50. Lessons from an Iconoclast

Fifty years ago this week, I was planning the events for my high school’s version of the first National Environmental Teach-In (later called Earth Day). All of the speakers my friends and I invited were either politicians or government officials. If I knew then what I know now, that event would have been much different. Here are a few of the main lessons I’ve learned since then.

1. Don’t trust the government

Everyone knows that “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you” is a joke. Yet too many people still believe that government works the way their high school teachers taught them. I recently watched some college students debate whether to privatize public transit, and one of them said, “I think transit should be run for the public interest and not for profits.” I wondered what made him think that any public agency operates in the public interest, but that’s what we are taught and that’s what many implicitly believe.

People in Congress and state legislatures know better; they’ve seen how the sausage is made. Yet most of the legislation they pass assumes that the bureaucracies they create and fund will automatically work in the public interest. The Supreme Court put this assumption into a legal precedent called the Chevron decision. In reality, we can’t trust any level of government — the legislators, the executives, or the bureaucrats — to work in the public interest, even if we could define it.

Another way of putting this is “trust the government to put its own interest first.” Private companies also put their own interest first, but to succeed they have to sell something that the public wants to buy. Public agencies don’t have to produce anything the public wants or needs; they just have to convince the legislature they are producing something that will be good for the legislators.

2. Incentives count

Someone — no one is sure who — once said, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” I would rephrase that to, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incentives.” Incentives drive the world’s institutions. Sometimes they lead people to do the right thing; sometimes they lead people to do the wrong thing, which I call “perverse incentives.” But don’t blame the people when something goes wrong; blame the incentives.

3. Trust government data

This might be a surprise, since I don’t trust the government, but I’ve found that government data are generally reliable. It isn’t until the government starts using, misusing, or ignoring the data that it becomes untrustworthy. Another way of looking at this is it is better to use the other side’s own data against them than to try to generate your own data.

One reason I trust government data is that it is replicable. The Census Bureau, Department of Transportation, and other agencies collect data every year, and year-to-year changes are minor even if long-term trends are not. Moreover, the people who collect the data are usually not influenced by incentives.

If Congress told transit agencies that it would fund them according to how many riders they carried, ridership numbers would take a sudden and suspicious rise. But if it said it would fund them according to how much fare revenue they collected, the agencies would have to find genuine ways to increase ridership and make transit travel valuable to riders. Most data collection, such as census data and highway travel data (which is based on road sensors), is not subject to such incentives.

While I trust the raw data collection, I certainly do not trust the government’s interpretation of its own data. The last several National Household Travel Surveys found that automobiles carry an average of about 1.67 people. When the Federal Highway Administration’s 2009 Highway Statistics was published, it assumed an average of 1.35 occupants. I immediately called them on it but they insisted their numbers were based on the household travel survey, which they clearly were not. The agency continued to use the lower number until 2017, when it went back to 1.67. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that 2009 through 2016 were the years Obama was in office. I’m not sure what Obama’s people were trying to do; lower occupancies would appear to downplay the importance of automobiles to the nation’s economy, but even at 1.35, autos still dominated the nation’s passenger travel.

4. Don’t trust computer models

From the Forest Service to the Federal Reserve, too many government agencies base crucial decisions on computer models that few people understand and fewer still consider reliable. As one Forest Service computer modeler told me, “Garbage in, gospel out.”

I was one of the few people who understood Forest Service computer models in the 1980s. That understanding helped save millions of acres of wildlands from below-cost timber cutting as I discovered numerous ways that agency officials manipulated the models to achieve predetermined outcomes. As a result, unless I know exactly how a model works and what data was entered into it, I don’t trust models.

Models are necessarily oversimplifications of the world. Planners too often respond to the oversimplified model by attempting to simplify the world so that it fits the model. Forest planners simplify by clearcutting mixed-age, mixed-species forests and replacing them with even-aged, single-species forests. Urban planners simplify by attempting to impose one design on all new developments. Neither work very well but that doesn’t discourage them.

5. Don’t trust predictions of the future

No one can accurately predict the weather ten days from now. Predictions of events twenty or more years from now nearly all have one thing in common: they are wrong. Basing plans on predictions that are wrong will create more problems than they solve.

