Insurance companies doing this to help people manage risk and are often attempting to help people in moments of grief and tragedy, and those people opted into the contract.
Train companies doing this to unsuspecting towns are stochastic monsters killing people because the victims are a financial externality and therefore cheaper dead than alive. They knew that a disaster could happen but chose good balance sheets over externalized risk.
Boiling this down to pure economics is monstrous; Flip this around. What if I get to decide if you live or die based on my spreadsheets?
Clearly the dollar value of thing isn't the only thing that matters. We should make these as safe as we can afford to, to the point that mass death or even mass destruction doesn't happen while billionaires are made from it. We can't afford infinite safety but while we can afford more safety we should. It is even correct from a macroeconomic standpoint, people who don't die or suffer from disasters go on to be more productive in the economy than dead people.
Train companies doing this to unsuspecting towns are stochastic monsters killing people because the victims are a financial externality and therefore cheaper dead than alive. They knew that a disaster could happen but chose good balance sheets over externalized risk.
Boiling this down to pure economics is monstrous; Flip this around. What if I get to decide if you live or die based on my spreadsheets?
Clearly the dollar value of thing isn't the only thing that matters. We should make these as safe as we can afford to, to the point that mass death or even mass destruction doesn't happen while billionaires are made from it. We can't afford infinite safety but while we can afford more safety we should. It is even correct from a macroeconomic standpoint, people who don't die or suffer from disasters go on to be more productive in the economy than dead people.