Great post, but aren't you begging the question a bit? Who decides what is sunk and what's recoverable? The fact that society is messy and uncontrollable can also be an argumnet for the kind of bet-hedging and contingency planning TB talks about.

It's still about political will, then, Gary, or about making a political decision. I'm actually kind of hard-pressed to work through your final two paragraphs to an actual alternative vision, though.

Here's what I read:

1) We cannot make Solomanic decisions that limited financial and other resources should be heavily invested at the sites of greatest probable risk. We have to protect all of society, all communities, equally.
2) We cannot abandon poorly sited cities and communities whose present state is the consequence of past governmental and institutional subsidy.
3) We need more effective governance.
4) We need to cut our losses or collapse from the burden. (Am I right in assuming you think effective governance will allow us to cut our losses?)

Ok. So if we cannot abandon bad past decisions, what losses exactly are you hoping that more effective governance will permit us to cut, which burdens are you hoping to shuck? When you say "effective", you musn't mean "politically effective" (e.g., at mobilizing social consensus) since that's pretty much what I'm talking about when it comes to political will. Do you mean technically or bureaucratically effective? I'm not clear on what effective governance is in your view which doesn't overlap or connect to what I'm talking about.

If cutting our losses involves coordinated abandonment of places which people should not inhabit, then what it is that permits us to make judgements about what is and is not prudent as a site of human community? Surely something like the precautionary principle, correct? Any place that people choose to live has its own environment hazards. You live near an area prone to occasional uncontrollable wildfires, for example--in fact, the ecology of much of the West requires such wildires. Many large urban concentrations in the US Southwest are in areas where water supplies are almost certainly insufficient in the long haul to support the numbers of people there, at least without the kinds of major infrastructural interventions that California has undertaken. We could go on making such lists. If in fact we are not permitted to concentrate planning resources at the sites of most probable failure or crisis because we have to evenly distribute such funds to the whole of society, then your challenge to "cut our losses" has to be equally evenly distributed to all of society, without regard for the most likely probabilities of failure or crisis.

If what you're arguing is, "New Orleans shouldn't be where it is", I don't disagree. But to make that observation anything more than a kind of dispassionate long-view commentary on human beings and their relation to environments--if it is meant to carry a recommendation to "cut losses", then I don't quite understand why you think political will or political leadership is beside the point. Whether that will (and accompanying funding) is spent on preparing for disaster or it is spent on getting people to leave or abandon mistakes is the real issue.

Maybe the useful case we can think about is the more generalized response of the US government to residential building in flood plains and along vulnerable coastlines. We probably end up agreeing in that case: effective governance, political will, whatever you want to call it, should be put behind encouraging people not to build in such places, and removing subsidies that encourage people to constantly return to or reconstruct communities that are exposed to constant crisis and failure. In that case, heavy investment in planning for disaster is almost a kind of subsidy, an assurance of support for bad decisions. But I think New Orleans is a different case: it's not a city that's where it is because post-1950 retirees decided they want to live on the Outer Banks. It's where it is for deeper, older, historic reasons. It was not practical before Katrina to imagine that any available policy instrument could have encouraged people to just abandon the city wholesale (especially given the deep structural poverty that 2/3 of the population was afflicted by).

I think the other thing we likely disagree on is whether more effective and fully funded planning could have helped in the wake of Katrina. I understand your skepticism, and on some level, agree with it. In many ways, there's nothing that could have blunted the worst. But: higher and better levees would have helped; newer pumping stations with more secure power supplies would have helped; an evacuation plan for people without their own transport would have helped (using, for example, the city's fleet of school buses, which sat idle the entire time). The first two would have been extraordinarily expensive, and that's why they weren't done in the first place. The third would not have been expensive or difficult: it would only take a municipal government capable of making a simple plan work. Which the government of the city of New Orleans was not. Here in fact we may again agree, if this is what you're thinking of when you talk about the need for effective governance.

Hi Gabriel,

It's nice to hear from you. You ask "Who decides what is sunk and what's recoverable?", which is what seems to be Tim's central issue too when he asks for "an actual alternative vision". It seems as if you both look for a platform or authority that is a different instance of the existing framework.

