One of Kevin Drum’s readers points him at an analysis of the decline in drunk driving back in the ’90s:
There are several takeaways from this:
- During the 80s and early 90s, drunk driving decreased significantly.
- By the mid-90s, the level of drunk driving flattened out and has been flat ever since.
- The effect of laws on drunk driving has been pretty modest. That’s the red band in the chart. Stricter laws are responsible for only a small fraction of the total decline.
There’s potentially some good news here. Grant concludes that the biggest effect by far has been from social forces, namely the increased stigma associated with drunk driving. If you discount demographics, which we have no control over, social stigma accounts for about half the drop in drunk driving. This suggests that what we need isn’t so much stricter laws, but a revitalized campaign to even further stigmatize drunk driving. I’m on board with that.
His conclusion’s implications are in themselves interesting. After all, aren’t laws, to some extent, simply our social consciences encoded into law? The fact that we separate law from social forces in such a way indicates the disconnect we have in the backs of our minds between our government and ourselves.
I suppose we could take this a step further and see that disconnect as a result of our basically selfish selves. A lot of law is about curtailing our selfishness in the interests of the greater good – taxes for government services, vehicle velocity limits (because our time is valuable, for those of us in a hurry but not seeking the adrenaline rush of driving like a nutcase), even laws stating that you will adhere to the contracts you sign, as breaking them is often out of some selfish design.
