The broader point is that incompetence and corruption plagues institutions (public and private) of all sizes.
Regardless of one's politics, it's critical that we hold our institutions accountable and help them get better over time.
This includes our country, our state, our county, our city, our company, our social and professional groups, open source communities, etc.
There is a strong human tendency to want to defend organizations we are part of (or rely on) rather than trying to constructively improve them.
Flint is an example of institutional failures at multiple levels, but over all the loss of life and suffering pales in comparison to what our failed institutions did in Iraq and around the world, and what they do to our schools all across the country, etc.
The more official an organization (government, etc.), the more fancy its facilities (buildings with columns, spires, domes, etc.) the more we must realize its credibility is based on self-perpetuation rather than on tangible, auditable results.
There are so many failures happening across the board, and the biggest enemy to progress is the idea that loyalty means keeping quiet.
Having worked in this area, I can say that "incompetence and corruption" is an intellectually lazy explanation for the problems facing municipal water supplies. The real problem is that water is a municipal utility and municipal rate setting boards set water rates far too low. There is simply not enough money to rip out all the old lead pipe and replace it: http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/clean-water-at-any-rate_b_504.... It's politically untenable for water boards to raise rates, especially since water bills are not progressive (seniors and the poor pay the same rate as rich people).
So fund the system with taxes. Issue bonds for necessary infrastructure upgrades. If raising money is politically impossible in any form, shut the system down. If the responsible people are just throwing their hands up and letting the systems collapse and poison people along the way, that's at best incompetence.
This does occasionally happen, e.g. Atlanta passed a 1% sales-tax to fund sewer-system replacement. There are lots of anti-tax voters, though. Another problem is that many states: 1) won't pay for the water-system improvements out of state revenues, but also 2) heavily constrain the ability of local governments to raise their own tax revenue, even when the local citizens support it. Atlanta had to lobby the state legislature for years to be allowed to pass its 1% sewer sales tax. That's also why a sales tax was chosen, even though they're somewhat regressive, because it was the only option they thought they could get through the very conservative state legislature.
I don't think you can call this fictional public servant incompetent and corrupt. He's just doing what the people wanted. That shortsightedness and aversion to investment is problem of the electorate.
When the people's wishes result in poisoning children, a good public servant doesn't just say "OK" and do it. "Just following orders" isn't any better just because those orders come through a democratic process. When it's that bad you fight it, you show people the consequences of what they're asking for, and if they insist then you either refuse or resign in protest.
Edit: it occurs to me that this characterization of "just doing what the people wanted" is probably completely wrong anyway. I'm sure there was never a public meeting in Flint, for example, where city officials stood up before the public and laid out the plan to switch water supplies and the subsequent poisoning of the entire city that would result.
But that's not the situation outlined in the thread. It's the public servant that see the lead pipes, the dangerous and untenable situation and takes action. Then he's sacked for taking action. What then?
Then someone new takes the position and the process repeats.
You can certainly blame the public for electing incompetent or corrupt public officials. Said officials also shoulder the blame for fucking up the water system. That they would be fired for doing the right thing does not absolve them in the least.
I'm not saying you can't blame the people for who they choose to govern, merely that the people who govern are also to blame.
The situation for Flint specifically is complicated by the fact that the city has an emergency manager appointed by the governor. The elected council approved the decision to switch as well, so the locals aren't free from responsibility either, but there's plenty of opportunity for finger-pointing in many directions.
I find the scenario believable, but I think the mechanism by which the 'good' politician is getting sacked is more complex. I think s/he is getting sacked because s/he spent a lot of political capitol on a difficult undertaking that doesn't bring much credit back to her/him. Improving decaying infrastructure doesn't insert a positive 'this politician accomplished' association into many voters minds. S/he's just doing the things that voters assume happen on their own anyway. On the other hand, the 'bad' politician that ignored the issue had a nice extra bit of political capitol to spend on flashier issues like crime, lowering taxes, etc.
