Complaining that government safety regulations weren't sufficient seems a strange position to take on a blog that regularly complains about government safety regulations being overreaching.

You could tell the exact same story about backup cameras in cars, which you recently railed against.

"From the moment the car started backing up, it was clear that little Joey didn't stand a chance.

Yet the car was fully compliant with all auto laws.

The auto laws were written for a different era before backup cameras had been invented.

There was little incentive for the car makers to question the auto laws.

If only the government has updated the auto laws to require backup cameras, little Joey would be alive today."

I was about to agree with Snoopy's sentiment.

I would have thought that your position should be that it was not a regulatory failure, it was a failure of common sense.

But, the article suggests that, once you start regulating, common sense will take a back seat to compliance with the regulation.

"If the government says I need 12 boats, I need 12, even if I REALLY need 14. Because, I don't NEED 14. The government says I only need 12 in order to comply."

On a slightly different note, I do not like saying it is a matter of regulatory failure either because that only encourages them to try harder next time.

-Jut

If it was the regulators who botched it, why was White Star sued afterward?

When people say things like that about matters like these, when they say "It was a failure of regulation," they're expressing a fantasy of complete domination.

They're talking as if corporations and individuals have no decency, or even agency, whatsoever. As if power over all things (politics & economics) were naturally collected in bundle somewhere, but we've forgotten how to defend it and deploy it. As if we could collect it all into one office cabinet again, and then have the world go forward.

It's a stupid thing to say.

So if the government had not had these onerous regulations which failed, this argument claims that White Star Lines would have a) had fewer lifeboats, b) the same lifeboats, c) more lifeboats?

Quite reasonably we conclude that the very presence of these regulations kept the well running White Star lines from doing the research needed to determine the proper number of lifeboats for their passengers and designing Titanic appropriately.

Amy has a point. Over reliance upon outer rules tends to cultivate a dependent mentality and a shutting down of our own initiative, and this is exactly what happened with the White Star Line. Correct number of lifeboats per government regs? Check. Next.

The flipside is also true - left to their own devices, companies do not always act in the public interest. Long history of that practically anywhere you look. Hence the perceived need for regulation. And more regulation.

The best regulation is a very informed public - not the government - exerting the kind of market pressure that keeps business in line through its bottom line. When the public fails or is unable to do this, government will step in to fill the responsibility void.

What Amy is doing - through her books, blog, articles, radio show, columns, appearances, private counseling and other venues is just that - teaching the public (sometimes with a swift kick) how to be informed and proactive. Don't accept what you're told and don't rely upon government to solve your problems. Be intelligent, informed and take charge.

"Quite reasonably we conclude that the very presence of these regulations kept the well running White Star lines from doing the research needed to determine the proper number of lifeboats for their passengers and designing Titanic appropriately"

That's exactly how I read this too. Yes, far too often we assume that the government will handle things. This is a form of complacency and it can clearly have dangers side effects.

If only the government has updated the auto laws to require backup cameras, little Joey would be alive today."

Your argument is flawed. Hint: unless you're going to make the operator observe the backup camera, it's an expensive pile of junk.

Next, there will be a requirement for a recording device for the backup camera to be accessed in the case of a backing up incident.

Followed shorty by people being arrested for recording encounters with police.

There's no satisfying you statists who haven't got the balls to live in the real word and must insist upon perfect safety, is there?

> There's no satisfying you statists who haven't
> got the balls to live in the real word and must
> insist upon perfect safety, is there?

I was being sarcastic. I was simply telling the exact same story as Chris Berg did regarding the Titanic regulatory failure using backup cameras, using the same/similar wording. You should be directing your comment at Chris Berg who apparently believes this.

Like many Libertarian arguments, this article makes a very good point, but ignores reality.

Taken to it's logical conclusion, you guys' argument seems to be that in the absence of any lifeboat regulation at all, White Star would have acted conscientiously and responsibly while providing the proper amount of lifeboats. That may be true. It may not. The reason for regulations is that, unfortunately, people can be dicks and often are. Besides, they think that there is so little chance that the boat is going to sink that the lifeboat bill is going to be pretty offensive and seem completely unnecessary. The free market may even have provided a marketing campaign that said, "Board the Titanic. She's so unsinkable, we don't even need lifeboats!"

The second prong of Amy's pretty good point is that people become complacent and don't look into things themselves before availing themselves of a service. That's true and I, like most people, am guilty of trusting that regulatory triggers are in place to lessen my chances of being screwed up the ass -- at least to an acceptable level of risk.

