> When you look at licensed engineering professions, they tend to be more about ensuring that designs meet agreed upon standards. If the engineer involved was following the standards and actually reviewed the design, it’s unlikely there would be any basis for criminal charges.
This still leads to bad results because then if ordinary practice leads to bad outcomes or inefficiency, everyone continues on with it because there is no liability for the status quo and potential liability for doing anything different.
The thing that usually works is to put liability on companies that cause injuries through negligence, because then the company has the incentive to prevent injuries in the best way it can come up with, without specifying any particular method of doing it. This isn't perfect because then you still have courts deciding what "negligence" means and large companies rigidly conforming to whatever the lawyers say, but at least then they're operating in a competitive environment where the ones that waste resources being unnecessarily rigid make less money and the ones that fail to prevent the harm get sued.
The problem is this doesn't work for governments because they're not subject to competition. Then they either immunize themselves from getting sued or waste a ridiculous amount of resources over-engineering a way to prevent the harm or fail to prevent it and get sued but it's the taxpayer who pays, and in all cases the harm falls on the public.
This still leads to bad results because then if ordinary practice leads to bad outcomes or inefficiency, everyone continues on with it because there is no liability for the status quo and potential liability for doing anything different.
The thing that usually works is to put liability on companies that cause injuries through negligence, because then the company has the incentive to prevent injuries in the best way it can come up with, without specifying any particular method of doing it. This isn't perfect because then you still have courts deciding what "negligence" means and large companies rigidly conforming to whatever the lawyers say, but at least then they're operating in a competitive environment where the ones that waste resources being unnecessarily rigid make less money and the ones that fail to prevent the harm get sued.
The problem is this doesn't work for governments because they're not subject to competition. Then they either immunize themselves from getting sued or waste a ridiculous amount of resources over-engineering a way to prevent the harm or fail to prevent it and get sued but it's the taxpayer who pays, and in all cases the harm falls on the public.