>FAA for pushing engineers to 'delegate' reviews of certain components back to Boeing themselves.
How much more proof do we need as a society that self regulation is a fool's errand?
How much more proof do we need as a society that self regulation is a fool's errand?
Instead the narrative is about big, bloated bureaucracies, ignoring the fact that they got so big by having to respond and add additional layers every time someone figured out a new way to screw things up, as with Boeing.
On the other hand I've seen many people complain about "regulatory capture" between FAA + Boeing repeatedly. That's even on the Wikipedia for FAA.
> The FAA has been cited as an example of regulatory capture, "in which the airline industry openly dictates to its regulators its governing rules, arranging for not only beneficial regulation, but placing key people to head these regulators."
Which is an entirely different problem than a culture of "pulling up your bootstraps".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aviation_Administratio...
[0] https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/perspective-on-airline-sa...
By any measure, the FAA and industry have done an exceptional job of keeping the American flying public safe.
And simply saying the Brooking's opinion isn't relevant isn't actually a supporting argument. Neither is stating that trains have more deaths: so do cars, but neither point is relevant to whether or not airplane safety was damaged by deregulation. Besides which, I think your estimate misses the much higher casualty rates among private aircraft, which do in fact rival cars [0]
The question has little to do with whether the FAA has done a good job, it's about what happened after the deregulation, and whether it would be even better without it.
[0] https://www.livescience.com/49701-private-planes-safety.html
Numerous aspects of the FAA have been politicized for decades (going back to at least the ATC strike under Reagan). The FAA also has a number of complex and lengthy programs (https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/ etc) that are have drawn extensive criticism from Congress, industry, and airport operators due to the cost, delays, and scope of proposed regulation etc. Even FAA reauthorization is a politically contentious issue.
Regulation for regulations sake (as in telling the public it's "regulated" by pointing to current scale and existing policymaking, while in reality it is not having the intended effect) is even worse than having no regulation at all.
The current congressional majority is hardly composed on the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" types being blamed by the GP. At least in terms of rhetoric and campaign platitudes they are known. Even among a significant percentage of the republicans camp is far from fitting into the anti-government oversight camp.
The article mentions of a lack of "funding" but I haven't been able to find any evidence where funding for aircraft safety has been reduced in the last few decades. If there was a crisis of funding, where new planes aren't getting sufficient oversight or controls, then this regulatory body have either failed to make it a public issue, shutdown whistleblowers, or (more likely) it's a failure of regulatory capture and/or the monopoly-esque companies have learned how to navigate the political system (checking the right checkboxes) without any disincentives for doing so.
As an individual, you probably want some kind of life insurance in the event of catastrophe. Your insurance carrier may require you only ride in such and such certified aircraft (eg, an aircraft that is insured against loss of life). An aircraft may only obtain insurance if it meets certain requirements, etc.
Unfortunately, we've got a regulatory body asleep at the wheel, telling people things are safe when they're not. This is distorting the insurance marketplace.
In a system with regulations, there has to be some meaningful method of enforcing penalties, and IMO this is particularly needed in the are of liability.
It shouldn't matter if Boeing got a defective part from a manufacturer, or bad software, or what have you from a 3rd party. It's still their primary responsibility to ensure safe travels. If that means certifying each and every nut and bolt that comes into their supply chain, then so be it.
$50m per dead passenger should be a suitable amount. We'll see just how confident they are in this MCAS and all this automation nonsense then.
The free market is not a panacea that solves every problem. It does solve some problems. Arguably for a very long time some degree of freedom has been better than the alternative of centrally controlled economies, but that doesn't mean that no better alternative or balance of the forces exists.
Probably because the culture of the time was that everyone knew horses were dangerous and if you borrowed a horse and it threw you, it was your fault, not the lender's.
There, the free market did provide a solution, but not for my original example. Because a free market does not solve all problems, even those that might theoretically be solved by a free market.
As for the free market resulting in utopia, that's an impossible standard. What the free market does do, however, is solve problems in an efficient way thereby bringing prosperity to every country that tries it.
