I (personally) think the best result does involve criminal liabilities for CEOs. That's having seen this same story play out at many organizations.
However, criminal liability in itself won't solve it. Capitalism forces this kind of behavior; it's the natural trend for any company. The Dictator's Handbook describes it well.
What's needed is what's been done in every other industry: Regulation which changes incentive structures. Raw capitalism forces meat packing plants to pack ground rats in with your ground beef, quack medicines, and all sorts of other issues. The regulatory solution needs to have short-term economic consequences of some kind for doing the wrong thing. There are many of those, including:
1) Require insurance, and let the market sort it out. If the settlements and fees came from an insurance company rather than Boeing, the insurance company could set rules and inspections as it believed adequate to turn a profit.
2) Have high standards and regular inspections
3) Major changes to both capitalism and corporate governance. We have the best system we've thought of so far, but we sort of stopped thinking about new systems 50-100 years ago (fascism and communism were the last major attempts, and didn't turn out too well)
4) Completely overhaul our infrastructure for transparency. This could include whistleblower protections, as well as FOIA-like schemes, where an academic can look at what Boeing is doing.
It's worth noting this is a quasi-monopoly / duopoly situation, so market systems tend to work worse than most places.
But yes, it's a problem that criminal consequences are for poor people or people lower down the rungs. People at the top should go to prison too if they do something bad, with the same quality legal process as poor people.
However, criminal liability in itself won't solve it. Capitalism forces this kind of behavior; it's the natural trend for any company. The Dictator's Handbook describes it well.
What's needed is what's been done in every other industry: Regulation which changes incentive structures. Raw capitalism forces meat packing plants to pack ground rats in with your ground beef, quack medicines, and all sorts of other issues. The regulatory solution needs to have short-term economic consequences of some kind for doing the wrong thing. There are many of those, including:
1) Require insurance, and let the market sort it out. If the settlements and fees came from an insurance company rather than Boeing, the insurance company could set rules and inspections as it believed adequate to turn a profit.
2) Have high standards and regular inspections
3) Major changes to both capitalism and corporate governance. We have the best system we've thought of so far, but we sort of stopped thinking about new systems 50-100 years ago (fascism and communism were the last major attempts, and didn't turn out too well)
4) Completely overhaul our infrastructure for transparency. This could include whistleblower protections, as well as FOIA-like schemes, where an academic can look at what Boeing is doing.
It's worth noting this is a quasi-monopoly / duopoly situation, so market systems tend to work worse than most places.
But yes, it's a problem that criminal consequences are for poor people or people lower down the rungs. People at the top should go to prison too if they do something bad, with the same quality legal process as poor people.