Regulation is intended to prevent human harm by setting and enforcing a safety standard.
You're left with things like plane crashes, which have to be minimized even if they're already rare. But that kind of regulation is extraordinarily expensive, and then the same regulatory model gets applied where it isn't needed.
I know we're all trying to be moderate here, but I'm not very good at that:
1) It is irrational. The cost-benefits of aircraft safety make no sense. Planes are held to a standard that we don't hold buses and trains to. We should strive to make rational decisions as a matter of policy.
2) There is no reason to think the US regulators are any good at what they are doing. As the thread root comment points out, the incentives are terrible. US industrial policy over my life time has consistently led to Asian growth and US stagnation in ways that were predictable. The US has banned most of the avenues that it could grow by, and coincidentally growth has largely stopped. Very similar story in Europe too, big focus on banning stuff (plus a bit of redistribution) and small focus on how to achieve more prosperity.
The US is dedicating the lives of countless smart people to taking a thing that was going to fly through the air like a bird and ... not changing the outcome much. They could have been doing something else that was more useful, like competing with China for telecoms leadership.
I don't think the evidence is there for this "having" to be minimised. The big picture looks a lot like people are behaving emotionally, that is sometimes leading to irrational decisions and those irrational decisions have added up to cause real harm. People should be more accepting of other people taking reasonable risk.
What are the poor ROI irrational decisions that the FAA makes on airline safety, how many lives do they save, and how many dollars do they add to the price of my ticket?
It's easy to say that things are not optimal. Let's say that's the case. What would you change?
> The US is dedicating the lives of countless smart people to taking a thing that was going to fly through the air like a bird and ... not changing the outcome much. They could have been doing something else that was more useful, like competing with China for telecoms leadership.
The US isn't a command economy, it can't redirect human effort like that, introducing subsidies into telecoms will distort the markets, and most of the country's intellect is wasted on financial innovation and adtech and middle management, anyways.
(The optimal number of plane crashes is not zero, as the saying goes, and it’s probably more than we have now.)
I'm not sure of a good way to have a middle ground between excessive regulation and devaluing human wellbeing. In that case, I'd rather that we err on the side of excessive regulation; especially since there are already powerful financial interests advocating for the other side.
Or highway/pedestrian/cyclist safety, for that matter?
I am not sure how well this works in practice - but I think the idea has real merit.
(How is this different from an ordinary procedural regulator? Because the insurance market has competition, which means that the insurance companies aren't only trying to optimize for reducing risk -- they're trying to reduce risk efficiently. And if they're not very good at it, they can be outcompeted by someone who is.)
Who regulates the insurers?
This ignores that regulators are also people, with the same traits, but with no vested interest in making anything work.
