Harm Caused by the Healer

This article is part two in a series on top-down power, and how a Strong Towns advocate might use existing top-down programs and federal funding streams as tools (in the short term) for boosting local resilience.

---

In the early 1930s, Australian sugar cane farmers had a problem. A troublesome insect, the grey-backed cane beetle, was wreaking havoc on their crops, and the only effective pesticides were highly toxic chemicals with nasty side effects. So the country's Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations hit on a novel solution. In 1935, they began to import thousands of cane toads—a species native to South America—from Hawaii to control the beetle population. 

Cane toad. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

The result is a now infamous story of unintended consequences. Cane toads spread uncontrolled throughout northeastern Australia, becoming a far greater nuisance than the cane beetle ever was. The highly toxic toads are frequently deadly to would-be predators and domestic pets that try to eat them, and they have devastated the populations of their insect prey as well, causing ripple effects up and down the food chain. The saga of the epic blunder that was their deliberate introduction has been the subject of multiple documentaries. (I highly recommend this incredibly entertaining one.) 

“Harm caused by the healer,” or iatrogenics (iatros is Greek for "healer") is a pervasive feature of the modern world. "Healer" here means anyone intervening with good intentions to solve a problem. Destructive unintended consequences to well-meaning actions have always been a possibility, of course: mice, men, best-laid plans, etc etc. But the risk is greatly magnified by features of modernity. These features include the ability of modern societies to intervene in complex systems very rapidly at huge scales. They also include a societal tendency toward oversimplfying complex problems in pursuit of highly legible solutions—easy to communicate, conceptualize, and thus to finance, implement, and replicate. Oversimplifying a complex problem usually means underestimating or discounting unknown risks, sometimes catastrophically so. Just ask a cane farmer in Queensland.

The disastrous nature of the pursuit of legibility is a theme of the brilliant 1999 book Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott, or you can get a Cliffs Notes-esque version from this excellent blog post by Venkatesh Rao.

Institutions where decision-making is greatly removed from where the consequences are felt—what we call “top-down”—are especially prone to this mistake. And urban planning history is rife with it. The story of America’s Suburban Experiment is, in large part, the story of how we standardized the way we built cities, making it legible, predictable, superficially rational… and deeply fragile. And we did so largely out of a desire to help—to improve people’s mobility and to open up mass homeownership to the middle class. Iatrogenics 101.

Traditional Development: Complex (and Illegible)

The Suburban Experiment: Complicated (but Ordered and Legible)

Top-down programs of today might reflect the same ideologies that prevailed in the 1950s. They might not prioritize the same technologies or privilege the same interest groups. But to the extent that they are based on the principle of legibility—a standardized, scalable, replicable solution to be applied across contexts—they are going to be just as liable to do unanticipated but grave harm.

The Need for Non-Naive Intervention

This piece is the second installment in a series on how to square the Strong Towns vision, in which change is organic, incremental, and bottom-up, with a world in which we face big, urgent problems causing imminent suffering. In that world, sometimes the only apparent tools to tackle urgent problems in an urgent way are top-down, blunt-instrument interventions. (You can read Part 1 here.)

It's easy to understand the impulse to help desperate Australian farmers that led authorities to introduce cane toads to their fields. It's also easy, in hindsight, to see the catastrophic consequences.

Try telling someone who has no idea how they're going to pay rent next month—or one of the millions of Americans who lost their job due to the pandemic and hasn't paid it in months—about your great idea to ensure their city has ample affordable housing 30 years from now. They can be forgiven if they don't give a rip. (Next try telling them all about how policies like rent control, which might keep them in their home for another year, are actually counterproductive for the long-term resilient functioning of the housing market. They can be forgiven if they get the urge to punch you in the face.)

Of course, the 30-year vision matters too. Treat the symptoms and not the disease, and you'll just keep throwing money at the same problem forever. But treat only the underlying disease, and the symptoms may just kill the patient while you're working on a cure.

If the choice is between working with the existing levers of power to do harm reduction, or working to change how those levers operate (even at the expense of relief now), the answer is always "Yes." Being philosophically pure is the province of professional pundits and Twitter loudmouths, but any real-world practitioner who's trying, first and foremost, to make people's lives better is going to need to multitask. 

Even Nassim Taleb, perhaps our era's best-known Cassandra when it comes to the known and unknown risk we invite by meddling in complex systems, acknowledges in Antifragile the need for vigorous intervention to limit the harms caused by previous rounds of meddling. Taleb's language suggests that there's a case for the use of Robert Moses's toolkit specifically to undo the work of (the proverbial, not literal) Robert Moses:

Let me warn against misinterpreting the message here. The argument is not against the notion of intervention; I am just warning against naive intervention and lack of awareness and acceptance of harm done by it. The message here is in favor of staunch intervention in some areas, such as ecology or to limit the economic distortions and moral hazard caused by large corporations. What should we control? As a rule, intervening to limit size (of companies, airports, or sources of pollution), concentration, and speed are beneficial in reducing Black Swan risks. 

