Removing Roads and Traffic Lights Speeds Urban Travel

[Bobby+Umit 161]

We wouldn't need anything like this if they make our fracking flying cars (ala blade runner).

[one...two...tree 2,762]

We wouldn't need anything like this if they make our fracking flying cars (ala blade runner).

Those were way cool!

[scandal 951]

Actually, to me the main lesson from these sorts of studies is that if you let individuals maximize their own personal utility functions, you won't necessarily get an optimal result for the society at large. It's a classic situation in which you need a group dynamic to coerce individual behaviors in a better direction.

America has always been about individualism and self-reliance, not what's "good for society".

"We were challenged [at the end of World War I] with a peace-time choice between the American system of rugged individualism and a European philosophy of diametrically opposed doctrines — doctrines of paternalism and state socialism."

-- Herbert Hoover (1928)

Actually, America has always been about the tension between the rights of the individual and the needs of the collective. Those themes date all the way back to colonial times, through the Articles of Confederation, the Constitutional convention, the ratification process, and the Federalist papers.

No doubt individualism and the protection of civil liberties is a key and vital part of what American political philosophy is all about. But it's couched in the context of "greater good" and social compacts. For example, why does the Fourth Amendment limit searches and seizures? To protect the individual from the tyranny of the state (police). But that presumes that there is a state. And it has an arm to impose its will by force (the police). And that this is a necessary part of our social compact for the "good of society".

You are wrong that America is about individualism at the expense of "good for society". America has always been about a balance between those competing forces.

Besides, the story in Steven's article about traffic engineering and my analogy to antibiotic over-prescription don't even fall into the realm of individualism and civil liberties. Nobody's liberties are impacted when roads are closed or rerouted. Nor are they impacted when medicines are used by public health officials for the best benefit of all.

Both of these cases (traffic, antibiotics) are examples of Pareto sub-optimal outcomes in which selfish behavior by a participant to maximize his own outcome leads to sub-optimal results for all participants. The term comes from game theory and the most famous example used to illustrate the concept is the Prisoner's Dilemma.

In short, frequently the optimal solution to a problem involves cooperative behavior. Since individuals on their own don't typically act cooperatively there is often the need to provide incentives (road closures, refusing to prescribe medications) that will coerce a desired outcome.

All of that is very wonkish technocratic engineering and social modeling and far removed from discussions of civil liberties which really have nothing to do with the subject.