In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government by Murray Charles

Author:Murray, Charles [Murray, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liberty Fund Inc.
Published: 2013-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

The Pursuit of Happiness and the 55-mph Speed Limit

Let me try to set the nature of the evaluation problem as it relates to the pursuit of happiness by using a homely example: the national 55-miles-per-hour speed limit enacted in 1974.

The Congress originally enacted the 55-mph speed limit as a temporary measure in response to the Arab oil embargo. Its purpose was

[print edition page 157]

to save fuel. As it turned out, this objective was unrealistic. Instead of the 10 to 30 percent reductions that had been predicted, the actual savings were trivial. And the fuel shortage quickly dissipated, so even if the law did save fuel, it wasn’t helping solve a national emergency. But by that time it had been learned (or thought it had been learned) that lives were being saved, so obviously the law had to be a good thing. In 1974, Congress made the national speed limit permanent so that more lives could be saved.* And thus began a sort of national schizophrenia.

A Gallup survey in 1981 (typical of others) illustrates how zany the situation became. A large majority of the people polled, 75 percent, proclaimed their support for the speed limit. But only 29 percent said they obeyed it consistently. Even among those who said they favored the law, 42 percent conceded that they observed the law “not very often or never.”2 The problem was that the lives-saved argument meant that it was not nice to be against the 55-mph speed limit. It was not nice even to think that one was against it. If you were against the 55-mph limit, you were in favor of people dying in car accidents that you could have prevented. And so it came to be that a large majority of Americans supported the law, including a large majority of congressmen and senators, and a large majority of Americans disobeyed it, and nowhere more uniformly or flagrantly than on the beltway surrounding Washington, D.C.

In 1987, a bill was finally passed that permitted states to raise the speed limit to 65 mph on rural interstate highways. The debate over the eventual modification of the law recalls Oscar Wilde’s remark about the difficulties of reasoning a person out of something he has not reasoned himself into. The Congress extricated itself not so much because its original expectation for the law was false, nor because the data on savings of lives were refuted, but because so many Americans hated the law they said they supported. Those who led the public opposition to the 55-mph limit never proved that the law did not save lives, nor did any other rationale for changing the law gain wide acceptance; rather, after years of frustration, they won what must seem to an impartial observer to be an irrational victory.

[print edition page 158]

In reality, I will argue, the debate over the 55-mph limit exemplifies the problem of defining dependent variables. The opponents of the speed limit were not ignoring “the good.” They were construing it differently. And in this difference lie lessons that apply to a variety of contemporary issues.

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