So, rather than it being a "the people have spoken" situation, I think that the situation is driven by constraints on public attention for political issues. I don't think you would get many voters endorsing continued poisoning of the population when a marginal increase (or reshifting) of taxes could address the issue. Rather I think that it is rarely ever politically advantageous to spearhead these kind of issues (that is until it explodes into an attention grabbing crisis, as is now the case with Flint lead poisoning).
We can see this sort of thing in microcosm in office politics as well. How often are we complaining about always being reactionary and putting out fires instead of proactively taking care of problems before they can cause a lot of damage? Well, once a fire starts, everyone is keen to figure out what's causing it and how to deal with it. But recognizing the pre-conditions that could potentially lead to a fire, and then eliminating them sound much more boring[1], and often requires a concerted information campaign just to get people invested in supporting the mitigation. But if there's an actual [2] fire, people are immediately interested by the inherent drama of the situation, and attention is no longer a barrier to overcome.
[1] even that description of it sounded much more boring than the bit about fire!
[2] an 'actual' figurative 'fire'. I know the wording is sub-optimal, but I'm pot committed to this metaphor so...
When a certain political party actively campaigns to convince people that (a) privatizing everything and (b) cutting all taxes will help the little guy, then it's absolutely to speak of moral and ethical corruption.
When you fail to communicate the urgency of replacing dangerous pipes to your electorate, you're (at best) incompetent.
Except this specific thread is all about how the municipal system is failing because either the populace won't vote for investment or higher political bodies block it.
In that case privatisation can work because it removes short term political incentives from the equation. Corporate structures enable investment and charging what is needed - plus things like water conservation ironically are often pursued more by those with financial stake in the game.
A private water utility can be sued into oblivion or killed by regulators over lead issues - yet a public system gets some soul searching articles that still mostly manage to blame capitalists while ignoring the failures of regulators. "Better regulation" is hard to achieve, but America in many ways seems to be truly shocking in how poorly regulated many areas are.
There is no chance that government can just hand over a hard problem to a private entity, and then make the private entity accountable for screwing it up. What private company would take that deal, and how would you draw blood from the stone when they screw up?
And the town that votes this way gets lead in its pipes.
Now that we've stated the obvious, it shouldn't be too hard to agree that "privatise everything" and "cut all taxes" is an extraordinarily stupid way to vote. Flint is evidence that some things are too critical to be privatized.
Part of the problem is that Flint neither voted this way, nor is it privatized. The state took over the city government and installed a city manager who made the decisions that led to this situation.
>It's politically untenable for water boards to raise rates, especially since water bills are not progressive (seniors and the poor pay the same rate as rich people).<
Based on my experience this is a key factor...
Just maintaining an aged system--making repairs to keep the water flowing--sometimes fully stretches the yearly budget...
I have a friend, a local businessman, who serves on the board of our local rural water district...he is a good man, serving with other good men and women, and the community is lucky to have such responsible citizens...in ways that they cannot even begin to imagine...
The board meets regularly to to review appeals from citizens who cannot afford that month's water bill...in almost all cases extensions are granted...
This is an infrastructure issue just as much as it is a health issue...don't get me wrong, safety is critical, absolutely...often utilities are doing the best they can with what they have to work with...all the while fully aware of what would be required for them to do better...
1) He's not blaming the tax-system. He's blaming the rate setting system.
2) How is that intellectually lazy? It seems like a perfectly reasonable point of view to me: fixing the system to remove the lead would cost money. Since rates are too low, the money isn't available to do that.
He's not saying the status quo is acceptable. He's pointing out what is necessary to fix it.
Gee it's almost like certain things shouldn't be privatized and profit-driven...
I never was able to wrap my head around this argument. If something is both (a) not commercially viable and (b) necessary, then it should be funded by taxed and operate (gasp!) at a loss.
Capitalist economics work really well for certain problems, and abysmally for others. Public water works falls into the latter category, as evidenced by Flint.
I don't think this is a good example of what you're trying to argue. It could easily be said that if water was privately provided, rates could be set such that the economics are feasible (everyone needs water - the demand curve is highly inelastic). Competition could ensure the water is pure and fairly priced. Who would go with Company A's lead-laden water if B's is clean?
