Insurance companies often require higher standards than building code demands.
Also, politically, the reason some societies have strict building codes is because there is a group-- insurance companies-- that have an economic incentive to push for stronger codes.
I heard a lecture once by a structural engineer who had worked in hurricane alleys in Florida. He said there was a cycle of tightening up rules (for instance on the number of nails needed to hold down a roof) after big storms, then relaxing them as the years went by. Without a big storm to remind people just why the rules were tightened up, there was inevitable pressure to relax them in order to make it cheaper to build.
This is more off-topic, but another interesting thing he said was that you could get a sense of maximum local wind speeds by looking at airstream-type trailers. They are, as you might expect, extremely well engineered to resist the sorts of wind pressures you get at highway speeds, so winds of 60-80mph don't tend to rip the hide off them. But you get above a certain threshold, and they all tend to give way at once.
Another factor is, if the storm is big enough, the feds step in with FEMA and bailout people who are underinsured.
People living in Florida's hurricane alley pay nowhere near the cost of the risk of living there, and the result is overbuilding, and catastrophic property losses when the big one eventually does hit.
Its true that government standards get tightened and relaxed, just as they do in banking. Which is probably a good reason not to rely upon them. They are dumbed-down, lowest common denominator standards anyway.
In a recent storm I saw a tree that had visibly fallen against a fully brick house and had merely slid down the wall. The house stood almost immaculate (aside from the smeared wall), with a broken window and a crushed fence.
I have noticed that roofers here in Ontario are rather lax in competency here. My in-laws townhouse just got re-shingled and they lost an entire shingle sheet (it had never been touched by a nail). Their neighbour in the building lost two shingles, one above the other, on a joint in the plywood and above the black-paper. They're lucky the management company got on the ass of the roofers and got it fixed as we got hit by about 50mm that weekend.
It's not just roofers. We've done a lot of runs out to repair siding jobs. We've seen entire siding sheets that had been installed with a single nail. They'll do like 2-3 rows with barely more than a nail per sheet and then nail an entire row properly, but because there's so much weight on the row that's nailed correctly that heavy-winds can cause the sheets to stretch and then when a big gust hits it can pop the sheet out of the lock.
Seriously, being used to solid reinforced concrete or brick buildings, building shoddy wood structures covered with paper-thin siding in tornado or hurricane alleys and then crying your eyes out when the inevitable happens is almost funny.
Insurance companies can coexist perfectly with lax building codes so long as the market can bear higher premiums - if cost of damage multiplied by probability of earthquake over a time frame is lower than the increased cost of construction or remedial work then nothing gets done. Engineer cartels and political will to avoid preventable casualties at all costs are more important in saving lives here than the free market.
Seems like a good illustration of just how insidious systemic corruption can be to the development of a nation.
"The Industrial Revolution in Japan occurred during Meiji period." [September 1868 through July 1912]
Not saying I'd like that, but interesting to see how other things already operate that way.
It would also make it economical for insurance companies to quite literally be thieves, and uneconomical for individuals not to pay protection money to the most powerful (and likely also most expensive) insurance company.
While savvy investors may indeed underestimate low-probability risks, I take issue with any claim the mortgage bubble showed this. The sad end of that bubble was an extremely high probability event.
The main thing the debacle showed was the willingness of many people to believe fallacious arguments which made reference to claims about low probability events. Even there, the willingness of investors to believe that standard "this time it's different" line has been shown over and over again.
And, for some, having friends in the government to bail out the fools who bet on the bubble growing forever so you can get paid.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/fear_and_overr...
Or table here: http://www.schneier.com/essay-170.html
A free society is not exclusive of a strong government to protect property rights and handle externalities economically. It's when they take liberties with their charge when things get bad.
I feel compelled to point out that not all journalists from the New York Times necessarily reside in New York. Based on his past articles and Wikipedia entry, Norimitsu Onishi seems to have been the NYT's Tokyo bureau chief at one point in time.
Even with hedging of risks and liabilities involved in shoddy construction, even with information brokers in place to help people make informed decisions, even assuming ample construction of houses across the spectrum for all kinds of buyers, it definitely seems like without some kind of guiding hand that failure to consider long-term risks will lead to a lot of deaths.
What's worse is that a lot of the codes are in place to protect neighbors as well. Electrical wiring codes, for instance, are there to prevent fires. The hypothetical You might say that this turns into insurance and liability, but accurately judging the long-term risk and correlative damages sounds exactly like a government imposing regulations.
Building codes are, in fact, the market response to earlier problems with lots of houses burning and falling down. The fact that later generations who grew up with houses not burning or falling down don't have the insight to know this is not evidence that they're right.
And they always make the argument that it would be good for the poor, and it's always bullshit. The poor don't benefit from dying periodically because some jerk made a quicker buck than he otherwise would have.
You get shanty towns when people are too poor to afford anything else. People don't live in a shithole just for kicks, they do it because they have no choice. We shouldn't pretend this tradeoff doesn't exist.
You can build a surprisingly nice house for 1,000$ worth of materials, but there is no incentive when you build in the middle of a shanty town.
Of course, that $1000 house costs a full year of wages from a person earning $3-4/day and spending almost all of it on essentials. And this ignores the fact that many shantytowns occur in areas where property rights are weakly enforced - build a nice house, and 20 people will show up claiming they own it. Even if you have the money, you might instead be spending it on your children's education or something of that nature.
Shantytowns are a result of poverty and nonexistent property rights. Building codes, even if they were enforced, would not magically enable shantytown dwellers to afford something better.
Social disorder feeds off it's self, when you live in a shanty town and are likely to be robbed it is much more reasonably to spend an extra 5$ on alcohol and get to enjoy it vs invest it in stuff that you might not keep for vary long, do that once a week for 5 years and your talking about 1,300$. Some of the hidden advantages of building codes are allowing people to build nicer houses without standing out from their community.
The hidden advantage of building codes you describe only applies when everyone can afford that $1000 house.
That doesn't mean that the codes shouldn't be updated / refactored once in a while, but that's a pretty difficult thing to undertake, and there may not be political will...
Rip all of it out.
The scary thing is that the basement lights are still on the old wiring - roughly 1920's vintage. Fortunately, no gaslights left, although I do have one fitting in the upstairs sitting room!
turns out, most of the time that's actually too much for everyone else to fathom, frankly.
Does anyone know if Japan has some equivalent to the Canadian Iron Ring[1]? I feel like examples like this drive home how it's even more meaningful if you live in the Ring of Fire. (Which would be an ideal name for such a ring)
So I disagree with your analogy with the Hammurabi laws. I looked up the text:
"If a builder build a house for some one, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall in and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death."
"[...] If it ruin goods, he shall make compensation for all that has been ruined, and inasmuch as he did not construct properly this house which he built and it fell, he shall re-erect the house from his own means."
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/hamcode.html
It actually doesn't contain anything like a building code -- no regulation for how to build houses, what materials and methods can be used, what standards should be met. It is only tort: how you construct a building, government does not care, but it will hold you liable if it fails. This is a solidly "libertarian" type of law: uphold property rights, but do not intervene otherwise, and do not tell people how to do things.