If Boeing was a student, they would be the kind that does the bare minimum in every class just so they don't fail.
I don't think that's a valid comparison.
For a startup to disrupt a market, it should have some semblance of a win.
Boeing is doing all this to avoid a major loss.
Fighting to stay afloat is not the same as disrupting a market.
If Boeing were developing radical new designs, I’d be with you. I might even be with them. But they’re not. The 737 Max 9 isn’t revolutionary in any capacity; the newness is practically all in the engines.
Anything that goes wrong is due to dysfunctional management, not greed.
“Dysfunctional management” is a direct function of managerial incentives, which is generally capitalistic greed (aka “obligation to maximize shareholder value”)
As for where you draw the line on safety regulations, the optimum answer is always “considerably past the point that business owners start complaining about excessive regulation”.
Pricing is due to both supply and demand - there can’t be a sustainable supply of a expensive-to-make cars at loss-making prices
However, all else equal, a vehicle with more active and passive safety features and more safety engineering is more expensive. Even after you account for economies of scale.
For example, airbags are extremely mass produced and have just about as much economies of scale as possible. But, in countries where they are not mandated, you can still find cars offered without them, because they are cheaper. The same is also true for vehicles without UHHS safety cages, ABS, stability control, etc. All of these things cost money.
We should all live in countries that mandate extremely high safety standards and spend their time worrying about how to raise the average income to compensate, rather than in a country that accepts unreasonable risk just to keep wages unreasonably low.
If Ford had accounted for those punitive costs in their calculation, then the outcome of the cost/benefit calculation would have overwhelmingly favoured a fix. The real business problem was not the empathy-free approach, but poor mathematical modelling.
That was in large part due to the disgust over the report they had penned.
> If Ford had accounted for those punitive costs in their calculation, then the outcome of the cost/benefit calculation
Would still have been a cost/benefit calculation rather than a moral or ethical one, aka capitalistic greed.
Nowadays companies can seriously suffer by mishandling their "attitudes" over social justice issues, my gut reaction was that if that's true how could they get away with a plane falling out of the sky. Still a bigger deal than dozen people dying in cars with faulty fuel systems, perhaps just because of the optics.
You're describing effective regulatory oversight. That is a manual control on capitalism, and something capitalism inevitably fights against. Psychopaths exist and look for ways to exploit capitalism, including "fuck it, we'll risk loss of human life and possibly having to shut down the company", which you said isn't due to capitalism. But it is: it's due to the combination of capitalism and human nature, but we can only control the former. The solution is regulatory oversight, as you just pointed out.
Also: realize that psychopaths will absolutely risk shutting down the company if they think they can exit with a personal profit before that happens. CEOs routinely fuck over the longevity of the companies they lead, knowing they won't be around for the fallout. In fact it's hard to find situations where this doesn't happen -- it's almost always private companies or companies where the CEO is completely entrenched.
That's a disingenuous take. There are plenty of examples where psycho apparatchiks of anti-capitalist regimes made decisions "for the common good" that resulted in loss of life and even genocide and still they hailed those results as a win.
You missed the whole point. The point is that having psychos in charge is not a characteristic of an economic system. It's a characteristic of forming organizations manned by human beings.
It's terribly disingenuous to use that as a pretext to bash an economic system as if you don't have the exact same problem affecting organizations that are not ran based on that economic system. It's like claiming that the fact that water is wet is a precipitation of capitalism.