Sometimes I wonder if we were just a different type of people 100 years ago. People were standing in the balcony while it was being lifted? Going to work as normal!? Society would never tolerate such risk these days.
I would follow the money to find the answer. People aren't less risk averse, but companies are because the huge financial toll of potential litigation.
not only that we unfortunately live in a society of fraud, where our mass transit system has to resort to their cameras to prove who wasn't on a bus when a car bumps it.
You think? I think most of them were wondering if that shit is safe. Tell me you'd work on the sixth floor thinking it's absolutely fine that you don't know the qualifications of the engineers who cooked this up, nor the odds of this going horribly wrong with you under a pile of rubble.
Or would you rather be thinking, like I imagine most of the workers were, "doesn't matter what I think, boss said if I don't get my ass to work, I'm fired. And no one wants to get fired during THE GREAT DEPRESSION."
Depends on the country. In a place like India or Mexico, people everywhere are doing things every day that would make headlines in the US.
An entire family of 4 riding on a single motorcycle without helmets in heavy traffic? Normal in India. Would generate new for weeks if done in the USA, parents would be arrested for child abuse.
Back in the 1990s there was a crew taking down a building on the block where I worked. Early on, they needed to remove a section of cornice so that a debris chute could drop straight. How do you cut through a concrete cornice? Well, you lean out the full-height window, hang on with one hand, and operate your jackhammer with the other. It didn't look safe to me. On the other hand, the guy was wearing a hardhat...