Testing, Measuring, Informing, But Not Making Policy
"Follow the science" is like following the news, not the leader. But leaders who reject science can start a viscous cycle of lower innovation, economic decline, and further public resentment.
Twenty years ago, Hurricane Katrina was such a big storm its clouds nearly covered the whole Gulf of Mexico. If you followed the coverage of the storm—or even just the twentieth-anniversary coverage—then you may have heard that when Katrina made landfall the hurricane had weakened from category five to category three. Direct damage from winds and storm surge was disastrous, as with any category three hurricane. But far more damage occurred because the levees in New Orleans failed. As a presentation by the Deputy Executive Director from the American Society of Engineers (ASCE) put it, that failure was the “worst engineering catastrophe in U.S. history.”
In the end, there were some fifty breaches to the levees in New Orleans, including to the 56 miles of “I-wall” levees. The ASCE presentation estimated those failures increased flooding by three-hundred percent.
Although the “worst engineering catastrophe in U.S. history” happened for several reasons, the ultimate question about protection from flooding surges is less about engineering and more about politics.
“How much money do we want to spend now for protection in the future?” is how Dutch civil engineer Jurjen Battjes put it to reporter John Schwartz in The New York Times (30 May 2006: “An Autopsy of Katrina: Four Storms, Not Just One”). With New Orleans levees:
the construction never met the original design’s intent (authorized by Congress after Hurricane Betsy flooded the city in 1965, the system was still not finished when Hurricane Katrina hit 40 years later);
the levees were not updated based on new information from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s understanding of hurricanes;
the levees were not properly maintained.
By contrast, flooding in 1950s Netherlands prompted politicians there to spend enough money—quickly—to build a system to withstand surges that might be expected every 10,000 years. A 2011 assessment of Netherlands flood risk management policy concluded it “can be continued for centuries” (so long as sea level rise remains less than 1.5 meters per century… as indeed there are always caveats in science).
The flood protection system for New Orleans that Congress authorized in 1965 was still not finished when Hurricane Katrina hit 40 years later.
In uncertain times, some politicians equate “follow the science” with “follow the leader.” But science’s inherent uncertainty—because science is a process of inductive reasoning—means scientists are always correcting past mistakes or, more kindly, revising results. Sometimes those revisions are small—such as a retracted paper—and sometimes those revisions are revolutionary. But that regular correction happens at all allows extremist politicians to push their own narratives, say, by persuading others that climate change is a “religion” so there’s no need to spend money to adapt to climate change or update understandings about hurricanes and fund weather forecasting.
Now, some extremist politicians are surfing the wake of poor policy decisions made during the coronavirus pandemic to reject science entirely, including asking—or allowing their subordinates to ask—scientists “to revise and to review and change studies that have been settled in the past.”
Rejecting science is common to extremist politicians worldwide (including increasingly in Europe). But when such politicians become political leaders, their rejection of science can lead to a viscous cycle of lowering innovation that furthers economic decline, resulting in an increase in public resentment—the resentment that often led to leadership of an extremist politician in the first place—and thus further rejection of science’s role in sustaining society.
Science’s Role
After hearing a presentation at a 2015 scientific conference about declining trust in science—with one slide asking “Why Don’t They Believe Us?”—I put together an editorial cartoon that swapped the question with an exclamation: “Why They Don’t Believe Us!”
I was reminded of the cartoon when I saw the twentieth anniversary characterization of Hurricane Katrina’s breaching the New Orleans’ levees as “the worst engineering catastrophe in U.S. history” rather than one of the worst policy catastrophes in U.S. history.
Would the levees have failed had they been properly maintained, including updating them in accordance to scientists’ increasing understanding of a hurricane’s power? Would anyone have died had economic and health conditions not been so bad that some people could not afford or were unable to follow city’s mandatory evacuation orders to leave New Orleans, as 1.2 million other people had done in advance of the storm?
