When you talk about the positive results of deregulation, that’s all economic regulation. Freight being run on regulated routes with regulated prices was protecting various groups’ economic interests. Usually at the implicit expense of the economic interests of everyone else.

Safety regulations are a completely different beast. Safety regulations in aviation have increased massively over this same timeframe, and the result has been an even more massive increase in safety. Crashes went from routine to unheard of despite a huge increase in activity. Cars have seen a similar increase in safety regulations and in actual safety, although the safety gains have been more modest and seem to have stalled out in the last five years or so.

That doesn’t mean safety regulation is necessarily good or that deregulation couldn’t be helpful sometimes. But the actual track record in recent decades is completely contrary to this idea of decreasing regulation providing better results.

We’re fixating on one instance of failure because it looks like a canary in the coal mine indicating a threat to the safest mode of travel ever devised.

Only they're not. If you impose a billion dollars in fixed regulatory burden then you can no longer have sub-billion dollar companies.

But lack of competition erodes everything -- even the safety rules, because bigger companies are more capable of capturing regulators.

Any regulation which is the direct cause of a lack of effective competition is doing more harm than good.

> That doesn’t mean safety regulation is necessarily good or that deregulation couldn’t be helpful sometimes. But the actual track record in recent decades is completely contrary to this idea of decreasing regulation providing better results.

That's kind of the point. The entire frame of "regulation bad / deregulation bad" is a farce. What you actually need is regulation that maximizes the ratio of benefits to regulatory burdens. That means removing burdensome and ineffective regulations and having efficient and effective ones.

But evaluating regulatory efficiency and effectiveness is dry and non-partisan. Framing it as "we need more regulation" is failing before you even begin.

This 737 MAX debacle is a case in point. It came about because Boeing was trying to avoid the high costs of recertification, so they didn't change things that could have made the plane safer because changing them would have required recertification.

So we have "safety regulations" negatively impacting safety by making it move expensive to improve safety than not. That's not a case of needing more overall regulation or less overall regulation, it's a case of needing to replace worse rules with better rules. The ideal outcome is that the net regulatory burden becomes lower and as a result it becomes less expensive to make changes that improve safety.

FAA was gamed, but If you think Boeing would self regulate, I think you are on a different timeline where stockholder dividends are not the prime directive.

Simply put, the definition of 'failure' of a regulation needs to be broadened. Regardless if it reduced deaths by the company itself in the near term, if it adds long term risk to deaths/accidents in the future by encouraging regulatory capture and eliminating any competition but Boeings to exist - we are worse off as a society, period. The only option we are allowing is some pseudo-market mega-corps with monopolies and the mediocrity in both service and safety or public gov run companies (which do make sense occasionally, but rarely).

There's a few solutions I can think of here which isn't "all regulation is bad" or "lets only have mega corporations in every market via poorly designed regulation" or "let gov nationalize the markets":

a) Contextual oversight. Allow a certain level of freedom at the lower tiers of markets so a future competitor to Boeing can exist and challenge them on everything from prices, to technology, customer service, and safety (which yes is a massive competitive advantage, ask all the people who now refuse to fly in Max, what other options do they have? A single European version of Boeing?). While allowing the courts to expunge any company that sacrifices on safety or any other externality via tort laws, liability, via stronger consumer and property rights.

b) Constant pressure on regulatory agencies (possibly by an outside agency) to look for regulatory capture within agencies and severely punish civil servants and companies engaged in any backroom deals, creating policy/incentives which are barriers for competition with little/zero benefit to citizens, punishing companies for obvious lapses, etc.

c) Stop politicians from anointing themselves job creators and promoters of businesses. They should strictly be in an administrative role when absolutely necessary (to eliminate any forms of violence, coercion, externalities that courts can't handle, etc). This is the biggest source of the worst of a) and b).

When politicians think their job is to 'create jobs' themselves by creating monetary/policy incentives for companies, this inherently create incentives for kickbacks to politicians and moral hazards for companies, and therefore should not be the job of politicians period. The only "help" to companies should be to help get out of the way by eliminating useless policy OR streamline necessary administrative systems. Otherwise don't help them at all.

Companies should not be able to buy success and maintain success in markets (by that I mean monetarily regardless of behaviour or outcomes) by having influence from politicians. All policy should be neutral of company size (or tiered based on size, the way modern rent control has tried to stop disincentivizing new lower income buildings by not applying to new developments) and factor in small firms who can't afford a team of lawyers or checkbox checkers.

