Since similar stories have been in the news recently, I have a question to pose. Who is the biggest goat in the story of the multiple crashes of Boeing 737 Max 8s? Boeing or the Federal Aeronautics Administration?
IMO it’s the FAA by a mile. Not that Boeing has covered itself with glory. But I think of Lennie Pike’s line in It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World: “Everybody pays taxes. Every businessmen who lie, and steal, and cheat from people every day, even they pay taxes”. We expect a certain amount of laxity, testing the boundaries from businesses. In the final analysis it will always be caveat emptor.
But the FAA has a heightened responsibility to promote flying safely. Its very purpose is to convince the public that it’s safe to fly. If it can’t do that, it shouldn’t exist at all.
But when unsafe aircraft are allowed to fly, unsafe drugs are prescribed to patients, unsafe food allowed to be sold to consumers, reckless banks become insolvent, yes, we should blame the companies but we really need to take the FAA, the the FDA, the DoA, and the OCC to task. They’re not there to be friends with the companies they’re supposed to regulate.
The biggest villain in the Deepwater Horizon story wasn’t BP; it was the Minerals Management Service, notoriously in the pocket of the companies it was supposed to be regulating.
Note that I’m not arguing against regulation or that we can always trust corporations. I’m just pointing out that it takes substantial vigilance to ensure that government agencies do their damned jobs. That doesn’t just happen automatically.
I understand and have sympathy for your point, but the behavior of Boeing from what we know right now is horrid. Maybe it’s just me, but I expect incompetence and malfeasance from government. I expect more from people who design airplanes. This wasn’t the manufacture of potato pealers.
I guess I’m the opposite. I expect businesses to stretch the rules as far as possible and want government to function as a backstop, to tell them “no”. I think that the FAA enabled Boeing’s misconduct rather than detecting it and brushing them back.
Consider BP, VW, and now Boeing. Clearly, expectations of voluntary good conduct from businesses need to be leavened. With what will they be leavened? Hence the title of the post.
The problem isn’t limited to manufacturers or primary producers, either. Facebook, Google, and Amazon are all pretty awful, too.
These are some of the reasons that I consider the present trend towards consolidation so terrible. With small businesses we can keep government contained as well. Bigger businesses require bigger government and bigger government, too, is dangerous.
I know you are. It comes through in your writing all the time. But speaking of themes, it’s the usual ginormousco vs smallco experience. These giant companies get drunk with power and influence. The preponderance of smaller companies don’t.
That all said, I don’t think it’s good marketing to have your planes falling out of the sky. Boeing will take a huge hit from this.
It won’t do the company in because it will continue to be subsidized but it will sure tarnish its star.
I work in a heavily regulated industry – nuclear power.
The plants were over-engineered, and the safety margins are large. This is good and bad. It is easy to become complacent.
Part of the designs include accident scenarios, but an accident is an unforeseen event. There is no way to plan for an accident, but because they have been over-engineered, they stand a better chance of remaining within the safety margin.
The problem with the regulators is that they do not have enough experience. The people most knowledgeable about the regulations are in the industry, and the only way to gain that knowledge is through years of experience.
The NRC has a lot of power, and even the lowest level regulator can shutdown a plant for a safety issue. Shutting down a plant is expensive. Operating costs continue to add-up, but there is no corresponding income. If the issue is determined to not be safety related, the person who hit the STOP button is not going to be a hero.
For an experienced regulator, they would have the knowledge to determine the upside vs.the downside, and he/she would be able to justify a wrong call. For inexperienced regulators, they must consult somebody with more experience, and this is usually an industry person.
Nobody working in the nuclear industry wants to kill or injure people or pollute the environment, but like many people, they rationalize decisions based upon the upside.
I doubt that Boeing executives were determining how many people they could kill before it affected their financial statement, but I have no doubt that they used the best downside scenarios to justify their decision.
“I expect businesses to stretch the rules as far as possible and want government to function as a backstop, to tell them “noâ€.”
I expect businesses, based upon past history, to occasionally prioritize making money over safety. I expect that they will be better at lying and hiding information so that we won’t know there are problems until after product release. I dont think government has the ability to stop that absent the kind of regulatory presence that would be stifling for all other businesses.
In almost all of our activities of daily living, be it work or whatever, I think that we still rely upon the common decency and honesty of most of our fellow human beings. We just cant regulate and police everything.
Steve
I think we are moving away from a culture based on internalized guilt to one based on externalized shame. In such a culture there is no conscience that ensures that people sustain “common decency and honesty”. I don’t think that a guilt culture can be maintained absent a general belief in a god that knows what you’re doing and punishes transgressions and we’re abandoning those beliefs.
As you note that’s going to require a lot more enforcement.