Boeing is far from an anomaly. They’ve just reached the stage where it’s noticeable.
My guess is that what's going on with Boeing is not that they're a particularly bad apple. It's that standard American business practices have slowly crept in, displacing the previous culture, which had focused on safety and quality. So I'd say Boeing was an anomaly that has now become typical. The interesting question then becomes: what is the deviance that has become normalized so broadly?
Also you are right about this being the norm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age
This is what a free market without systemic competition always boils down into.
They’re still around to ask about this stuff.
I think cutting way back on antitrust enforcement starting in the mid 70s accelerated the shift (that part, you may or may not hear from the older workers who watched this happening—though I bet their stories include some M&A activity as inflection points)
It's from about halfway through the process you describe. If you don't have time to read the whole thing, look for the section on "milking the plant"
And I think I'd add to that the concept of "business class", the notion that executives are a special caste who deserve to rule over the lessers. Who not only can but should treat with contempt the people who do the work, who hold the knowledge.
There's another related component to me, what Mary Poppendieck called "The Tyrrany of The Plan". There's a notion that if you have a sufficiently good plan, anybody can execute it and you should get a perfect result. The extent to which that almost never works rarely diminishes faith in the creed. My long experience is that for anything worthwhile, a plan only takes you so far; you need expertise to adapt to changing circumstances, to learn along the way. But belief in The Plan fits in well with a managerial upper caste, because it lets them take credit for the successes and blame others for the failures.
If you haven't read it, you might enjoy Locke and Spender's "Confronting Managerialism".
Welchian management. "Greed is good". It's so infected the American psyche that people believe corporate management has a fiduciary duty to shareholders to the point that they legally must put profit above all else. That is not in any way the case, and no law has formalized any such thing. It's a choice, a choice made every day in nearly every company, to create human suffering in pursuit of profit and to eschew any concept of loyalty or ethics.
Jack Welch destroyed GE doing this, and his acolytes destroyed IBM, Boeing, and many other American institutions. His brand of management has now become the only brand of management taught across nearly two generations of MBAs. It is now the normal culture of American corporations.
Arguably, this is on the FTC and EC; if the mergers which created Airbus and current-Boeing hadn’t been permitted, the market would look very different, and there’d be less space for making a Terrible Plane; no-one would buy it.
You see this elsewhere; look at the old Soviet/Warsaw Pact car industry, or somewhat more arguably the pre-European-accession British car market (before it joined the EU, the UK was quite protectionist around cars). _Terrible_ products, but people had to buy them because nothing else was realistically available. So, why bother putting any effort into making them good?
But they thought that, since the pilots would just have to do the 'runaway stabilizer procedure', it would be enough. They didn't consider how startling and different the system would feel.