The problem was not the oxidation. That problem is easily dealt with by applying antioxidant paste at the wire terminations, as is required. The problem was single strand solid conductor aluminum wiring. Higher capacity wires are multistrand, and virtually all such wiring is aluminum due to the cost difference.
Single strand solid aluminum conductors expand and contract due to heat changes from high draw, they can work themselves loose, and eventually create shorts and fires. They make special connectors so you can remedy this by attaching a small piece of copper wire (a pigtail) to the aluminum, and don't need to replace all the wiring in your house. This of course means that we could just legislate for better connectors throughout the building, as we should do anyways, and we could safely use single strand solid conductor aluminum wiring instead of copper virtually everywhere.
> by applying antioxidant paste at the wire terminations, as is required
As is NOT required. This is old old info: antioxidant paste is not just not required, in some places you will fail inspection if add it, and other electricians might laugh at you for not keeping up to date.
> expand and contract due to heat changes from high draw, they can work themselves loose
Nope, this is also not true. It's simply that there is a new allow of aluminum used today (since 1975) which retains its strength under heating and this problem is solved.
> This of course means that we could just legislate for better connectors throughout the building
Connector rated for Cu/Al are widely available, and not hard to make. There's just no market for it for smaller wires since everyone got scared and no one wants to install aluminum anymore.
It doesn't have to be that way, the current alloy is 47 years old at this point. People just don't want to change.
Doing a little reading and there is some truth to some of what you say, but it is not any more correct than what I said because we are both a bit lacking in nuance, so I will just leave a few links for further reading. I don't agree with your conclusion that everything is now ok and it's just nerves. My point on legislation would be just to take anything not rated for the use off the market, so there would be no worry about installations using the wrong products.
Some of the problems with aluminum wiring and whether all problems are solved:
I looked at your link and they confirm what I said 100%. Aluminum installations after approx 1975 are simply not a problem. There is no issue with oxidation, no issue with multi strand, nothing.
> I don't agree with your conclusion that everything is now ok and it's just nerves.
What issues do you find? All you need is a connector rated Cu/AlR and that's it.
Not really. If the higher insurance costs are born by the building owner rather than the person who installs the wiring (which is likely the case), then increased insurance premiums aren't likely to haveuch effect. Classic externality
The causal connection can be remarkably tenuous, especially if you add securitization or other financialization into the mix. The people supplying the money often care more about hitting standards than maximizing overall eventual profit. Understanding this aspect of human and market behavior is useful for realizing why a lot of libertarian ideas are unworkable in practice.
Not sure, it's very workable for lots of other aspects of buildings.
Eg I don't think there's a legislation that floorplans have to be useful (and how would you even define that in the abstract). Yet, most buildings have quite reasonable floorplans.
There's some transaction costs in that its hard for the eventually consumer of the building to express all their preference to the builder. As you say, for some aspects the price signals can be weak.
More competition can help.
See also how it's pretty easy to find restaurants that serve tasty food, despite taste not being legislated nor regulated.
But seriously though, since when did Laissez-faire economics and legislation ever lead to sufficient safety not to kill people or burn down their homes willy-nilly?
HN is the only place I visit that has such wild ideas as "safety regs are too burdensome, let the free market sort it out".
In the UK, only around 1 person per year is killed by electricity in the home. And often that person is doing something totally non-standard, for example building a tesla coil, or deliberately committing suicide.
Contrast that to 250,000 deaths per year (in the USA) by medical mistakes or preventable adverse effects.
At some point, we have to decide where to put our efforts. Electrical safety is arguably oversolved - ie. we put too much effort into it compared to the safety gain of any extra effort, compared to medical accidents which is likely undersolved. Even simple things like requiring a doctor to not do more than an 8 hour shift, like we require of truck drivers, would probably save a lot of lives.
The idea of 'more safety is always better' needs to be broken.
If you live in a representative democracy and vote for politicians that expand regulations, you are effectively regulating.
> yet they see a lot of need for regulation
Of course they do, their ideology reaches for that solution by default. Look at this particular thread just to see how misguided the recommendation for regulation was in this case.
Yeah, with perfect information these wouldn't compete. This is why some countries put energy efficiency labels on products and on property sales. To make the market work better.
Some countries just prefer to ignore long term problems for short term "gains" though, in a tragic fractal way.
I don't think there's any law anywhere that prohibits a manufacturer from sticking the required information on their product and in their marketing.
As a customer, I can draw my own conclusions when a manufacturer doesn't provide the information: I'll assume that thing is a gas guzzler and will avoid it. (Unless I read trusted reviews to the contrary.)
It's not the law that prevents the people in a Prisoners Dilemma situation from freely choosing the best outcome for themselves. It's the lack of enforcement of rules which incentives defection.
In this case:
good guy installs insulation
bad guy doesn't
good guy publishes info on future savings
bad guy publishes fake info
good guy publishes trusted reviews
bad guy publishes fake reviews.
and so on.
The good guys want the legislation, not to force then to do the thing they wanted to do anyway, they want it to stop bad guys putting them out of business via scamming customers.
Yes, the answer that evolves is co-operation, i.e. in the real world, regulations and legislation, binding all the individual players to do the thing that's best for all of them and punishes defectors to ensure incentives are aligned.
The better analogy for the prisoners dilemma is a drug deal or a spy swap. How can you trust the other person to do the right thing with no legal system to enforce penalties if they don't? Without that, less deals are made than they would otherwise, a loss of efficiency.
