Unfortunately, regulation doesn't fit with the narrative of self-determination and "pull yourself up by your bootstraps"
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.
I've never heard anyone criticizing the size of the FAA or calls for airplane manufacturers to be deregulated. Do you have examples of this? Or are you just making a general politicized point about deregulation?
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".
Yes, I have an example. The parent comment was about regulation in general, and mine was in response to that. However, there was the massive deregulation of the FAA in 1978 due to this sort of pressure. It had one effect of creating more competition in the industry, but it arguably went too far and has had an impact on safety as well. [0]
I am not sure if you know what you are talking about. The FAA can’t be “deregulated” as it is the regulatory body. And the airline deregulation that happened in ‘78 was deregulation of airline routes, not airline safety requirements. Furthermore, that 1996 Brookings opinion; that hasn’t held up very well considering that US aviation has an extraordinary safety record since that time and an even better record than during the regulated days. More people are killed by trains every year than die in commercial airliners, but are we suggesting that train regulation is deficient? About 16 people a week are killed by trains in the US, yet with commercial airliners in the US, we’ve had a just single fatality since 2009.
By any measure, the FAA and industry have done an exceptional job of keeping the American flying public safe.
I think you're cherry picking and looking for reasons for me to be wrong because you don't like my conclusion. The Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) and FAA were closely affiliated agencies until the '78 deregulation, and in the wake of it the FAA picked up some of the CAB's former duties. The CAB was deregulated out of existence.
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.
> I've never heard anyone criticizing the size of the FAA or calls for airplane manufacturers to be deregulated. Do you have examples of this?
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.
Projects tend to be fair game to criticism for failing to meet goals after funding. My question was about examples of airline manufacturers getting "deregulated"? Particularly top-down pressure from congress related to aircraft safety at the manufacturer level (rather than the aircraft manufacturers getting special treatment from the FAA or freely gaming the system - by bypassing protocols of "new" plane models without any pressure from the regulatory body).
Great, lets hope congress now has the incentivize to properly analyze the incident and determine if a lack of adequate resources was the source of the problem and then acts on it.
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.
Looking back a hundred or more years when the market was more free, your vision of how things might work does not hold. 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Really? Because at the time "everyone knew" sea-bound shipping was dangerous and if you were directly tied to that industry the "culture of the time" was very much bound up in insurance markets that protected against loss.
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 far as I know, the insurance for shipping was for loss of the cargo, not liability for injury or death.
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.
Well, we don't have the department of horse safety, do we? I'm sure operators of business that do horse rides have general liability insurance. So, in effect, the free market did solve this problem.
> 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.
Your counter is that now, a hundred years after they ceased to be widely used for personal transport, the free market has a solution? After centuries of their use where it did not solve the problem? That is pretty weak reasoning. I'm honestly not sure if you're just trolling me now. It amounts to saying something like "evolution can solve all problems". Even if true, the timeline leaves a bit to be desired, and a bit of manual intervention can do better. Not only that, but insurance happens to be a regulated industry, so your argument is flawed on that account as well.
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.
You're talking about cultural norms while the examples we're using here are in the context of economic transactions. Even still, yes, there were differences in who was considered responsible for problems. 100 years ago and more, the government was seen as less responsible, i.e, less regulation. This is why I chose it: Closer to an unregulated free market. That makes it more apt for examples where the free market had an opportunity to arrive at solutions for common problems, yet failed to do so.
> 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 right, insurance markets have appeared for many things. I'm not sure why you think that's evidence against my argument. I cited an example where they did not, where the free market did not come up with a solution.
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.
Just because the marketplace didn't do something 100 years ago doesn't mean that it never would. Obviously, there wasn't a need for such a thing, so what problem is being solved here? You just contrived some set of circumstances that you believe fits your hypothesis; in no way is this a reflection on the free market's capabilities.
It's not contrived, it's an actual problem that existed for centuries coinciding with insurance markets during which the free market did not provide a solution. Saying there wasn't a need for the thing because the free market didn't provide a solution is tautological.
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.
Totally unrealistic. Insurance companies typically assess risk with actual data, they are very reluctant to insure completely unknown risks without a loss history that can be evaluated. Who's going to be the initial ones dying so that the risk can be estimated?
FTA: The FAA, citing lack of funding and resources, has over the years delegated increasing authority to Boeing to take on more of the work of certifying the safety of its own airplanes.
Self-regulation as a consequence of the FAA getting insufficient funding is distinctly on-topic.
That is misleading at best. The FAA was instructed to let the industry to regulate itself more, a typical republican/libertarian belief. Boeing being allowed to self regulated created this mess.
>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.
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.
Our government is quite vulnerable to corruption by the rich and powerful. You will watch some propose that, since the rich have corrupted the governement's protections for the people, that those protections should be removed. But this is the original goal in the first place: Remove protection for the people against the abuse by the powerful.
>> That is misleading at best. The FAA was instructed to let the industry to regulate itself more, a typical republican/libertarian belief. Boeing being allowed to self regulated created this mess.
> 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?
Is the solution to eliminate regulation, so the regulated don't have to bother to "capture it" -- and just decide to live with all the problems regulation can solve or mitigate?
When someone reports a software bug to you, do you often ask them if the solution is to abandon the entire product? This doesn't seem like a productive methodology.
No, that's why I phrased my comment as a question. When the implementation difficulties of regulation come up on libertarian-leaning forums, it often seems like it's really an indirect way of arguing against the whole concept and practice of regulation (e.g. like this comment describes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19424511). I just wanted to see if that was the case here or not, hence the question.
Libertarians probably don't often advocate the strawman position of no regulation whatsoever, or the ill-defined yet ludicrous "self regulation", but rather independent regulation by third-party companies, such as is the case in the kosher food certification industry, or the Underwriters Laboratories, or PCI compliance.
> position of no regulation whatsoever, or the ill-defined yet ludicrous "self regulation", but rather independent regulation by third-party companies
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.
Kosher labeling seems to work decently, even though "nobody has the time" to figure out what any of the logos mean.
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.
> Kosher labeling seems to work decently, even though "nobody has the time" to figure out what any of the logos mean.
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.
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.
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?
Not to diminish the role of the FAA in this, but do other nations not do their own certifications of new aircraft? Is it a nation of origin thing? e.g. Boeing is regulated by the FAA and everyone trusts the FAA, then Airbus gets regulated by EASA and everyone trusts EASA?
That's basically how it works for complex aircraft. The 777 was the first airliner to receive automatic EASA approval after FAA acceptance.
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.
How many 737s crashed while under FAA jurisdiction? The US has had one commercial airliner fatality since 2009, so it would seem that the FAA is doing something right. Maybe Kenya and Indonesia need some improvements?
In effect two, because the countries in which crashes occurred deferred to the FAA certification rather than require their own, as compared to Brazil. And what's Kenya got to do with this topic?
Why is this downvoted? It’s a fact. The FAA doesn’t regulate the training, maintenance or competency of Indonesia or Kenya. Under FAA regulations, the copilot on the Kenya crash would have never been allowed to fly: he had just 200 total hours. So somehow that’s the FAA’s fault?
How much more proof do we need as a society that self regulation is a fool's errand?