[mikeash]

It doesn’t seem very useful to talk about “regulation” as some sort of singular entity.

When you talk about the positive results of deregulation, that’s all economic regulation. Freight being run on regulated routes with regulated prices was protecting various groups’ economic interests. Usually at the implicit expense of the economic interests of everyone else.

Safety regulations are a completely different beast. Safety regulations in aviation have increased massively over this same timeframe, and the result has been an even more massive increase in safety. Crashes went from routine to unheard of despite a huge increase in activity. Cars have seen a similar increase in safety regulations and in actual safety, although the safety gains have been more modest and seem to have stalled out in the last five years or so.

That doesn’t mean safety regulation is necessarily good or that deregulation couldn’t be helpful sometimes. But the actual track record in recent decades is completely contrary to this idea of decreasing regulation providing better results.

We’re fixating on one instance of failure because it looks like a canary in the coal mine indicating a threat to the safest mode of travel ever devised.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Safety regulations are a completely different beast.

Only they're not. If you impose a billion dollars in fixed regulatory burden then you can no longer have sub-billion dollar companies.

But lack of competition erodes everything -- even the safety rules, because bigger companies are more capable of capturing regulators.

Any regulation which is the direct cause of a lack of effective competition is doing more harm than good.

> That doesn’t mean safety regulation is necessarily good or that deregulation couldn’t be helpful sometimes. But the actual track record in recent decades is completely contrary to this idea of decreasing regulation providing better results.

That's kind of the point. The entire frame of "regulation bad / deregulation bad" is a farce. What you actually need is regulation that maximizes the ratio of benefits to regulatory burdens. That means removing burdensome and ineffective regulations and having efficient and effective ones.

But evaluating regulatory efficiency and effectiveness is dry and non-partisan. Framing it as "we need more regulation" is failing before you even begin.

This 737 MAX debacle is a case in point. It came about because Boeing was trying to avoid the high costs of recertification, so they didn't change things that could have made the plane safer because changing them would have required recertification.

So we have "safety regulations" negatively impacting safety by making it move expensive to improve safety than not. That's not a case of needing more overall regulation or less overall regulation, it's a case of needing to replace worse rules with better rules. The ideal outcome is that the net regulatory burden becomes lower and as a result it becomes less expensive to make changes that improve safety.

[kjar]

If I interpreted this argument correctly - regulation is bad, costs money. How much is a human life worth? Clear to me is that Boeing did that sick math and rolled the dice and F’d up royally and fatally.

FAA was gamed, but If you think Boeing would self regulate, I think you are on a different timeline where stockholder dividends are not the prime directive.

[Mirioron]

I understood his argument as: regulation is rigid and some regulations end up pushing things towards a bad ending, because actors in the real world don't always do what regulators imagine they will do. Eg the total costs of recertifying the plane are so high that it's worth it (for the company) to roll the dice to avoid it.

[dmix]

This isn't about whether more or less regulations should exist or not, but how we can build better administrative systems. When the regulations create an environment where only one or two mega-companies like Boeing can exist, combined with pretty much any democratic system where said company can have a direct influence on both the regulatory agencies (often through staffing via knowledge gaps in industry/academia where those in the company often are the only ones who know enough to make the policy) and policy making itself by elected officials in favour of just the current company not the future.

Simply put, the definition of 'failure' of a regulation needs to be broadened. Regardless if it reduced deaths by the company itself in the near term, if it adds long term risk to deaths/accidents in the future by encouraging regulatory capture and eliminating any competition but Boeings to exist - we are worse off as a society, period. The only option we are allowing is some pseudo-market mega-corps with monopolies and the mediocrity in both service and safety or public gov run companies (which do make sense occasionally, but rarely).

There's a few solutions I can think of here which isn't "all regulation is bad" or "lets only have mega corporations in every market via poorly designed regulation" or "let gov nationalize the markets":

a) Contextual oversight. Allow a certain level of freedom at the lower tiers of markets so a future competitor to Boeing can exist and challenge them on everything from prices, to technology, customer service, and safety (which yes is a massive competitive advantage, ask all the people who now refuse to fly in Max, what other options do they have? A single European version of Boeing?). While allowing the courts to expunge any company that sacrifices on safety or any other externality via tort laws, liability, via stronger consumer and property rights.

b) Constant pressure on regulatory agencies (possibly by an outside agency) to look for regulatory capture within agencies and severely punish civil servants and companies engaged in any backroom deals, creating policy/incentives which are barriers for competition with little/zero benefit to citizens, punishing companies for obvious lapses, etc.

c) Stop politicians from anointing themselves job creators and promoters of businesses. They should strictly be in an administrative role when absolutely necessary (to eliminate any forms of violence, coercion, externalities that courts can't handle, etc). This is the biggest source of the worst of a) and b).

