This is an old and interesting problem in organizational learning. How do people learn to do cheap problem-prevention instead of expensive problem-cure?5 There’s no immediate reward for putting in a sprinkler system, only extra nuisance and expense. A larger, slower entity—the community—has to do the learning and instill the lesson, by convention, habit, rite, or law. Convention is preferable to law, being more adaptive, accommodating, and locally appropriate, but a fast-moving society outruns the pace of informal convention and must resort to abstract law.
