[cs702]

I found the OP very insightful, and would recommend reading and thinking about it. The lessons we can draw from the construction of The Empire State and other buildings of that era, before the advent of computers, are applicable to any large, capital-intensive project.

My only reservation is that the OP fails to mention that some workers died during the construction of The Empire State building: According to the builder, "only" 5 workers died, but according to a newspaper, 14 workers died.[a] No one in the developed world would want to finish a project faster and for less money if the cost has to be measured in human lives -- expect in extreme circumstances, like war.[b]

See also: https://patrickcollison.com/fast .

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[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_State_Building#Construc...

[b] In some parts of the world, projects are routinely finished faster at the expense of human lives. For example, according to https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/nov/27/qatar-death... , between 6,500 and 15,000 workers died, and more were injured, to build all the stadiums and facilities in time for the World Cup in Qatar, a tiny country in the Middle East / Western Asia with a total population of under 3M people.

--

EDITS: Added " -- expect in extreme circumstances, like war" to the last paragraph, and a link to Patrick Collison's fantastic page with examples of "people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together" and thoughts on why projects take so much longer today.

[yamtaddle]

> No one here would want to finish a project faster if the cost would be measured in human lives.

People—including some here—choose risk to life for greater productivity, all the time. Every advocate of going back to the office, in places without excellent public transit or walkability, is proposing to trade some serious micromorts for extra productivity (driving's dangerous).

[majormajor]

I think there's a pretty clear line in many places in today's western world about the difference between "directly causing death" and "causes fractional death."

So comparing "directly dying from construction" to "commuting in a car" is a big reach.

Diet, stress, physically-taxing-if-not-directly-fatal jobs, cancer-linked chemicals, pollution, etc. Tradeoffs made at both the societal and individual level every day.

Even in cars, consider the difference in attention "death from direct failure of the vehicle or manufacturer" gets compared to the more-random "accident that could've happened to anyone" increased-death-probability cases.

And that ties us neatly back to construction! We have many more things in place for construction safety - from regulations to equipment to practices - but it doesn't prevent there from being any loss of life, still. We just don't want to go backward.

[gpcz]

All death is "fractional" if you make a fraction out of it. For example, dividing the number of people that died making the Empire State Building by the total number of workers. It seems subjective which fractions matter and which don't. It seems to be based on how much the responsibility can be laundered.

[kragen]

i don't understand why you think directly dying from having a steel i-beam fall on you is so different from directly dying from having a toyota hilux t-bone you in your civic, but you say it's 'a big reach'

aren't these both random 'accidents that could've happened to anyone'

do you maybe think that the foreman on a construction site sometimes picks one of the employees and orders him to get killed that day or something

[samstave]

Ill never forget;

I was a Title Runner when I was 18 in Reno. The Clarion had been purchased, and renamed Atlantis - and they were adding on/remodeling it...

I was driving by and there was a crane lifting a pile of I-Beams to the top of the tower... and as I was driving, I looked and thought "Damn, that would suck if they dropped that"

THE CABLE IMMEDIATELY BROKE and all the beams fell like 15 stories!!!

I got really freaked out and said "Ill never focus on disasters like that again."

Luckily nobody was injured, but I was mentally scarred.

[samstave]

"Pre-emptive Health Neutralization" was one of the names for the CIA's kill list eras (they always change the name for the kill list such that it compartmentalizes and rewrites the history of what is being said (narrative) - I believe that one was Reagan's name for it. I believe the kill-list name changes with each POTUS as stated by Annie Jacobson

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=joe+rogan+annie...

[axus]

Apparently there was a historic increase in US road fatalities in 2020 and 2021 instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

Maybe having more food delivery guys on the road is worse than more commuters, for public safety? Let's wait and see how 2022 did.

[hunter-gatherer]

So I work for a major insurance company, and though I'm not involved in the "insurance" aspect of it, it's been said during large corporate-like meetings that the reason is that vehicle during the pandemic were going a lot faster, probably because of less vehicles. My understanding from the people who sell auto insurance is that less cars yields more intensive accidents, albeit if fewer. Interestingly enough the numbers work out that car insurance payouts have been a lot less profitable during the pandemic because of it, because the crashes are more damaging.

That's hiw I understood it from the guys who's job it is to make money by selling auto insurance anyways.

[skedaddle]

Would you trade a dozen workmen's lives to get a development project done in under one year, rather than two? Are there actually many examples of tech businesses doing this right now? It doesn't seem to happen all the time. You're comparing multiple fatalities on a single year project to micromorts.

[eternityforest]

Yeah, and that's a big problem, that leads to people not really having the choice at all, because they are forced to keep up with people who value productivity over safety.

