Martin Gilens, Tali Mendelberg, and Nicholas Short write:
Despite the importance of effective disaster policy, governments typically fail to produce it. The main explanation offered by political scientists is that voters strongly support post-disaster relief but not policies that seek to prevent or prepare for disaster. This study challenges that view. We develop novel measures of preferences for disaster prevention and post-disaster relief. We find strong support for prevention policies and candidates who pursue them, even among subgroups least likely to do so. Support for prevention has the hallmarks of “real” attitudes: consistency across wordings and response formats, including open ended probes; steadfastness in the face of arguments; and willingness to make trade-offs against disaster relief, increased taxes, and reduced spending on other programs. Neither cognitive biases for the here and now nor partisan polarization prevent robust majority support for disaster prevention. We validate these survey findings with election results.
This is from a paper, “The Politics of Disaster Prevention,” being presented next week in the political science department; here’s a link to an earlier presentation. I’m just sharing the abstract because I’m not sure if they want the full article to be available yet.
In any case, the results are interesting. Lots to chew on regarding political implications. And it reminded me of something that something comes up in policy discussions.
Disaster preparedness is an area where experts play an important intermediary role between government, citizens, media, and activists. And, unlike, say, medical or defense policy, where there are recognized categories of experts (doctors and retired military officers), there’s not really such a thing as a credentialed expert on disaster prevention.
I’m not saying that we should always trust doctors or retired military officers (or, for that matter, political science professors), just that there’s some generally-recognized path to recognition of expertise.
In contrast, when it comes to disaster preparedness, we might hear from former government officials and various entrepreneurial academics such as Dan Ariely and Cass Sunstein who have a demonstrated willingness to write about just about anything (ok, I have such willingness too, but for better or worse I’m not an unofficially NPR-certified authority).
We might also hear from researchers who are focused on judgement under uncertainty—but they can also have problems with probability themselves. The problem here might be that academics tend to think in theoretical terms—even when we’re working on an applied problem, we’re typically thinking about how it slots into our larger research program—and, as a result, we can botch the details, which is a problem when the topic is disaster preparedness.
I offer no solutions here; I’m just trying to add one small bit to the framework of Gilens, Mendelberg, and Short regarding the politics of disaster preparedness. They talk about voters and politicians, and to some extent about media and activists; somehow the fact that there are no generally recognized experts in the area seems relevant too.
I sent the above to the authors, and Mendelberg replied:
Prevention policy experts do exist. FEMA may be best known. Less known is that disaster response and preparedness is a profession, with its own journals, training certification, and even a Bureau of Labor Statistics classification (Emergency Management Director, numbering about 12,000 jobs, mostly in local and state government). Btw, Columbia has a center for disaster preparedness, and they offer training certifications.
Do these experts have influence? One comparison point is the role of experts in opinion about climate policy. That role has become fraught, as that policy domain has become politically polarized. People skeptical of climate change are turned off by climate scientists asserting their scientific expertise to advocate for policy. By contrast, according to out findings, disaster prevention is not very polarized. So prevention experts could shape public opinion on prevention policy. Whether they shape disaster policy is a separate question. Anecdotally, I’ve heard they wish they had more policy influence. Are they hamstrung because politicians under-estimate public support? An interesting question.
Wow, indeed Columbia appears to be home to the National Center for Disaster Preparedness. I hope some of its staffers come to Mendelberg’s talk.
Hi Andrew,
in fact, Sunstein has already written an entire book on it roughly 15 years ago calles “Risk and Reason” and it is an interesting discussion about the so called precautionary principle. This principle is or was more influential in guiding policy making in the EU than in the US and I was always wondering whether this actually matched or reflected the preferences of the respective citizens. You know the “German Angst” (fear of something something happening in the future so you might as well prepare for it), that has always translated to less risk taking etc. Interesting if this work extends in comparative fashion, as far as I can tell this is a study of American citizens right?
> there’s not really such a thing as a credentialed expert on disaster prevention
Lol, we’ve apparently forgotten about the entire profession of Civil Engineering?
Sounds about right. Civil Engineering is a thankless profession. Quite literally. No one goes around thanking you because there wasn’t a dam breach and flood, thanking you because their house is still standing every morning, thanking you because water is delivered to their tap every day. Of course when unavoidable stuff happens… hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, forest fires… everyone gets upset.
If you want to know what life without civil engineering looks like just look at the syrian earthqake in Feb 2023 that killed tens of thousands. Compare that to the death toll in the Northridge quake in LA at 57 people.