I happen to disagree with the argument I just provided, but for reasons different than the quality of service a free market would provide.
> Who would go with Company A's lead-laden water if B's is clean?
That's not a realistic scenario however as that implies that each company would set up its own plumbing infrastructure, water sources, etc. In reality, the infrastructure is shared. So I see no reason why the choice wouldn't target be between "company A who has lead-laden water, company B who does some extra purification and charges for it heavily and company C who serves the exact same water as A but has better advertisements."
What would be the incentive to actually fix the infrastructure if it benefited your competition just as much as you?
One time money influx from feds solves that beautifully. And is viable economic stimulus that creates a lot of blu-ish collar jobs. We could have done that in 2009-2010. And as a bonus it helps the poorest areas the most.
This would have been an ideal stimulus project, if the stimulus had been more about stimulus and less about pork-barrel spending for politically-favored groups.
(And now you understand why so many Americans are skeptical of calls to just raise taxes to fix the infrastructure or the social problem de jure: they believe the alternative is just as bad and more expensive)
> This would have been an ideal stimulus project, if the stimulus had been more about stimulus and less about pork-barrel spending for politically-favored groups.
Politically-favored groups like Wall Street and defense contractors? And Alaskan islands, if I recall?
Well remove the protection government employees have, sovereign immunity protects both negligent government employees as well the entire bureaucratic structure. In other words, if a privately managed water system is found deficient or worse individuals are found knowingly negligent they can be held liable criminally. When it comes to the public sector this is not true, you cannot sue the people or government organization involved. You can only make a claim against their insurance if that is allowed and they can decide if it is.
If we are going to continue to have important services be run by government we must life the sovereign immunity they enjoy. This will raise the accountability so they act in our best interest.
> In other words, if a privately managed water system is found deficient or worse individuals are found knowingly negligent they can be held liable criminally
That certainly worked well with the banking industry.
Let's not forget that banking is a government-protected industry. A big recourse that a lot of people have in the normal, private space is to switch to a competitor. This naturally leads to competitors that try out things that are different to things you don't like. That mechanism is simply not present in the banking industry precisely because it's controlled (regulated/restricted entry) by government.
That was acutely tied up in consequences for politicians and regulators - and as Flint is showing the one thing political turkeys don't vote for is Christmas jailtime for themselves.
The Federal Government actively encouraged the mortgage crash through encouraging uneconomical home ownership and destroying banking regulation.
"Big water" is not the banking industry, the disparity between regulator and regulated is much less likely to occur and the opportunities for mega profits with which to bribe politicians, and allow them to bribe us with the resultant tax take, simply aren't there.
I think a major factor is that the US hasn't been around for very long and we're coming to a point where a lot of infrastructure is coming under need of repair or replacement simultaneously. In particular instances, this infrastructure degradation has been greatly exacerbated by decisions to save money in the short-term. My personal opinion is that this is all part of a decades long rightward shift away from "big government" and willingness to pay for proper maintenance of public works. 2008 was a wasted opportunity to combine much needed infrastructure investment with fiscal stimulus.
There is no question a lot of work will need to be done over the next decade. The question is, who will do the work, and how will it get paid for?
I think I agree with you on most of this, but I completely disagree with your first sentence. The US is one of the oldest current stable governments. All of the other major countries today got to completely rebuild their infrastructure after WW2: Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore , perhaps even the UK. Some of these advanced countries weren't even politically stable until the 70s-80s.
The US on the other hand has been politically stable for at least ~150 years and the northeast has been for longer. (Most of my life I've lived in houses that were over a century old. Go to Korea and you will find /no/ living areas built more than 30 years ago.) We're building on one or two century old infrastructure at this point. The two hardest things we have to deal with that no one else does (except China perhaps, but they're not at this stage yet to care, I think) is the size of the country and the age of the current infrastructure.
As a fun fact, some cities in Korea don't even use telephone poles, it's all underground[0]. And I'm sure you've heard of similar infrastructural marvels in Japan.
