Quite a few of the men in my wife’s family are firefighters. My wife’s great-nephew is training to become a firefighter and, if he persists as I expect he will, he will represent the fourth generation of firefighters in my wife’s family. With such a family connection to firefighting I found Greg Easterbrook’s post on the political evergreen of increasing the number of firefighters interesting, to say the least:
With stricter building codes, built-in sprinkler systems and the near-universal use of smoke detectors, incidence of structure fire in the United States has declined dramatically in the past generation. In 1985, there were about 2.5 million reported fires in the U.S. Since then, fires have declined steadily, down to 1.3 million last year. The report also shows that fire deaths are down from 6,000 in 1986 to 3,100 in 2010. That’s a 48 percent decline in both fires and deaths caused by fires.
Over that same period, the number of career (not volunteer) firefighters has risen from 238,000 in 1986 to 336,000 in 2010. That’s a 41 percent increase in publicly paid firefighters during the same period that safety technology has been able to decrease the occurrence of fire.
When that’s considered per 100,000 population the results are even more striking. Since 1986 the population has increased about 30% so the number of fires per 100,000 population is about a third of what it was in 1986 while the number of firefighters is more than 30% more. Since more firefighters are only marginally related to the total number of fires, the increase sounds pretty hard to justify.
Fire departments aren’t the only public institutions increasing in size to questionable advantage. Skipping over the contentious issue of the relationship between the number of police officers and crime, it can hardly be argued that the explosion in the number of public school administrators has resulted in improved education for public school students. I won’t even bother dredging up the statistics. The number of public school administrators is a multiple of what it was just a decade ago, there are more per 100,000 population, and there are more per 100,000 students (here in Chicago the number of public school administrators has grown even as the number of public school students has shrunk, an instantiation of one of Parkinson’s laws), while the graduation rates have remained stubbornly high and achievement has struggled at best.
I think we need a more thoughtful approach. Not only is right-sizing the question that we should be considering, maybe we should give more consideration to something that’s a repeating theme around here: not just do more or do less but do differently.