As a co-production with society, science can test, measure, and inform policy decisions. But, of course, science does not make policy decisions. People do. Science is a useful input to those policy decisions, as is history, economics, ethics, laws, religion… even political considerations may usefully inform policy decisions. So “follow the science” is really less like “follow the leader” and more like “follow the news.” Indeed, news is often referred to as “the first rough draft of history.” And as with any rough draft, revisions typically yield improvements. So too for science, where experiments and evidence inform scientific revisions and hence, can better inform policy decisions.
Reasons for Resentment
Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is still recovering. Organizations such as LowerNine.org are helping to rebuild the neighborhood one house and one renovation at a time.
Part of the reason for the slow recovery is bad policy. In one federally funded program, the state of Louisiana used a grant-awarding formula to help residents rebuild that was found to be discriminatory. Housing advocates sued, and in 2010, the U.S. District Court ruled that “The statistical and anecdotal evidence… leads to a strong inference that, on average, African-American homeowners received awards that fell farther short of the cost of repairing their homes than did white recipients.”
Additionally, a post-Katrina charity founded by actor Brad Pitt also “went horribly wrong” and resulted in a slew of lawsuits for shoddy construction and poor materials that had led to a raft of problems, including rotting wood products that were supposed to last 40 years. Urban studies academic Judith Keller stayed in one of the houses in 2018 as part of her research on the non-profit development. When she returned in 2022, she found things worse, writing “Mismanaged housing developments, even when constructed with lofty goals, only compound the hardships of the low-income people they purport to serve.”
Extremist Inversion
The twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is but a timely example of how poor policy decisions enable extremist politicians. In April, 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt was hardly an extremist politician by today’s standards. He was then Governor of New York, first elected in 1928 and then re-elected in 1930 after the stock market crash and onset of the Great Depression. But in April, two months before he won the nomination to represent the Democratic Party in the 1932 Presidential election, FDR gave a radio address that was extremist compared to the politics of President Herbert Hoover. In his address, Roosevelt called “for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power, for plans… that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” He criticized Hoover and Congress for bailing out the big banks and corporations at the expense of the forgotten man: “Here should be an objective of government itself, to provide at least as much assistance to the little fellow as it is now giving to the large banks and corporations. That is another example of building from the bottom up.”
A month later, Roosevelt gave a commencement address at Oglethorpe University, decrying the “theory that the periodic slowing down of our economic machine is one of its inherent peculiarities — a peculiarity which we must grin, if we can, and bear because if we attempt to tamper with it we shall cause even worse ailments.” Instead, Roosevelt famously concluded, “The country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”
It took several votes at the Democratic National Convention of 1932 for Roosevelt to win enough delegates to secure his party’s nomination. But that November, Roosevelt won in a landslide against President Hoover. He went on to champion policies that helped lift America out of the Great Depression.
Roosevelt’s experiments included instituting minimum wages, ending child labor, implementing Social Security, and, among other things, ending the outsized budget dedicated to the Immigration Bureau’s “conducting sensational raids and generating controversy” by harassing immigrants (all described in a federal webpage that, as far as I can tell, has not been modified by the Trump Administration).
Those experiments that worked were continued or modified. Those that did not were harshly criticized, and historians note that “the New Deal accumulated a record of notable failures,” too.
Back to Life/Reality
Treating scientific findings as the first rough draft of tomorrow’s solutions—tentative and revisable, but indispensable—can yield levees that hold, evacuation plans that include every resident, and economic policies that nurture growth for everyone without stoking resentment, among other policy decisions made by political leaders.
But it will take summoning political will to use those rough drafts—and political patience to see their revisions—as they are intended, including abandoning policy experiments when they fail. Science is not a compass that points the way to an inevitable destination. Science is a candle in the dark casting light on truths hidden by pseudoscience and superstition: if we allow the wick to gutter, we risk stumbling into avoidable catastrophes.
How do you use scientific inquiry to sustain your habitat?
Well written, thoughtful, portrait of our current untenable position. Thanks to the link to Sagan's book.