Like most of the neoliberale 'economic theoretical models', the idea that the regulation is fully separated from the arena of the competition and thus cannot be captured and coopted is so ludicrous it begs the question how it ever became more than a joke in a b-list standup comedian's backup repertoire.

A German automaker was caught gassing the world population. They're still around, even having the audacity not to even change the brand name.

But I was replying to a pair of comments talking about the practical history of regulations over the past few decades. That history diverges wildly for the two types of regulation. Economic regulation was massively lightened, resulting in huge benefits. At the same time, safety regulations for airplanes and cars were massively increased, also resulting in huge benefits.

So, yes, the whole point is that “regulations good/bad/anything” is nonsense, as the recent history of economic and safety regulations illustrates.

It's also difficult to evaluate these things based on statistical trends, because it's easy to pass a safety regulation that e.g. mandates a specific safety method, and then you get an immediate safety improvement by making that state of the art method universal, but as time passes that ossified requirement becomes stale and prevents newer, better methods from replacing it. And all you see in the numbers is the improvement from the original mandate spreading through the installed base over time, not the comparison to what would have happened when something even better was invented a year later but was prohibited by the rule from being deployed. (As evidence for this, the original 737 was introduced prior to the moon landing.)

It's also problematic to look only at the one target. If we improve aircraft safety per mile but only by making aircraft more expensive (or destroying competition, which does the same thing), that makes flying less competitive against alternatives that are much more dangerous, like driving. So you can get a safety improvement on paper even though the result is more people are killed.

That doesn't mean you can't make a rule that actually improves safety, but it's harder than it seems to get it right.

Regarding measures that appear to improve safety but are actually a net loss because it encourages driving instead, the FAA does evaluate regulations this way. For example, this is why infants aren’t required to be in a child seat and are allowed to just be held by a parent. They determined that this requirement would cause more families to drive due to the extra cost, and the result would be a net loss of life.

Yes, and one of the possible definitions of a (technical, safety related) regulation is "the added cost that the society is reasonably willing (or capable) to pay for a reasonable increase in safety"

The issues always revolve around how much the "reasonably willing to pay" is and what is the corresponding "reasonable" increase in safety (and how exactly to measure the latter).

Based on available reporting, Boeing chose this path not to avoid higher cost, but reduced time to market to compete with Airbus because, again, shortsightedness, lack of innovation and planning, and even lack of imagination that their competitor would do exactly what they did, and had no contingency and no response for ~9 months after the Airbus 320neo announcement.

I also can't take seriously any complaints about lack of competition in the U.S. market when it's so docile about competition law. The 1960's merger of McDonnell and Douglas is questionable, but the 1990's merger of McDonnel Douglas and Boeing directly lead to the loss of any remaining domestic competition in transport category aircraft. U.S. regulators are tacitly saying this is a natural monopoly, and yet should be regulated as if it's a competitive market.

> I also can't take seriously any complaints about lack of competition in the U.S. market when it's so docile about competition law. The 1960's merger of McDonnell and Douglas is questionable, but the 1990's merger of McDonnel Douglas and Boeing directly lead to the loss of any remaining domestic competition in transport category aircraft. U.S. regulators are tacitly saying this is a natural monopoly, and yet should be regulated as if it's a competitive market.

You're discounting the competition between Boeing and Airbus. They're clearly not a monopoly.

That said, it's possible to have two sets of bad rules at once, and it's even worse in that case. Then you get antitrust regulators approving mergers while industry regulators impose high barriers to entry, so that you get high consolidation with no way to break it because no one new will ever enter the industry.

Sadly that seems to be the status quo in multiple industries now. You have antitrust approving any merger that doesn't result in a literal monopoly even if there are only two or three companies left, meanwhile those companies practically ask the government for regulations that make sure nobody else can ever come up behind them because it takes a nation-scale company to survive the compliance costs.

One example of a third way would be that when a plane is 97% the same as one you're certified on, have something between no and full recertification which is only 3% as time consuming because it only covers the differences between the planes instead of going back to square one.

You suggest that we should sacrifice the rigor of pilot training to allow delivering planes without safety compromises ... I think there’s absolutely no justification for safety compromise in this scenario - the new plane will pay for retraining costs in a slightly longer amount of time than it would’ve had retraining not been required — oh well. That’s the cost of doing business and it’s absolutely without doubt that in this case - designing a plane that wasn’t inherently flawed would’ve been a better strategy for Boeing and for all of their 737 Max customers ...

