opposition to raised gasoline taxes because it is seen as an unfair on rural people. It's also regressive since income is much lower in rural areas.
If "city pollution" and "congestion" are the externalities then congestion taxes actually make more sense - and are extremely popular compared to gasoline tax.
City gasoline taxes would make sense, but they don't allow hour by hour control of congestion. I don't work in the city but I can drive in "for free" e.g late in the evening.
I'd be surprised if you could commute 100km in one hour on ordinary rural roads. I have a colleague who commutes from Åmot to Drammen and he takes about an hour and its only about 60km and that's pretty good roads most of the way. I know Swedish roads are often better than Norwegian ones but are they really that much better? Or do Swedes just drive a lot faster?
Roads are certainly straighter and wider in rural Sweden than Rural Norway, because of the geography (topography rather perhaps). In Norway you are never far from the next tunnel.
If you live next to e.g. The E4 that spans the length of Sweden (most people in the northern 2/3 do) the speed limit is 110/120 for the most part so at least in summer conditions you have no problem doing well over 100km/h since there is so little traffic. If you have a long commute in rural Sweden it's almost certainly mostly freeway driving in a very flat landscape.
Obviously you are driving much slower at the beginning/end of such a commute, but normally you can do it without being slowed down by traffic. On more normal rural roads and in winter conditions you might be lucky to do 70 or 80 (90-100 on the largest roads).
It's actually an interesting difference between city and country - in rural areas we always talk about distances in km (since they translate directly to driving time with an expectation of doing 80-100km/h no matter where you are going, since traffic or road quality is almost never a factor) whereas in cities a distance is almost always given as a driving time.
True about the tunnels but in fact they generally make things better not worse. The problem with roads in Norway is that there is almost always a hill of granite rock or a lake or fjord in the way. My 22km commute to Drammen hugs the edge of the fjord and the longest straight is probably not more than about 300m.
Swedes do overspeed a lot more than their Norwegian neighbors. More speed cameras in Norway as well. Even the speed limit is lower (80km/h) in Norway (vs. 90km/h in most of the EU)
Source: a recent (last May-June) road trip Stockholm <-> Bergen with quite a bit of rural/mountain exploration.
I'm all for taxes that attempt to follow a mathematical distribution, which makes the most sense in such a scenario. This would have to be a "federal government" thing, which on top of the pollution tax (equal everywhere) adds a congestion tax that increases as you approach dense city areas, such that it's probably not worth it to drive more to fill up the tank. But no system will be perfect so it's best to minimize complexity in my opinion.
I learned recently that Finland is contemplating removing tax on both gasoline and cars (including the purchase of cars) and replacing it with a tax on distance driven, using some kind of mandatory installed device.
That seems counter-intuitive because it would make vehicles with high fuel consumption more economical than before. I can't imagine that his is their intention?
No, it isn't. But it's not entirely opposed to their intention either.
Try to make a list of your own of what you personally think is important goals to optimise traffic policy for: Less noise in the city, less pollution in the city, fewer traffic accidents, fewer people killed, fewer people hurt, faster journeys, lower cost, less fuel spent, less fuel per kilometer, less per joyrney, and so on and so forth. Many of them partly overlap. Is saving fuel important to you?
IMO, I'd disregard the drivers fuel cost savings completely and focus completely on emissions, noise and accidents. If optimising for lower total emissions leads to lower fuel costs per km, fine. If higher, also fine.
a libertarian solution would have been more efficient and penalized the source on a consumption basis (gasoline tax)
The purpose of the tax in question isn't to lower pollution, though: it's a congestion tax intended to spread out traffic over time to reduce congestion (lower the need for more and/or larger roads). Lower pollution just happened to be a side effect.
"Congestion taxes are justified by the fact that the people who are contributing towards congestion and environmental problems are paying for the costs to society this causes."
I am certainly no libertarian but I think the framing is a bit uncharitable, anarcho-capitalism is a radical fringe, the vast majority of ideological libertarians (my estimate) are okay with the state internalizing externalities, although there would be objections to its ability to do this fairly and effectively
In this case, it isn't fair - the externality is pollution, but the fee is unrelated to the emission levels of the vehicle. But even such an inefficient system is still superior to doing nothing and letting the public suffer the externalities.
It's astounding that these politicians and bureaucrats who ostensibly have the right idea almost exclusively come up with these complex schemes full of mis-incentives, instead of using simple, correct solutions, like raising gasoline taxes.
An example: the Obama administration set forth a regulation that forces automakers to produce one 50 MPG vehicle in their line-up within the next five years. Of course, this is a stealth tax which has similar negative effects (and positive ones) to a higher gasoline tax, but the negative effects -- like higher car prices -- are less traceable to the mandate, which is good for politics. However, there are less obvious negative effects, like raising the barrier to entry for competition (it is no coincidence that the heavily regulated auto industry has very few startups -- Tesla being an anomaly.) A new company that only produces 30-45 MPG SUV models cannot compete, whereas it would be relatively competitive with a higher gasoline tax.
