Most commentators who invoke the shibboleth crisis maintain that the problem is too much liability and that this is a recent and temporary phenomenon. They blame trigger-happy litigants, greedy lawyers, irresponsible juries, and bleeding-heart judges. They deplore the increased cost of insurance, its unavailability to some, the willingness of others to go bare, and the impact of all this on the production of vital goods and services. Like all effective propaganda, this account contains a kernel of truth. Victims obtain more favorable outcomes in the tort system today than they did in the past-although recovery is still based on fault. Juries occasionally award large verdicts, but many are reduced by judges, and most verdicts are small (for example, half were less than $8,000 in Cook County, Illinois, between 1960 and 1979). Indeed, if the largest verdicts are excluded, the median has actually been declining.1 Propaganda does not mislead through lies, however, but through partial truths. The jeremiads about the crisis ignore the fact that fluctuations in insurance premiums, which affect everyone, are at least as much a function of interest-rate cycles as of changes in liability rules or jury awards. And they greatly exaggerate the extent to which inflation in the price of goods and services is attributable to higher insurance premiums, which normally constitute an insignificant fraction of total costs.2