>It's folly to pretend that those engineers designing shoddy Chinese apartment complexes that occasionally fall down during construction don't have the same formulas and simulation tools at their disposal. They just have different inputs and design constraints. They know that if they build 100 buildings and ten fall down it's still cheaper than 100 better buildings where none fall down. There's no point in building a 100yr building if it's gonna be bulldozed in ten.

Not quite, it's more of a deliberate fraud made possible by political corruption in the contract awarding process where they also know they won't be liable for rebuilding because they'll be long gone. The calculus is different than what you described.