Suppose I have a tooth ache while traveling. I need a dentist, but I don't have the time, resources, or expertise to really vet him. I see that he has a degree in his craft and holds a license in good standing with a government agency that knows something about teeth -- because I sure don't know anything about dentistry. I don't know anything else about him, but my tooth hurts and I don't know anyone who can vouch for him. That'll do.

Due diligence with researching a product or service is one thing, but to do it properly, you'd have to have a PhD in absolutely everything. No one person has that much expertise.

The USDA is a good example. That's "big government" regulation alright. Do each of you have the expertise and the appropriate equipment to properly test your butcher shop against salmonella or e-coli before you make burgers for your family?

I'd rather be a member of society. A society that says, "Why don't we, as a group, hire people who know about all that shit to check out these meat processing places so that we can be reasonably sure that we're not going to poison our families?"

The author has a point that this was a bad regulation because it wasn't a forward looking regulation. A better one would have been to afford lifeboats based on passenger capacity rather than tonnage. No lifeboat regulation at all? That ignores reality.

I should read the piece before commenting.

> No lifeboat regulation at all? That
> ignores reality.

"Ignoring reality" is a pretty harsh piece of language. It has the tone of someone about to make a power grab. Would transatlantic consumer culture of 1914 had no response to the sinking of the Titanic except through regulation?

Favorite passage:

This is a distressingly common problem. Governments find it easy to implement regulations but tedious to maintain existing ones—politicians gain little political benefit from updating old laws, only from introducing new laws.

Government power explodes because people want the world to be made safe before they even try to move through it.

Regulations, of any sort, set out the MINIMUM legal requirements you need to meet if you don't want to be fined or thrown in jail. They're the low bar a company must clear, not the high bar a company is supposed to reach for.

Joe Paterno and that McQueary guy complied with the law and committed no crime - they reported what they saw & heard about to their bosses, then they washed their hands of it. Meanwhile, their buddy Jerry carried on raping children. When you blogged about it here, most commenters thought that fulfilling the minimum legal requirements was not enough.

There was a regulatory failure on the Titanic, but it wasn't bumbling regulators who prevented the White Star guys from counting the passengers & crew & lifeboats on their ship. It was THEIR fucking ship, not the Board of Trade's ship.

Gee. This ignores a couple of very real things about Titanic which are bigger failures.

First, the hull plates weren't alloyed with enough toughness. Impurities made them more brittle than they would have been if quality controls were thorough.

Then, the existing lifeboats weren't filled to capacity. The sea claimed possibly two hundred who didn't have to die; for some reason, they just didn't get on the boats.

Do you think the regulatory burden on the construction of Costa Concordia was less than that applied to Titanic?

This is a distressingly common problem. Governments find it easy to implement regulations but tedious to maintain existing ones—politicians gain little political benefit from updating old laws, only from introducing new laws.

Government power explodes because people want the world to be made safe before they even try to move through it. -- Crid [CridComment at gmail] at April 13, 2012 5:44 PM

I agree.

Yet the Titanic was fully compliant with all marine laws. The British Board of Trade required all vessels above 10,000 metric tonnes (11,023 U.S. tons) to carry 16 lifeboats. The White Star Line ensured that the Titanic exceeded the requirements by four boats. But the ship was 46,328 tonnes. The Board of Trade hadn't updated its regulations for nearly 20 years.

The way regulations should be written is that they are automatically applicable to the situation. Such as:

All ships over the 10,000 metric tonnes are required to have lifeboats of sufficient capacity for the expected number of passengers and crew on board.

If there isn't a way to write the regulation to be open ended, then it should have an automatic five to ten year sunset on it. Actually every law or regulation should have an automatic sunset if it isn't in the Constitution. But of course you need laws that are constitutionally enforceable in the first place. And I'm not talking general welfare or commerce clause constitutional.

Since we're on the subject of the Titanic, here's a great graphic:

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/04/13/follow-the-titanic-down-to-the-bottom-of-the-ocean-graphic/

"Would transatlantic consumer culture of 1914 had no response to the sinking of the Titanic except through regulation?"

That's a great point, Crid. What would be a more appropriate response?

I suspect that a purely consumer response, assuming you don't believe that a government regulation has any relation to an actual consumer response, might be to not get aboard a seafaring ship ever again. That probably wouldn't do much for the passenger shipping economy. Perhaps regulation plays a role in consumer confidence and, therefore, has a positive impact on the free market.

