Your point is a good one, although it not at all obvious or self-evident that the regulatory burden is more "costly" on society than that of poorly built struct

Your point is a good one, although it not at all obvious or self-evident that the regulatory burden is more "costly" on society than that of poorly built structures. Your post doesn't provide any evidence of that. I would guess that the general consensus holds the opposite to be true, at least for building codes in the U.S. today. It is certainly a difficult question to analyze in any kind of numeric detail.