> Yes but none of us want to die.

This is the problematic false dichotomy. If you give someone a choice between "this specific set of onerous, expensive, competition-destroying regulations" or "you will be killed", they make the obvious choice.

But those aren't the only options. Existing regulations are poorly optimized. It would be possible to save the same number of lives -- more lives -- by doing more work to improve the benefit:burden ratio of regulations.

The problem is that people aren't interested in this. It's detail-oriented work that doesn't make for good sound bites, so the beneficiaries (the general public) aren't organized enough to know how to ask for it, and the organized incumbents don't want it because it would result in a larger number of viable competitors.

And it's too easy for incumbents to make the sound bites go the other way, by pretending that not spending a billion dollars to save one life is irresponsible, even though the same billion dollars could save more than a thousand lives if saved here and used beneficially somewhere else.

Could you give us an example of a specific FAA or NTSB regulation which has a suboptimal benefit:burden ratio?

> Could you give us an example of a specific FAA or NTSB regulation which has a suboptimal benefit:burden ratio?

Sure. The air traffic control system is 20th century technology that has air traffic controllers doing things manually that could be done by computers. A better automated system would have the same or better safety while requiring significantly less labor.

The FAA has been actively working to modernise the air traffic control system for decades. It's a hard problem. I fail to see how that addresses the point?

The point is that it's a hard problem whose solution yields large returns, but we're expending resources to solve it at a rate that takes decades to produce the solution.

That's true. I'm not saying the safety regulations are a bad idea. I'm just saying that they have the side effect of giving the advantage to large airlines and posing a barrier to entry for new competitors. (And that, since they are indeed regulations and have gotten more stringent over time, it is a mistake to think of the airline industry as being "deregulated" in the sense of the term "regulation" that is being used in this discussion.)

Driving is far less safe than flying, but people choose to drive all the time.

Yes, and even after 9/11 there is clear data showing that people stopped flying en masse and took the wheel instead, resulting in increased overall death count.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/05/september-11-r...

> However, Professor Gerd Gigerenzer, a German academic specialising in risk, has estimated that an extra 1,595 Americans died in car accidents in the year after the attacks – indirect victims of the tragedy.

With driving people think they are in control and that safety is determined by their own skills. When you sit in a plane you are at the mercy of the airline and the pilot. I would more compare it to buying a car. And there are a lot of safety regulations on cars. When you buy a car you know that the steering or brakes won't fail randomly.

Depends on the price.