> According to the study, conducted by researchers at MIT and Harvard University and published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, excess emissions from Volkswagen’s defeat devices will cause around 60 people in the U.S. to die 10 to 20 years prematurely. If the automaker recalls every affected vehicle by the end of 2016, more than 130 additional early deaths may be avoided. If, however, Volkswagen does not order a recall in the U.S., the excess emissions, compounding in the future, will cause 140 people to die early.
https://news.mit.edu/2015/volkswagen-emissions-cheat-cause-6...
Great compilation of California pollution regulation that applies https://www.dieselnet.com/standards/us/ld_ca.php#leviii
Which the government hasn't done for decades, so it is a little hypocritical to make a big thing of the VW scandal.
The FBI's actions have nothing to do with the MIT link.
Unfortunately doing that in today's world would render them unelectable.
Emissions regs are the best our defective system can do, hence slow changes. That even those aren't being honoured makes it a big thing.
Of course many would rather see them start with fraudulent banking than fraudulent car makers.
So yeah, billion-dollar white collar crimes are, IMO, definitely worse than murder.
If a wasteful project is government, then you have the additional complication that the government ultimately uses police and SWAT teams to enforce the tax code. So $20 million / ($50,000 total taxes paid in a year) = 400 man-work-years wasted. Multiplying by the 22% time spent working above gives 90 years, which is close to the lifespan of an average person. So you could say a waste of $20 million is equivalent to wasting a software developer's life(assuming his taxes are $50k).
Murder removes the remaining lifespan from someone, so there is a sense in which it is equivalent to time spent on pointless labor, which is equivalent to money.
Though, you'd want to specify how the Volkswagen incident is a 'multimillion dollar catastrophe':
* Is it from the fines imposed? That's an arbitrary number in the law or from some judge. You can't blame Volkswagen executives for causing economic damage here; the judge or lawmaker seems like the responsible party.
* Is it from environmental damage? It's tricky to get a dollar number from this. You can try, but I'd have low confidence in the result, and chaining that with the low confidence in the 'murder<=>wasted labor' equivalence makes an unpersuasive argument.
* Is it the forced recalls? Here, the Volkswagen executives could be said to be responsible for wasted consumer time driving it to a dealership for repair, wasted employee time fixing the cars, wasted lawyer's time defending their case, wasted judge's time fining them, wasted regulator's time preparing endless reports, etc. But, the economic cost of just the recall is probably smaller than what the OP was thinking.
* Is it damage to the Volkswagen brand? I was recently shopping for a car with a friend, and one criterion was "Anything but a Volkswagen". Even if I don't care about the pollution, cheating makes them untrustworthy. This reduces consumer choice, which has some economic effects.
In what other senses can you say that the Volkswagen executives caused an economic catastrophe(and hence, robbed people of their precious little life cleaning up the mess)?
I think you made a math error there. Instead 500 work-years should equate to about 12 lifetimes (most people's working life is about 40 years)
50 work years or 11.4 years of time are wasted per $1 million.
What VW did was like a cheesecake maker being told they're not allowed to use trans-fats, submitting their cheesecake to the FDA for testing to prove it doesn't use trans-fats, and then selling a completely different product on the market that does include trans-fats, but not printing that on the label.
You're allowed to sell cheesecake even if we know it's harmful, you just have to follow some regulations to make sure the harm is contained to a reasonable level and to ensure that consumers are well-informed of the risks they're undertaking. VW cheated the regulations and lied on their label. Of course they should be punished.
Yeah, the question is how much. Cheating on emissions tests is definitely more murder than selling cheesecake.
Is it?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/0...
> Scientists are asking people across the globe to lay off sugary drinks, linking the consumption to an estimated 184,000 adult deaths each year, including more than 25,000 Americans.
I wouldn't expect cheesecake to fare much differently.
Is the implication here that causing economic harm is the same as murder?