The real question to learn from this tragedy is not how can we make it slightly less expensive to produce a new air frame — it’s how can we ensure that safety is not allowed to be compromised during the design phase of new passenger aircraft in service of _truly_ minor cost savings ... if we had a real regulator that was not captured - they should’ve had the flexibility to say no to the 737 Max very very early in the proposal process — and if necessary they should’ve been allowed to offer a tax incentive to offset some of the pilot retraining cost required by them not budging on safety requirements.

Building and deploying safe airplanes into real world use is more expensive than building unsafe airplanes — but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the cost to society...

Describing this as "sacrifice the rigor of pilot training" is illegitimate. If someone is already certified on a similar plane, the training they need is really only on the difference between the planes.

> I think there’s absolutely no justification for safety compromise in this scenario - the new plane will pay for retraining costs in a slightly longer amount of time than it would’ve had retraining not been required — oh well.

The problem is that monetary costs are still safety costs. Now the new thing costs more and people choose alternatives that may be less safe. If new planes are more expensive then older planes that are more likely to suffer wear-based mechanical failures stay in service longer. If air travel costs more then more people drive.

Boeing obviously screwed this up, but we gave them the incentive to screw it up, and that's on us too.

> The real question to learn from this tragedy is not how can we make it slightly less expensive to produce a new air frame — it’s how can we ensure that safety is not allowed to be compromised during the design phase of new passenger aircraft in service of _truly_ minor cost savings

But that is how you do it. You figure out how to achieve the cost savings without compromising safety. There is no law of nature that says they're mutually exclusive, and without forcing them to be at odds there is no longer an incentive to choose the wrong one.

No WE didn't. THEY wanted to cut costs and it appears to me THEY cut corners to achieve it. This is like saying the professor made me cheat by making the exam artificially complicated and learning would have cost to much time.

This isn't a game or a class. If you have rules that result in preventable deaths in actual reality then you have bad rules. Even when there is plenty of blame to go around.

> ...Yes WE did...

Who is WE here? The general public who use the planes? The airlines who bought the planes?

The public and the airlines relied on the FAA. The FAA allowed boeing to self-cert. The FAA's job was safety. The FAA failed in that. It was their job and they didn't do it properly. It's the FAA at fault not some amorphous WE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings

But that's not because 737 MAX aircraft flying in US airspace somehow didn't have the problem that caused the crashes. There has been plenty of coverage online of US pilots repeatedly filing reports with the FAA of "near miss" incidents in 737 MAX aircraft caused by the same problem.

Are you seriously suggesting that?

For example, some marks of Spitfire had engines that spun in the opposite direction to the rest of them. The aircraft were otherwise similar.

If a pilot gunned the engine during the take-off roll, the torque reaction will cause it to swerve. The pilot can catch it with the rudder if they are expecting it. If the engine is spinning the wrong way, and the pilot inputs opposite rudder, the aircraft will wreck it's undercarriage and roll over on the runway.

Whilst training to fly any variant, when a pilot has experience in other variants is obviously going to be quick and easy, expecting them to swap back and forth between variants is also clearly unsafe.

Whereas without that, what did Boeing do? They gave pilots an iPad for difference training, and kept them in the dark about the differences between 737 NG and 737 MAX. That was their choice. The lie of omission by manufacturers is the whole reason why we have type certifications in the first place.

You're talking about training for completely different planes. Type training is commonly multiple weeks long. What I'm suggesting is something intermediate for two variants of a plane that are much more alike than that ("subtype training"), so that it's hours or days rather than weeks because there aren't as many differences to cover between two 737 variants than between a 737 and a 787.

> Whereas without that, what did Boeing do? They gave pilots an iPad for difference training, and kept them in the dark about the differences between 737 NG and 737 MAX.

Right, exactly. So they have the tiers too far apart. There is too big a jump between "here's an iPad" and tens of hours of training over multiple weeks, so there's a need for something in between for smaller variations.

Further the regulations say whether a type certificate is required, and what goes into it, is up to the administrator. It's not strictly defined. You can in in effect have subtype ratings.

FAA regulations are very much dependent on delegating authority rather than detailing every nitpicky thing. They really aren't that complicated.

Aren't the 737 and the 757/767 completely different planes? Isn't the difference between a 737 NG and a 737 MAX a lot smaller than the difference between a 737 NG and a 767?

