I first met Randy Simmons when we were both graduate students at the University of Oregon. He was seeking a Ph.D. in political science, but like me when I was in urban planning, he decided to get a different view of things by taking a course in urban economics. I was in my first term as a student in economics and they assigned me to be a teaching assistant in the course he was taking.
I had already taken urban economics, but the course I took was for graduate students and the course he was taken was for undergraduates and included a lot more basic economics while the graduate course focused on modeling. As a result, I was a terrible T.A. because I didn’t yet know much about basic economic concepts such as elasticity. Yet Randy and I got along because we were both interested in environmental issues.
By 2000, Randy was the chair of the Utah State University political science department. He had studied and written about public lands, endangered species, and wilderness (and since then has written much more). But he really thinks more like an economist than a political scientist, and today he is in Utah State’s economics department.
When I say that someone “thinks like an economist” I mean that share a particular view of how the world works. While schools in planning, economics, political science, and even forestry overtly appear to teach tools that can be used to manage a part of the world, they also more subtly teach a worldview.
Forestry schools teach that wood is a crucial part of society–“from the cradle to the grave, we are surrounded by wood,” wrote one forester–and so growing trees is the most important job a forester can do. Planning schools teach that urban problems result from poor urban design and that planners can fix those problems by changing the shape and form of urban areas. Political science schools teach that all decisions are political, so making government bigger somehow gives more power to the people.
Notice that all of these views place the professionals at the center of the world. I’d like to think that the economic worldview does just the opposite. According to this world view, society is made up of individuals who each make decisions every day based on their own preferences, costs, and their ability to pay those costs. Some of those decisions are made in the marketplace, some in the political sphere, and some are made for religious reasons. But society works best when people are allowed to make their own decisions and are not compelled to do so by some central power.
Many economists might not recognize this as the economic worldview, though it is the view of libertarian economists who call themselves public choice economists. I think most economists between Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes subscribed to this view, but the growth of government since 1930 led to a new kind of economist who would support such growth. This might be called the market-failure economist, who says “markets are great when they work, but when they don’t work we need government intervention.”
The modern epitome of the market-failure economist is Joseph Stiglitz, who won a Nobel prize for arguing that market failure is so pervasive “that government could potentially almost always improve upon the market’s resource allocation.” The critical word here is “potentially”: just because government might possibly be an improvement doesn’t mean that it would necessarily be an improvement. Ironically, James Buchanan had previously won a Nobel prize for proving that, while markets may not be perfect, government failure is often much worse.
I mentioned that people make decisions through markets, politics, and religion, and Utah presents an interesting example as it is more influenced by one religion than any other state. Randy, his family, and most of his students were members of the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints (which I’ll contract to “Saints,” as Mark Twain did, as they seem to not like the term “Mormon”).
This is the most successful of a number of new churches that emerged out of Second Great Awakening in nineteenth century America, including the Shakers, Christian Scientists, and Seventh Day Adventists. The Saints are also philosophically related to the Anabaptists, including Mennonites, Amish, and Hutterites.
My friend John Baden is another non-economist who thinks like an economist. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology after studying decision-making in Hutterite communities. Hutterites are communal, sharing all resources equally. As I understand it from John, they seem to realize that people can only maintain relationships with about 150 other people at a time, so when communities get to be larger than 150, it becomes easy for people to slack off or steal from community. As a result, when their communities grow to be that large, they split in two.
Decisions about community leadership and splitting of the property are made by God, they say. Since they are farmers, they would buy a new farm and divide all the resources from the existing farm into two. Then they would divide the group into two and the groups would draw lots to see which would stay on the current farm and which would move to the new farm. Leadership of each group was also decided by God, that is, by drawing lots.
The Saints started out communal as well but it didn’t work for them, probably because they allowed their communities to grow larger than 150 people. So they decided instead to be aggressively capitalist, encouraging members to build wealth but then to tithe, meaning donate 10 percent of that wealth to the church, which used some of it to help poorer people in the community.
I mentioned Baden’s comments on Hutterites to a student at Utah State and he said, “Yes, we Mormons are a bit jealous that they managed to figure out how to live communally while we did not.” Of course, there are 16 million Saints in the world and less than 50,000 Hutterites, so perhaps having the freedom to build wealth is more attractive than living in a possibly repressive commune.
Actually, what I realized in Utah was that the Saints had developed an excellent system for helping their children to grow up and be productive members of society, which is what Joseph Campbell says is the main purpose of religion. Boys are encouraged, and lately girls are allowed, to go on a mission to spread their religion to other parts of the world. Often, they end up having to learn a language and the culture of the place they are visiting to do their mission. When I took Randy Simmons came to speak during one of my Berkeley fellowships, I took him an Italian restaurant in San Francisco. He spoke with our waiter in Italian and was happy to discover that the waiter had grown up in a small town in Italy where Randy had done part of his mission.
After the mission, the young people are recognized as elders. They know that they are going to get married, probably rather young, and are going to have children. They know that their families will provide a safety net so they can go to college, if they want, even as they grow their own family. They know that others will help them find a job once they are out of school. Randy, for example, started a program encouraging various congressional offices in Washington DC to take on his students as interns, something not done by many other political science departments. I’m sure he didn’t discriminate based on religion, but the point is that this is an example of the impulse Utahn’s have in helping others find work.
Religions, of course, don’t have to be oriented around a god. Another friend, Bob Nelson, who had participated in Karl Hess’ Africa tour, argues that environmentalism is a religion. I can go along with that to some degree, but he goes further and argues that economics is a religion. I can’t agree to that, but my definition is somewhat stricter than his.