[atoav]

"No one in the developed world would want to finish a project faster and for less money if the cost has to be measured in human lives -- expect in extreme circumstances, like war."

Are you sure of that? If the pandemic brought me any surprising new insight, then it would be how big the part of any given population is with hundred thousands dying if it just inconveniences them a little less. It needs no war, it needs people not being able to go to the hairdresser for a month.

[skedaddle]

Your example deals with something completely different. This issue is more akin to the meatpacking workers' deaths, which were very high at some companies. It does generally does happen in extreme circumstances, or when some singularly evil engineer / executive / firm is in charge. Your typical person though remains not a psychopath.

[projektfu]

https://www.history.com/news/mohawk-skywalkers-ironworkers-n...

[warning: auto-play video]

It is an interesting history of the Mohawk ironworkers who built NYC. I came across another exhibit once that said that the ironworkers originally took the jobs because, culturally, they appreciated the risk and heroism, and then it became a tradition of the tribe. In fact, it was probably this risk tolerance that kept them working without harnesses and lifelines for as long as they did.

At the end of the above article, it says that 30-50 ironworkers still die each year.

[seventhtiger]

That casualties number for the Qatar WC does not present an accurate picture. That number of deaths is the total number of expat deaths during the period of construction. It's not just workers in stadium construction.

"Overall, 15,021 non-Qataris died in the country between 2010 and 2019, according to the government. A Guardian analysis in February 2021 found that more than 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka had died in Qatar since the award of the tournament. The death records were not categorised by occupation or place of work."

It's a normal number considering Qatar's 3 million population is 90% expats.

[kragen]

14 deaths out of ≈3500 workers over 18 months is a death rate of 270 per 100_000 per year, or a life expectancy of 380 years

this is about ten times the average death rate for young people today but it still doesn't seem like an unacceptably dangerous workplace environment in the sense that if you worked in an environment that dangerous all your working life you'd still make it to retirement age with about 90% probability

that's a similar level of risk to smoking cigarettes, but of course you can't make a living smoking cigarettes, so i think skyscraper construction is somewhat more morally defensible

we aren't talking about the mines of potosí or something here

[newsclues]

> No one in the developed world would want to finish a project faster and for less money if the cost had to be measured in human lives.

Depends. I think the Manhattan Project killed more people (not including using the bombs in combat).

[ciscoriordan]

Possibly including John von Neumann, one of the greatest polymaths ever. Everyday life now would be different if he had lived to a normal life expectancy instead of dying to aggressive cancer at 53.

[newsclues]

Louis Slotin was a scientific hero for myself as a young person.

[cs702]

Good point! I added " -- expect in extreme circumstances, like war" to the last paragraph. Thank you.

[cm2012]

I strongly suspect that the excellent planning behind Empire State led to less deaths than equivalent towers from that time.

[clairity]

BLS says that roughly 5000 people die in construction accidents annually. those deaths are certainly tragic, but not disproportional.

[yamtaddle]

Ordinary house roofing work (and, by extension, things like rooftop solar installations/maintenance) is terribly dangerous. Tons of deaths and serious injuries per year. Little attention on it at all, let alone political movement toward making it safer.

[nerdponx]

Isn't this partly because roofers rarely take the full "correct" range of safety precautions while working, because they would significantly slow down the work?

[ElevenLathe]

It probably also has to do with the fact that most of the work is small contractors, many without even a business license or insurance, or even just the homeowners themselves. Ironworkers deal with big structures where the financing demands large business entities and therefore usually unions, both of which are typically fanatical about worker safety.

[mrguyorama]

Also because a lot of them are of the "hardhats are because we live in a nanny state" and then fall off a roof or fall backwards on the ladder, because they are fabulously un-self aware, DAD

[samstave]

There is a mini documentary on the conditions of the workers of the world cup qatar stadiums...

WRETCHED! I FN HATE the the world cup (FIFA) --> one of the most corrupt institutions.

The conditions of the living quarters for the workers for FIFA on the world cup builds are horrific.

Plus, they wouldnt pay the workers, would seize their passports and beat them.

No safety equipment, and extremely hot working conditions. Some of the temps were as high as 125F and these guys are doing really hard physical labor.

-

Actually there are a bunch of vids on the conditions:

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=working+conditions+of+build...

[imgabe]

The assumption here is that the speed caused the deaths and that’s not necessarily true. We have better safety practices now like hi-vis vests, tie-offs, etc. They don’t slow things that much. I think we could build just as fast without deaths with modern materials and machines.

[nerdponx]

I wonder how much longer the Empire State Building construction would have taken, or what other compromises would have been required (fewer floors, less ornamentation, etc) in order to prevent those deaths.