Why drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit

It's a much more economical choice than suffering through a civil suit and paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages and medical bills to a criminal who, for all the court cares, wanted to rape and kill you. In the end, it's capitalism working as intended, top to bottom.

Below quote from http://www.warchronicle.com/us/combat_historians_wwii/marsha.... Emphasis not in original This calculation assumes, however, that of all the questions Marshall might ask the soldiers of a rifle company during his interviews, he would unfailingly want to know who had fired his weapon and who had not. Such a question, posed interview after interview, would have signalled that Marshall was on a particular line of inquiry, and that regardless of the other information Marshall might discover, he was devoted to investigating this facet of combat performance. John Westover, usually in attendance during Marshall's sessions with the troops, does not recall Marshall's ever asking this question. Nor does Westover recall Marshall ever talking about ratios of weapons usage in their many private conversations. Marshall's own personal correspondence leaves no hint that he was ever collecting statistics. His surviving field notebooks show no signs of statistical compilations that would have been necessary to deduce a ratio as precise as Marshall reported later in Men Against Fire. The "systematic collection of data" that made Marshall's ratio of fire so authoritative appears to have been an invention.

Let's play the devil's advocate and understand the motive behind it-

The average annual wage of a Chinese citizen is $7,500 USD, whereas the average annual wage of an American is $45,000.

Which means that $400,000 is worth 400,000 x 45,000 / 7,500 = $2,400,000 . And that's only over 23 years so far. You have to keep paying until the day the victim dies. That's the equivalent of $105,000 for Americans per year.

If you refuse to pay, the victim will take you to court and confiscate all your belongings. If you still refuse to get a job to pay, the court will throw your ass in jail and (here is the important part) force your family to pay, indefinitely, until the victim dies.

So are you going to have your family pays $105,000 per year while you sit in jail, or are you going to make sure the victim is dead?

Trust me when I say no one wants to kill another human, but when the law is lay against you in such way, well don't be surprise that humans can override their natural instinct.

(I am from Hong Kong that, while most people there do not share the same sentiment, but can understand the math behind this horrific logic.

I rem reading about how people value time so much in the Scandinavian countries because they see so little of the Sun and how in tropical countries the concept of punctuality is close to non existent.

It's an accident because it's not on purpose. If you intentionally kill your ex with your car then people don't call it an accident.

Moreover, there are less than 5000 pedestrian fatalities per year in the US, and the reason there are that many is that US drivers drive three trillion miles a year. That's less than one pedestrian fatality for every 600 million miles. At 12,000 miles a year it would take more than 50,000 years before the average driver would kill one pedestrian. And that isn't doing any accounting for the cases where the pedestrian was at fault.

Most drivers never kill anyone. And that remains true even though almost all drivers are idiots at least some of the time. Because to kill someone you have to be an idiot and be in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. But you can't control random chance, which is why we have insurance.