(Posted by Ampersand, who will probably embarrass himself, because there are some serious Titanic buffs online who will probably catch him in lots of errors. But oh, well.)
In a typically well-written and reasoned post (how dull! Mark, you should experiment with bad writing and reasoning once in a while, just for variety’s sake!), Mark Kleiman discusses cost/benefit analysis and the Titanic:
The Titanic had enough lifeboats for first and second class passengers, but not for steerage. So the poor passengers almost all drowned, while the rich passengers mostly survived. Pretty disgusting, right? The company ought to be ashamed of itself, even after eighty years. There ought to be (ought to have been) a law!
Well, maybe not. It turns out that about half the passengers on the Titanic were traveling steerage (what United Airlines calls “coach”). But their total fares amounted to only 8% of the revenues for the voyage. A requirement of one lifeboat space per passenger might have made carrying steerage passengers unattractive to the lines — they could have carried cargo instead, as the Lusitania famously did. At least, it would have made the cost of carrying steerage passengers greater, since even a big liner has only so much space and weight-bearing capacity. If the steerage passengers were only paying 8% of the total fares, a small increase in the total costs of running the ship would have translated into a big increase in their fares.
So the well-intentioned regulation “one lifeboat space per passenger” might have had the consequence of making it much harder for poor people to emigrate from Europe. (Since all of my great-grandparents came over in steerage, and since there was no alternative way to get from Europe to America, I take this point rather personally.)
(My great-grandparents came over in steerage, as well; but this makes me more, not less, sympathetic to the idea that steerage passengers should have had their lives protected. I don’t take this point personally, and I encourage Mark not to either. :-p )
Mark’s analysis is based on some questionable assumptions; for instance, steerage passengers accounted for 8.7% of revenues if they paid about 3 pounds a head, but it’s not certain that’s how much they paid. Some sources say steerage tickets cost 8 pounds – in which case steerage would have accounted for 21.5% of revenues (more than second class accounted for). Probably the real number is somewhere between 8.7% and 21.5% – but in any case, Mark’s revenue estimate is definitely a lowball figure. (Source – warning, it’s a pdf file).
But it’s not even revenue that matters – it’s profit. Steerage passengers paid far less, but they also cost the shipping company far less; they required less space, less expensive food, less facilities, and less staff to see to their needs.
How much would adding 20 more lifeboats have decreased profit? It’s hard to say, but I’m not at all sure it would have been enough to force a significant rise in ticket price. (Remember, the Titanic was designed to hold enough lifeboats; the number of lifeboats were decreased so there’d be more promenade space.) But I can say that Mark is probably mistaken to suggest a strong connection between lifeboat space and immigration.
The Titanic’s dangerous passenger-to-lifeboat ratio was a result of a bug in British board of trade regulations; the applicable law, written in 1894, stated that “16 lifeboats shall be carried for ships 10,000 tons and over.” But in 1894 the largest ships were only about 12,000 tons (the Titanic, in comparison, was 46,000 tons); at the time that the British law was written, the effect of the regulation was to require that there be enough lifeboats to accommodate all passengers.
Not long after the 1912 Titanic disaster, all companies began providing enough lifeboats for all passengers. So the period in which there were routinely not enough lifeboats for steerage is a relatively brief one, from sometime in the early 1900s (when boats began being built that were much larger than the British board of trade anticipated) to 1913. But as far as I can tell, immigration from Europe to the US remained very high after 1913, and stayed high until congress changed immigration laws to make immigration more restrictive (around 1920). So although doubtless safety laws had some impact on ticket price – maybe immigrants needed an extra week or two to save up before they could leave – I don’t think there’s any support for Mark’s theory that regulations requiring sufficient lifeboats (like the ones US companies had to deal with in 1912) would have been a significant barrier to European immigration.
To sum up, contrary to Mark, I think it’s likely a significant increase in safety – and in the number of lives saved aboard the Titanic – could have been had in exchange for a very small decrease in the total number of poor immigrants.
Finally, it should be noted that lifeboat space wasn’t the only issue on the Titanic. Standards requiring all ships to monitor wireless communications twenty-four hours a day might have saved every life aboard the Titanic – the Californian, only ten miles away, might have heard the Titanic’s distress call and come to rescue passengers. A more southerly route in winter would also have saved the Titanic. Both these changes became standard practice after (and as a result of) the Titanic disaster.
Postscript: While reading up on the Titanic to write this post, I came across this hilarious page; Titanic history as written by holocaust revisionists..