My intent was to question the framework, the assumptions of current practice, on several levels. It doesn't physically work, it isn't ethical, and it's inelegant aesthetically. It is that framework that is an unrecoverable sunk cost, I claim. There are also specific wrecks, such as NOLA, that ought to be abandoned though we can't, and that will collapse at some point relieving us of the need to make hard decisions. It's fractal in this way; the system as a whole is misframed and the approach to each problem is as well.

My failure to offer an alternative vision isn't a failure so much as a designed omission. My personal vision is merely one of the multitude. As a group we can pool our knowledge and problem solving skills to work each issue. I've been impressed by the work of Scott Page, Lu Hong and Cosma Shalizi about the value of heuristic diversity in group problem solving. It seems contradictory but groups of experts are much the same heuristically and so lack the diversity needed to be good problem solvers. We see this repeatedly in wildly diverse scenarios, everything from the failure of the intelligence community to be as good as an actuarial table for prediction, to the failure of the Army Corps of Engineers to identify which section of the levee would collapse. (It was a new, recently upgraded section that none expected to fail rather than one that they wanted money to repair and upgrade. And this is hardly the first instance of that sort of mistaken analysis followed by hugely expensive yet ineffective construction.)

We are still learning how to do these things, how to even think about them. We are so used to authoritarian systems and authoritarian approaches to systems management that we get brain freeze when trying to imagine how to proceed when we admit that authoritarian approaches don't work, are unfair in any case, and are ugly as well. But I'm not advocating revolution, it's more like a 12 step program. First you admit that there is a problem and that you lack the tools to solve it. Then you . . . well, we need to develop the other steps. It is fitting that this would be a group problem solving activity too since we will have a better program if we apply diverse heuristics, one kicking in where another gets stuck, and as a group nudge the problem bit by bit closer to solution. I know that this sounds something like anarchy, or maybe anarcho-socialism or even anarcho-capitalism, but it isn't my intent to rescue those steam age ideas with information age tools so much as to reason about useful approaches to systems management. Subsidarity comes to mind.

Hi Timothy,

There may be something above that is responsive to some of your concerns, but I also know that this stuff is weird for you. As we have discussed in the past we have mostly a one way flow; I profit from your work and use it for my purposes, but my work is too far outside the canon, too Phi Zappa Crappa to be of much value to you. I've been cooking some other posts that belabor the points touched in this one and will play off your critique in part. To Be Continued. . .

P.S. It isn't that I can't make semi-useful, inside the canon remarks about your posts. I do sometimes in your comment section.

As I observe in my own post, we lack what I would call "technopolitical wisdom", which I think lies more in the direction you seem to want to go: more robust, distributed systems of decision and distribution, away from command economies and concentrated forms of expert authority.

That being said, I think you let yourself off too lightly with some zen kung-fu jargon here. There's just a plain old contradiction you want to duck in what you have to say: you want New Orleans gone and yet you know it would take precisely the kind of authoritarian mechanisms you reject to do that. You rely on the intellectual power of expertise but you don't believe in it. You believe that there are things which are more true than others which are knowable in superior ways through something resembling science and technical know-how and yet you abjure most of the people who create the knowledge that you cite as authoritative when it suits your critique.

What I think you particularly fail to see is that New Orleans is where it is not because of a command economy or an authoritarian form of governance or a series of bad-faith expert decisions. Those are late overlays and veneers over a deeper history. It is where it is because of precisely the kinds of things that you want to turn to: the emergent, massified logic of crowds, the robust and distributed social mechanisms that direct and sustain everyday life, the immanent logics of history. The only way to cleanly walk away from patterns that wide and deep is precisely the kinds of technocratic, bureaucratic or centralized authorities that you so firmly (and often sensibly and correctly) want to turn you (and our) back on. Failing that kind of clean, quick judgement from above, you're really left with a kind of profoundly antisocial and illiberal option: that what happens to people is what happens to people, that everyone is responsible for making their own decisions, and that no one is owed anything or any help even if the federal government or some other authority has baited an ecosocial honey trap for them. You know that's not right, either: it's why you say we can't "abandon" New Orleans or places like it. So you're left talking about instruments and mechanisms yet to come and largely unimagined, of necessity. This is fine, but it should, in all honesty, rob you of the option of tough talk about abandoning New Orleans, or cutting our losses, or knowing in advance what it is that we should do, precisely because the future mechanisms that you as yet can dimly perceive should precisely forbid that kind of certainty about what it is that must be done or not. You invoke the long span of history, and the inevitability of cutting your losses or suffering collapse, but that's the most potent ambiguity of all: over the long span of history, some of the most improbable communities survive, some of the most fragile beauties persist, some of the most illogical or irrational choices flourish, and some of the worst suffering that the most prudential and precautionary technocrat would rightly forbear flower into riches and satisfaction all unpredicted. The robust, distributed, massified mechanisms of decision making, the emergent kinds of wisdom you anticipate, could not possibly decide cleanly to cut losses or endure collapse: whatever they are, they will be of necessity more gradual, more ambiguous, and possibly filled with precisely the kind of communitarian generosity of all towards all that you invoke on occasion.

