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Comment by NPMaxwell | Hacker News Reader

Roundup, asbestos, leaded gas, and lots of other engineering products say to me that the industry/culture of engineering has a problem. I think that problem is not engineering itself, but emerges when engineering is mixed with current MBA culture of stockholder value rather than stakeholder value. Obvious, and obviously worthless, strategies are to add BS "ethics" courses to engineering programs. It's possible to turn this ship. I don't yet have ideas for how it's actually done.

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It’s an economic problem that boils down to not putting a high enough price on negative externalities.

the 11000 lawsuits against Monsanto are the high price of the negative externalities. the article is about them attempting to game the political process to neutralize that.

Agreed. This is a major problem in the energy sector as well. I regularly hear "oil and gas are cheap energy compared to the alternatives" but they're really not. They're just punting the real costs down a generation or two.

Plus why in the heck do we have fossil fuels being subsidised? That always felt absurd to me, at least these days

Almost all of what are called subsidies for oil and gas (can’t speak for coal), at least in North America, are just the fact that we don’t price in externalities. There are a few token non-operational subsidies that oil companies enjoy, but they are orders of magnitude smaller than the taxes we apply to oil and gas at multiple levels of production, distribution, and sale.

Oil and gas, if you ignore global warming, really is very, very cheap.

The idea that a regulator can pre-run the economic actors to price in all known and unknown negative externalities before transactions occur is disingenuous. Competitively breeding an evolving species of ever more creative amoral actors seeking to concentrate benefits and externalize negatives and then somehow hoping you can contain them is madness. In an environment were the 'guards' can and frequently do swap places with the inmates it is beyond madness.

Furthermore, even if that were true there is nothing to stop a malevolent actor, either deliberate, by ignorance, or by lack of better alternatives, to just eat the cost.

Yes perfect regulation is impossible and yes it's an arms race but it's one we have to keep fighting. The alternative (less regulation) is far worse. We've tried that.

Just to be clear: I was not at all advocating less regulation.

I'd say it's a regulatory problem. Any kind of innovation that can be applied to massive scale, like pesticides, mobile phones, cars, computers etc. should be tested for decades if not more before it is allowed to disturb the society.

No one does any risk analysis and the short-term upside makes the long-term downside invisible.

No one knew how problematic pesticides can get. We are just now discovering the effects.

That in turn boils down to a reluctance people have to acknowledging the magnitude of an externality of they are the ones imposing it on others, or even its existence.

It's particularly severe when it's up to an MBA running a company, but an engineering education only goes so far in mitigating that tendency: the Koch brothers majored in chemical engineering at MIT. A major component of their education was all about externalities. And yet they've devoted their political activism to nurturing anti-intellectualism in the Republican party specifically so that the GOP would deny any and all externalities.

Engineers themselves (in America) tend to be extremely conservative and pro-business, so they're definitely part of the problem.

This is a pretty huge generalization. As an engineer in Seattle, I find most of my coworkers are very liberal. I imagine it varies wildly depending on discipline and location

Software engineers are far, far more liberal than all other engineering professions.

Don't forget, a lot of engineers don't even consider software engineering to be an engineering discipline.

What does that have to do with my comment? I'm not a software engineer

That is a very judgmental comment. Is everything you work on 100% a net positive to society? Do you work for a non-profit helping the homeless or other social issue at 20% of the salary you could get working for a big tech company? Most people hate change and like to have money to support their family. Each person has to establish their own moral threshold.

Past tense.

I still have an extremely conservative outlook, and I have no ideological opposition to the private sector, but when "conservatives" are the ones running around upsetting apple carts and setting fires, it becomes hard to be an engineer and a conservative.

Well, just like "liberals", there's different flavors of conservatives out there, and this has always been the case. There's the pro-big-business old-school Republicans, for instance, on one side, and on the other side you basically have nationalistic fascists. These days, in America, the "conservatives" are swaying closer to the latter side. But even the milder ones, because of their generally pro-business and anti-regulation stance, can be a problem in the context of this story, because that mindset generally seems to lead to too much power with the corporations, too much regulatory capture, etc.

So, I think there are two entities that are failing in cases like these: 1) the government (regulators, and Congress) 2) the corporate boards

The CEO of, for example, Monsanto, has doubled down on Roundup in so many ways he cannot fail to fight this and keep his job. So I'm not surprised that he is fighting it (and getting Monsanto's many PR resources to fight it). But, the longer term for Monsanto is very negative if they don't change course, because even if they can suppress this in the U.S. they can't in Europe or elsewhere.

So, while the failure of our regulators and/or legislators to respond is certainly part of the problem, the other part is that our corporate boards of directors, whose only remaining job really is to know when to pull the CEO, are not up to the task.

You have to wonder how twisted you can really get though in the name of increasing shareholder value. How do these top brass justify to themselves what they're doing

All of those are chemical products.

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