After the dust settled with the car accident, the ensuing insurance payout, and the series of repairs making use of the insurance money, I came out of the affair feeling that I was still ahead with a little money still in the bank, and I couldn't help but think: "Jesus I feel like I've just come back from a long night at the casino." And then I got to thinking about that.
The insurance company ended up giving me a little under $6K to salvage my car, which was more than my hillbilly ass expected from them. This fact in itself is kind of interesting. In hindsight, I know that the actual repair was way less than 6K. But what is an insurance company actually dealing with? Lots of different busted cars with very different extents of damage. This damage is not always visible or easy to suss out in a short amount of time, and these judgments have to be left to mechanics and garages with interests of their own.
The insurance companies themselves are looking at the numbers and the averages of all of the cases that they see, and they are deciding that given the decline in value of older cars, it often makes more sense to just give a lump sum to the owner and either total the car and send it off to auction or have the owner salvage the car and give them a smaller lump sum calculated appropriately and be done with it. And they have their own models and greater layers of sophistication for making decisions that are going to benefit them.
As stated before, I didn't want to total the car because I had no idea what else I could get in a short amount of time with the proceeds, and who knows what unforeseen problems the next car would have. If I salvaged my car, I knew what I had for the most part upon visual inspection. But what I didn't know was what would happen when I got it to a garage. What kind of equipment and labor would it take to perform all of the necessary fixes?
So, a family member got wind of my predicament and offered to come out and help with the repair. When we popped off the body of the car and pulled out the damaged parts, we realized that I was in luck. All that was damaged was the radiator, the thermostat it was connected to, a lower hose, and the actual front of the car frame, all of which was easily repairable on the cheap. So I ordered a radiator and picked up a new thermostat, hose, and some coolant and transmission fluid, all of which amounted to $200 or so, plus another $300 for gas and lodging for the helping hand.
After that, I took my car to a garage anyway because I was short on time and had to get the brakes checked out, and then double check the radiator because the engine was still running hot. Turns out the brakes were shot, and so were the tires, and with additional radiator diagnosing, everything came out to $3500 or so when all was said and done. Holey moley, as I said, still ahead.
OK, so I'll still maintain that I don't intend this thing to be a straightforward diary, so where am I going with all of this?
For one thing, the whole insurance claim affair just feels bad. Yeah I came out ahead, but how can you plan for any of that or count on any of that? Without access to any of that information, you just roll the dice and hope you are made whole, or close to it. Like I said at the beginning, it feels like getting back from the casino.
And the casino as an institution is interesting in itself. I mean, what a weird place: a central location where social resources are pooled and then shuffled around behind probabilistic symbols, which by chance - and some skill - can end up in your hands, but as more time passes, is more likely to gradually - or quickly - pass from your hands to the house, as the institution is structured so that the house always wins.
And given a series of failures and then a big win, our brain is wired to get flooded with those feel-good chemicals. Some brains take the win and back away in caution and relief, while others seek out bigger and bigger wins, the prospects of which seem ever more compelling with bigger failures. Some folks can get really addicted to this shit.
You often hear the anguished refrain that the financial system - and by extension the greater economy - more and more resembles the workings of a casino. But if you look at it, the same underlying motivations of the seemingly quarantined casino system - regulated in isolation as a unique vice - is the same set of motivations that drives the movements of capital in general.
Managing complexity and risk with various symbolic contrivances and calculations is part of the elemental building material of merchant capital and finance. But there is a whole set of dynamics behind that which is way too interesting and vital to waste on a sidenote, and it is something I'll have to return to later. For now I just want to get back to the car stuff and then I'll wrap this post up.
A lot of car repairs could be done a lot cheaper if communities were a bit tighter and folks trusted each other a bit more. What we are paying for when we are paying for insurance is basically a massive gambling ring based on not only the management of incredible complexity and material risk, but a simultaneously collapsed trust and centralization of pooled resource in alienated and self-interested actors. You also get the individual garages acting in their capacity as self-interested businesses, who have to pay rents and fees and part prices to other self-interested businesses, with costs slowly (and sometimes very quickly) inflating over time.
There are of course places where overhead costs such as these are just simply unaffordable and unworkable. The people of Cuba for example are known for making just about any kind of car run for an indefinite amount of time, and you hear about communities in Africa that can sift through electronics refuse and keep electronic products going for as long as physically possible. But what does this have to do with insurance?
To have a situation where an insurance company can just whisk away your car and give you a bunch of money for a new one implies a whole lot of wealth sloshing around. But that state of affairs is also coming to a profound turning point. I remember hearing stories about people getting their cars hit, and then insurance totaled the car and gave them a huge wad of cash, and gee whiz they just got a newer better car! Lemonade out of lemons and this and that.
That's quite a bit tougher to do now. Now people back away from "total" offers in dread. Used car prices have roughly doubled since the beginning of the pandemic due to various supply chain issues and inflationary pressures. Sure you can get more for your totaled car, but you're also dealing with depreciation, and if you're looking for a newer car with less mileage on it, prices go up quick. And newer cars with all of their increased complexity could have mechanical and electrical problems that are more difficult to sniff out, and which could end up costing much more to address later on.
Simpler and more reliable models are highly sought after and treasured, and which could theoretically be worked on by their owners or by a sympathetic family member who knows a thing or two. This issue is going to be regional too. You can find a bunch of cars older cars running around in Cuba, and then Western and Western-aligned car manufacturers are sliding into deeper crisis, while Chinese electric cars are getting ever-cheaper and ever more reliable, which will circulate to the places economically and politically aligned with them. This state of affairs will change over time.
On the Western side, if this is what we can expect from our institutions and the changing environment they are clamoring to survive in, I'd certainly prefer the family and friend approach to infrastructure and tool maintenance myself. This whole insurance affair has been exhausting, and I didn't even get into the issue of getting the claim settled, which again was like pulling teeth because these organizations are huge and dysfunctional and full of alienated people who hate their jobs and resent you for putting a claim on their time and energy.
And again, your daily intentional actions in the course of living life are temporarily sharply constrained and put on hold as you become pinned between larger economic interests, waiting for their decisions to be passed down as they determine what they owe you on an industrial scale, constrained not by conscience but by what is politically granted to them and what exactly they can get away with.
And hey, every once in a while you can get lucky and get a little ahead, because playing the averages, sometimes you can get a little more than you expected to balance out all of the times you can get less than expected. But it also pays to remember that the house intends to win in the end. Also too, though, where there are jackpots to be had, there are also voids deposited in their wake, which as we know, can accumulate.
