you say 'All your examples together aren't worth that one earthquake.', but the banqiao dam failure killed a quarter of a million people, which is five times the death toll of that earthquake. however, there have been many earthquakes like this, not just one

i think i was adequately clear above that i think the case for government regulation of house construction to prevent ordinary people from buying deathtraps is potentially much stronger than the case for government licensing of civil engineers who property developers hire to build bridges; quoting a part of my comment you were replying to:

> so on one hand building codes make a huge difference in cases like earthquakes and fires, where places with reasonable and enforced building codes have orders of magnitude lower mortality than places like iran, turkey, and haiti ... but ... even if government licensing of engineers were the best way to ensure that ordinary people don't get suckered into buying a deathtrap house or a money-pit house, that wouldn't imply that it's the best way for property developers to avoid hiring incompetent structural engineers who will build them deathtrap bridges

but i note that you seem to have retreated to defending the motte of protecting people from living in deathtrap houses, which i wasn't trying to attack. should i thus conclude that you concede that it's a terrible idea to extend such regulation any further than mass-market houses to be sold to the general public?

as for the survivorship-bias thing, you seem to have misunderstood. i'm saying that, among the recent engineering disasters (not 'issues') i can cite, while all of them are from situations with regulated engineering, many more of them, and all of the most severe ones, were caused by government regulation (my first list) than caused by freedom from government regulation (my second list). this doesn't necessarily imply that the disasters in the second list were less heavily regulated (bhopal, for example, was notoriously heavily regulated) but we are still trading off disasters of the first type against disasters of the second type by our degree of government regulation

this wouldn't justify the claim that the optimal degree of government regulation to prevent disasters is zero, but it clearly does justify the claim that the optimal degree of government regulation of civil engineering is less than at present, rather than more, which was the claim i intended to make. i'm sorry that was unclear

in the case of many projects in the first list, similar projects proceeded in other countries with less regulation, but have not resulted in similar disasters; compare, for example, banqiao with the hydroelectric dam system in the us, or chernobyl with fukushima daiichi, or the beirut blast with the innumerable safely delivered fertilizer shipments around the world every day

it's true that heavily regulated construction has become much more prevalent over the last century, but contrary to your assertion, this has not been associated with smaller death tolls in the resulting disasters; it has been associated with larger ones, as well as a near halt to progress in finding safer and cheaper designs for infrastructure projects, progress which was quite dramatic over the previous century in the countries where it was minimally impeded by regulation

not only was this what brunel predicted, it is more or less what you'd expect from observing the incentives at play. 'regulation' is a sort of petitio principii in a word, like 'structured programming' or 'responsible disclosure', because it's never a question of whether a bridge is built by accident or by deliberate planning; bridges more advanced than a fallen tree do not get built by accident. rather, the question is who are the decisionmakers deciding what the plan will be, how competent are they, and what are their incentives?

shifting the decisionmaking from cigar-chomping investors to civil servants and politicians could in theory make it either worse or better, but generally it tends to make it worse, because however poorly the investors' incentives align with the public's, the civil servants' and politicians' incentives are even more poorly aligned, and their competence is lower