> Perhaps regulation plays a role in consumer
> confidence and, therefore, has a positive impact
> on the free market.

This case demonstrates that this confidence might be unearned.

I'm not sure what the correct response is, just that more regulation is often pointless in a culture that has a boiling system of torts and lawsuits as ours does. Bryan Caplan describes how this goes:

1. Something must be done
2. This is something
3. Therefore, this must be done.

Well, NO.

What Jim P. said. The point is not to have no regulation, but effective regulation. His rewording is sensible and would have prevented the regs falling behind the times.

A big however though - for those who read the full article, the prevailing wisdom was that a large ship would take a long time to sink and that the lifeboats were just there to ferry passengers to responding rescue ships, *not* to rescue the full complement. By that standard they had more than enough, and the theory had been vindicated recently. The problem was in the assumptions, so it isn't at all clear that rewriting the regs would have helped much.

I could point out numerous examples of safety theory colliding with reality. One is the Piper Alpha oil platform fire - the only people who survived were those who did what they had specifically been told not to do, i.e. jump into the water. The correct procedure was to retreat to a fireproof refuge and wait for rescue. Unfortunately, due to numerous communications failures and delays, all those people died when the rig collapsed.

A big however though - for those who read the full article, ... -- Ltw at April 13, 2012 11:03 PM

That is part of the over-regulation problem. I read regs, standards, etc. with the express idea of how to poke holes in them. People automatically assume that god or government is there to protect them. The thinking person knows that 911 is there to clean up the mess that you or someone else has created.

I also never want to think how to respond if a mad man walks into the Luby's I'm sitting in and starts shooting. I know to look for entrances/exits, where the floor and cover is. That is an automatic assessment when I walk into a room. That is a personal habit.

Once you realize that the defensive/offensive force is usually five plus minutes away, and the action will probably be over in four, you grasp personal responsibility.

"The correct procedure was to retreat to a fireproof refuge and wait for rescue."

Off-topic a bit; but there was a time when the "correct procedure" was for passengers and crew to follow the directions of airline hyjackers; land safely, and allow "the authorities" to negotiate.

That "procedure" disappeared in one day. Passengers now fight back. But it took an extraordinary event to overcome that complacency.

Charles - exactly my point. But you try standing up in meeting beforehand and saying so. There are lots of similar examples.

I'm not sure what the correct response is

I am Crid. Firstly, as Jim P pointed out, write the regs to be outcome-oriented rather than methodology oriented. So for instance, sufficient lifeboat capacity to evacuate the full complement in some *reasonable* (engineers may laugh here and demand a number) length of time.

Rather than, that is, specifying the number of lifeboats. How big? How fast to launch? How quickly can you load them?

Secondly, review regs to see if they are achieving their intended outcome.

Thirdly, accept that people behave strangely in stress situations. As you said

Then, the existing lifeboats weren't filled to capacity. The sea claimed possibly two hundred who didn't have to die; for some reason, they just didn't get on the boats.

Have you ever run an emergency exercise? It doesn't matter how many flashing signs you put up, how much you coach people over PA, phones every 60 metres in case they are lost, and so on - in road tunnels a similar proportion of people will walk downhill rather than uphill just because it's easier. No matter what you tell them. If you lose 1 in 5 to disorientation and panic you're doing well.

LTW - totally agree. As far as "you try standing up in meeting beforehand and saying so." God, don't I know it.

I was the fire warden (just an office designation; nothing official from the FDNY) on the floor in my office in midtown Manhattan. It was always a a chore to get folks to stop work to come to the emergency stairwell twice a year to listen to the emergency procedures. Usually we had a handful of folks show up; most likely they were using the drill as an excuse to get away from work for 10 minutes!

With the alarm sounding, I would go office to office to let folks know that they needed to assemble by the exit stairwell - I was chewed-out so many times for disrupting meetings that I stopped doing that. Yes, the alarm is going off and *I* am the bad guy for saying pay attention!

Well, all that changed on the first post 9-11 fire drill. We had to do 2 sessions because there wasn't enough room in the hallway for everyone to hear. (where the hell were they all before? I know, in meetings telling me to butt out!)

We also changed the rules; no longer would folks stay on their floor until directed to leave by PA; no longer would we go 2 blocks over to our designated assembly area. The rules now were; leave, just exit the building ASAP. Then head north to central park (never mind the rest of the city might be doing the same - boy, that park is going to be crowded). We all have enough cell phones (which might not work!) or whatever that we will try to get in touch then. But, for now, don't panic, just get out.

