The tragic Ethiopian Airlines crash this month killed 157 people, including many workers for the United Nations and world aid groups. It followed the suspiciously similar Lion Air crash in Indonesia that killed 189 last October. The two disasters shook world travel and resulted in the grounding of Boeing’s 737 Max planes. In the final moments of the Lion Air flight, the previously-stoic copilot begins to pray on the black box cockpit recording, before meeting a horrifying death. The Ethiopian Airlines flight’s crash left a huge crater in the ground.

These terrible stories should sound a little familiar. They fit a long-running pattern of companies knowingly choosing to expose consumers or employees to huge risks. The company itself faces only a part of that risk. The danger to others, like the passengers and crew, are only taken into account to the extent that the company might be legally liable for them. Apart from that, the risk is an “externality,” an impact to others that can be disregarded much as environmental pollution so often is.

Investigations into the Ethiopian Airlines crash are still at an early stage. But airline industry opinion is that the similarities to the terrible Lion crash mean that the cause is likely to be the software Boeing installed on the Max. Its new stall-prevention system, called MCAS, prevents the plane from climbing too steeply, but many pilots were not trained on it. Apparently the software pulled data from a single sensor that erroneously told the system the plan was rising too fast, causing the software to push the plane’s nose back down, leading to the erratic takeoffs and crashes of both flights. The FAA’s hasty green-light of Boeing’s new software, their reluctance to bother training new pilots on it, and the foot-dragging in the US to ground the planes, all reflect the huge pull Boeing and other giant corporations have over state decision-making. Government compliance with corporate demands to loosen regulations has clearly contributed to these deaths.