Podcast: Breaking down the 2024 election

"As far as human nature is concerned, with panic comes irrationality." This simple statement by Professor Steve Calandrillo and Nolan Anderson has profound implications for public policy. When panic is highest, and demand for reactive policy is greatest, that's exactly when we need our lawmakers to resist the temptation to move fast and ban things. Yet, many state legislators are ignoring this advice amid public outcries about the allegedly widespread and destructive uses of AI. Thankfully, Calandrillo and Anderson have identified a few examples of what I'll call "panic policies" that make clear that proposals forged by frenzy tend not to reflect good public policy.

Let's turn first to a proposal in November of 2001 from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). For obvious reasons, airline safety was subject to immense public scrutiny at this time. AAP responded with what may sound like a good idea: require all infants to have their own seat and, by extension, their own seat belt on planes. The existing policy permitted parents to simply put their kid--so long as they were under two--on their lap. Essentially, babies flew for free.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) permitted this based on a pretty simple analysis: the risks to young kids without seatbelts on planes were far less than the risks they would face if they were instead traveling by car. Put differently, if parents faced higher prices to travel by air, then they'd turn to the road as the best way to get from A to B. As we all know (perhaps with the exception of the AAP at the time), airline travel is tremendously safer than travel by car. Nevertheless, the AAP forged ahead with its proposal. In fact, it did so despite admitting that they were unsure of whether the higher risks of mortality of children under two in plane crashes were due to the lack of a seat belt or the fact that they're simply fragile.