Yeah, I'm sure the fossil fuel industry would be overjoyed if they couldn't dump CO2 into the atmosphere without first contracting with every person and animal on earth to reimburse them.
And how are you going to ensure that buyers are aware of those ongoing maintenance costs? In a free market builders are disincentivised to make such issues public. So I guess the only way to be sure is to create legislation forcing such detail to be exposed. But if you're going to do that, then why not just create legislation that solves the actual problem instead?
> The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism is a widely-cited[1] 1970 paper by economist George Akerlof which examines how the quality of goods traded in a market can degrade in the presence of information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, leaving only "lemons" behind. In American slang, a lemon is a car that is found to be defective after it has been bought.
The obvious-in-hindsight business solution to this problem didn't require legislation. It's just to build a used-car dealer that builds and safeguards a really solid reputation.
People don't need lemons. They do need home. So often in free market economies you see companies virtually colluding to put themselves first in sectors where consumers are required to buy into that product or service. Because in those sectors, businesses have a captive audience with no other options and they don't need to worry about reputation.
Housing is one of those sectors. Often people need a home based around requirements other than the reputation of the builder like location to the school that their kids already attend, or family members, or work, bus or rail stations, etc. Cost to rent. Is parking available. etc
If you can pick a property based on the reputation of the builder than you're already in a class above most people.
I know you want to believe that a free market fixes all of life's problems but it's really not that simple. For starters even if your ideology worked in practice, you still require a bunch of customers to get burnt initially in order to generate that reputation. However there's also nothing stopping disreputable businesses restarting with a new company name and branding so the reputation model doesn't work in practice (you see this all the time with online sellers eg on Amazon). And that's on top of the former point about how some products are essentials that people don't have the luxury to shop around on.
We have much stricter regulations in Europe and it doesn't harm our commerce. So you absolutely can have a vibrant market and regulations to protect consumers.
> Well your past history of housing problems would suggest your optimism here is misplaced
Who is 'you' in that sentence? I can see that I have optimism, but what's my past history of housing problems?
And what makes you so sure that those past problems were caused by not enough regulation? (Instead of eg too much regulation, the wrong kind of regulation, or they might have nothing to do with regulation at all.)
> If you can pick a property based on the reputation of the builder than you're already in a class above most people.
Huh? It's always a trade-off. All else being equal, I'd grab a house from a builder (or landlord) with a great reputation before one without a reputation or even a bad reputation. I might even pay a bit extra for a great reputation.
Your argument would apply equally well to jobs: people need a job just as much as they need housing. Yet, employers with great reputation still find it easier to attract good applicants than those with lousy reputations.
> I know you want to believe that a free market fixes all of life's problems but it's really not that simple.
Who said that? Huh?
I suggested that in this specific case more regulation is not required.
The free market won't get you a girlfriend, for example. But neither would any sensible regulation.
> We have much stricter regulations in Europe and it doesn't harm our commerce. So you absolutely can have a vibrant market and regulations to protect consumers.
You know that European real GDP per capita is quite a lot lower than in the US? (You can pick almost any European country. Or pick the average etc.)
And the US is also still pretty overregulated.
I grew up in Germany, but put my money where my mouth is, and now live in rather more pro-market Singapore.
I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree on this. Partly because this is really more of an opinion-based discussion but also because comparing Singapore to the US or Europe is never going to work given how massively different their cultures are. So there's far more variables at play than just how the markets are run.
That all said, one part did stick out for me:
> Your argument would apply equally well to jobs: people need a job just as much as they need housing. Yet, employers with great reputation still find it easier to attract good applicants than those with lousy reputations.
I'd argue that disproves your point rather than proves it. The reason being, lousy jobs still exist because employers know that people need jobs. So there's no incentive for employers to change. Hence why we need employment laws.
This comes back to my point about different cultures. For example some American and UK companies have been gaming the system, arguing that people who work from them are not employees. In the UK we call them gig workers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gig_worker) and they're effectively working for 0 "dollars" if business is slow that day. Yet some people work them simply because they have no other choice.
In Singapore, we just have employment laws that aren't as strenuous on the employer, so there's less need to 'game the system'.
Oversimplified: legally everyone is already a gig worker in Singapore.
Seems to work out fairly well.
This is also closer to how the system worked in eg the US until a few decades ago, when it was easier to get a job just by walking into the shop and asking and also work your way through college etc.
I remember, Slatestarcodex had an article about the dangers of outsourcing your social welfare to employers.
I feel this point is getting lost on you but Singapore has a vastly different culture to America. The fact that Singapore doesn't need to "game the system" isn't because there are fewer regulations. It's because it's a different culture.
The reason America needs legislation is because American companies have a culture of abusing a free market.
What works for one country doesn't automatically work for another.
Singapore is mostly made up of immigrants from China. Remember, China is the place where we like to complain about 'companies abusing a free market' even more than in the US.
It seems like this is an ideal case for modular wiring, ie the wire is cut to size, and terminated with modular connectors at the factory. Installation is just threading the wire through the building and pluging it in.
Connectors could be copper, the wire itself could be aluminium, completely sealed in pvc.
Single strand solid aluminum conductors expand and contract due to heat changes from high draw, they can work themselves loose, and eventually create shorts and fires. They make special connectors so you can remedy this by attaching a small piece of copper wire (a pigtail) to the aluminum, and don't need to replace all the wiring in your house. This of course means that we could just legislate for better connectors throughout the building, as we should do anyways, and we could safely use single strand solid conductor aluminum wiring instead of copper virtually everywhere.