| > Some people are willing to be drive drunk. This doesn't mean that taking into account the views of people who don't want to be killed by drunk people when determining who gets to use the roads is "overestimating the value we actually put on human life" You're assuming there is just one such value. There isn't. People who are willing to drive drunk put less value on human life than people who aren't. We deal with that by penalizing people for driving drunk, to give them another incentive not to do it. And, as you say, we do that because people who drive drunk are doing it on the same roads as everyone else, and many if not most people have to use the roads as part of their daily lives, and they value their lives more than the people who choose to drive drunk do. Also, the person who drives drunk bears risk--they can get injured or killed themselves. They can control that risk Air travel is not like that. Most people do not have to travel by air as part of their daily lives. Plus, the people who design, build, and maintain the airplanes are not the ones who bear the risks of a crash: the crews and passengers do. So the incentives involved are different. But there's another aspect to this as well. An airline is not going to operate an airplane unless they can sell enough seats to make it profitable, and not just for one flight, for the expected lifetime of the airplane. So we're not talking about one person choosing to drive drunk. We're talking about enough people choosing to fly on an airplane type that's known to have had fatal crashes due to a design flaw, for a long enough time to make it profitable for an airline to operate that airplane. That is the hypothetical I was responding to, and in that hypothetical, you can't make the kind of argument you're making, that it's a small minority of obvious outliers who are making what you consider to be the "bad" choice. And it wasn't my hypothetical, I was just responding to it. I actually don't agree with its premise: I don't think that in a free market enough people would choose to fly on such an airplane to make it profitable for an airline to operate it. And at least one reason why I believe that is the differences between that hypothetical scenario, and the current reality of some people choosing to drive drunk, which I've just described. > without the safety reporting infrastructure and mandatory disclosures the average person would have absolutely no ability to learn whether the crashes said anything about the safety of the aircraft as a whole Straw man. In a free market where people knew they could not depend on the government to "regulate" (and, as I've pointed out, it didn't in this case), people would refuse to fly on airplanes whose safety records were not well-documented and attested public knowledge. To do otherwise would be obviously foolish. The only reason people don't seek out more such information now is that they believe the government has their back so they don't have to. And that belief, as we've seen, is not justified. In a free market, indeed, a safety reporting infrastructure not very different from what we have now would be expected to evolve--but because it was not run by a government and could not take advantage of the free pass the government gets to skimp on regulations, it would have to build and maintain a justified track record of accuracy. > You'd have never known about the 737 Max crashes otherwise You must be joking. They were worldwide news. We didn't need government safety reporting to tell us that two 737 Max aircraft crashed killing everyone on board. Which all by itself would make any sane person not want to fly on a 737 Max aircraft until they understood what had happened and were convinced the root cause had been fixed. Indeed, the safety reporting system, if anything, contributed to facilitating the crashes--by not bringing to light the many instances of reports by pilots of US flag air carriers about odd behavior of 737 Max aircraft in exactly the same conditions that led to the two crashes. The existence of those reports only came to light, as far as the public was concerned, after the fact, when it was too late. |
LMAO. Perhaps leave lecturing what transport looks like in the absence of regulation to people who've actually seen what transport looks like in the absence of any effective regulation (hint: the public does not rely on independent safety reports or indeed have access to much accident reporting at all, the transport is usually [over]full, and yes it kills a lot more people than commercial aircraft, sometimes including people that didn't consent to use the transport). Even specifically within the sphere of aviation there's this not-that-little country called Indonesia whose airlines were banned from operating in the West for a long time because of an extremely well known lack of adequate safety standards, and an accompanying tendency to plunge passengers to a fiery death. It was one of the fastest growing air transport markets in the world.
People whose extreme ignorance of transport safety is exceeded only by their overconfidence they'd do a better job than the regulators are of course precisely the people such regulation aims to protect.
> You must be joking. They were worldwide news
They were worldwide news because of mandatory disclosures and independent safety regulation which in unregulated transport environments simply do not exist. If these did not exist, you would have no reason to assume that aircraft crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia have any bearing on the safety of your flight in the USA. (You're evidently not aware of the other six serious crashes involving Lion Air, the operator of the first Boeing 737 Max across its first two decades of operation, and certainly won't have boycotted the aircraft types involved as a result). If you wanted to get a bus or ferry in Indonesia, you wouldn't have the first clue which ones operated to adequate safety standards or not. This is not because Indonesians trust their government; it is because the libertarian fantasy of independent third parties seamlessly filling in the knowledge gaps is not a reality. Take it from someone that actually spent the first part of their career working for a company that collected data on the aviation sector...