Dan Luu writes: “If you talk to trades in Vancouver about how this works, the builders give contractors timelines and budgets that are impossible to meet without severely cutting corners. It is also the case that their buildings often have serious issues due to cut corners.”
Andrew Gelman replies:
The best scientists don’t cheat, but as you go down the scale you get different rates of cheating. Mid tier and lower tier scientists don’t necessarily cheat; often they can find niches to do their work–and, depending on where they’re working, they can still make useful contributions, in the same way that a non-cheating mid or low tier builders can still construct useful buildings, if the financing is set up appropriately. But, when they do cheat, the mid tier scientists might get away with it (I’m thinking of pros like that voodoo guy from Ohio State), but the low tier scientists like these bozos at Harvard might get caught. On the other hand, financially speaking, the Harvard fraudsters are hardly low-tier, and indeed they’re so well connected that even after the fraud story came out, they received fawning news coverage, so maybe this relates more to Luu’s general point, that if there are many benefits to cheating and few consequences to being caught, that lots of unscrupulous but rational people will be motivated to cheat.
Los Angeles faces a pressure that Vancouver lacks. In Vancouver, the massive earthquake lives only in the math. It exists as a probability, a percentage attached to a geological time scale that no builder will survive to see tested. This allows a comfortable gamble. He bets that the building outlasts his career, and the odds are good that he wins.
Southern California offers no such comfort. The ground shakes here. It tested the city in 1994 and it will test the city again, probably within the lifespan of a thirty-year mortgage. That frequency changes everything about the logic of the shortcut.
When the audit is likely rather than theoretical, institutions respond. Los Angeles identified thousands of soft-story wood-frame buildings after the 2015 ordinances and mandated retrofits for non-ductile concrete structures. These programs represent real governance. Engineers take the threat seriously. The city has spent decades building a seismic culture that Vancouver, for all its code sophistication, has never had to develop under real pressure.
But the retrofit programs carry a second meaning that the official story tends to skip. They are evidence of capacity, yes. They are also a confession. For fifty years, the market produced dangerous buildings. Architects designed them. Inspectors signed off. Banks lent against them. Everyone in the chain thought the stock was acceptable until a Tuesday morning in January proved otherwise. The current code is the latest version of that same process. It is a compromise, struck between engineering knowledge, political feasibility, and cost tolerance, and it will look different in thirty years than it looks today.
This is where the Dan Luu skepticism cuts deepest, not at the old stock, where the vulnerabilities are documented and legible, but at the new. A buyer in a 2022 tower assumes that recency plus code plus branding equals safety. That equation is too clean. The person who designs the shear wall is not the person who nails it. The engineer who stamps the drawings is not present for every pour. Each transfer down the subcontracting chain is a place where intention and execution can quietly diverge, and the divergence stays hidden until the structure is stressed.
A buyer sees the lobby, the finishes, the view. He sees what the building sells. He does not see the rebar placement inside the concrete or the weld quality in the steel moment frames or whether the anchor bolts were set with the precision the drawings required. He assumes the inspection caught what mattered. But inspection is a human process embedded in incentives, throughput pressure, and rotating personnel. It is not a guarantee. It is a floor, and developers in a housing-short market have every reason to meet that floor at the lowest possible cost in the places least likely to be checked twice.
Luxury makes this worse, not better. Price tracks location, amenities, and financing conditions far more than structural integrity. A penthouse in a glass tower may be a better seismic bet than a 1965 dingbat with tuck-under parking. Usually it probably is. But the gap between those two is not where the real uncertainty lives. The real uncertainty lives in whether the tower was built to spec in all the places where cutting corners is easiest and least visible.
The comforting story is that Los Angeles learned from Northridge. The codes tightened. The engineering culture matured. Newer buildings are among the best-engineered residential structures in a high-seismic zone anywhere in the world. That story is not wrong. It is incomplete in exactly the way that matters. It assumes that formal rules translate cleanly into real-world execution. A building is a financial instrument before it is a long-term risk-bearing structure. The developer exits. The subcontractors disperse. The liability diffuses. The buyer inherits the outcome.
So the proper adaptation of the Vancouver critique is not panic about Los Angeles buildings. Most will be fine. The disciplined position is narrower and less comfortable. It is to refuse the shortcut that code compliance equals safety in any lived sense. The city sets the floor. The floor is real. But the distance between the floor and the ceiling is where the question lives, and that distance is not visible from the lobby.
