Accountability & Liability - Are we letting our cognitive biases and decision heuristics take over ?

In US, we have or we have been experiencing two major crisis leading serious leading serious economic impacts for citizens, namely the financial crisis and now the oil spill crisis.

Let's look at how we handled the financial crisis : Primarily created by leading financial companies, taking on risky bets. Our Response was to bail them out with Tax Payer money. Even though now these banks are starting to make billions of dollars again, there is no sign of holding any single institution accountable. In simple terms, information on who exactly to blame is clearly not available to our brain, and more over the framing of the problem by our leaders was clearly in favor helping the banks out to avoid a crisis (framed in terms of minimizing losses everyone affected). This resulted in no single company or individual being accountable and the average tax payer took on the complete risk of bail out.

Fast forward to today, Let's look at how we are handling the oil crisis. It is clear, the way all these oil companies are run, this disaster could have happened at any major oil company doing deep sea drilling and none are capable to fixing it (as no one has come out said they can help ). Since the facility was BP's facility, Information is readily available to our brains who is at fault and the Framing of the problem by the government is clearly blaming BP and no one else (framed in terms maximizing gains for everyone affected). This is resulting in holding a single company accountable and liable for the disaster and not effectively putting our collective IP and Resources to work.

Does this sound right?

So what's My take#

Both these calamities have similar root cause - The worst case scenario was never modeled, allowing both financial companies and oil companies take on risks that were not logical. Both have lead to serious economic impacts to common people. Additionally, The problem with oil crisis is now way beyond BP's control and is a disaster that probably exceeds the impact of Katrina, yet, however there is no talk of pulling all the Oil companies together to putting the entire industry to task.

The only difference is that banks were in financial trouble and BP is slowly getting there.

So if I remove my biases and ignore how the our leaders have framed the problem, these two crises should be treated identically as the problems have similar root causes and similar impacts. Alas, I guess we are all human and at some level our cognitive biases rule. It is probably imperative on all of recognize this before taking sides for the greater good.

Thanks for reading, your comments are welcome and appreciated.

Thanks
Nagesh
The views represented in this blog are my personal views and are not a reflection of or opinions of any of the institutions I am associated with or have worked for.