> Because a free market does not solve all problems, even those that might theoretically be solved by a free market.
If it's a solvable problem, it can be solved with the free market. If a solution is possible that is merely not implemented, that means the market decided it wasn't of sufficient utility.
My argument doesn't say the free market can't solve problems. It's not terribly difficult to think of theoretical free-market solutions to many problems. My argument is that the free market doesn't solve all problems. Or if I grant your reasoning on the horse problem, they don't appear anything like as quickly as we'd want.
For example, it wasn't that long ago that heresy would get you burned at the stake, but a sexist/racist joke didn't even merit comment.
Today, it's the reverse.
> There were no insurance markets for potential injury due to riding a horse, no private certification of stables that lent horses to ensure animals were fit and free of issues of temperament that might cause them to throw a rider.
Insurance markets have appeared for all manner of things now. This argument doesn't really make any sense.
> The free market is not a panacea that solves every problem. It does solve some problems.
I haven't heard of a problem it doesn't solve yet. How much safety regulation (via insurance) would an airline industry need? I don't know, but the market would surely tell us. It may decide that more or less safety is optimal, based on market inputs. Surely there are proponents of more regulation and surely there are proponents of less regulation, how do we decide who's right?
Your argument amounts to an article of faith. "The free market solves all problems, because if we let it, it would find a way." The crux of your comment when given an example where there was no such solution was to repeat your article of faith.
If centuries is an acceptable time scale for obtaining a solution, then we're not really arguing about the same thing at all. I'm sure we could both come up with theoretical free market solutions to just about any issue. The problem is they don't always materialize, and it's not terribly difficult to see any number of issues in history that existed before widespread regulation that were not solved by the free market.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2019/03/18/did-tru...
>Still, the US DOT mandated that the FAA begin the process of review to reduce regulations. The FAA assigned this task to ARAC, effectively putting the question of what rules to cut and which to eliminate before creating new ones in the hands of a body that includes representatives from manufacturers and airlines.
If a suspect nicely asks a police officer not to arrest them, and the officer complies, that's a failure of policing.
The only difference here is that the vulnerability of regulatory bodies to asking nicely is so well-recognized that it has a fancy name ("Regulatory Capture"), and is backed by loads of published research, and quite frankly is probably the reason that the business class even submits to this sort of regulation at all.
A more accurate analogy would be the police chief ordering the officer not to arrest the judge's son for drunk driving.
If the police chief was asked on a golf course not to arrest someone, but instead do "self policing", and he complied, it's still a failure in policing, and not any failure of whatever "self policing" is supposed to be.
Maybe we need a regulation solution that doesn't involve handing over ultimate authority half the time to a party that is consistently on record as opposing regulation?
> But an inherent bug of government regulation is that it's always vulnerable to lobbying like you cited. So it's still a failure of regulation, except one that is permanent and unsurprising.
It's a failure of regulation that the regulated would lobby to weaken regulation?
I think these positions are essentially the same, at least in the case of most consumer-facing regulation. The latter would cause a myriad of captive "independent regulatory" bodies to emerge to confuse consumers, complete with slick websites and easy to confuse names and logos (or outright fraudulent ones). It would be hard to sort through them, and no one will have the time to do it.
Meanwhile, evidently "nobody has the time" for knocking on enough congressmen's doors to override Big Business' billion-dollar lobbying efforts, and so here we are watching planes fall from the sky.
Mainly because it relies on government regulation to function, namely trademark law. It's also probably a fairly unique case, since I doubt there's a ton of money in kosher food production (meaning the payoff for abusing the system is low), and the people who care about keeping kosher care about it a lot and can focus on it due to the presence of other regulation.
Smaller nations follow FAA or EASA. Russia and China have their own certification systems but defer largely to the Big Two for imports. However it is notable that the Chinese regulator took a long time and much persuading before they accepted the Max.
Why it isn't done at an international level I don't know. Small aircraft could still be certificated nationally if they're not intended for export.
Self-regulation as a consequence of the FAA getting insufficient funding is distinctly on-topic.