And we may need to intervene to control the iatrogenics of modernity— particularly the large-scale harm to the environment and the concentration of potential (though not yet manifested) damage, the kind of thing we only notice when it is too late.... To me it is mostly about having a systematic protocol to determine when to intervene and when to leave systems alone.

Naive intervention can be described as the mindset that the existence of a problem demands that those with power “do something!”—and the mere fact of doing something is always preferable to doing nothing.

Non-naive intervention is different. We don't reject the possibility that we can and should do something about an immediate crisis. Rather, we evaluate what we should do with the humility appropriate to one who understands that we are going to get things wrong, and we are going to unleash unintended consequences. And we should only intervene where we have a good handle on the downside risks, and they are limited in comparison to the upside potential.

The goal of non-naive intervention is twofold: to prevent dire harm now, but also to restore local nuance and feedback mechanisms so that we don't keep fighting the same war.

What we really need is a set of ground rules to minimize the chance that our best intentions gone awry leave everybody worse off. What might those rules look like in the context of programs that shape the built environment? 

Here are three (humble and certainly incomplete) suggestions. Follow-up articles in this series will take the principles, one at a time, and flesh them out with examples.

1) Prioritize damage control.

It's a cliché for a reason that the first thing to do when you’re in a hole is stop digging. With regard to many of the most destructive policies that have fueled the Suburban Experiment, we have yet to actually accomplish the "stop digging" step. (Just read the Frontier Group's annual Highway Boondoggles report if you have any doubt of that).

So if you’re a reform-minded person who ascends to the helm of an agency historically responsible for problems on the ground, what should your priorities be? First, second, and third: Get. Out. Of. The. Way. If you're not clearly and deeply committed to stopping the things you ought to simply stop doing, why should anyone trust you to build great new things?

All this applies to legislative bodies as well. This is true at the city level, where zoning codes and parking mandates flatten hyper-local nuance and prevent good projects right and left. It's true at the state and federal level, where, for example, aspects of the tax code often hamstring cities' ability to set and fund their own priorities in rational, sustainable ways. Identifying where to remove distortions, rather than add them, should be an obsession of those who want to wield their top-down authority for good.

2) Invert the rules of engagement. Those at the top are there to serve, not lead. 

One of the hallmarks of the Suburban Experiment is that we've neutered local government as the locus of problem solving in direct response to people's urgent needs. We've turned cities into an implementing arm for policies created at higher levels of government. Major building priorities, from transit to sewer expansion to vanity projects, are now shaped more by the availability of state or federal funding than by any sort of mandate from the community.

And we've made cities more like each other in the process—meaning they will all fail in the same ways. Because local projects conform to criteria established in a centralized way—whether it be a light rail line, or an affordable housing complex funded (as almost all of them are) by the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit—the same incentives and assumptions now drive policy in vastly different places. Bad experiments get the chance to be replicated hundreds of times before we understand how bad they are.

Our state and federal agencies, through control of the purse strings, are set up to establish standardized, legible "solutions" that can be dropped, plug-and-play style, in cities vastly different from each other. They don't have to be set up this way. What if these agencies behaved, instead, as flexible sources of technical expertise, information on best practices, and open-ended block grants that can serve as seed money for a local government with a promising idea?

3) Directly tie emergency relief to systemic fixes.

A tension or contradiction between treating the symptoms and treating the disease is a key feature of dysfunctional institutions. When a broken system is failing to meet people’s needs, providing relief to those people from the immediate consequences can seem the humane thing to do. But it can also be a powerful source of moral hazard. By insulating the system itself from the consequences of failure, we risk rewarding bad actors and perpetuating bad incentives. Delaying a necessary reckoning with something that is fundamentally broken usually just means a bigger, more painful reckoning down the line.

Chuck Marohn made this point in 2020 in writing about the financial straits of New York City transit. The consequences of not bailing out a system that is the lifeline of millions of New Yorkers are unconscionable. The consequences of bailing it out are unacceptable. There is a way out of this Catch-22, though it’s not without complications: tie the one-time bailout to fundamental reform as a necessary condition.

If it were me and I ran the printing press, I would give the MTA the $12 billion it wants. I would then offer to retire their $35 billion in debt if they—the MTA, as well as the city and state governments—would restructure their funding approach so that value capture was used to fund system expansions, a broad real-estate tax was used to fund maintenance, and the fare box was dedicated to funding operations.

A policy of non-naive intervention means that we recognize that, no matter how much people are suffering now, we must find ways to help them that don’t simply push the pain onto their future selves or descendants–let alone amplify that eventual pain in the process. There is a place for big interventions, for big bailouts, for coordinated and centralized action. But the challenge we face is that it can’t be the equivalent of releasing a bunch of cane toads and saying, “What’s the worst that could happen?"

Ribbit.

---

---

---