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Comment by pcurve | Hacker News Reader

Question for economists here:

"These losses include medical costs, lost productivity, legal and court costs, emergency service costs, insurance administration costs, congestion costs, property damage, and workplace losses. These figures include both police‐reported and unreported crashes. "

So it costs $340 billion... but then that 'cost' also counts as GDP. It pays for insurance companies, cops, medical staff, repair shops, lawyers, etc. Right? So in a perverse way, there are people who care benefiting economically, and helps with flow of money.

If traffic crashes were to go down to 0 and the cost goes down to $0, has anyone calculated what the total impact would be?

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I'm not an economist, but this sort of situation has been considered since the 1800's and is sometimes known as the broken window fallacy:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Basically, society is better off using that money for something actually productive, rather than just repairing damage.

> Whence we arrive at this unexpected conclusion: "Society loses the value of things which are uselessly destroyed;" and we must assent to a maxim which will make the hair of protectionists stand on end – To break, to spoil, to waste, is not to encourage national labour; or, more briefly, "destruction is not profit."

I don't have a direct answer to your question but I believe the broken window fallacy applies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

I buy groceries. I try to buy what I need so I have enough but I'm not wasting anything. Having enough is more important than not wasting anything. So, there is always a non zero amount of food I have to throw out as it didn't get eaten.

I could optimize this to zero, but it would likely cost me _more_ to do that than the return would be _worth_. I suspect the same would be true here.

the ecconomy is not a zero sum game so you cannot calculate anything. We can however say with confidence that without that cost of money people would buy other things instead, and so would be better off.

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