How factories were made safe

So, one lesson we might apply to is infosecurity would be automatic liability for information they collected and leaked. That would cause companies to fight for their user privacy and implement stronger security measure while also collecting less information.<p>Well, maybe. We won&#x27;t know if it work well until it&#x27;s actually implemented.

&gt; Thus, accidents were typically attributed to worker “carelessness.”<p>This attitude survives, not only in the workplace (where safety laws are often fought as &quot;needless red tape&quot;) but outside it too (your poverty is due to carelessness, and is nobody else&#x27;s responsibility).

The audacity of that tangent at the end. &quot;Natural and inevitable&quot;? People fought and died for your 40 hour work week. You know May Day? The Labor Day for the rest of the world? Commemorates the Haymarket Massacre, which was fighting for the 8 hour work day.

It&#x27;s tempting to use macro trends, like the advent of workplace safety, to confirm one&#x27;s existing beliefs. Economy-wide changes like this are pretty much without exception driven by a bunch of different factors working together and you can pretty much always find some to cherry pick to back whatever your opinion is that minute.<p>Pretty much all the current literature about workplace safety seems to follow one ideological bent. I commend the author for at least hitting the topic from a wide array of angles even if he missed a couple.

&gt; The lack of systems thinking<p>We managed to make factories safe but kill 1.3 M people&#x2F;year in traffic instead [1]<p>I wonder: will we ever manage to apply systems thinking in traffic as well?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.who.int&#x2F;news-room&#x2F;fact-sheets&#x2F;detail&#x2F;road-traffic-injuries" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.who.int&#x2F;news-room&#x2F;fact-sheets&#x2F;detail&#x2F;road-traffi...</a>

&gt;&gt;a simple and effective change to the law set in motion an entire apparatus of management and engineering decisions that resulted in the creation of a new safety culture. It’s a case study of a classic attitude from economics: just put a price on the harm—<i>_internalize the externality_</i>—and let the market do the rest.<p>There it is — internalize the externality — when someone is profiting via externalizing costs or harms, they are essentially stealing from others (either the commons or the specific people on whom the harm falls).<p>Ensuring that external costs are borne by those who create them is simply requiring that people creating business are actually ADDING value to society, and not simply extracting or stealing value by creating greater external harm than their products&#x2F;services create.

<i>Thus, accidents were typically attributed to worker “carelessness.” Even if partly true, this was a dead end in terms of understanding the causes and how to fix them. It would not survive a modern root-cause or “five whys” analysis. In modern parlance, “systems thinking” was lacking.</i><p>This way of thinking still appears to be common in US road&#x2F;street design.

This is a summary of <i>how</i> the factories were made safe masquerading as a summary of <i>why</i> the factories were made safe. It comes to the Whiggish conclusion that factories were made safe because time moves forward. It mentions that the real reason was Workers&#x27; Comp., which made injured workers a <i>cost</i> for employers, and buries in a parenthetical that Workers&#x27; Comp was created by socialist union protests, and taken up by German politicians as a way to reduce the socialists&#x27; popular support.<p>It concludes with some weird-ass hypothetical conversations between the author and a made-up socialist that ignores that fact. In between, it implies that socialists and anarchists weren&#x27;t responsible for the 40 hour workweek, either, without offering any evidence (who would need evidence that time moves forward?)<p>It&#x27;s really an apologia for capitalism masquerading as a history of factory safety. Apparently it&#x27;s because of attitudes and mindsets and lack of systems thinking <i>that everybody had, including the workers</i>. If the workers were universally fine with the situation, it&#x27;s really strange that they protested in the streets until the general populace backed them to the degree that government had to adopt the policy for fear of being voted out.<p>edit: It&#x27;s really telling that it starts with an anecdote blaming a child for his own death. You see, the child sat during his shift because one of the managers would let him. With proper systems-thinking mindset, he would have of course been forced to stand for 80 hours a week.

Roots of Progress explores a fascinating and critically vital question, but does so under ideological blinders and using manifestly obvious rhetorical techniques (strawman arguments, blame-the-victim, historical revisionism) which hugely impair the entire project.<p>Tremendous potential. Miserable accomplishment.

Just wanted to say thanks for posting this, I&#x27;m finding this incredibly fascinating. I can clearly see there&#x27;s been so much ingenuity (and suffering) that&#x27;s finally gotten us to where we are now.

I love reading about the industrial revolution and the social and economic change from the mid 19th to early 20th century, because you can draw so many parallels to the modern information revolution. The details of the story are different, but the outline is the same:<p>We&#x27;ve got massive progress and insane improvements to efficiency. The world as it exists now couldn&#x27;t have been dreamed up half a century ago. On the other hand, there&#x27;s also serious regressions caused by the efficiency, with novel problems that our society is ill-equipped to solve. All the while, we have a wild west business environment and the founders, executives, and capitalists leading the way are getting unfathomably rich as they make a land grab for ownership over the infrastructure and technology that enables our modern efficiency.

We really do need liability for software.