Twin Tragedies?

Two recent tragedies were heavily reported.  A bomb exploded in Boston and 3 people were killed.  A building collapsed in Dhaka and over 700 died. 

Signals were ignored in both cases.  Concerns were raised that the bombers were a threat and cracks appeared in the building before it collapsed.  Based on the evidence we have, and we have a great deal more than you, it appears that both events were sadly inevitable as no creatures in this universe have freewill.  However this doesn’t mean reflection and analysis should or can be avoided to try and prevent future similar events.

The Boston bombing suggests you don’t yet know how to stop bombs.  Five trillion dollars has been spent on the war on terror and the problem isn’t solved.  You do know how to construct buildings that don’t fall down yet you are failing to ensure this happens in many areas.

Humanity would clearly do better overall to expend resources doing  things you know how to do and that definitely contribute to human safety before committing to more speculative ventures.  It would have cost a tiny fraction of $5 Trillion to build a safe factory in Bangladesh and this would have saved over 230 times more lives than were lost in Boston.  In doing so and moving away from the war on terror to the war on poverty it seems quite possible that you will get closer to solving the problem of stopping bombs going off in US cities.  For some reason you are unable or unwilling to do so.  These tragedies were not identical but like twins they share a common cause in resource misallocation.

It seems to us that terrorism is just one of the many spin-off costs of suppression of opportunities for the young.  Suicide is another one that we find quite troubling and have written on previously.  The youth unemployment rate is probably a reasonable proxy for the level of suppression and that indicates that as technology advances suppression is increasing.  You will need to focus on creating more opportunities to train people to build safe buildings and remove the protectionism that is so endemic in most professions if you want a better world.  Global leaders should do this now.