How Ralph Nader Ruined Detroit
Kenneth Whyte has his book, "The Sack of Detroit: General Motors and the End of American Enterprise," excerpted at Quillette. An excerpt of that excerpt -- of special interest to me because I'm from Detroit and witnessed the ruin:

The last great tsunami of corporate regulation struck America a half-century ago. In 1965, regulated industries in the United States represented seven percent of America's GNP; by 1978, it was 30 percent. Twenty-five substantive consumer and environmental regulatory bills were passed in that time, and hundreds more were considered. The victimized consumer was all the rage. Activists and politicians faced American capitalism in an adversarial pose, armed with shocking facts and moral indignation.

...There is a cloak of mythology around Nader, supposedly a lone author-activist who took on the giants of Detroit, demonstrated that their cars were death traps, and convinced Washington to regulate the automotive sector. Nader is credited with saving hundreds of thousands of lives with his auto-safety campaign. And there is some truth to the legend: He did embarrass GM and he did encourage the federal government to regulate Detroit. But that's as far as it goes.

Nader was a product of his times, educated at Princeton and Harvard Law School in the 1950s, and influenced by an array of writers and thinkers who chafed at the economic orthodoxies of the Eisenhower years. Ike's highest priority was economic growth, maintained by constant stoking of the consumer economy. The more people bought and sold, the stronger the economy, and the better America's chances of out-pacing its global rival, the Soviet Union: that, in a nutshell, was the so-called Cold War Consensus, and not only Republicans but most Democrats embraced it. Every red-blooded American was said to owe it to his countrymen to double what he ate, double what he smoked, and wear three shoes.

Sociologist C. Wright Mills was one opponent of that consensus. He considered it a self-serving invention of America's "power elites" in government and business, who were enriching themselves by enslaving people to consumerism. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith shared Mills's skepticism. Why, he asked, should economic growth be Washington's highest priority when people were already rich enough? Americans enjoyed a material standard of living unexampled in history. If they actually needed more consumer goods, barrages of advertising would not be necessary to convince them.

To Galbraith's mind, America had solved the age-old problems of economic scarcity and insecurity. It was time to shift its attention from economic growth to better governance, from commercial production of alcohol, comic books, mouthwash, narcotics, pornography, and automobiles, to public goods such as schools, hospitals, urban redevelopment, sanitation, parks, and playgrounds.

Automobiles, then the hottest commodities in the consumer economy, accounting for one in five retail dollars and the largest share of the nation's advertising, provided critics with their best illustrations of America's material excesses and social ills. It was not lost on Mills that three positions in Eisenhower's cabinet were filled by former General Motors men. Galbraith thought it crazy for Washington to worry about private-sector growth when a company such as General Motors, the world's largest and most admired industrial enterprise, enjoying record profits and funding enormous advertising budgets, was unassailable and in all probability immortal.

Both saw an obsession with automobiles (there were 1.4 in every garage by this time, and consumers were always looking to trade up) as symptomatic of America's backward priorities. Wrote Galbraith: "The family which takes its mauve and cerise, air-conditioned, power-steered and power-braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, blighted buildings, billboards, and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground ... they may reflect vaguely on the curious unevenness of their blessings."

So many of the political elite assume they know best for the populace and impose their beliefs -- through supposedly population-protecting regulation.

Nader had studied Mills at Princeton and was familiar with the works of Galbraith. He and many other young intellectuals and activists shared their rejection of the Cold War Consensus and their anti-corporate worldview. He also shared their intuition that any effort to reduce the influence of consumerism in American life, and forge a new American agenda concerned primarily with public welfare, would benefit from putting a big dent in Detroit. The issue of automobile safety was the instrument Nader would use to make that dent.

...There is no arguing with Ralph Nader, and every other safety crusader, that the 49,163 fatalities on American roads in 1965, the last year before passage of Johnson's traffic safety legislation, were a public-health catastrophe. Reducing the death toll was a perfectly legitimate goal of public policy. The question remains, did the safety crusaders solve the problem, or at least save more lives than would have been saved without their intervention?

Nader and the NHTSA claim that the legislative and regulatory apparatus created in 1966 saved 3.5 million lives during the 50-year period that followed, with the NHTSA calling it "one of the most effective public health and safety efforts of the past century." But the data does not support this claim. Statistically speaking, there was more safety progress in the half-century before the 1966 legislation than in the half-century that followed. Moreover, that 3.5-million figure includes fatality reductions that are unrelated to vehicle-safety technology, such as those associated with mandatory seatbelt usage and drunk-driving laws.

Seatbelts alone are credited by contemporary researchers with saving more lives than all other vehicle safety technologies put together, between 1960 and 2021. These devices were installed pre-1966 by automakers under pressure from state legislatures (part of the maligned "traffic-safety establishment"). But few people used them. Congress could have made them mandatory, but lacked the courage to impose their use on the nation's drivers.

This was one of the more invidious effects of second-collision theory: The rush to blame Detroit for traffic deaths gave drivers a free pass. In fact, Nader himself vociferously opposed mandatory seatbelt usage on the grounds that people were incorrigible and behavior-control laws would never work. "We learned that in prohibition," he told a government hearing in 1983. As for drunk driving, he told a journalist that he was skeptical of prohibiting that, too, because "the culture is deeply embedded. I thought it was too ingrained."

...The NHTSA can legitimately take credit for airbags, which it championed relentlessly. They are estimated to have saved 76,114 lives between 1960 and 2012. That's progress. But more than 90 percent of accidents are caused by human error of one kind or another. As recently as 1982, more than 60 percent of all US traffic fatalities were alcohol-related, as compared to less than half of that today. And so the beneficial effects of NHTSA regulations arguably have been offset by the number of lives lost thanks to the federal government's emphasis on the crashworthiness of cars rather than the behavior of drivers.

America once had the safest roads in the world. But in the wake of Unsafe at Any Speed and the passage of the 1966 legislation, countries that moved more quickly toward mandatory seatbelts and against drunk driving, including Canada, Australia, and Great Britain, each reduced their annual fatality counts more quickly. In a 2014 published study of traffic fatality rates in 25 countries between 1972 and 2011, the United States was found to be a "unique outlier," with by far the lowest rate of traffic-fatality decline among the entire group. In 1972, the United States and the Netherlands both reached their peak traffic fatality rates. Over the next three decades, U.S. deaths declined by 41 percent. In the Netherlands, the corresponding figure was 81 percent.

If, in 1966, Congress had told the driving public to sober up, buckle up, and drive right, rather than pursuing a largely political campaign against Detroit, regulators would have something to boast about. But in truth, Ralph Nader and the federal government actually seem to have harmed the cause of traffic safety.