David Brooks (New York Times, 5/28/10) informs us that the idea that “government should have more control over industry” is one of the “predictably partisan and often puerile” reactions to the oil spill. The lesson that smart people derive from the spill, Brooks says, is “that humans are not great at measuring and responding to risk when placed in situations too complicated to understand.”
What follows is, as Matthew Yglesias pointed out (5/28/10), largely cribbed from a 1996 New Yorker essay by Malcolm Gladwell (1/22/96) that argued that “accidents are not easily preventable” because of various psychological pitfalls that humans are prone to–e.g., in Brooks’ paraphrase, “people have trouble imagining how small failings can combine to lead to catastrophic disasters,” and “people have a tendency to place elaborate faith in backup systems and safety devices.”
In other words, it’s all very complicated, and what we need to do is work on “helping people deal with potentially catastrophic complexity” so we can “improve the choice architecture.”
But is the story really all that complicated? The New York Times had a story in yesterday’s paper (5/27/10), headlined “BP Used Riskier Method to Seal Well Before Blast,” about how the oil company chose to use a cheaper casing for the well, even though this could lead to a buildup of explosive gasses–as it seems did happen, leading to the catastrophic spillage in the Gulf. Did BP make this decision because as human beings they have trouble understanding complexity? Or did they make that choice because they are trying to pump oil as cheaply as possible so they can maximize their profits?
Of course, telling the story that way makes it sound like maybe you need to have some outside authority watching over companies engaged in dangerous activities to make sure their corner-cutting doesn’t lead to disaster. And that would be partisan, and probably puerile.
Brooks is at his best as a republican apologist and at his worst as dot connector. As for to complicated, the new favorite canard of the media. I’d say it’s all to complicated for the Times.
turns out the well design was based on some wishful thinking too…
TOM FOWLER Houston Chronicle
The seeds of destruction for the Deepwater Horizon rig may have been planted well before its drill bits started churning into the earth a mile under the sea.
Engineering plans for the thousands of feet of pipes and joints, which BP filed with federal regulators prior to drilling, made the well particularly susceptible to a major accident, a number of industry experts say.
â┚¬Ã…“The entire well construction, in my view, was cavalier,â┚¬Ã‚ said an engineer and industry consultant who asked not to be named. â┚¬Ã…“They were putting a lot of faith in their calculations that things would not go wrong.â┚¬Ã‚Â
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/energy/7022355.html
Now the National Guard is tasked with cleaning up BP’s mess. BP makes the big money not hiring lots of people to clean up their mess. Should the LANG send BP a bill for services rendered? Damned right and it should be big enough to cancel out any profits they made this year!
“Well” (to quote Reagan), they should NOT have promised efficacious ‘safety’ measures, then!
Brooks is a schmenge, but even by his own reasoning, if you’re in over your head, you should get the hell out of the water, right?
But that’s where the money is, innit?
And when you’ve got lapdogs instead of watchdogs for regulators and a mainstream media, you reckon any damage (to you, not to your victims) can easily be covered out of petty cash and the PR budget.
And you’d be right.
Nothing complicated about it.
I do have a question ? Would it be possible if not practical to freeze BPs domestic assets as an method to move towards a transparent resolution…..of this debacle ..
The mainstream media starts with corporate blame, shifts to government, and sooner or later they blame us for it. Sooner or later it will be our greed for oil that caused the spill – you watch.
Hey Corporate America; BP, Mining companies, Johnson and Johnson, Bankers, etc. thanks for putting patriotism ahead of profits in these hard times! Guess what, I’m being facetious and I’m not buying it, or your products.
Blamestorming aside, someone made a decision to ignore caution and avoid delay. The result was the oil spill. Instead of profit, loss to B.P. and other businesses, with an environmental catastrophe as a consequence. This reminds me of the Challenger disaster.
Gosh, Mr. Brooks, if we are rendered so helpless and hapless by complicated things, maybe we should just forget nuclear power.
And, considering that we really can’t blame little ol’ BP for this complicated but only-to-be-expected consequence of our greedy appetite for energy, maybe we the people should take over these energy companies, thereby assuming all the risk, the blame and the profits together. Imagine what we could do with those profits–schools, infrastructure, research.
Finally, Mr. Brooks, if these things are too complicated for you, perhaps you could retire from your nice little apologist job and spare us your typically sweetly stated inane excuses for corporate appetite.
Interesting that ignoring a “buildup of gasses” was central to both this Gulf disaster and the Massey mine explosion – in both cases (..and how many more scenarios impending..??!) the corporations evaded, defied, and shirked safeguards, oversight and regulations and showed a callous disregard for lives, the environment and common sense precautions.
Both cases involved the MMS – seemingly distracted and asleep at the switch, and in bed (even, literally!!) with the corporations they were supposed to be regulating…
In both cases, big red flashing warnings were blithely ignored – for the sake of expediency and profit$, and at everyone else’s peril.
This clearly shows core systemic deficiencies, particularly for giant energy firms (so deeply imbedded – pun intended! – into politician’s pockets) and oversight agencies with their own systemic defiencies and conflicts of interest.
It shows the the solutions need to be deeply systemic, also, and not just a cosmetic re-alignment of “deck chairs on the Titanic”.
That mess now swirling in the Gulf absolutely mirrors the “muck” at the core of how business and govt now operate on this planet, and we absolutely need a new generation of fearless “muck-rakers” to get in and clean up this Herculean Stygian horror, before we all drown in it.
Unfortunately, the ‘fouth estate’ media is largely as conflicted, tainted, and systemically flawed as well and needs its own internal “de-mucking”…
A big part of this is the toxic, deadly fossil fuel addiction (a cumbersome dinosaur) from which we need to learn to wean ourselves ASAP.
We also need severe penalties to all those who endanger lives, health and our precious eco-systems (and those who abet such destructive activities) so that we can begin to learn that such continued cataclysmic (and even incremental) infringements can be tolerated NO longer!!!!
Brooks’ argument is what is partisan and puerile, the usual territory of right-wing apologists. Blame those for exactly what you’re doing, this is Karl Rove’s contribution to humanity. Brooks is trying it out now, with an immediate loss to his credibility. What never ceases to amaze me is that these people, people like David Brooks, need a clean place to live too, but they proceed as if they are living on another planet! We know the mainstream media is increasingly a mouthpiece for big business, and a right-wing military agenda, basically they are advocating all those things that will create hell on Earth for the vast amount of the global population. And we’re just going to let them do it? That’s just wrong.
If I recall correctly, “too complicated,” was exactly what the Times wanted everyone to think single payer, or a publically-funded healthcare program would be.
Saying things are too complicated for the “lay person” to understand is just deliberate mystification. It’s not so complicated to understand the Gulf is filling up with oil and BP and the government have done nothing to stop it. If the federal government oversaw the response (but on the up and up, not by pandering to BP) we would have already seen top engineers from MIT and Stanford, etc. involved in fixing the problem.
I just heard an engineer/geologist from a CA university outlining a reasonable sounding plan that would stop the oil flow. His take was that BP doesn’t intend to seal their well and nothing else they do will stop the oil spill. According to him, BP and the U.S. government (who loves BP) both know this very well.
One of the cures for our addiction to oil is RATiONING! Guess what, we lived through it during WWII. I was there. And we are still at war. Or have we forgotten? Rationing might be inconvenient, but it works. Of course, everyone would be blaming everyone else and that’s not good near elections. And probably, Obama would get thrown out with the oily, scummy bath water he inherited. There’s just no cure for human nature.
Watching the live feed, from my engineering background, this is going to work