Policy by the Numbers: When Big Numbers Trump Small Ones

When Big Numbers Trump Small Ones

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Millions of people have likely heard some version of Stella Liebeck’s story. She’s the 79-year-old woman who spilled coffee on herself and sued McDonalds, winning a multi-million dollar judgement. For those who heard about Liebeck from late-night comedians, this was a story about how the legal system gone terribly awry. For those who watch the documentary Hot Coffee -- where you can see pictures of the severe third-degree burns that covered her skin -- this story may be about justice being served.

Regardless, Liebeck’s story is one that demonstrates how numbers -- by themselves, absent context -- can be deceiving when it comes to public policy. ABC News called the case "the poster child of excessive lawsuits" and the case was widely cited a reason for “tort reform,” putting limits on the ability of individuals to be compensated for harms done to them by others.

But this one case and massive judgment says very little about whether the massively complex system of torts is actually working well in the aggregate. This point is made very well in an excellent TED talk by Phillip Howard, “Four ways to fix a broken legal system.” Howard suggests that the complexity of the legal system is pernicious not because of cases that grab the headlines, but rather because of the many individual acts that go relatively unnoticed and are hard to measure. He tells the stories of doctors who fear giving nuanced advice to their patients because it could become grounds for malpractice, and a teacher who, fearing a lawsuit from a student’s parents in retaliation, decided against giving the student a lower grade in a class. By itself, this harm may be trivial -- but aggregated across many different people, it could be quite substantial.

There’s no clear right answer here about how to reform the legal system. But these videos make clear that getting the right answer requires looking more closely at and measuring the impact on individuals in context.

Posted by Derek Slater, Policy Manager

Policy by the Numbers

When Big Numbers Trump Small Ones

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