Saying that NOLA "ought to be abandoned" doesn't mean that I want it abandoned. It's more like noticing a cow levitating in my pasture and remarking that "that thing ought to fall" since there's no way it could happen without extraordinary intervention. It's a good bet in such cases that the cow will fall.

New Orleans has been under command and control since the French settled it. A condition of land ownership was improvement, and that was defined as building levees. No levees, no land. It's the local version of zoning regulation and building codes. In other places you had to build fences, or cut trees or plow land. In this way we felled forests, drained wetlands, and made dust bowls.

The whole development of NOLA as an industrial center and port was a command and control effort. Nothing about it was the result of distributed decision making. Not then, not now. Nothing emerged. It was designed and controlled. Not well designed or controlled, just firmly directed.

There's nothing clean about cutting losses, not when done by command and even less so when it is a distributed decision. The end comes with a whimper not a bang. It's a slow withering as individuals and institutions (such as companies for example) turn their backs and walk. See Rust Belt for a fairly recent example.

It isn't that this is pretty. It's that the alternative is worse. See xUSSR for a recent example. Decline is terrible, but not as bad as collapse. And that's the point of all this. Pretending that we can prop up failing systems, that all we need is the political will to take money from one region and spend it in another, can at best delay the inevitable though at the cost of even greater calamity in the end, and at the cost of missing other opportunities elsewhere.

Speaking out about the foolishness of past decisions isn't just historical neeping since we still do it. We still think that we can design systems from the top down. It wasn't just the environmental issues that we botched (dust bowls, wetlands etc.), we also have endured unlivable socialist-realist cities and urban renewal, both of which created wastelands where the poor, especially immigrants, now squat. We still build mass transit systems that no one wants to use. We still have advocacy orgs yearning to gain control of some city or other and redesign it.

"You rely on the intellectual power of expertise but you don't believe in it. You believe that there are things which are more true than others which are knowable in superior ways through something resembling science and technical know-how and yet you abjure most of the people who create the knowledge that you cite as authoritative when it suits your critique."

This is false in general and in every particular. Recognizing the limits of current expertise isn't the same as denying its utility. Experts at any given time and place are bumpkins compared to later experts and this is important to grasp. Humility is in order. Being an expert does not mean that you are equal to a given task. The recent research confirming what many had previously intuited, that a gaggle of experts was not as good at problem solving as a heuristically diverse gaggle, takes the critique a step further and disputes the whole idea of consensus. This doesn't mean that expertise has no value, it means that there is work to do to increase the skill of experts as well as they ways in which expertise is deployed for tasks. Interdisciplinary teams are an aspect of this, one which exposes one of the chief difficulties of heuristic diversity. The team members must be able to communicate in order to realize the benefits of diversity. Diversity has its limits too.

When we apply these insights about the limits of expertise to current plans for top down designs it becomes clearer why they deserve to be opposed. Experts created the monstrosities we have now, working in good faith, to the best of their knowledge and ability, never dreaming that they were making unholy messes. We have learned from the past and are unlikely to make the same mistakes, we'll make new ones instead. We'll make new unlivable cities spawned from the fever dreams of current planners. Their blunders will be studied in future by students who wonder how anyone could have been so stupid.

