[wrong_variable]

I am not sure why this is not talked about often enough.

Prior to the 1980s, Japan's economy functioned as a sort of War economy. Companies would spend and invest to gain market share at the cost of margins. share prices were rarely something a company worried about, it was always about product.

This was key to Japan's insane post WW2 success.

Then came the 80s, with it US style shareholder capitalism. and within 10 years Japan's economy collapsed - never to recover.

If you notice, China is following the same exact pattern, running a War economy with a razor focus on market share over profitability. It's what causes great fortunes to be made and lost in China.

Coming back to Boeing, because of the monopolist dynamic here, nothing is going to change. Especially since the people who died were mostly foreign nationals. I doubt even if some unfortunate event like that happens in the EU,NA Boeing would go bankrupt - there would be a lot of noise for a few years, maybe some board members get fired. Too many pension plans and retirement plans depend on Boeing's survival.

[amluto]

One might argue that the US, as a matter of national security, should forcibly fix Boeing. In my mind, the US’s major defense suppliers are too consolidated and too dysfunctional to adequately support the military.

Arguable the US should develop more in-house capabilities (as in government employees producing their own technologies) to compete with Boeing, etc if for no other reason.

[noir_lord]

Or not by things unless there are two viable independent sources for them, forcing the companies to co-operate but not merge, since if you merge no longer two sources, if you don't co-operate no longer two sources.

[_bxg1]

I don't think anyone wants Boeing itself to go bankrupt. We want the execs who established this culture to go to jail, and to be replaced with new ones who are now strongly incentivized to do things differently.

[peteretep]

> I don't think anyone wants Boeing itself to go bankrupt

I do. Going bankrupt means the shareholders who benefited from this lose their shirt, the company goes into Chapter 11, and the market learns that airplane companies exist to make airplanes that don't fall out of the sky.

[cloakandswagger]

Both of you are proposing an emotionally charged witch hunt.

As one of the top comments stated, embracing a punitive culture toward engineering accidents has no long-term benefits. In my work (and this is probably true in any successful organization) even the most severe screw up is examined honestly and without emotion so that it can be prevented from happening again. If the immediate response is to fire a bunch of people or throw them in jail, people are going to do everything they can to avoid responsibility and ultimately fixing the problem.

If in the course of an investigation it comes out that Boeing execs were willfully negligent or malicious, then we can start discussing throwing people in jail and bankrupting companies, but that shouldn't be the first reflexive impulse.

[perl4ever]

I don't follow. You're implying "US style shareholder capitalism" is poison to other cultures that try to adopt it, but why then do you think it has worked in the US?

There's clearly something unique about the US in that nearly half of the capital in the global stock market is US companies, and the gigantic, relatively young, public companies are very disproportionately American (FAANG, etc.) Is it obvious to you what it is, because I've never heard a convincing, succinct explanation.

Here's a illustration of how skewed the world stock markets are by country:

https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/56a627a158c32379008b4...

[Rch_East]

After living and working in multiple countries around the world: in the USA its easy to make money. In much of Asia there is a huge amount of corruption, and in the EU a huge amount of needless tax and regulation, and in neither areas (apart from a few Anglo countries) is English spoken as the official language.

In the EU companies spend a lot more time optimising their tax situations (for the founder and employees) and cannot easily hire or sell products across borders due to language barriers. The EU needs to adopt English officially and individual EU countries need to adopt English as an additional official language and allow children to be instructed in it