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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

It’s not surprising at all that the lack of accountability goes right to the top, and it’s tragic that it takes an earthquake to expose the corruption. But Turkey is far from the only country with a corrupt, ticking-time-bomb of construction and infrastructure quality issues. Pretty much every low-to-middle income country has taken the semi-rational approach of cutting corners in order to do more with less. And the high-income countries have arguably swung the pendulum too far in the opposite direction, with very high standards that lead to very high prices for construction of anything (and a few unfortunate places which enjoy the high price of high standards, and enough corruption to bypass these standards).

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"Do more with less" is perfectly fine and rational.

"Do less with more and line my pockets along the way" is the problem.

If customers were _paying less_ for the substandard construction they're getting, okay that's one thing. But if customers are paying more, and they _think_ they're getting sturdy code-compliant construction, but contractors at one or more levels are skimming money and using substandard materials and techniques, then that's a corruption, enforcement, and auditing problem.

> "Do more with less" is perfectly fine and rational.

> ...

> If customers were _paying less_ for the substandard construction they're getting, okay that's one thing.

Not really. Customers are likely not in position to rationally make those kinds of trade-offs, and even if they were, there's a good chance they're not going to be the one to pay the price (e.g. they sell the home, and the purchaser N sales later dies because it collapsed due to the substandard construction).

Whether the buyers/victims are able to assess the situation or not don’t change the fact: they paid more for shoddier construction.

They might sell and move on but since this is a systemic issue, it’s very likely that their next residence has been built as shoddily and is just as dangerous.

> Whether the buyers/victims are able to assess the situation or not don’t change the fact: they paid more for shoddier construction.

I'm not disputing that's a problem, too. My only quibble is with the idea it's fine for people to knowingly choose substandard housing for some kind of discount.

Indeed - you just need to look at the UK cladding scandal to see this.

I mean ffs:

    In the 1980s, the Conservative Government introduced its 
    Deregulation Initiative; in consequence, the Building Act 
    1984 reduced building regulations from 306 pages to 24.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_cladding_crisis

Indeed, apartment owners are facing millions in costs to put things right. That's not right, it should be on the developers who took advantage of this.

Cars have a safety rating, I wonder if houses could have the same kind of rating?

Would it be a better situation if houses for sale/rent will have a transparent safety rating visible to tenants and contractors could choose whether they build expensive, high safety buildings, or cheaper, low safety buildings?

Might sound dystopian, but to me it seems like the preferable solution. I know I live in an old house that would probably not fit for an earthquake, but I also know that if I want to live in a safer house, I'd need to pay more or move to a less desirable location, so I'm OK with taking the risk that an earthquake will kill me while I'm in the house.

The question is whether the market could balance itself enough so contractors don't build just crappy houses and take all the new margin to themselves.

The safety standards are the rating. Someone can build a house for "better than code" and they can advertise that too, but a "rating" here would be the standard that for example a building with X floors needs to follow to ensure it's earthquake resistant, can bear at least Y amoung of weigth, resist to Z winds, etc. The mix of all these things are what become the building standards or "code".

Otherwise to do ratings like you suggest you can only do it to mass produced things, in this case the closest would be mobile homes or prefabs, since you can actually destroy it and see how difficult it was and give it a rating.

> Pretty much every low-to-middle income country has taken the semi-rational approach of cutting corners in order to do more with less.

For what it's worth, the "developed" Western countries have done just the same. Look at the fellow front page article about the train catastrophe in East Palestine or how virtually all companies got hit hard by supply chain interruptions - no matter if from Covid, the Ever Given or Ever Forward getting stuck, strikes, or whatever else tiny or small interruption, the key thing is that resilience aka stockpiles got out of fashion because they were seen as too expensive...

Cutting corners is an universal problem.

So, it’s easy to be cynical here and point to examples of where high-income countries have had disasters, and from those data points conclude that everywhere is the same, but it really isn't the case that everywhere is the same. The fact we hear about failures, we see their political causes debated, and lawsuits filed, and root causes analyzed, and hands wrung in headlines… these are all symptoms of a system that is more or less working. These are the course-corrections and isolated incidents that serve to calibrate and revalidate that the accountability is there.

This is nothing like countries where corruption is endemic.

Witness Turkey’s recent arrests. What do we think is more likely: those contractors were the true root cause, and their arrests will prevent future building collapses during earthquakes? Or that they are merely the tip of a very large, very corrupt iceberg, and they will be made scapegoats to provide political cover that allows the rest of the system to quickly get back to business as usual?

I hate how people seem to act like a country of 350 million people and 20 trillion in GDP somehow can't afford a 10% safety factor on literally every single thing. How much money do we overwork ourselves to funnel into just a few owner's pockets, and they STILL bristle at the idea of giving the rest of us a minimum viable standard of living, as if having $100 billion spare is just not enough of a safety blanket.

Yep. I've just seen an interview of a custom officer here in France. In the past 25 years the amount of foreign goods entering the country has more than doubled; in the meanwhile, the number of custom officers was slashed by 30% (in Germany it slightly increased in the same period). Illegal goods of all kinds (from toxic paints to non-conforming tools and drugs) are now everywhere. But the state saved money! In the short term at least...

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