normal accidents: closing quote


    catastrophes send us warning signals.  this book
    has attempted to decode these signals: abandon this, 
    it is beyond your capabilities; redesign this, regardless
    of short-run costs; regulate this, regardless of the   
    imperfections of regulation.  but like the operators of TMI
    [three-mile island] who could not conceive of the worst --
    and thus could not see the disasters facing them -- we
    have misread these signals too often, reinterpreting them
    to fit our preconceptions.  better training alone will not
    solve the problem, or promise that it won't happen again.
    worse yet, we may accept the preconception that military
    superiority and private profits are worth the risks.
    this book's decoding asserts that the problems are not
    with individual motives, individual errors, or even
    political ideologies.  the signals come from systems,
    technological, and economic.  they are systems that elites
    have constructed, and thus can be changed or abandoned.
                                      --normal accidents, charles perrow, 1999