According to you, truckers are already safer than non-truckers. Isn't that safe enough?
Depends on the marginal cost of saving a life by increasing safety standards. Typically if it's $5 to $10 million/life or less, I'm in favor of it, which is typical for policy decisions in the States.
And if truckers begin to quit, the equilibrium will shift. Do you have any evidence that it will not?
I feel like we're talking past one another. Yes, drivers could quit en masse, which would change prices. But they don't, which is a revealed preference--they prefer driving unsafely and feeding their families to not driving and not feeding their families. The current equilibrium is the reality; what you're looking for is an exogenous shock, while a single person entering or leaving the market is endogenous.
According to a quick google search, there are about 500,000 trucking companies, 96% of which operate 28 or fewer trucks and 82% of which operate 6 or fewer trucks.
From that same site: "It is an estimated over 3.5 million truck drivers in the U.S. Of that one in nine are independent, a majority of which are owner operators."
Just under 400,000 of those 500,000 companies are single truckers who are contractors.
Sheer number of companies isn't a good measure of competitiveness. You've got to look at the full set of and characteristics of employers in a given region. Check out, for instance, Boise, Idaho. http://www.quicktransportsolutions.com/carrier/idaho/boise.p...
It has many companies, but if you look at the distribution of number of trucks operated, there's a very long tail. The median number of trucks operated is 1, but you see a couple that are > 100. Just like you might have hundreds of OSes but an effective monopoly by Microsoft, you've got to look at the actual share of the marketplace.
As you note, the search and switching costs are also lower, which makes the market for truckers closer to an ideal free market than the market for programmers. So why do you believe prices will not respond to a shift in the supply curve for truckers?
It is closer to an efficient market than that for programmers, notwithstanding the caveats I mentioned above. So, yes, prices will respond in a shift in the supply curve for truckers. But you are under the impression that a single person entering or leaving the market shifts the supply curve. That choice is an endogenous in the model--people choose to join or leave the market based on the prevailing price--whereas a shift in the supply curve is exogenous (e.g. related to automation, increased education, mass slaughter of truckers, whatever).
Depends on the marginal cost of saving a life by increasing safety standards. Typically if it's $5 to $10 million/life or less, I'm in favor of it, which is typical for policy decisions in the States.
And if truckers begin to quit, the equilibrium will shift. Do you have any evidence that it will not?
I feel like we're talking past one another. Yes, drivers could quit en masse, which would change prices. But they don't, which is a revealed preference--they prefer driving unsafely and feeding their families to not driving and not feeding their families. The current equilibrium is the reality; what you're looking for is an exogenous shock, while a single person entering or leaving the market is endogenous.
According to a quick google search, there are about 500,000 trucking companies, 96% of which operate 28 or fewer trucks and 82% of which operate 6 or fewer trucks.
From that same site: "It is an estimated over 3.5 million truck drivers in the U.S. Of that one in nine are independent, a majority of which are owner operators."
Just under 400,000 of those 500,000 companies are single truckers who are contractors.
Sheer number of companies isn't a good measure of competitiveness. You've got to look at the full set of and characteristics of employers in a given region. Check out, for instance, Boise, Idaho. http://www.quicktransportsolutions.com/carrier/idaho/boise.p...
It has many companies, but if you look at the distribution of number of trucks operated, there's a very long tail. The median number of trucks operated is 1, but you see a couple that are > 100. Just like you might have hundreds of OSes but an effective monopoly by Microsoft, you've got to look at the actual share of the marketplace.
As you note, the search and switching costs are also lower, which makes the market for truckers closer to an ideal free market than the market for programmers. So why do you believe prices will not respond to a shift in the supply curve for truckers?
It is closer to an efficient market than that for programmers, notwithstanding the caveats I mentioned above. So, yes, prices will respond in a shift in the supply curve for truckers. But you are under the impression that a single person entering or leaving the market shifts the supply curve. That choice is an endogenous in the model--people choose to join or leave the market based on the prevailing price--whereas a shift in the supply curve is exogenous (e.g. related to automation, increased education, mass slaughter of truckers, whatever).