> Further the regulations say whether a type certificate is required, and what goes into it, is up to the administrator. It's not strictly defined. You can in in effect have subtype ratings.

It's not surprising that the regulators have that level of discretion, but that only helps if it's expected they'll use it like that, which seems contrary to what Boeing did expect given their apparent aversion to it.

No. But then, given your questions thus far, we clearly don't have a common frame of reference, so I don't really know what you mean by completely different. They are not 100% different, that's for sure.

Consider this: the difference between a 737 NG and MAX is smaller than the difference between a 757 and 767. And yet the 757/767 share a single type rating. They were designed at the same time and have nearly identical cockpit layouts. And guess what, the Airbus 320 and 340 share the same type certificate as well, they're more different from each other than the 757 and 767 are to each other. But the two Airbus's also have the same cockpit layout, control systems, and software abstraction such that in normal flight they pretty much behave the same (obviously ground operations are different, they are rather substantially differently sized).

A "subtype" is just not applicable in this discussion. Any completely redesigned airplane from Boeing, in lieu of the 737 MAX, no matter its size, is going to so radically depart from any other airplane's flight characteristics and cockpit layout, that it would absolutely end up with its own type certificate. You can't design a new airplane model, and shove in the cockpit from a 737 NG. You can't and you wouldn't want to.

They dropped the ball. And the instant the Airbus 320neo was announced, Boeing was shown to have gotten caught with their pants down, and that has nothing at all to do with the regulatory paradigm.

In this specific case, though, I suspect that measuring the "X% the same", and what the new training should be, is much more difficult than it looks at a first glance.

No we don’t. Other companies have followed the regulations. Boeing chose to value cost avoidance over risk to human life. The owners and management of Boeing are culpable.

When we're talking about human lives, there is no regulation too burdensome or inefficient.

And your argument about there being too little competition is a little odd since hundred have been killed in two crashes because of competition.

> It came about because Boeing was trying to avoid the high costs of recertification, so they didn't change things that could have made the plane safer because changing them would have required recertification. So we have "safety regulations" negatively impacting safety by making it move expensive to improve safety than not.

That's absurd! The safety regulations were good, and the reason they didn't work is because the FAA hired Boeing to enforce them and Boeing didn't do so. Boeing only managed to flout the regulations because they fraudulently signed off their own planes as being airworthy. And the only reason Boeing got away with this is because they controlled the people in the FAA.

Your argument appears to be that Boeing cheated to get around the regulations, so it would be better if there were no regulations, because then Boeing wouldn't have to cheat. American capitalists are truly a special breed of human.

This is not only not true, it directly contradicts how regulations are evaluated. Regulations are judged at the cost per life saved (or similar metrics), and are rejected if that cost is above some threshold.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Policy_applicati...

I recommend we ban all travel over five miles. This will eliminate all danger from air travel and substantially reduce traffic fatalities.

The first article you cite, about delivery companies, is from an industry publication. Naturally, they're going to advocate things they view as beneficial to the industry.

Your claim that deregulation is the cause of electricity prices plummeting, and that the regulated side produces more cost, are wholly unsubstantiated. Even if there was substantiation of the trend, that doesn't mean one caused the other.

Likewise, according to the article you cite, there's now _more_ regulation in some areas of the airline industry, like security. Maybe _that's_ why fatalities have decreased. (I don't actually believe that, but it's equally plausible.)

Objective views of numbers and long-term trends are meaningless in the absence of an effort to understand the causal relationships. Correlation does not imply causation. Compelling evidence that deregulation provides economic benefit requires an evidence-backed explanation of _how_ it has done so.

Edited to address your edit re: the Internet as an industry: Again, it's the same issue. You don't present any evidence that the Internet being unregulated is the reason it's successful - or even a contributor. And the scenario you propose about ad regulation isn't anything like the kinds of actual regulations that have been proposed, like net neutrality.

For example there have been numerous financial crisis over the years, generally in the wake of the financial industry deregulation.

The deregulation of carriers in 1996 (Telecomm Act) helped spur some competition within known telecommunication products (mainly wireline) but was unknowing of the new and emerging markets. Which is part of the problem with deregulation of moving markets.

I think, however, many have a perspective that deregulated industry often creates monopoly. Healthcare, telecommunication, search, retail, etc are all monopolized by a select few. Is there still small, heel-biter competition? Sure. But DigitalOcean isn't a worry for AWS, GCP or Azure. It's a facade of competition in the "open" market.

