> The United States leads the world in airline safety. That’s because of the way we assign blame when accidents do happen. The communists were great at assigni

> The United States leads the world in airline safety. That’s because of the way we assign blame when accidents do happen. The communists were great at assigning blame, just usually not to the right person. If I remember correctly during the VW emissions scandal [1] they tried to pin it all on one engineer. The UK Post Office similarly tried to blame Fujitsu for a systemic failure [2]. > In the aftermath of a disaster, our immediate reaction is often to search for some person to blame. Authorities frequently vow to “find those responsible” and “hold them to account,” as though disasters happen only when some grinning mischief-maker slams a big red button labeled “press for catastrophe.” With Health and Safety (H&S) in the UK, every person is each themselves responsible for raising concerns as they see them. If something were to happen in our work place for example, I think questions would rightfully be asked of all employees 'if you saw it and agree it was dangerous, why didn't you say anything?'. To foster this all you need is a work culture that accepts criticism and is open to discussion about it. > It’s often much more productive to ask why than to ask who. In some industries, this is called a “blameless postmortem,” and in aviation, it’s a long-standing, internationally formalized tradition. It's all good and well, but the blame is then just assigned to a system with no real accountability - any accident can be explained away with tighter control measures. I remember a story about nuclear lab technicians taking photos of radioactive materials and almost causing a serious incident. I couldn't find an article on it, but it happens regularly enough at nuclear facilities [3]. You can't use a system to entirely automate your way out of negligence. If you hire people that have no drive to improve their work place, you will inevitably have issues. Just a few days ago I was at a theme park type event and noticed that a structure that was fully on the ground (easily accessible) had been allowed to rust. Most paints for this use have a 10 year rating, but the employees were young and had no interest in the future of this place. An accident will at some point occur and some rules will be changed, but the company itself will continue to hire people with no incentive for the company's future. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal [3] https://www.science.org/content/article/safety-problems-los-alamos-laboratory-delay-us-nuclear-warhead-testing-and-production https://www.science.org/content/article/safety-problems-los-...