The Costs of Explaining Away Accidents
posted by Frank Pasquale
In the wake of a horrific train wreck in California (25 dead, 40 critically injured), operators of the train rapidly assigned blame for the crash to one bad apple, an engineer who (they say) went through a red light. Are they being too quick?
In a surprisingly swift assessment, the operators of the commuter train involved in the head-on crash that killed at least 25 people blamed its engineer for the horrific accident. However, a National Transportation Safety Board member [Kitty Higgins] cautioned that it was too early to establish the cause of Friday’s accident. Others, too, questioned the timing of the operator’s move to affix culpability.
Ray Garcia, a Metrolink conductor until 2006 who now works for Amtrak, [also] said initial evidence could be misleading, as in the case of a central computer inaccurately showing that a signal was red. “It is a rush to judgment,” he said. ”It’s just way too early in the game to point the finger.”
Of course, the operators have some obvious incentives to fault individual error (rather than systemic problems) as the cause of the crash. But what are the larger social consequences when we buy into a “bad apple” explanation for a given tragedy?
Here’s an anecdote from David Cay Johnston about another train crash:
A jury in Florida found that CSX had saved $2.4 billion by not properly maintaining its railroads for safety, which meant the stock was worth more than it would be otherwise and executives got a lot more money. They also left a lot of dead bodies in their wake.
In one case it killed eight people, including a police sergeant. The jury awarded $50 million in punitive damages to send a message. But there was no message because Congress requires that any punitive or actual damages paid by the railroads be picked up by the taxpayers if an Amtrak car is involved.
What incentive do I have as the head of a railroad to make the railroad safe? We’ve adopted all sorts of policies that induce moral hazards. You can make a lot of money, and if what you do kills people or damages the environment, the taxpayers will pick up the bill for your bad judgment. Guess what? We get a lot of bad judgment. . . . When he left the company, [former Treasury Secretary John Snow] . . . walked away with $70 million.
Before we conclusively assess blame for the LA Commuter Train crash, we need to know the larger context. How did safety rules in the LA area evolve over the past 10 years? How about tort and other liability-generating law? Did “tort reformers” make it harder to sue companies like Veolia Transportation, which supplied the engineer?
Johnston’s anecdote reminds me of James K. Galbraith’s superb new book The Predator State, which describes in detail the effective merger of corporate and governmental entities in many sectors of the economy. As one review notes, Galbraith “skewers conservatives for paying lip service to the free market while running up federal spending and deficits, handing out tax breaks to favored industries and making ‘free trade’ agreements that are anything but free.”
September 14, 2008 at 9:09 am
Posted in: Administrative Law
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Bruce Boyden - September 14, 2008 at 12:17 pm
The NTSB is correct to go slow here for another reason. It’s not just that it’s too early to tell if in fact the engineer made a mistake. It’s also too early to tell if any mistake that occurred could have been predicted and avoided. That’s a lesson that airline safety regulators began learning almost 40 years ago — that you should anticipate common mistakes and seek ways to minimize them. More here: http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2008/01/what_copyright.html
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