Quite a bit of European infrastructure is old, e.g. much of the stuff in the Nordic countries is >100 years old. But more money has been put into maintenance and replacement.
For this issue specifically, part of the problem is that the U.S. kept installing lead pipes through much of the 20th century, and as a result is saddled with a lot of them. Flint's lead pipes aren't even particularly old, most dating to its big population/construction boom of the 1920s-40s. That is late enough that concerns were already pretty widespread by then, e.g. Helsinki decided to phase out lead pipes during the 1890s. I can't seem to find a date for when the U.S. as a whole phased out lead pipes, but I do find that NYC stopped new installations in only 1961, so it seems to have been quite late.
Apart from a handful of cities that were utterly destroyed not much of Europe got rebuilt from scratch after WWII. There are parts of water systems from Roman times still in use today, and town centres whose housing stock largely dates back to before the Declaration of Independence.
150 years ago the US had only 23 million inhabitants, most of whom lived in rural areas that didn't have much infrastructure. The government might trace a continuous line back to then, but very little of the infrastructure or housing stock does. US infrastructure might be old compared with Singapore's but it's young by Western standards.
That is some good perspective. I am most familiar (whatever that means) with the US and Asia; I should have stuck to the two.
In any case, the fact remains that the US has a huge handicap due to the size (population and land) of the country. It is much easier for infrastructural change to happen in most other countries because they are much smaller. This is obviously only my theory right now from experience in the US and Asia.
Unless I'm mistaken and in light of the fact that infrastructure is mostly publicly funded, this is pretty much (true but) completely irrelevant.
Smaller countries also often depend on and have a very close relationship with the major private companies. For instance, Samsung builds apartments and helps fund subways.
That's a really good point. I guess we'll see if Europe has its own infrastructure problems in 50 years or so when some of that "new" WWII infrastructure starts to get old. I would say, though, that not all parts of Europe had to rebuild from scratch. You still find WAY more 100+ year old structures in Europe than the US.
Well, the UK wasn't by any means completely destroyed in WW2 and there's a lot of work being done there to upgrade centuries old infrastructure.
Some examples:
1) The Thames Tideway sewer is being constructed to handle the fact that the old London sewers have run out of capacity and routinely flood sewage into the Thames when there are heavy rains. The problem is that unlike modern sewer systems, London's is used for both rainwater and household sewage. And the original system was designed to overflow into the Thames, on the assumption that would ~never happen. But population growth and lots more concreting means it now happens regularly. The Thames Tideway is a massive, very deep underground tunnel that roughly follows the path of the river.
2) The London Underground is the world's oldest underground railway. It is upgraded continuously. The Crossrail upgrade is the largest construction project in Europe (technically Crossrail is not LU, but it's all a part of an integrated somewhat underground network).
3) The UK road network costs less to maintain than is raised via fuel taxes. The roads are effectively a profit centre for the government, in a sense. They are maintained continuously.
4) The UK water pipe network has had leaks at an economically sustainable level for 15 years now (i.e. the cost to find and fix the remaining leaks is higher than the value of the water lost). It does not use lead piping:
I don't think there's actually any difference in infrastructure age between Europe and America. WW2 is a red herring. A lot of modern infrastructure runs underground and was undamaged or only lightly damaged by bombing, which was in any case, focused on the cities. The biggest impact of WW2 on the London Underground, for example, is that these days they have to do systematic searches for unexploded underground bombs before doing any work.
Thanks for the response. I really don't know much about the UK so I appreciate all those examples!
However, even if WW2 is a red herring, I don't think you can compare Europe and the US to each other because the US is a single country under one government and Europe is a group of very individualistic countries that don't always cooperate well. This is just my theory, but any single country in Europe has the ability to change their countries infrastructure much more easily than the US (or any city in it) because the entire country's resources can be more easily bent toward it.
Furthermore, those areas of many century-old buildings in Europe are /probably/ not located in the most economically advanced city/countries and therefore falls out of my initial comparison of the US versus the major economies/countries today.
The UK also has a partially privatised water system. When it first happened it was highly controversial, especially regional price disparities.
