5 ms·

A bad engineer who designed a bridge that later collapsed and injured/killed people will go to jail, in addition to being fired.

• kjs3 11y ago
  People dying is not equivalent to people loosing money.
  • Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    Mass loss of money, while not as direct a cause and effect, can be far more lethal. People not going for checkups they can no longer afford. People scaling back budgets resulting in less healthy choices. People forgoing using costly medication. People moving to cheaper (and less safe) neighborhoods due to money lost. The general increase in stress with the money lost. Far harder to measure but magnitudes greater damage.
  • Crito 11y ago
    Madoff was sentenced to more prison time than many murderers. Murder and fraud may not be equivalent, but that does not mean that one must necessarily be less serious than the other.
    • tsotha 11y ago
      Financial crimes in the US carry some pretty draconian penalties in terms of sentence length. They have to, because if people think financial institutions are going to run off with their savings the whole industry collapses. In Madoff's case there was an additional issue - the people he defrauded were mostly wealthy and powerful.
• wwweston 11y ago
  Can anyone verify that there are cases of criminal negligence where engineers have been imprisoned as a penalty?
  • harperlee 11y ago
    No need. We can use the example of medical negligence, if your rather.
  • dmd 11y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maccabiah_bridge_collapse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maccabiah_bridge_collapse is one in Israel.
    • moioci 11y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versailles_wedding_hall_disaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versailles_wedding_hall_disaste... another Israeli example.
  • ridgeguy 11y ago
    Don't know if this was ever enforced, but in the Code of Hammurabi (~1754 BC), Sections 229 and 230 prescribed capital punishment in the event a builder constructed a house, which then fell and killed someone. http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/txt/ah/assyria/hammurabi.html#Hammurabi.Law.228 http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/txt/ah/assyria/hammurabi.html#Ham...
• moioci 11y ago
  The most relevant [ETA: US] case I can think of is the Hyatt Regency Walkway Collapse (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse) in which over 100 people died and the engineers involved lost their licenses. No one went to jail, and this case was actually noteworthy for professional consequences being imposed for negligence.
• kevinchen 11y ago
  That's not a 1:1 analogy. Civil engineering is a mature field, and the best practices in design / methods for analyzing structures are very well defined at this point. Effectively regulating the finance industry requires more than following the rules to the letter - also involves who you know, creativity in catching new kinds of misbehavior, and a bit of luck.
  • TaylorAlexander 11y ago
    There is an argument to be made that we shouldn't allow the finance sector this much creativity. Banking has worked for hundreds of years, and most problems seem to be caused by new phenomena. It may be better to over regulate and then remove certain regulations only when the activities can be proven safe, rather than let everyone go crazy with our money and bankrupt millions of Americans every decade or so.
    • AnimalMuppet 11y ago
      Right. New financial products/services should be, essentially, "guilty until proven innocent". Regulations should be very tight in the beginning, and then slowly relaxed - say, over 50 years. By way of analogy, if I create a new kind of medical device, the FDA does not say, "We don't have any regulations that cover that, so it's completely unregulated until we see the need to write some." No way. But a new financial product, while it can't kill anyone, it can still cause massive damage. (We just got a case study in this in 2008.) The default for any new financial idea should be regulated, not unregulated. And "but it's not a bank!" doesn't cut it. Mortgage securitization wasn't a bank activity, but it still nearly destroyed the world economy. Repo isn't a bank activity, either, but it played a significant role in the crash. Both are "bank-like" enough that they needed serious regulation. Since the risks were not yet understood, any regulation in place was not nearly stringent enough.
      • cm2187 11y ago
        How did repos play a role in the crash?