When politicians think their job is to 'create jobs' themselves by creating monetary/policy incentives for companies, this inherently create incentives for kickbacks to politicians and moral hazards for companies, and therefore should not be the job of politicians period. The only "help" to companies should be to help get out of the way by eliminating useless policy OR streamline necessary administrative systems. Otherwise don't help them at all.

Companies should not be able to buy success and maintain success in markets (by that I mean monetarily regardless of behaviour or outcomes) by having influence from politicians. All policy should be neutral of company size (or tiered based on size, the way modern rent control has tried to stop disincentivizing new lower income buildings by not applying to new developments) and factor in small firms who can't afford a team of lawyers or checkbox checkers.

[wbl]

Do you think Boeing owners would like it if no one bought Boeing planes because of safety concerns? Of course not.

[PeterStuer]

They might not 'like' it but they might not care enough as long as the stock goes up and the dividends keep flowing. The regulation should be there to prevent the erosion of certain boundaries, the eternalization of certain costs and the eventual public recovery of the profits.

Like most of the neoliberale 'economic theoretical models', the idea that the regulation is fully separated from the arena of the competition and thus cannot be captured and coopted is so ludicrous it begs the question how it ever became more than a joke in a b-list standup comedian's backup repertoire.

[wbl]

The dividends would not flow if no one ordered the plane.

[PeterStuer]

Planes are ordered because companies hope they can make a profit operating them (the hope is important, it does not necessarily mean they can). Which planes they order depends on many factors other than safety. Costs and risks of accidents are externalized through insurance, executive and shareholder indemnification and. as a last resort. bankruptcy. Then again, if they are seen as 'strategically relevant', or have the right connections, they can rest assured they will not have to pull in the 'last resort and will be bailed out of any troubles.

A German automaker was caught gassing the world population. They're still around, even having the audacity not to even change the brand name.

[mikeash]

In theory, all regulations need to be carefully considered and walk a fine line in order to do more good than harm.

But I was replying to a pair of comments talking about the practical history of regulations over the past few decades. That history diverges wildly for the two types of regulation. Economic regulation was massively lightened, resulting in huge benefits. At the same time, safety regulations for airplanes and cars were massively increased, also resulting in huge benefits.

So, yes, the whole point is that “regulations good/bad/anything” is nonsense, as the recent history of economic and safety regulations illustrates.

[AnthonyMouse]

What I'm getting at is that the types of regulation don't really have anything to do with it. It's not that all safety regulation is good and all economic regulation is bad (though if you wanted someone to disprove "all economic regulation is bad" you might be in for a wait). You can screw up safety regulations just as bad if you're not careful.

It's also difficult to evaluate these things based on statistical trends, because it's easy to pass a safety regulation that e.g. mandates a specific safety method, and then you get an immediate safety improvement by making that state of the art method universal, but as time passes that ossified requirement becomes stale and prevents newer, better methods from replacing it. And all you see in the numbers is the improvement from the original mandate spreading through the installed base over time, not the comparison to what would have happened when something even better was invented a year later but was prohibited by the rule from being deployed. (As evidence for this, the original 737 was introduced prior to the moon landing.)

It's also problematic to look only at the one target. If we improve aircraft safety per mile but only by making aircraft more expensive (or destroying competition, which does the same thing), that makes flying less competitive against alternatives that are much more dangerous, like driving. So you can get a safety improvement on paper even though the result is more people are killed.

That doesn't mean you can't make a rule that actually improves safety, but it's harder than it seems to get it right.

[mikeash]

Sure. I’m just saying that the actual history of the past few decades in the US shows a stark contrast with these two types of regulations in terms of how they worked and the consequences they had.

Regarding measures that appear to improve safety but are actually a net loss because it encourages driving instead, the FAA does evaluate regulations this way. For example, this is why infants aren’t required to be in a child seat and are allowed to just be held by a parent. They determined that this requirement would cause more families to drive due to the extra cost, and the result would be a net loss of life.

[jaclaz]

>In theory, all regulations need to be carefully considered and walk a fine line in order to do more good than harm.