Now years later there's an interesting political storm in Scotland which has retained a public water utility. The public sector has to contract out for water supplies and a private bidder came in with a much lower bid. The Scottish Government, for various reasons not least that the private bidder was English, gave Scottish Water three opportunities to try and make a more competitive offer - they couldn't.
I can only say that you get what you pay for, private vs. public non-withstanding. I don't put it past any private company to put in an unrealistically low bid, and hope for one of three exit strategies (based on what I've seen in my short lifetime):
1) Bill the difference later, resulting in huge overruns.
2) Be out of the picture when the hits the fan.
3) Declare bankruptcy, all stakeholders walk away with their gains
Except you don't have to take the lowest bidder but the best. In this instance the Scottish Government desperately wanted to not take the Anglian Water bid - if they could have pointed out the bid was infeasibly low, or that Anglian had a track record of the behaviours you mention, or other benefits that the public sector offer might have then they could have avoided giving it to Anglian. Despite trying several times to make the Scottish Water bid better they still couldn't beat the private sector alternative.
For point 3 ... that's the case for motorways and other major roads. Local road maintenance comes from the local council, and that's why anything less than an A road is usually littered with potholes that are rarely repaired.
>2008 was a wasted opportunity to combine much needed infrastructure investment with fiscal stimulus.
Yeah, but that would raise employment and, by extension, wages, which American business elites don't want.
They'd rather keep half heartedly talking about basic income and some techno utopian magic robotic future for the next 50 years rather than support restarting the Public Works Administration and providing a decent job guarantees again to do actual needed work like this.
> Regardless of one's politics, it's critical that we hold our institutions accountable and help them get better over time.
I think this is naive. A huge portion of the electorate's views are all about actively seeking institutional collapse - get in power, undermine the institution (through budget cuts, restrictions, demoralizing the workforce, etc), wait for the inevitable problems to discredit the institution and finally get rid of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
Holding institutions accountable takes a back seat when the real argument is whether they should exist at all. If you think the government shouldn't be in the business of providing clean water from the tap (and there many places in the world where that's the norm), then what's happening in Flint is not an issue.
This view is naive. There is an exceedingly small number of people that do not think the government should get out of the water business and even then, these are the people most critical of these kinds of institutional failures.
They seem to want us to be like Mexico, where the rich live in private enclaves with good services and everyone else lives in a slum. Mexico, last I checked, is not a world power. World powers have healthy populations and solid infrastructure.
Don't get me wrong. I do think government can be a "beast." But the other problem with starve the beast is that in practice it starves the wrong part. The healthy tissue (such as water services) atrophies and dies, but the waste and corruption finds a way to hang on. If anything the conditions of near-collapse created by these tactics are actually friendlier to corruption and waste. Look under the hood at Flint's water drama and you can see this in action.
The free market provides a great laboratory for analyzing organizational structures and pressures and their results. Perhaps we should look there to see what management tactics result in positive, good kinds of efficiency. I guarantee you that cutting the legs off your infrastructure, logistics, and core competencies is not a successful strategy. What would happen if FedEx cut back on repairs to its truck fleets in an effort to save money?
>The broader point is that incompetence and corruption plagues institutions (public and private) of all sizes.
Is it? Because it seems like it's just a funding problem. American infrastructure is in a pretty sad state. Fly into JFK and you don't get a sense you're flying into the richest nation in the world. The trains are decrepit. There's a looming bridge crisis, with ~20k bridges needing repair.
If there is incompetence it's that municipal, state and federal government don't want to pay for any of it because it would necessitate higher taxes and taxes are the devil.
Coming into the US and driving many LA highways, it feels/sounds as though the car's tyres have suddenly got a nail/bolt stuck in them. So many seemed to be in a poor state with problematic expansion joints or cracking?
Snowden exposed a vast amount of criminal activity within our government, and the governments response is "lets prosecute snowden!" ... no reforms, no groundswell for reform.
The spying isn't even a topic in the upcoming election.
