Titanic lifeboats and regulation
This is from Frankie (one of the main instigators behind the creation of the BoN), and was sparked by the Hindenburg post.
"About the Titanic. It, infamously, didn’t have enough lifeboats. Why? One explanation seems to be because they did the minimum requirement – with no obvious reason to conduct their own research on what was possible or would be to their best advantage – the government regulatory body in the UK asked of them. Which was to have a certain number of boats per TONNAGE, not to account for lifeboats of the total number of passengers. Yet another classic example of the unintended consequences of regulation where government involvement obfuscates actors’ best interests and lulls everyone into a false sense of complacency just by its mere existence."
Another interesting aspect to me about this is that the culprit is always said to be a lack of detailed enough, specific enough, and invasive enough regulation, rather than the existence of any regulation at all in the first place. When the Russians graded their lamp factories by the weight of their output, they made the bases of the lamps out of lead. You could barely move them. When they told their lightbulb factories they were to be evaluated by the total wattage of their output, they produced only industrial floodlights. When the regulations were changed and the factories were judged by the number of bulbs, the only bulbs you could find on store shelves were reading lights. Yet if you had just told the factory that it was operating for its own profit, you would have had a nice mix of lightbulbs responsive to customer demand.
"About the Titanic. It, infamously, didn’t have enough lifeboats. Why? One explanation seems to be because they did the minimum requirement – with no obvious reason to conduct their own research on what was possible or would be to their best advantage – the government regulatory body in the UK asked of them. Which was to have a certain number of boats per TONNAGE, not to account for lifeboats of the total number of passengers. Yet another classic example of the unintended consequences of regulation where government involvement obfuscates actors’ best interests and lulls everyone into a false sense of complacency just by its mere existence."
Another interesting aspect to me about this is that the culprit is always said to be a lack of detailed enough, specific enough, and invasive enough regulation, rather than the existence of any regulation at all in the first place. When the Russians graded their lamp factories by the weight of their output, they made the bases of the lamps out of lead. You could barely move them. When they told their lightbulb factories they were to be evaluated by the total wattage of their output, they produced only industrial floodlights. When the regulations were changed and the factories were judged by the number of bulbs, the only bulbs you could find on store shelves were reading lights. Yet if you had just told the factory that it was operating for its own profit, you would have had a nice mix of lightbulbs responsive to customer demand.
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