Too Big to Exist?

pgl at EconoSpeak:

...While the “drill baby drill” proponents of offshore drilling used to tell us that we had the technology to keep oil spills from happening or once they did happen from becoming environmental nightmares - as we have recently learned, technology has not advanced that much. If oil companies are shielded from paying more than pennies on the dollar for such potential problems, it is no wonder they under-invest in this technology. The stock market seems to be signaling that BP shareholders may indeed pay much more than pennies on the dollar. If that does happen, bravo! ...

John Boehner voices a very different view than mine:

In response to a question from TPMDC, House Minority Leader John Boehner said he believes taxpayers should help pick up the tab for the clean up. "I think the people responsible in the oil spill--BP and the federal government--should take full responsibility for what's happening there," Boehner said at his weekly press conference this morning. Boehner's statement followed comments last Friday by US Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue who said he opposes efforts to stick BP, a member of the Chamber, with the bill. "It is generally not the practice of this country to change the laws after the game," he said. "Everybody is going to contribute to this clean up. We are all going to have to do it. We are going to have to get the money from the government and from the companies and we will figure out a way to do that." So today I asked Boehner, "Do you agree with Tom Donohue of the Chamber that the government and taxpayers should pitch in to clean up the oil spill?" The shorter answer is yes.

This sounds like the Congressman wants us to subsidize negative externalities.

Essentially, the well was too big too fail, but it failed anyway. Technology has given us the ability to create things whose individual or collective failure can cause tremendous damage, from oil wells to complicated financial assets, more so than ever before.

It is evident that we need to do a much better job of evaluating and regulating these types of risks. If the answer to the question "what if there's a problem and all of our safeguards fail" is "there will be a huge disaster," and if we really can't quantify the true risks due to black swans, etc., or be absolutely certain we can handle or even think of every possible contingency, then perhaps these technologies are too big to safely exist.