Yes, and one of the possible definitions of a (technical, safety related) regulation is "the added cost that the society is reasonably willing (or capable) to pay for a reasonable increase in safety"

The issues always revolve around how much the "reasonably willing to pay" is and what is the corresponding "reasonable" increase in safety (and how exactly to measure the latter).

[qarlow]

Safety regulation might be a burden for aircraft manufacturers, but it is what enables competition among airlines. The reason we can have low cost airlines are because safety isn't really in question. Of course you want to "optimize" regulation, but deregulation as in leaving it up to the participants frequently can't support a competitive market.

[cmurf]

It came about through short shortsightedness. The path they chose was in fact more expensive than the recertification cost. But even Boeing had come to dislike the regulatory paradigm they helped to create. I think most people are framing the regulatory paradigm as needing to revert to what we had, because clearly less regulation resulted in multiple bad outcomes.

Based on available reporting, Boeing chose this path not to avoid higher cost, but reduced time to market to compete with Airbus because, again, shortsightedness, lack of innovation and planning, and even lack of imagination that their competitor would do exactly what they did, and had no contingency and no response for ~9 months after the Airbus 320neo announcement.

I also can't take seriously any complaints about lack of competition in the U.S. market when it's so docile about competition law. The 1960's merger of McDonnell and Douglas is questionable, but the 1990's merger of McDonnel Douglas and Boeing directly lead to the loss of any remaining domestic competition in transport category aircraft. U.S. regulators are tacitly saying this is a natural monopoly, and yet should be regulated as if it's a competitive market.

[AnthonyMouse]

Yeah, Boeing have made real clowns of themselves here.

> I also can't take seriously any complaints about lack of competition in the U.S. market when it's so docile about competition law. The 1960's merger of McDonnell and Douglas is questionable, but the 1990's merger of McDonnel Douglas and Boeing directly lead to the loss of any remaining domestic competition in transport category aircraft. U.S. regulators are tacitly saying this is a natural monopoly, and yet should be regulated as if it's a competitive market.

You're discounting the competition between Boeing and Airbus. They're clearly not a monopoly.

That said, it's possible to have two sets of bad rules at once, and it's even worse in that case. Then you get antitrust regulators approving mergers while industry regulators impose high barriers to entry, so that you get high consolidation with no way to break it because no one new will ever enter the industry.

Sadly that seems to be the status quo in multiple industries now. You have antitrust approving any merger that doesn't result in a literal monopoly even if there are only two or three companies left, meanwhile those companies practically ask the government for regulations that make sure nobody else can ever come up behind them because it takes a nation-scale company to survive the compliance costs.

[danmaz74]

Airlines are forced to certificate their pilots for the plane they're going to fly. How many lives have been saved by this regulation, in comparison with those which were lost because Boeing tried to cheat at said regulation? Ignoring that is the same as pointing to people killed by airbags, without considering those saved by them.

[AnthonyMouse]

That's the false dichotomy again.

One example of a third way would be that when a plane is 97% the same as one you're certified on, have something between no and full recertification which is only 3% as time consuming because it only covers the differences between the planes instead of going back to square one.

[breatheoften]

I think you are also guilty of over constraining the solution space ... airlines want a new more fuel efficient plane with a certain size and passenger carrying capacity. Building a new plane for this need either involves training pilots on this new plane type or inherently unsafe engineering to deliver the new product without requiring the pilot retraining expense.

You suggest that we should sacrifice the rigor of pilot training to allow delivering planes without safety compromises ... I think there’s absolutely no justification for safety compromise in this scenario - the new plane will pay for retraining costs in a slightly longer amount of time than it would’ve had retraining not been required — oh well. That’s the cost of doing business and it’s absolutely without doubt that in this case - designing a plane that wasn’t inherently flawed would’ve been a better strategy for Boeing and for all of their 737 Max customers ...

The real question to learn from this tragedy is not how can we make it slightly less expensive to produce a new air frame — it’s how can we ensure that safety is not allowed to be compromised during the design phase of new passenger aircraft in service of _truly_ minor cost savings ... if we had a real regulator that was not captured - they should’ve had the flexibility to say no to the 737 Max very very early in the proposal process — and if necessary they should’ve been allowed to offer a tax incentive to offset some of the pilot retraining cost required by them not budging on safety requirements.

Building and deploying safe airplanes into real world use is more expensive than building unsafe airplanes — but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the cost to society...