(wikipedia says 59,259 people died in the Syria quake)
Daniel:
Yes, good catch, and also see Mendelberg’s response that’s at the end of my post. The funny thing is, one of my closest colleagues at Columbia is a civil engineer!
I guess that all kind of makes my point, that what it takes for someone to be a media-credentialed expert is to be a well-connected fluent bullshitter in the Sunstein vein, rather than to actually have worked in the physical world. And I didn’t think of civil engineers, even though one of my close friends and collaborators at Columbia is in that profession!
To loop back to the topic of political science: the study of who is considered an expert or who is consulted on these things is an interesting question in itself. I’m sure that actual government commissions on disaster preparedness will be full of civil engineers and will not waste their time with media-friendly law professors—but when it comes to policy, the entire field of disaster preparedness is just one more constituency.
Likewise, we have basically eliminated water-borne illnesses in some rather poor places, despite exploding population density and the global spread of some nasty illnesses. And we have made airline crashes so rare that one can become a global gossip sensation for weeks. The apocalyptic wildfires in Canada kill one or two people here and there not whole communities. “Despite the importance of effective disaster policy, governments typically fail to produce it.” sounds like classic availability bias.
I’m interested to see the different approaches they took to assessing that these are ‘real’ attitudes or not – people just coming up with their responses on the fly is something I have to deal with in my work because quite a bit of it covers pretty niche issues that people might not have thought about much before being asked. Any idea when the paper will be out, or a preprint?
I’m also curious about this. A few days ago, there was a comment regarding how different people express preferences depending on slight differences in wording – this work claims that their results are robust with respect to that. I’ll be interested to see exactly what they did and found. I admit I am skeptical – a claim that people generally support risk prevention seems to conflict with so many things – poor support for public health, little action on climate change, little action on protecting the electrical grid (beyond what individual producers are doing), etc. All of these areas are subject to much debate and conflicting “evidence” and there is always the question of whether opinions translate into action. Presumably their results concerning tradeoffs with increased taxation should shed some light on this – but, is it survey questions about hypothetical taxation or actual analysis of taxation to address disaster prevention? Then there is the whole issue of whether resources devoted to disaster prevention are wisely spent – are we spending on the “right” things? This whole area of research is fraught with unresolved issues that their clear and strong claims are surprising. I’ll be anxious to see what they did.
There are a lot of areas in which robust measures of public opinion say one thing and policy says another. Gun control is a familiar example, as is health care/insurance. The standard political economy response is to say that the interests that would be harmed by such policies are better organized, more concentrated, command more resources, etc. I’ve argued that this is very much the situation with climate change, for instance.
Disaster preparedness covers a lot of specific domains, bringing many interests into play. You’ve got construction for earthquake preparedness, development for floodplains, and so on. Is it regularly the case that the interests vulnerable to preparedness are more powerful? Perhaps the exceptions are illuminating.
FWIW, Sunstein’s work on catastrophic risk, aside from its other faults, doesn’t pay any attention to the distribution of costs. Political economist he ain’t.
“the interests that would be harmed by such policies are better organized, more concentrated, command more resources, etc. I’ve argued that this is very much the situation with climate change, for instance.”
To the extent this is so, perhaps an important consideration is why they became better organized and came to command more resources in the first place? Perhaps that has something to do with the value they provide to society.
Most of the rise in life expectancy in human history can be tied directly to the discovery and commercial development of oil and natural gas. It’s hard to argue against the value that provided and continues to provide to society. And beyond the shear value of the energy, Rockefeller made Standard Oil one of the most efficient companies in the world – forcing the rest of the industry to follow suit or never get off the ground. When Standard was broken up, all the baby standards continued with Rockefeller’s management style – and as a result the oil industry as a whole remains today extremely well managed.
So, on the one hand, when an industry provides high value to society, it’s products earn a good return and the people operating the industry become wealthy (e.g., command more resources). But on the other hand, they got that wealth by providing excellent value, which in turn creates strong demand for those products and means the public won’t be so enthused about rising prices undermining the value proposition – especially when they can see that those price rises are imposed by elected officials who can be unelected.
In the end the argument that the only reason climate legislation has failed for over thirty years is becase FF companies have used their wealth and political power to block it is pretty far-fetched. The fact is the combined resources of the government, the legions of Hollywoodies, tech millionaires and billionaires, other billionaires like Tom Steyer and the combined resources of millions of poeple contributing to the Green.Orgs *far* outweigh those of the FF industry can spare for political activity.
