Capitalism and Air Safety

Here is a clear and brief account of what went wrong with the Max8:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2tuKiiznsY

The comments on youtube understandably express outrage that Boeing failed so grievously to ensure the safety of its passengers. The FAA comes in for criticism as well. These responses are thoroughly human.

But let’s think: given the incentives, and capitalist socialization, what was to stop Boeing from making this decision? A deep concern for the well-being of others? But that had already been blunted and numbed by capitalist socialization.

The liberal answer to this problem would be regulation—and that approach has had success; we no longer allow dairies to put formaldehyde in milk, for instance. But as billionaire capitalism advances, acquiring more wealth and power, the regulatory agencies are more and more often put on the defensive, and in the end they no longer have the political influence to do their jobs.

This is not a matter of bad people corrupting an otherwise value-neutral system. This may sound shocking, but the people who made these decisions may well be good people outside the constraints of their jobs. If a Boeing executive saw a child drowning, they would likely attempt to save the child. It’s not a certainty, because capitalist socialization does tend to bleed over into the rest of one’s life, but human decency still has the power to emerge from the darkness, like a returning hero in an ancient legend.

But on the job, their natural goodness is overwhelmed by capitalist socialization and its associated incentives. We just couldn’t lose market share to Airbus! We just couldn’t! That may sound morally bankrupt, and it is—but it’s not the moral bankruptcy of individuals, but of the system itself.

 Of course, if the job is obviously dirty, the managers will tend to select designers with a history of doing bad work—without consciously thinking about it in those terms, of course. So some of the people involved may well have been incompetent or uncaring, but that didn’t happen by accident. For capitalism, incompetence has its uses; although most of the time capitalist enterprises want competent employees, there are moments when corners must be cut, and the best employee for that is someone with deep experience in carelessness.

 Imagine if a good software engineer were told to write code to tilt an airplane’s nose down based on sensor readings, without any input from the pilot. He or she would have attempted to change the design, to put it mildly; the pilot has a much better grasp of the situation that the software can get from a single set of sensors.

And that attempt at re-design would have resulted in someone else getting the job.

But the main point is not whether the individuals involved were competent or incompetent, good or evil. The point is that capitalism always has the potential to harm or kill employees, customers, people who live nearby, or even people thousands of miles away. And even once it is clear that people are dying, capitalism will not stop—as we see with tobacco companies, asbestos manufacturers, HFCS vendors, oil and coal companies, ad infinitum.

This is inherent to capitalism, and if we want to save our civilization and our planet we must stop that behavior. The institutions we devise to do so must be stronger than the old liberal methods of passing laws and setting up regulatory bodies.