Even after this I had trouble trying to get the folks in charge to set up some sort of buddy system to make regrouping easier to know who got out and who didn't. Their response? "Too much trouble."

It is sad that it seems to take something drastic for folks to listen. Kinda like when we all complain about the busy intersection with just a stop sign - "There are so many accidents at this intersection. Are they going to wait until somebody dies before they put up a traffic light?" Yep, that is usually what it takes - a death or two.

Yeah, Charles, everyone ignores drills until it becomes serious. But I suppose my point was more that sometimes the procedure itself is flawed. Is the best thing for you to run from office to office? Maybe...but who knows?

Case 1 - the firefighters who ran into the WTC really thought they had an hour or two to get people out. They knew they were risking their lives, but they weren't committing suicide. Then the building collapsed. Wasn't meant to happen that fast.

Case 2 - we ran a realistic evacuation simulation on a tunnel about to open. They asked for employees, friends, relatives (anyone with working knowledge of the systems was excluded) to volunteer to act as members of the public. My sneaky boss put in his wife - who is confined to a wheelchair - as one of the faux evacuees. And didn't tell the operators. Boy, did they have fun, fielding calls from the people who stopped to help and couldn't get her up several flights of stairs.

We also changed the rules; no longer would folks stay on their floor until directed to leave by PA; no longer would we go 2 blocks over to our designated assembly area. The rules now were; leave, just exit the building ASAP. Then head north to central park (never mind the rest of the city might be doing the same - boy, that park is going to be crowded). We all have enough cell phones (which might not work!) or whatever that we will try to get in touch then. But, for now, don't panic, just get out.

Btw Charles, much more sensible rules. I went to a auto-parts factory plant once to try to sort out a problem with the heated, ten-ton presses they used to turn 6 inch thick felt into moulded underlay. The problem was the presses would stay down, then catch fire. And of course the fibers from the felt would flash through the ventilation system and set fires everywhere. This was a weekly occurrence.

Our escort explained that we should be careful if that happened, because the first thing everyone did was grab the nearest forklift and shift the finished product outside before the sprinklers started. So don't get run over.

I was there with an intern, and he looked a bit green at this point. I pointed at the nearest roll-a-door and told him "If that happens, forget about assembly points, etc. I'll be 40 metres the other side of that door and still accelerating. We can come back and sort out the details later.

I'm not even going to get into the ban on carrying on campus; but another example of regulatory failure: Nine Lessons Learned from the Oikos College Shooting.

So for instance, sufficient lifeboat capacity to evacuate the full complement in some *reasonable* (engineers may laugh here and demand a number) length of time. -- Ltw at April 14, 2012 6:32 AM

I saw an interview this morning that said in every computer model they ran, the Titanic should have rolled. But all witness accounts said she went straight down. In addition no one from the engineering spaces survived. They suspect, but will never be able to prove, that the engineers maintained trim on the ship until the end.

They were brave souls that didn't run.

The disaster in the sinking of the Titanic was due to a wide number of factors:

- the "watertight" bulkheads had doorways cut into them so passengers didn't have to wait for the person carrying their requested items to go all the way to the top deck and back down.

- ships had only recently switched to automobile steering, so when the helmsman (a long-time veteran of maritime travel) ordered the ship "hard left," the ship turned left - instead of right which he may have intended.

- until the Olympic (Titanic's sister ship), no one had ever steered a ship that large and the maritime world was ignorant of the effects such a large ship would have. On its maiden voyage, Olympic was involved in an incident in which a ship of the Royal Navy intentionally rammed the giant passenger ship - or so it seemed. Using a tub and models, the Navy was able to prove that large ships cutting through the water displace vast amounts of water and that filling the resulting void may have the affect of drawing in nearby ships. Most of the maritime world scoffed at the Royal Navy's "bathtub toys."

- wireless radio was new and mostly viewed as a toy. Captain Smith received several iceberg warnings via wireless - which he ignored. Had those warnings been plotted on a map, they would have shown the Titanic surrounded by icebergs.

- as has been mentioned here, lifeboats were not viewed as floating platforms for abandoning a ship, but as ferries to take evacuating passengers to nearby ships. So, it was not considered necessary to have one for all passengers. And passengers could be evacuated by order of berth class (First, Second, Third, Steerage). There were no nearby ships when Titanic sunk.

> The point is not to have no regulation, but
> effective regulation.

When absolutely necessary. Otherwise, the point IS to have no regulation.

You're starting to seem kinda ham-fisted over there.

That happens a lot nowadays.