Writing in Atlantic, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson believe they have found a villain to blame for the water crisis in Flint, Michigan—the erosion of the U. S.’s “mixed economy”:
It is tempting to search for a single villain in the Flint crisis: the austerity measures of state Republicans and especially Governor Rick Snyder, the weakness of local protections, the missteps of the EPA. But the reality is that these threats to public health and social well-being are at work across the United States, and they have much deeper roots. Figuring out where responsiveness broke down, punishing those responsible, and fixing systems of accountability are all imperative. But that won’t solve the deeper problem—America’s retreat from an effective mixed economy.
Begin with the plummeting investment in the physical underpinnings of communities, the roads, bridges, water systems, and other public goods that make the places where people live and work safe, livable, and productive. American infrastructure once used to be the envy of the world and a major source of Americans’ improved living standards. But in an era of government-bashing, it has been allowed to crumble, risking health, safety, and economic success.
Yes, there’s nothing like a grotesque failure of government at all levels for building support for more aggressive government action.
Let me tell a different story about Flint. In the 1920s and 1930s significant numbers of African Americans moved from the American South to the North, simultaneously fleeing the racially oppressive South and seeking good-paying jobs in the factories that were opening in Northern cities. From 1910 to 1930 Flint, Michigan’s population ballooned from 39,000 people to 156,000 on the strength of the growing General Motors which originally called Flint home. Many blacks found jobs at GM, in the other, smaller companies serving the automobile industry, and in the hotels and restaurants that served these companies.
In the 1970s and 1980s under competitive pressure from German and Japanese auto companies, GM shut down many of its factories and began employing overseas subcontractors rather than the domestic ones it had fostered for half a century. Flint citizens who were most portable, i.e. could find jobs elsewhere the easiest, mostly white, left Flint for better prospects, leaving the city with a majority black, generally poor citizenry, the situation there today.
There are fundamental assumptions in the very decentralized form of government that has grown up in the United States. By and large counties have assumed that its cities would take care of themselves and states have assumed that its counties would take care of themselves. Another assumption is that Americans would show initiative rather than waiting for someone else to solve their problems.
Those assumptions have grown progressively weaker over time. Not only have poor minorities tended to concentrate in the cities, the compensation packages of the cities’ workers have grown out of proportion to the abilities of the cities’ residents to pay them, and counties and states have grown decreasingly willing to fund these cities’ bloated budgets, seeing them as corrupt and, frankly, due to racial and/or class prejudice.
I see Flint’s problems as due to a combination of globalization, deindustrialization, white flight, and a failure of the model of governance. Flint can’t take care of itself and neither Genesee County, the State of Michigan, nor the U. S. government is willing to devote the resources to take care of it.
I have written frequently about the “Fordist model” that Mssrs. Hacker and Pierson are referring to as a “mixed economy” and would point out to them that it isn’t merely failing in Michigan. It’s failing everywhere under the pressures of globalization and modern technology.
I would very much like to see Mssrs. Hacker and Pierson quantify some of their claims. I see few signs that the federal government is regulating less. As one objective measure, the trend in the number of pages in the Federal Register published annually continues to be up. I do think there are ample reasons to believe that the federal government is decreasingly able to regulate effectively. IMO that stands to reason. The modern world moves too quickly and is too complex for effective regulation.
The modern technocratic conception of “market-friendly” policies is to craft highly complex and specific rules in an effort to regulate with the scalpel. In the past it was understood such things should be simple, transparent and understandable, a controlled economy rather than a regulated one. If the goal is clean water you put in a clean water infrastructure rather than relying on arcane “incentives” to make it happen. if the goal is expanding health care access you give people access rather than Rube Goldberg legislation like the ACA.
Controlling the outcome means many if not most regulations can be dispensed with.
“It is tempting to search for a single villain in the Flint crisis.”
I’m not just tempted, I’m pretty unmovable. Water supplies are regulated activities that require a person or persons with the proper licencures and certifications to sign-off an everything. There is someone’s name attached to everything done here. Either standards were met, or they were not.
If standards were met, I could probably come up with a large number of potential explanations involving uncertain science, cost-benefit considerations, and reliance on response measures (monitoring determines actions to be taken in response to test results).
Ben:
Once upon a time the government was in the business of providing services rather than managing contractors who provide services. There are still vestiges of that, e.g. the USPS at the federal level and the public school system at the local level.
I don’t think that micromanagement of how services are provided is an avoidable problem once you’re committed to not providing the services.
PD:
In my meager understanding of the situation there were failures at every level. As I’ve been saying all along it really sounds like a systemic failure (as Ben is suggesting) rather than that somebody screwed up. It looks like everybody screwed up and when everybody can screw up it’s a systemic failure.
@Dave, my way is easier. Blame some faceless, nameless souls that signed a government form and wait to hear their excuse while they are drug away to be burned. Some potential excuses, like I relied upon the government’s inaction, are not legally recognized.
This is wrong: “At the time, most American children were routinely exposed to lead levels far higher than those in Flint. Then as now, the worst affected were disproportionately poor and black, because levels were so dangerously high in the congested streets and aging buildings of inner cities.”
No, lead-paint and lead-water-pipes were relatively high-end goods. People knew that lead was toxic, but while lead-based paint cost more, it looked newer longer and resisted deterioration. Lead water pipes were more expensive, but they lasted longer and could be bent around existing structures. This is why I’m suspicious of the Kevin Drum theory; there are confounding socio-economic factors.
For the rest of it, I don’t believe the harm from lead water pipes in has been quantified. The article conflates different exposure routes for lead (eating paint chips, breathing exhaust, and drinking water that’s come into contact with lead, i.e. diluted lead). We don’t run human experiments on safe lead-exposures and don’t know near as much as this article suggests. We are operating almost entirely from a precautionary principle that looks for the easiest and most significant source of lead-poisoning, which isn’t the water pipes.
Part of the reason that quote bothers me is that it ignores an important part of the story that Dave mentions. African-Americans had middle-class jobs in Flint. They owned their own homes (and appear to have fallen into the trap of property-rich, income-poor). Something happened.
“This is why I’m suspicious of the Kevin Drum theory; there are confounding socio-economic factors.”
He links it pretty closely to leaded gasoline. Violence drops correlate with when leaded gasoline stopped being used. Pretty strong correlation. Should try bringing back leaded gas to see if violent crime goes back up so we could prove it.
Steve
@steve, Drum could do the same analysis of other countries that had markedly different phase-outs of leaded gasoline. Still, when focusing on inhalation of leaded gas, its not an exposure route limited to the poor and black in the inner cities, at least before white-flight.
I’m still not certain what the article’s point about “mixed economies” are. Some people get their water from public systems others from private systems. One complaint is that the government tends to be less rigorous in regulating public entities, but I’m not sure that is the issue here. It would be more obvious that smaller systems are subject to less regulation than larger systems, and that may have played a role here because there seems to have been some confusion as to Flint’s size classification.