So anyone at Boeing going to jail for killing 346 people?
Diffuse responsibility is a real problem. 'Teaching to the test' is a real problem. Normalizing risk is a real problem.
Blaming individuals is very satisfying, and it's very easy to do with hindsight, but if you want large complex systems to work better, you have to get over individual blame. I'm not saying it's easy, and I'm not saying that we should stop looking for law-breakers, but I am saying that punishment will not lead to better outcomes in the absence of other positive actions.
The I'd go over all the certification process. Any person who concealed information or misled in an official capacity goes to jail. That's the whole point of requiring titled engineers signatures. The buck stops with them.
These things rarely happen by individual malfeasance. They are part of a system of small mistaken assumptions that compound into big lies.
For doctors a failure can make their license get revoked (even tho it doesn't seem to happen very often in practice). Wonder if there could be something similar but indeed it is very hard to find "a person to blame", maybe the CEO? CTO? :)
No I don't believe that. There will be firings, demotions, lost bonuses, etc. Maybe there should be more of that, maybe not. A CEO may step down and have trouble finding a similar position, etc.
I don't actually have a suggestion of a better way, I just agree that you can't automatically throw one person into jail.
The way to get less of an undesirable behavior is to make it lead to undesirable outcomes. Unless there is some other operative reason, you're right in another way - we don't have to care where that (dis)incentive comes from.
The firm owners are ultimately responsible - they are responsible for hiring the execs responsible for the firms' actions. Fine the criminal company so hard that shareholders of their future potential employers will think twice about the risks they might impose on their savings.
Of course, this is a national security concern, and so TBTF. Man, isn't the US a great place, if you're filthy rich?
>Boeing admitted that two of its 737 Max flight technical pilots “deceived” the FAA about the capabilities of a flight-control system on the planes, software that was later implicated in the two crashes, the Justice Department said.
...what exactly does that mean when "deceived" is in quotation marks? Seems like deceiving regulators would be a straightforward crime. Unless "deceived" means something other than the usual definition.
It's a bit of a bug in the language that real quotes and "scare quotes" are delimited with the same symbols. But we're stuck with it.
Post-Enron accounting rules via Sarbanes-Oxley made it so that the CEO had to sign off on and certify the financial statements. The buck stopped there. [0]
Why not here as well?
Unless you are thinking about putting the system that incentivizes a CEO and company to do this on trial.
If the CEO goes to prison, other CEOs will care more than this one, if some compliance officer does, the next one won't be as willing to bend to implied pressure from leadership.
If middle managers and top engineers see that there is no reward in doing things right and taking time, in fact its shooting one's foot, then most folks +-align with this policy and move on. At the end almost everybody is in for the paycheck.
The CEO has enough power to prevent such a thing from ever happening (by that I mean he can easily create a morally corrupt company culture) and there is a very big profit motive to do so.
That fortunately doesn't matter.
To send someone to jail, you need to convince a jury they committed a serious crime.
Sure. My point is that it's quite different from a conviction.
And they charged the corporation. They also have a consent decree. You can be sure that under the consent decree both the corporation and everyone in it are under a microscope. A consent decree is, among other things, like probation. If they mess up again, the DOJ will drop the hammer.
A lot of people seem to think that punishment makes people care more somehow, but punishment is always a distant possibility at the time of the wrongdoing. People don't generally think they are committing serious wrongdoing, humans are really good at rationalizing our actions, especially when each individual action is a small step.
Boeing should be forced to publish all trade secrets that were used in their planes which contributed to the deaths of these people (so basically all IP that Boeing owns), and they should have all their patents annulled.
"Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible."
Hyman G. Rickover, father of the US nuclear navy
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Hearings/IcO0QpCJdQYC?h...
I strongly agree with his comments in their original context.
is the implication that you do not agree within this context?
> Blaming individuals is very satisfying
I was not sure how you intended it, as you did not provide any other comment, so I went looking for the original context.
Here's how I understood the original context: Congress was looking for who to blame nuclear incidents on. Adm Rickover pointed out that for Thresher, very many of the responsible people in the production and development process changed multiple times during the process. He also pointed out that Congress, as the funding body still maintained some responsibility.
In the context of Boeing, I think it does apply, in the sense that the development project was faulty, albeit in a different way than the development of Thresher. It also applies in the fact that the funding body bears responsibility (Boeing shareholders and management). This is my interpretation. Everyone is free to make their own.
