I agreed with some of your more abstract posts on this topic, but I really can't buy into that assumption that just being a little less fearful would reduce cos

I agreed with some of your more abstract posts on this topic, but I really can't buy into that assumption that just being a little less fearful would reduce costs by half. You wave that second bid around as if they had actually done the same work, at the lower price, with a known quantity of bloodshed. But that is only a hypothetical, That second bid might have had even bigger cost overruns, we don't know. The winning bid might actually have terrible safety standards while being lucky, we don't know. There is no simple, isolated safety/cost tradeoff that you can dial in at will and get the expected results. On the contrary, a contractor that is sloppy with safety will often also be sloppy with other things, causing costs to increase, not to sink.