If you live in Texas, or know someone who does, you know that right now the state is experiencing a massive – and bizarre – cold front. Though the average low temperature in February in Texas is 36°F, some parts of the state now have temperatures below zero. The cold has overwhelmed the state’s infrastructure: water pipes are freezing, electricity turbines are freezing, the power grid can’t keep up. People are getting dangerously cold in poorly-insulated homes with no heat, no hot water and no ready supply of winter gear like most of us have up here in the tundra. (Yes, I know North Dakota is not actually the tundra.)
How did this happen? Why didn’t Texas have a system in place to keep people from freezing to death? Why wasn’t everything insulated? Why didn’t they have alternative power supply?
We might also ask the same about lack of preparedness for major hurricanes, landslides, tsunamis and (ahem!) pandemics. As it happens, most governments, most places, under-spend on preventing damage from rare but catastrophic natural events. A lot of damage from natural disasters could have been prevented, but wasn’t. Why not?
To start, disaster prevention is expensive and when you are trying to prepare for a very rare event, it doesn’t always make sense to spend the money. Every dollar spent on preparing for a disaster that might or might not happen is a dollar not spent on something else that is needed right now, like teachers’ salaries or unemployment insurance or road repairs. Temperatures like these don’t happen in Texas often: the last similar cold snap happened roughly 30 years ago. Asking why Texas wasn’t prepared for sub-zero temperatures is a bit like asking why I haven’t paid to have my little house on the prairie retrofitted to survive an earthquake. (Of course my house is designed to prevent flood damage, but floods in Fargo are common, not rare).
But that’s not all there is to it. As it turns out, politicians don’t have a strong incentive to put a lot of money into disaster prevention. One problem is time horizons. Disaster prevention means spending money now, to reap a reward at some later date, when disaster strikes. However, most of the people involved in disaster preparation are in the executive branch — presidents, governors, mayors – and these politicians typically serve only a few terms. Chances are good that the politician who makes the sacrifices necessary for disaster prevention (which means reducing other expenditure or increasing taxes) will be out of office before the disaster shows up. Most politicians are not excited about bearing all the expense of investment so the next person can get all the benefit. (Imagine if she not only gets all the credit, but she’s from the other party! That would be a real disaster!)
The other problem is visibility. Disaster prevention is not particularly easy for voters to see and understand (have you read your state’s disaster plans?) Plus voters may dismiss the need for prevention because humans are notoriously terrible at estimating the risk posed by rare events. Disaster response, on the other hand, is highly visible. The disaster is no longer hypothetical and voters can directly observe whether and how quickly their government comes through with housing, food relief and insurance payments. And they reward politicians who respond in the wake of disaster in exactly the way they don’t reward politicians for effective disaster prevention, because no one pays attention to disaster prevention. So not only do politicians have little incentive to prevent rare disasters, they have something of an incentive not to prevent them. If disaster happens to strike, they can swoop in and save the day.
As usual for this blog, if you don’t like it, do something! Learn about disaster prevention and start rewarding politicians for their plans, rather than their response. If voters demand preparation, politicians will prepare. And otherwise, Texans will just have to be really really cold every 30 years or so. Holler if you need us to send you some mittens, y’all!
Wait! We can explain! 