4 ms·

Suing is all fine and dandy. But no amount of money is going to fix the ocean.

holygoat 16y ago
The idea is that assigning a tangible cost to fucking up will cause people to try hard to avoid it. For example, if everyone in the BP executive chain were personally responsible, and would go to jail/get beaten up/etc. as a consequence of an oil spill, then this might not have happened.
- angrycoder 16y ago
  No, it won't. The execs will make their money, spend it or squirrel it away, and be gone when the damage is done. Even if you did something as extreme as threaten jail time, the chance to make millions still outweighs the chance of any punishment. Thats all it is at that point, its gambling. Either you make a ton of money, or you loose. The only problem is, when you loose, you make a whole shitload of other people and the environment loose in the process.
byrneseyeview 16y ago
That argument applies to any transaction that transfers money. The point is to give BP the proper incentives. There is some point at which the reward for drilling (cheap energy) is worth the risk of a disaster. By ensuring that they'll get sued for the monetary cost of the disaster, you can get the socially optimal level of drilling. And if they'd been "regulated" by an insurer who promised to pay the cleanup costs of the once-a-decade spills, you can bet that these regulations would be to a higher standard.
- MichaelSalib 16y ago
  And if they'd been "regulated" by an insurer who promised to pay the cleanup costs of the once-a-decade spills, you can bet that these regulations would be to a higher standard. Given that a large insurance provider called AIG promised to pay massive clean up costs and utterly failed at regulating its clients, I think your theory is incorrect. At the very least, it is incomplete. Your theory needs to incorporate the fact that human organizations often behave irrationally, and even when motivated by appropriate incentives, they are prone to systemic reasoning errors. In addition, it needs to deal with the fact that a representative government cannot credibly refuse to promise to clean up messes of this sort, so an element of moral hazard will always remain.

The idea is that assigning a tangible cost to fucking up will cause people to try hard to avoid it. For example, if everyone in the BP executive chain were personally responsible, and would go to jail/get beaten up/etc. as a consequence of an oil spill, then this might not have happened.

angrycoder 16y ago
No, it won't. The execs will make their money, spend it or squirrel it away, and be gone when the damage is done. Even if you did something as extreme as threaten jail time, the chance to make millions still outweighs the chance of any punishment. Thats all it is at that point, its gambling. Either you make a ton of money, or you loose. The only problem is, when you loose, you make a whole shitload of other people and the environment loose in the process.

byrneseyeview 16y ago

That argument applies to any transaction that transfers money. The point is to give BP the proper incentives. There is some point at which the reward for drilling (cheap energy) is worth the risk of a disaster. By ensuring that they'll get sued for the monetary cost of the disaster, you can get the socially optimal level of drilling. And if they'd been "regulated" by an insurer who promised to pay the cleanup costs of the once-a-decade spills, you can bet that these regulations would be to a higher standard.

MichaelSalib 16y ago
And if they'd been "regulated" by an insurer who promised to pay the cleanup costs of the once-a-decade spills, you can bet that these regulations would be to a higher standard. Given that a large insurance provider called AIG promised to pay massive clean up costs and utterly failed at regulating its clients, I think your theory is incorrect. At the very least, it is incomplete. Your theory needs to incorporate the fact that human organizations often behave irrationally, and even when motivated by appropriate incentives, they are prone to systemic reasoning errors. In addition, it needs to deal with the fact that a representative government cannot credibly refuse to promise to clean up messes of this sort, so an element of moral hazard will always remain.