Joe Average

There's been a lot made of the fact that the most people believe that they are "above average" drivers. Depending on whom one asks, the number ranges from 80 to 92% of people surveyed. It's become something of a joke at the public's expense. When it came up in conversation, a few days ago, there was an attempt to demonstrate the effect by asking everyone if they felt that they were an above average driver. People's discomfort was palpable; people didn't want to be the sort of overestimate their own abilities, yet they didn't want to admit to poor driving skills, either.

When the instigator of all this asked me, if I was an above average driver, something occurred to me, and I said: "I hope not."

The problem with the average in the United States is that it's consistently viewed as mediocre, at best. Given this, the average drive is presumed to be a rolling public safety crisis. But if that were true, automobile accidents would a lot more common than they are. On average, people tend to rack up one collision claim every 17 years or so. Which is a pretty good amount of time. But it's worth pointing out that this doesn't mean they were driving poorly, or driving at all, at the time. My old station wagon was in two collisions in the 19 years that I owned it. The first was when the person behind me took their foot off the brake at a stop light and ran into the rear of my car, and the second was a person who struck my car in a parking lot, then fled the scene (but, it turns out, not before bystanders took down his license plate). So that's two for me, but neither of them point to my being at fault. In fact, I managed to put more than 250,000 miles on my car, without ever being in a serious accident. So, I reasoned, if most drivers were better at it than I was, that likely meant that the roads were pretty safe. And what could be wrong with that?

And I started to think, more broadly, that the social tendency to not only see oneself as exceptional, but that being exceptional was a minimal standard to be considered worth anything, isn't helpful. It casts the average person as being objectively poor at nearly everything. They're "weak, fragile, vulnerable and kind of stupid," and incompetent on top of it. And not casting oneself as exceptional is buying into that characterization of oneself. But if one views oneself as a constant, and says: You know, I'm not half bad at this," then the average can be better. It still might not be something to aspire to, in the grand scheme of things, but it's not an admission of mediocrity. Maybe the world would be a somewhat better place if people thought better of one another in this way.