Later On

I’ve seen it so many times: the safety gauge’s needle has moved through the green, past the amber, and is now in the red! What to do? Business mindset gives the same answer all the time: “Carefully bend the needle so that it points again into the green. Be careful not to break the needle.”

So, for example, in the fight against mad-cow disease in the US: the beef industry adamantly opposes large-scale testing: as long as we don’t test, the number of reported cases stays low, so everything is fine.

That response is almost universal, regardless of industry and issue: if taking any step to reduce a danger is more expensive than hiding the danger, for a business the choice is obvious: hide the danger. Dump toxins where they won’t be found—or, if found, can’t be traced back to the business.

Business operates for one thing only: Grow profits. Whatever it takes. So the search for cheaper approaches is constant. The only serious question about doing something cheaper: “Will we get caught?”

Japan is learning that now, but it’s a lesson that doesn’t stick because the pressure to grow profits is unceasing, and if the current management team is not willing to “make the hard decisions” (i.e., lie, cheat, endanger public health, ruin lives, whatever), then they will be replaced by a team who will.

As a footnote, the US nuclear-power industry is currently funneling large sums of money to Representatives and Senators to forestall as much as possible reforms in the US, which currently keeps even more spent fuel rods in even less water than in Japan, and which still uses designs that proved ineffective in Japan. And they do NOT want to spend the money to improve those things. It would cut into profits. It’s much cheaper to buy off legislators.