There are myriad other anecdotes, such as the recent research that reveals that "there is less than a 50% chance that the results of any randomly chosen scientific paper are true". By true they only mean to the best of our knowledge since in the end they will all be proven false as science progresses. Seeing expertise for what it is allows making use of it in intelligent ways. Debunking the self-importance of experts isn't just good sport, it's a useful corrective for a pathology of sorts which costs us dearly. Get used to it. In our internetworked world amateurs will once again become important innovators. (In a perhaps related vein, Rosen IIRC recently stated that he no longer sees journalism as a profession. It is a behavior.)

One expert I've taken to task repeatedly is Paul Ehrlich. It isn't that he is unique, he's just a prominent example of just how foolish experts can be. One post discussed his recent discovery of economics while working in a mixed team with Kenneth Arrow and others, and how his views have been enlarged and his previous expertise put in question. Another post documented how his environmental prescription for the preservation of an endangered butterfly species was precisely the opposite of what it should have been, and that the mistake was not knowing what any illiterate range manger knows. And then there are his very public humiliations at the hands of Simon. In each case Ehrlich was an example of a defect shared by many, many others. It isn't just that he is a bad apple, it's that the barrel has a lot of problems, and we are coming to know how to do better.

Just today I posted about how soil scientists have just discovered that their tests and prescriptions for nitrogen use were complete bunk. They are now making some pretty good suggestions, and that's nice, but they are decades behind field practice. Even I knew all the things years ago that they just discovered, and I have no education beyond having done a little reading. There are some other bits I could clue them about too. That doesn't mean that their expertise has no value, but it does mean that it has limits and that they should be aware of this and have techniques to mitigate their vulnerabilities.

All this leads into a useful insight about why distribted decison making is so useful. A large percentage of decisons will be bad, experts or not. When there are more independent decisions and they have smaller scale effects the net benefit is greater and corrections come quicker. You may not have big wins, but you also don't have big defeats. You have a better average. This irritates the small minded prig who sees the spotty failures and longs to eliminate the clutter and make everything right. His whole objective is to eliminate those failures though they are in truth among the most valuable parts of the system. In his longing for neatness and order he creates tragedy. It isn't that the small failures are desired, or that they are not lamented since real people suffer, it's that there is less suffering that way. Old truck and all that stuff.

Ehrlich is a good case, re: your recent thoughts on wisdom, because Julian Simon was not just some guru on a mountaintop who posed his challenge to Ehrlich because he had contemplated his navel long enough. Simon was able to expose Ehrlich because he had both expertise and the wisdom to know its limits. It just seems to me that you have an appreciation of the latter, but an inability to ever credit the role of the former, even when you cite the products of expertise and the knowledge it creates as evidentiary support for your own perceptions of problems. How do we know the history of New Orleans? Not by wise contemplation on a mountain peak. Wisdom instructs us about the uses and limits of knowledge; but knowledge production takes something other than wisdom.

And as an example of this single-mindedness, you see only the ways in which New Orleans was a "command economy" from the beginning, not all the organic, distributed decisions of all the many people who chose to live there and make it a special place. The feel of the city was not a command decision. The early logics of making a port there were not the later logics of the Army Corps of Engineers; the social and political world of colonial America is asymmetrical to that of te early 21st Century is a great many ways. You ride your idee fixe too far sometimes, rather like Jared Diamond: everything looks like a nail to the kid with a hammer. New Orleans was what it was both because of the kinds of political structures and expert logics you (often quite rightfully) decry and because of the kinds of emergent, distributed decision-making you exalt. As are most things. The trick is to get the balance right, and I think you're perfectly correct to suggest that 20th Century America (and now 21st Century America) mostly has gotten the balance greviously wrong. But an important component of wisdom, it seems to me, is a kind of judicious fairness in applying one's key insights: I think you occasionally teeter towards becoming an anti-expert expert, mimicking the worst tunnel-vision single-mindedness of the expert who has a theory and is determined to apply it exclusively to all things at all times.

Well, there's a snake in that woodpile somewhere. I certainly focus more intently on the problems of expertise. Perhaps I could improve my credibility by sometimes extolling the virtues and accomplishments of experts I admire.