The world has enough problems today. Solve these problems rather than worry about the future. As Gandalf said in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”

6. Don’t trust special interest groups

I worked with the environmental movement for 25 years and I’m proud of what I accomplished. But I also learned that it is hard for activists to have a political impact unless they can convince Congress or other legislators that there is a crisis. As a result, everything has become a crisis: obesity, vanishing farmlands, acid rain, peak oil, and so forth. Not only should we be wary of dire pronouncements made by special interest groups, we should treat bureaucracies as their own special interest groups.

7. Don’t trust the media

Whenever I read or watch a story about an issue I know about, the reporters get at least some of the facts wrong. If they are wrong about things I know about, how can I trust them about things I don’t know about?

It was bad enough when “the media” consisted of one or two newspapers per city and three major television networks, all of which pretty much told us the same things. Now we have hundreds of news sources that are more oriented towards confirming our preconceived notions than informing us. I don’t believe any of them. Until and unless I’ve independently verified the information, I don’t believe the ones I agree with any more than I believe the ones I disagree with.

8. Don’t trust peer review

Scientific research and debate are important. But just because something has been published in a peer-reviewed journal doesn’t make it the truth. I realized this when a smart-growth group did a study that found a weak correlation between the suburbs and obesity. They published this result in a peer-reviewed journal and then issued a press release proclaiming that they had proved that the suburbs cause obesity. Many journalists reprinted the press release as if it were gospel.

Since then, studies have found that more than half of peer-reviewed experimental results can’t be replicated. Even when results can be replicated, they aren’t necessarily important. Many studies rely on statistical significance, so when a study finds that, say, people who eat oatmeal are 0.5 percent less likely to have heart attacks than those who don’t, it might be statistically significant but 0.5 percent is not going to make me change my eating habits, especially considering Bayesian probability.

9. Become an expert in something

If we can’t trust government, interest groups, the media, peer review, models, or predictions of the future, how are we to make our way through the world? My answer is to develop enough expertise in one or more fields that I can safely say I know more about those fields than 99.99 percent of the people. Then I can focus on those fields and try to ignore everything else. When I have to consider topics outside of my area of expertise, I try to draw lessons by analogy.

For example, my analyses of natural resource and transportation issues have taught me that markets are imperfect, but government failure is much worse than market failure, leading to greater waste and often greater environmental damage. The appropriate approach for the government to take to market failure is to make the market work better, not to try to be a substitute for the market. Thus, when it comes to issues outside my areas of expertise, I’ll tend to support proposals to make the market work better and oppose proposals to have the government replace the market.

10. To promote change, use a wide variety of tactics

I consider myself a policy activist — neither a pure policy analyst nor a grassroots activist. Instead, I do the policy analysis but follow it up by working with grassroots activists who support the institutional changes that my analyses suggest should be made.

My years with the environmental movement taught me that policy analysis is important but is only one component of social change. Environmentalists devoted no more than perhaps 5 percent of their resources to it. The rest went to grassroots organizing, lobbying, lawsuits, and public education. I’m not trained for or particularly good at any of those things so, if I want my policy analyses to be meaningful, I have to work with people who are.

During my transition from environmentalist to libertarian, I noticed a major contrast between the two movements. Environmentalists were highly decentralized and used a wide variety of tactics, while libertarians were (ironically considering their political views) fairly centralized and their tactics consisted of policy analyses and running someone for president every four years. Environmentalists accepted people of all political views so long as they supported the environment while libertarians applied a variety of litmus tests to everyone and anyone who didn’t measure up was rejected as a potential ally.

Both movements had begun in the 1960s and had roots extending many decades before that, and if anything liberty should have been a more central core of American beliefs. Yet the environmental movement was so much stronger that everyone claimed to be an environmentalist, while libertarians were considered kooks. The relative strengths of the movements, I suspect, was proportional to their decentralization and the variety of tactics they used. I spoke about these concerns to various libertarian groups and wrote about them in Liberty magazine.

As I was moving from one movement to the other, the movements themselves were changing. Thanks to demands from foundations and an infiltration of big-government supporters, the environmental movement became more centralized and less tolerant of dissent. Meanwhile, free-market advocates adopted a wider variety of tactics with the creation of groups such as Institute for Justice (which focused on legal tactics) and Americans for Prosperity (which focused on grassroots organizing). The movement also became more decentralized with the creation of a network of state-based think tanks.

Not Done

I’ve taken 50 chapters to describe the last 50 years of my life. But the story isn’t done as I expect to keep working for several more years. In the meantime, I hope these lessons help others who are navigating their way through the polarized world we now live in.