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Investigators are still sorting through the wreckage of Monday's crash of two Metro rail cars in Washington, D.C., the deadliest in the system's 33-year history, which killed nine people and injured scores of others. Federal officials said on Tuesday that the train that rear-ended another was an older model that lacked equipment that might have helped avert the collision and, according to the Washington Post, had been overdue for needed brake work...
Although public transit is aging, it's worth noting that it is not unsafe - crashes like the one in D.C. are an anomaly, and statistically, riding a train is far safer than driving. Still, failing to shore up transit is an invitation to risk, and while accidents may be infrequent, as the Metro crash may show, they can be deadly...
Sabbag is more of a writer than Ollestad. At the time of the crash, he was already a published author, and he has a knack for thumbnail portraits and sardonic humor, whereas Ollestad's prose has a more breathless, unpolished, confessional quality. But Sabbag's book, while more eloquent, is less complete. If there is a tragedy in Down Around Midnight, it is not of the Greek kind - Sabbag's bad luck was purely random, and if there was a fatal flaw involved, it wasn't his. He circles and circles around the trauma, interviewing his fellow victims, and their...
Fisher fell on hard times after the 1929 crash--getting by thanks only to the generosity of a wealthy sister-in-law and his employer, Yale--and so did the myth of the rational market. For a few decades, financial markets were seen as unruly beasts that had to be tamed with tight regulation to help protect the hard-earned savings of regular Americans. But memories of the 1930s eventually faded, and in the 1950s, the idea that markets knew best began its comeback. This was part ideological reaction to the antimarket conventions of the day, part scientific progress...
...stock-market crash gave Shiller and Summers all the ammunition they needed. "If anyone did seriously believe that price movements are determined by changes in information about economic fundamentals," Summers said just after the crash, "they've got to be disabused of that notion by Monday's 500-point movement." The crash also demonstrated that prices didn't follow the statistical model of a random walk--if they did, a 20% one-day market drop like that of 1987 should happen only once in billions upon billions of years...