Stochastic Road Murder

The free market is great and all, but I do have an issue with this part, where companies promote 2.5-ton urban assault vehicles to people who can be talked into dropping $100,000 by telling them it’s big.

That’s the tag line on a billboard I passed on Sunday, my daughter in the car, the L plates up, as she learns to drive. “IT’S BIG,” says the billboard, that’s the whole tagline, and the Ford F150 is all grille, as seen from the perspective of someone small who’s about to go under the wheels.

Not that the tray is big, or the mileage is big, oh no! Those would be rational arguments, and it’s all emotional appeals for these cars, like “EATS OTHER CARS FOR BREAKFAST,” that’s another one.

I’m a very reasonable person, so I don’t want to ban big cars. I just think we should start jailing marketing people who decide the target market for steroid trucks is irrational people. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the marketing people are personally running down kids in the streets. They just may as well be. Either click Send on your creatives, or trot on down to street level and take a baseball bat to a pedestrian; either way, you’re going to cause a predictable level of harm.

It’s simple economics: Capitalism demands that we jail those marketers. It’s not a morality issue. Maybe you’re fine with a few broken bodies in the service of letting fragile men feel alpha, and, well, okay, but the free market demands we correctly allocate costs to those who produce them. So if we’re rewarding marketers with bags of cash for putting murder cars in the hands of the people we absolutely least want to have murder cars, we must also present them with the invoice for the ensuing pedestrian bodies.

It’s about setting correct market incentives. You wouldn’t even have to jail that many marketing people. Well, maybe you would. To send a message. But I think even a few marketing people in jail, or, you know, heavily fined, or publicly humiliated, all those are good, would be enough to insert a little pause into a marketing exec’s thoughts. Just a little pause, right after: “I love the simple emotive pull of this ‘LEAVES OTHER ROAD USERS FOR DEAD’ campaign, that’ll speak clearly to dudes who perceive lane changes as personal attacks.” Let’s see where that pause gets us.