As stated:

> There is a reason anti-deregulation screeds focus on isolated incidents and are heavy on narrative. Objective views of numbers and long term trends make the situation look far more rosey.

This isn't the the case of regulation strawman argument. Financial markets were plundered by greed in 2008 due to deregulation. That isn't an "isolated incident". Almost nobody spent time behind bars for the actions of those who abused it. And we know that it wouldn't have taken place with proper regulation and oversight.

Regulation of safety is paramount. Auto manufacturers didn't buy into providing the 3 point seat belt as standard equipment until they were forced. Deregulation isn't a silver bullet, but in many cases it plays out as a zero sum game. Many people lose and many people gain. It's often a vehicle to shift power and wealth as history so directly has shown us.

To use financial deregulation as an example. Yes, the 2008 crisis was bad. But on the whole, are people still worse off? When my parents bought a house in 1989, their interest rate was multiples higher than I’m paying now. One of the things that caused interest rates to collapse was securitization. Moreover, the boom times of the 1990s was also partly due to the financial system. It was deregulated banks that provided the private capital for the first tech boom. And, this website covers an industry that resists regulation at every turn—its bankrolled by investors largely free of regulations applicable to investors managing retail deposits, and numerous companies stay private to avoid public company regulations. What is the net cost-benefit from financial deregulation over the last 30 years, accounting for both benefits and costs? Pro-regulation folks never look at it in those terms.

There is no doubt that deregulated markets are leas predictable than regulated ones. Regulation can smooth out the boom-bust cycle. Thus looking at busts, instead of long-term trends, is a convenient way for pro-regulation folks to distort the overall impact of deregulatory measures.

In 1980, Congress passed the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act.

> Moreover, the boom times of the 1990s was also partly due to the financial system.

So surely you remember the tech bubble then and all of the consumer loss. One snippet to jog your memory: "Pets.com stock had fallen from its IPO price of $11 per share in February 2000 to $0.19 the day of its liquidation announcement." [0] I'm sure there were plenty of consumers who bought into that company under false pretenses.

> Thus looking at busts, instead of long-term trends, is a convenient way for pro-regulation folks to distort the overall impact of deregulatory measures.

What about if we flip that around, maybe... Looking at falsely inflated markets, instead of real earnings and growth, is a convenient way for pro-deregulation folks to distort the overall impact of regulatory measures.

Get rich schemes are unfair to the unknowing victim. There are more parallels with many of the questionable financial vehicles and products that turn up when no rules are in place.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com

Yes. Entire generations. Permanently and irreparably.

True cross-country air freight can easily cost >$100 to ship a small package weighing a single pound. Nothing you buy online is using this service unless you're paying out the wazoo for it.

Also, for an apples-to-apples comparison, try buying that cross-country plane ticket 2 hours before takeoff.

You don’t even have to take their word for it, you can get an instant quote right now from the freight companies (most places that aren’t amazon-scale probably pay about 30-40% of that retail rate)

Also, the passenger thing isn't remotely comparable because last-minute plane tickets aren't that cheap, and you're forgetting to account for the 12+ hours of labor involved in sending a mule along with your package. If you already had someone going there and back that day anyway, sure, sending the package along with them would be cheaper than sending it through UPS Next-Day. But if not, just sending the package will be way cheaper.

This is incorrect. Deregulation only started in the late '70s. There was adequate oversight and anti-trust enforcement until then. The unusually high growth in that period was during an _expanding_ government role (and wider union membership and 90% tax rate for the extreme brackets). Since the 80s, GDP growth has slowed to low single digits with continuously rising inequality.

>In the electric industry, deregulation...

Deregulation in this area also resulted cutting of power to tens of millions as blackmail for orders of magnitude higher rates until the state stepped in again.

And while initial deregulation of airlines has had many advantages, stifling the already inadequate oversight from FAA and thinking it will produce better out comes is literally fatally flawed reasoning.

And also during a unique period in history, when the US economy was the only one in the world not devastated by World War II and when there were huge new markets opening up that made corporations willing to pay high wages and taxes in order to capture market share. By the 1970s that was ending as markets saturated and other countries rebuilt their economies and caught up.

And incidentally dispelling the idea that, where necessary, adequate oversight does not kill an economy.

I work for a large company whose goals are not only to become largest, most profitable, and never lose money ever again. But also, to gain strategic ownership where ever possible by acquisition.