Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [66]
McNamara reported this to the commanding officer, the notoriously headstrong Curtis LeMay, who responded by flying the lead plane on bombing missions and vowing to court-martial any pilot who turned back. The abort rate, McNamara says, “dropped overnight.”
After the war, the Ford Motor Company asked McNamara and others from his unit to bring their statistical wizardry to the auto industry. McNamara wanted to return to Harvard, but he and his wife had both racked up huge medical bills—from polio, of all things. So he took the job at Ford. He quickly rose through the ranks even though he wasn’t a “car guy” in any traditional sense. “Instead,” as one historian later wrote, “he was absorbed by such novel concepts as safety, fuel economy, and basic utility.”
McNamara was particularly concerned with the deaths and injuries from automobile accidents. He asked the car guys what caused the problem. There were few statistics available, he was told.
Some aeronautical researchers at Cornell were trying to prevent airplane deaths, so McNamara commissioned them to look into auto crashes. They experimented by wrapping human skulls in different materials and dropping them down the stairwells in Cornell’s dormitories. It turned out that human beings were no match for the hard materials used in car interiors. “In a crash, the driver was often impaled on the steering wheel,” McNamara says. “The passenger was often injured because he’d hit the windshield or the header bar or the instrument panel.” McNamara ordered new Ford models to have a safer steering wheel and a padded instrument panel.
But the best fix, he realized, was also the simplest one. Rather than worrying about what a passenger’s head would hit when he was flung about during an accident, wouldn’t it be better to keep him from being flung at all? McNamara knew that airplanes had seat belts; why not cars?
“I calculated the number of deaths we’d prevent each year, which was very high,” he says. “And this came at essentially no cost, with no great penalty for wearing them.”
McNamara had all of Ford’s company cars outfitted with seat belts. “I flew down to visit an assembly plant in Texas,” he recalls. “The manager met me at the plane. I buckled my seat belt, and he said, ‘What’s the matter, you afraid of my driving?’”
That manager, it turned out, reflected a widespread sentiment about seat belts. McNamara’s bosses saw them as “inconvenient, costly, and just a bunch of damn nonsense,” he says. Even so, they followed his lead and put seat belts in the new Ford models.
McNamara was of course right: the seat belt would eventually save many lives. But the key word here is “eventually.”
The brilliant rationalist had encountered a central, frustrating tenet of human nature: behavior change is hard. The cleverest engineer or economist or politician or parent may come up with a cheap, simple solution to a problem, but if it requires people to change their behavior, it may not work. Every day, billions of people around the world engage in behaviors they know are bad for them—smoking cigarettes, gambling excessively, riding a motorcycle without a helmet.
Why? Because they want to! They derive pleasure from it, or a thrill, or just a break from the daily humdrum. And getting them to change their behavior, even with a fiercely rational argument, isn’t easy.
And so it was with the seat belt. Congress began setting federal safety standards in the mid-1960s, but even fifteen years later, seat belt use was laughably low: just 11 percent. Over time, the numbers crept upward, thanks to a variety of nudges: the threat of a traffic ticket; expansive public-awareness campaigns; annoying beeps and flashing dashboard lights if the belt wasn’t buckled; and, eventually, a societal