[AnthonyMouse]

> You suggest that we should sacrifice the rigor of pilot training to allow delivering planes without safety compromises

Describing this as "sacrifice the rigor of pilot training" is illegitimate. If someone is already certified on a similar plane, the training they need is really only on the difference between the planes.

> I think there’s absolutely no justification for safety compromise in this scenario - the new plane will pay for retraining costs in a slightly longer amount of time than it would’ve had retraining not been required — oh well.

The problem is that monetary costs are still safety costs. Now the new thing costs more and people choose alternatives that may be less safe. If new planes are more expensive then older planes that are more likely to suffer wear-based mechanical failures stay in service longer. If air travel costs more then more people drive.

Boeing obviously screwed this up, but we gave them the incentive to screw it up, and that's on us too.

> The real question to learn from this tragedy is not how can we make it slightly less expensive to produce a new air frame — it’s how can we ensure that safety is not allowed to be compromised during the design phase of new passenger aircraft in service of _truly_ minor cost savings

But that is how you do it. You figure out how to achieve the cost savings without compromising safety. There is no law of nature that says they're mutually exclusive, and without forcing them to be at odds there is no longer an incentive to choose the wrong one.

[Eopia]

>Boeing obviously screwed this up, but we gave them the incentive to screw it up, and that's on us too.

No WE didn't. THEY wanted to cut costs and it appears to me THEY cut corners to achieve it. This is like saying the professor made me cheat by making the exam artificially complicated and learning would have cost to much time.

[NickNameNick]

Training to fly two very similar planes can be more dangerous than flying to completely different ones.

For example, some marks of Spitfire had engines that spun in the opposite direction to the rest of them. The aircraft were otherwise similar.

If a pilot gunned the engine during the take-off roll, the torque reaction will cause it to swerve. The pilot can catch it with the rudder if they are expecting it. If the engine is spinning the wrong way, and the pilot inputs opposite rudder, the aircraft will wreck it's undercarriage and roll over on the runway.

Whilst training to fly any variant, when a pilot has experience in other variants is obviously going to be quick and easy, expecting them to swap back and forth between variants is also clearly unsafe.

[cmurf]

The aircraft type rating is exactly difference training. You don't start from scratch just because a type certificate differs between two airplanes. The whole point is to require that difference training, and for it to be specifically laid out.

Whereas without that, what did Boeing do? They gave pilots an iPad for difference training, and kept them in the dark about the differences between 737 NG and 737 MAX. That was their choice. The lie of omission by manufacturers is the whole reason why we have type certifications in the first place.

[danmaz74]

I'm all for having good regulations. The dichotomy comes from those which say that all deregulation is good (which implies that all regulation is bad).

In this specific case, though, I suspect that measuring the "X% the same", and what the new training should be, is much more difficult than it looks at a first glance.

[phs318u]

> So we have "safety regulations" negatively impacting safety

No we don’t. Other companies have followed the regulations. Boeing chose to value cost avoidance over risk to human life. The owners and management of Boeing are culpable.

[markdown]

> That means removing burdensome and ineffective regulations and having efficient and effective ones.

When we're talking about human lives, there is no regulation too burdensome or inefficient.

And your argument about there being too little competition is a little odd since hundred have been killed in two crashes because of competition.

> It came about because Boeing was trying to avoid the high costs of recertification, so they didn't change things that could have made the plane safer because changing them would have required recertification. So we have "safety regulations" negatively impacting safety by making it move expensive to improve safety than not.

That's absurd! The safety regulations were good, and the reason they didn't work is because the FAA hired Boeing to enforce them and Boeing didn't do so. Boeing only managed to flout the regulations because they fraudulently signed off their own planes as being airworthy. And the only reason Boeing got away with this is because they controlled the people in the FAA.

Your argument appears to be that Boeing cheated to get around the regulations, so it would be better if there were no regulations, because then Boeing wouldn't have to cheat. American capitalists are truly a special breed of human.

[pfdietz]

"When we're talking about human lives, there is no regulation too burdensome or inefficient."

This is not only not true, it directly contradicts how regulations are evaluated. Regulations are judged at the cost per life saved (or similar metrics), and are rejected if that cost is above some threshold.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Policy_applicati...

[mikeash]

“When we're talking about human lives, there is no regulation too burdensome or inefficient.”

I recommend we ban all travel over five miles. This will eliminate all danger from air travel and substantially reduce traffic fatalities.