> It's astounding that these politicians and bureaucrats who ostensibly have the right idea almost exclusively come up with these complex schemes full of mis-incentives, instead of using simple, correct solutions, like raising gasoline taxes.
It's because the issue they're directly trying to tackle is congestion, not pollution (which is only being tackled as a secondary issue). Also, in Britain there are already high petrol taxes, they make up about half the price of fuel. In general it's a good thing, and it does discourage a completely car dependent society - people to live closer to the centre, closer to work, use alternatives like walking, cycling, public transport etc - but it's not a particularly direct way to tackle air pollution, or at least it doesn't tackle the particular spikes in air pollution you get in the cities. In order to tackle air pollution in London using only fuel tax, you'd have to make driving in the countryside ruinously expensive. So you get layered policy - medium fuel tax nationwide, congestion charge for the centre (where it is the biggest issue), and an air pollution charge, or limit, covering the whole city.
I do agree that often politicians are not that great at designing these things (the proposed air pollution charge in London is rather strangely designed for instance), and the complexity is partly incompetence, but it's also partly because the problem is complicated.
See my other comment -- why not just have an added petrol tax at city gas stations? They are trying to address both issues, but the issue of just 'being around' (the source of congestion) is a very dubious thing to tax, whereas carbon emissions are not and taxing them produces the same intended incentives.
Congestion is not a kind of linear cost, and pollution is not its only externality. It also makes everyone else around you slower. Congestion is actually complicated. Once a place is congested, the marginal addition of a car makes traffic flow relatively much worse, and vice versa for the removal of a car.
It's extremely complicated -- far too complex to effectively tax every aspect, especially with a scheme like the one proposed. It matters whether you're making turns into traffic, where you're going, length of time on the road, how many others are on the route you chose, how quickly you accelerate, how alert of a driver you are, the type of car your drive, whether you're a pedestrian who rushes to go at the end of a signal, etc. But I don't like the idea of taxing people for "being out" when it's a stretch to fundamentally link that to infringing on the rights of others in a way that truly needs to be regulated. They already paid for the roads, and should be able to use them as they please. The petrol tax captures the necessary incentive.
My thoughts are that large, and therefore complex, political structures have a harder time converting the right idea to something that can be implemented practically.
Sweden, where the OP example comes from, is a relatively small political entity. 10 million people represented by 349 members of parliament, who are elected through a proportional representation system.
We have high gasoline taxes. Actually a carbondioxide tax and an energy tax. It also attracts VAT. In 2016 the petrol (95) price was 13,02 SEK / litre ($1.50) of what 8,64 SEK ($0.99) was taxes.
However, in Stockholm it wasn't enough to combat emissions and congestion. So rather than penalising all car travel across the relatively sparsely populated country, it seemed to make sense to have a toll at the city borders.
In Europe we have high taxes on fuels and CO2 emissions, but London and Paris still have worse air pollution than many US cities. Mostly because automakers focussed on Diesel engines to maximise MPG at the cost of everything else (NOx, particulates etc)
Yes, and many European countries tax diesel less than gasoline. I think when these sorts of policies were enacted only heavy vehicles like trucks, buses and cars that were driven a lot (taxis, mostly) used diesel, and there was an extra yearly per-vehicle "diesel tax" that made buying a diesel car economically unfavorable unless you drove a lot.
I think this sort-of ties into the political ideology where "luxury consumption" is bad. I.e. truckers transport Important Stuff(TM) and thus deserve a tax rebate on fuel, whereas a private person driving their own vehicle is bad, and should be discouraged.
But, the world changed (or, lets say the balance between the different taxes, incomes etc.) and at some point it started to make economic sense for the average Joe to buy a diesel car instead of a gasoline one.
But of course, changing the tax policy by getting rid of the diesel tax rebate runs into fierce opposition by the trucking/taxi/etc. lobby. So here we are.
It would be producing the most fuel efficient SUV's on the market, and it wouldn't be allowed to compete... Some people are going to get SUV's or trucks no matter what.
The fee goes to the state, not to the victims. Therefore, it's statism. Nobody knows what would have happened in a "purely anarcho capitalist society" for lack of experimental data.
(That's assuming the study is even correct, and I don't claim to be a libertarian or speak for them.)
Just yesterday it was decided to fund a new subway line by dramatically increasing the congestion pricing. Hopefully that will decrease traffic further. With the public transportation system in Stockholm most people really have no business driving through town.
Why are some acts (driving and polluting) penalized, but other acts that also cause harm (especially to children) are not penalized?
Driving and pollution are low hanging fruit, but what about polluting water supplies? Trash, sewage, dumping, antibiotics and pesticides in food sources....
Surely all of these things are dangerous to everyones health, especially children.
Should we have facial recognition software for people walking around with bags near water sources at certain hours of the day?