Or another way would be to temporarily send the company to "jail" meaning to suspend its operations for a while.
When you look at this example or what happens to banks when they support criminal activity like money laundering or tax evasion the fines are simply way too low for them to stop doing bad stuff.
The above comment is very, very uninformed. Aviation is a heavily regulated industry, totally unlike IT.
There's several legal avenues for individual prosecution:
1) False certification documents about MCAS performance were submitted to the FAA, so it would be very easy to find out who those people were, and who their managers were. The US government has no problem prosecuting people for fraud in the aviation world. (FAA certification is almost totally dependent on paperwork, both in mfg. and operations.)
2) The manager of the test pilots who wrote the critical SMS messages was fired, so that is another easily traceable route related to the above.
3) Southwest asked for a penalty of $1 million per airplane if type-specific traning was required, so both Southwest and Boeing negotiators agreed in a reckless manner to disregard airliner safety with that perverse incentive. (Reckless is a catchall in the FARs for pilots, but could be applied to companies and mfgs.)
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.13
To give Congress credit, they are re-visiting the ODA delegation process because of MCAS, which Boeing abuses by having managers pressure ODAs:
https://www.aviationpros.com/aircraft/commercial-airline/new...
Boeing is the US' largest exporter, so should face intense government scrutiny as it affects not just passengers and suppliers, but all Americans.
Source: commercially-rated airplane pilot who has followed MCAS very closely, far more closely than anybody else on HN.
> I'm not saying it's easy, and I'm not saying that we should stop looking for law-breakers, but I am saying that punishment will not lead to better outcomes in the absence of other positive actions.
If laws were broken, by all means, use the justice system to pursue those lawbreaker; but do not expect that to solve everything.
Last time I checked neither of these individuals programmed the ECU of VWAG diesel engines to cheat emissions tests although some engineers were blamed and fired.
It all starts at the top.
I don't think Martha Stewart is a billionaire.
At that level, I'm not sure there's a useful distinction between her level & billionaire
https://www.thestreet.com/lifestyle/martha-stewart-net-worth...
Good.
That should motivate shareholders to assure that they can hold management of firms they invest in accountable.
> and lower level employees
Which is regrettable, but I’m not sure how any form of corporate sanction could avoid that.
Do boards generally try to claw back compensation in these sorts of situations? (Just as they have been doing in some of the recent cases involving financial shenanigans.)
and something interesting I just noticed:
"In 2015, Airbus Group said it was establishing an R&D center and venture capital fund in Silicon Valley."
A closer scrutiny reveals exactly the opposite. It is the government that is too powerful, government tries to open an investigation with an explicit objective of jailing the executive. At some point Boeing has to ask how much it stands to lose if the executive goes to jail. Even though the probability is low, the DOJ has long arms and more resources to harass Boeing. $2.5B is not a fine but a bribe that an all powerful DOJ has extracted from Boeing.
$2.5B is still lot of money and 346 deaths is even bigger disaster for Boeing. Boeing did not benefit from 346 deaths on other hand it suffered massive losses. A selfish and greedy company like Boeing have far greater incentives to course correct rather than DOJ or US government. Remember how USA bombed countries while making completely fraudulent claims about WMD ? Who went to jail for that ?
I'm not sure where you get the idea that an investigation was opened with the specific purpose of jailing an executive: I don't see any indication that was the case, and just about anyone in or outside of government could have predicted before the investigation that no executive would go to jail over this.
Not at all. If government could actually investigate and prove charges and jail Boeing CEO would be the sign of an effective government.
The fact that it simple files charges, does a phony investigation and settles for a very low bribe for the deaths of my loved ones is the proof that we are dealing with a mafia and not a government of people.
"It is the government that is too powerful, government tries to open an investigation with an explicit objective of jailing the [person responsible]."
Oh no. Just wait until you learn what the job of the police is in a civil society.
> Boeing did not benefit from 346 deaths on other hand it suffered massive losses.
It absolutely did. It benefited up front from not having to redesign the 737 MAX to conform to global aviation standards. This allowed it to go to market faster, reduced development costs, and gave it an edge in sales against its competitor, the A320 family on the order books. You know, the one that didn't fall from the sky spontaneously. Boeing achieved this through lying and deception.
All this fine did was attenuate the benefit.
> Remember how USA bombed countries while making completely fraudulent claims about WMD ? Who went to jail for that ?
One unprosecuted crime doesn't mean all crime should no longer be prosecuted. Whataboutism is never a good look.