kiessig@idi.UUCP (Rick Kiessig) (06/23/84)
This brings to mind an interesting true story. A big
manufacturing company once hired a new president. They were
having trouble with productivity, and so after noticing that all
of their machinery was drab gray in color, he said "Paint all
of the machinery orange". Voila, productivity increased. Well,
this was hard to believe. So the next thing he did was to have
the machinery painted gray again, and voila, productivity
increased again!
Moral of the story: You have to examine carefully all
factors in a given experiment before coming to any conclusions.
In the case above, the fact that something was changing - that
management seemed to care - affected productivity. In the case
of the 55mph speed limit, it's true that it may have saved lives,
but it's not at all clear that changing it back to 65mph won't
save even more lives! It may be that after it was changed to 55,
people simply paid more attention to what they were doing - the
actual speed limit itself may have relatively little to do with
survival statistics - as wittnessed by the removal of the speed
limit in Germany over 10 years ago, and the subsequent decrease
in highway mortality numbers.
It would also be interesting to get some numbers on
the actual mileage improvements of a "typical" set of cars
at 55 vs 65 (or 70) and see if the fuel saved outweighs the
time lost by people spending more time commuting instead of
working (or playing, which also "stimulates the economy").
I don't believe the tradeoff is even close, myself.
Of course the reason we still have 55 is totally
political. Can you imagine a politician making the above
sorts of arguments? No way!
--
Rick Kiessig
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