Since 2001, we have only seen the government go the opposite way- gathering more power, from the creation of the TSA to NDAA they are clearly not beholden to the people. (I don't believe most people support this, if accurately educated about the scientific and legal basis of these- thousands of TSA agents have been arrested for crimes that victimize travelers, they fail tests to see if they will catch bombs, and no terrorists have been found...and this isn't just Bush's doing - NDAA and the porno scanners happened under Obama, and during the whole period we haven't been seeing congressmen of either party attempt to stop it (though Rand Paul did a filibuster at one point.))
The fundamental problem is that the US government- at all levels, and across parties- is not answerable to the people or for their crimes.
This is why I'm an anarchist- I believe no government can be kept accountable.
The anarchist position is totally self defeating. We live in a complex society so some systems are needed. You can't do without a functioning justice system, functioning infrastructure, a financial system you can trust not to steal your money and other things. The market can't provide these things without some rules.
I really wish people would start asking for government accountability instead of wanting to abolish things that don't work and thinking that there is some magic fairy that will jump in and make it work. Getting systems to work well is hard, never-ending work and there are no simple solutions. Most of us here build technology systems so we should know this first hand.
Not that I'm advocating anarchism, but you misunderstand what anarchism is if you think that it doesn't involve complex systems. The dream of anarchism is to have a stateless society, where there's no top-down control, not one without complex social institutions. In fact, an anarchist society would require more complex systems in order to function.
That's the same fantasy like extreme libertarianism. How do you build a power grid? How do you build national defense? How do conflicts get resolved? I have never heard a real answer to those questions.
>Power companies are responsible for their own infrastructure.
How exactly do you build infrastructure without government powers such as eminent domain, or without inserting easements for utility access?
A libertarian landowner could simply refuse to allow utility lines to cross their property and thus cutoff others from access, or require expensive routing around their property. Roads, power/sewer/water/gas lines, phone/cable/data - all would be at the whim of landowners large and small as to whether it would even exist.
There is no realistic way for a private company to negotiate access between them and every single landowner they'd need to in order to build infrastructure that serves a sizeable population. Hence government "coercion" is required.
In Spanish regions controlled by anarchists during the Spanish Civil War (a country which at the time had a lot of dirt poor farmers and a lot less large landowners), landowners were given the choice between working their lands collectively, or keeping only the land they could work themselves. That's not the same thing as Ayn Rand-style libertarianism.
I...don't know where you get the idea that libertarianism is about knocking everyone else down.
Perhaps if you focus entirely on removing welfare, it looks like that. And then, I (and other libertarians) believe that a Basic Income Guarantee would be extrenely useful, and a BIG would cover more people than current welfare systems.
Or perhaps you think that deregulating business will lead to massive monopolies, ignoring that the regulations you defend make it harder for new companies to enter a market (thus making it easier to hold a monopoly).
It's not like there haven't been regulations that cause more harm than good, though--for instance, regulations on pollution that only apply to new powerplants, leaving old ones untouched.
Libertarianism treats regulation like engineering: Simpler is better, and the ideal solution is the simplest; complicated solutions add more points of failure, which leads to a more broken result.
If you're not the person with either the most money or the most guns, anarchy ain't going to work out very well for you. Because once those with the largest amount of power don't have to play by any rules, well, it's game on. And I suspect almost all of us will be in the 99.99999% of the population that loses that game pretty badly...
Regardless of one's politics, it's critical that we hold our institutions accountable and help them get better over time.
This includes our country, our state, our county, our city, our company, our social and professional groups, open source communities, etc.
There is a strong human tendency to want to defend organizations we are part of (or rely on) rather than trying to constructively improve them.
Flint is an example of institutional failures at multiple levels, but over all the loss of life and suffering pales in comparison to what our failed institutions did in Iraq and around the world, and what they do to our schools all across the country, etc.
The more official an organization (government, etc.), the more fancy its facilities (buildings with columns, spires, domes, etc.) the more we must realize its credibility is based on self-perpetuation rather than on tangible, auditable results.
There are so many failures happening across the board, and the biggest enemy to progress is the idea that loyalty means keeping quiet.