The simple reality is that while lots of people want to help the climate, not enough of them want to pay higher gas prices, lose jobs in the local economy, deal with the economic drag that higher energy prices put on the economy, or see their 401Ks take a hit to do it. It’s easy to say. It’s harder to deal with real consequences.
So much for surveys. Staisticians working with survey claims about people’s behavior should just throw in the towel. Become behavioral economists. Even as bad as much of that work can be, at least building models of what people actually do, even through a chain of inference, as opposed to what they (say they do, think should be done, would support doing…bs…bs…bs…) has the potential to actually produce something useful.
There are several fields you and the article are discussing (Disaster Preparedness, Disaster Response, Disaster Recovery, Mitigation). Each field has it’s expertise–the first two usually sit in public health and emergency management. The last two sit often as a Resilience/Mitigation sub-department within each of a locality’s Housing, Community Development, Environmental, Transportation, Emergency Management and Public Works departments.
The US uses a National Disaster Recovery Framework, which guides Congress to appropriate monies to the cognizant agency responsible for awarding funds. FEMA runs some programs internally, but also awards to a variety of local agencies for larger projects. HUD awards to local Housing and Community Development agency for long term housing rebuilding. EPA awards to local Dept of Environmental Protection for pipes rebuilding (both drinking and sewerage). DOT awards to local Dept of Transportation for emergency road repairs. Etc.
There are a variety of disaster types, but the two top of mind for administrators are public health (ie Covid) vs natural disasters (ie hurricanes). Their frameworks for preparedness and recovery are very different (people focused vs built environment). FEMA has work and funding that overlaps both worlds.
Recognized experts are former CDC and local Public Health agency staff for public health disaster preparedness, then FEMA staff and local resilience divisions staff within local agencies for natural disaster preparedness (“natural disaster preparedness” is misnomer — in the field its called resilience or mitigation). Some states and local gov are creating Chief Resilience Officers.
In the end, because natural disasters affect the a multitude of aspects of places and build environments, researchers have many loose ends to pull on and study. I think the biggest issue is few researchers have enough experience across the disaster recovery/mitigation landscape. So it’s hard to become an authority unless you were an administrator in a local agency, or worked for FEMA/HUD/EPA/DOT where you gained exposure.
This isn’t exactly about disaster prevention, as much as:
a) Planning what to do if one hits
b) Having slack in the system to allow rapid deployment/diversion of resources (monopoly money is nice, as we used to say).
Once upon a time, the old Bell System had 1M+ people, and somewhat resembled the US government, occasionally needing to act like FEMA.
While I was working at Bell Labs in NJ in 1975, the worst service disaster in Bell System history occurred in NYC, as a major switching center burned.
A massive effort ensued, and it was fixed in 28 days, but obviously there had been planning somewhere beforehand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_New_York_Telephone_exchange_fire
I am reminded of the situation in Wuhan at the start of the pandemic. The Chinese Govt built a hospital is some incredible time, One week?
It appeared to be a completely prefabricated structure. A lot of pre-plannng and emergency preparedness went into that.
“Despite the importance of effective disaster policy, governments typically fail to produce it. ”
The Japanese work pretty hard at it. Lots of flood control, earthquake prevention stuff. Some of it misplaced, but most of it pretty good. The section of Tokyo I live in has some areas with close-together wooden pre-war structures that are seen as a major fire hazards in an earthquake, so when we renovated, even though we’re nowhere near those places, they offered us a (small) tax break if we did approved earthquake resistance measures. (Our contractor told us we could do either A or B to meet the tax break standards. We did both. As a result, my office is kinda noisy, though*, since “B” was to replace the traditional Japanese heavy tile roof with stamped tile-shaped sheet metal “tiles”, which ping in a heavy rain. Better than having the building ripped apart in an earthquake.) Lots of rivers have major flood control stuff. The Arakawa River’s name means “Raging River”, and prior to the early 20th century it regularly made horrific messes of places people were living, so they fixed it. (The links are photos of the Edo River (another river in east Tokyo), but this is the idea; wide flood plain and monster dikes; they don’t fool around.)
https://pbase.com/davidjl/image/171063646
https://pbase.com/davidjl/image/171063648
Amusingly, one of the pet peeves of foreigners (usually afluent and/or Harvard-educated American foreigners) in Japan is that the Japanese trash the natural environment with errosion-resisting concrete embankments on a lot of smaller rivers. Obnoxiously stupid since Japan has a nasty typhoon season, and even smaller rivers often overflow.
*: https://pbase.com/davidjl/image/160763279