Since my students at Utah State had already had Randy as a professor, they had previously been exposed to free-market environmentalism, unlike my Yale students. And many of them were influenced by a religion that endorsed capitalism, they didn’t have the skepticism of my Berkeley students. So I probably didn’t contribute as much to their educations as I did at the other two schools. Nevertheless, Randy listed me as a “visiting professor,” which I later discovered looked better on my resume, at least to some people, than “fellow” at Yale or Berkeley.
In addition to teaching a class, I spent my time in Utah writing my second book, The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths. I still didn’t really know how to write a book, so I divided it up into 157 chapters averaging about four pages each. Forty of these were called “chapters” and could be read from cover to cover. Another 70 or so were called “myths” and debunked claims about light rail, density, and the costs of sprawl. Eleven “facts and statistics” included the then-latest data on such issues as density, transit, and highways. Eighteen chapters were devoted to a case study of Portland, plus there were seven more case studies of other cities around the United States and Europe. The book also included links to “web tools” such as on-line sources of information about land use and transportation.
In other words, it was really a book of short magazine articles. People solely interested in light rail, housing, or congestion could easily find and read the chapters on those subjects.
Rather than submit it to a publisher, I decided to have the Thoreau Institute publish the book and to promote it by selling it for as low a cost as possible: $15 a copy, a good price for a book of more than 500 pages. Too late, I learned that Amazon would only sell it if I gave them 60 percent off the list price, which wouldn’t leave enough to cover printing and shipping costs. I should have listed it for $25 or $30 and then put it “on sale” for lower prices depending on the forum.
It probably didn’t matter as people seemed to be hungry for the information and I ended up selling thousands of copies. The book received a positive review in Planning magazine, which was published by the American Planning Association.
“O’Toole in 2001 looks a lot like Jane Jacobs did in 1961,” said the magazine. “They’re both outsiders with a detailed grass-roots view of how planners — with the best of intentions — are following a fashion into disaster. If smart growth is to be more than a recapitulation of the urban-renewal catastrophe, then its advocates will publicly engage O’Toole with facts and arguments. If they ignore him, or if they brush him off as a libertarian fanatic with no credentials, then we can be pretty sure that he’s on to something.”
The worst thing the review said about the book was that, with all of the chapters, it “is easy to dip into, but hard to read straight through.” Of course, that was the intention.
While I was in Utah, Randy also asked me to look at Salt Lake City’s light rail. The city had built one line and had a measure on the ballot to build more. During the 1990s, such measures usually lost if there was any organized opposition. But the Utah Transit Authority pioneered a new campaign technique.
As a public agency, UTA was forbidden to actually promote the ballot measure. Instead, it ran a television ad campaign showing someone driving down an uncongested freeway, then showing a light-rail train and a claim that the train took thousands of cars off the road. The ad never mentioned the ballot measure, but it also never asked anyone to actually ride the light rail. It ran repeatedly up to the election, and then disappeared from the air waves a few days later. Other transit agencies followed soon UTA’s example, both in focusing on congestion and in using public funds to not-so-covertly promote ballot measures, which increased the number of rail transit ballot measures that received voter approval.
My report, of course, found that light rail was a waste of money, but I didn’t actively campaign against it. I was, however, surprised to meet intelligent people who had the strangest argument in favor of rail. Salt Lake City, they said, was hemmed in by mountains on the east and the lake on the west, making it long and narrow and perfect for a rail transit line.
Even at its closest point, I told him, the lake was about 20 miles from the mountains. Salt Lake was no more suited for rail than Dallas, Houston, or other low-density metropolises. After adjusting for inflation, Utah Transit has spent $4.7 billion on rail transit, more money per capita on rail transit than any other urban area in the country except Honolulu. In 1990, before it built rail, transit carried 3.48 percent of Salt Lake City urban area commuters to work. By 2018, it was 3.39 percent, which is hardly a great success.
While I was in Utah, Brian Child, the economist who helped Zambian villages profit from wildlife, was doing a fellowship at Berkeley. I’m sorry to say that no one at Berkeley recognized what a prize they had with him; he ended up on the faculty at the University of Florida, and spends the monsoon season there and the rest of his time in Africa. In any case, while he was at Berkeley I brought him to Utah to speak to my class.
While he was there, he wanted to go see wolves, which were as exotic to him as lions are to most of us. So I offered my class an opportunity to take an expedition to Yellowstone. Fortunately, Randy had one of the leading experts on Yellowstone wildlife on staff, a man named Charles Kay.
Kay was the leading critic of Yellowstone’s wildlife policies and the main source of information for Alston Chase’s controversial book, Playing God in Yellowstone. The Park Service said that its goal was to manage the national parks as “vignettes of pre-Columbian America,” which was widely interpreted to equate to “natural.” Kay was enraged that the Park Service willfully ignored the roughly 100 million Native Americans who lived here before European diseases wiped most of them out, as well as the impacts of their hunting and prescribed fire had on the land. The Park Service had forcibly evicted Indians from the parks and then wrote them out of their natural history.
The Park Service had also paid people to kill wolves in the parks. The removal of the two dominant predators led to a rapid overpopulation of elk and bison. In the 1960s, the Park Service dealt with this by paying government hunters to shoot the surplus herbivores. But hunters objected, saying that if the Park Service was allowed to shoot elk, game hunters should be allowed to do the same.
The Park Service’s prohibition against hunting went back to a time when the states made no effort to control hunting. Entire species were wiped out because no one had an incentive to keep a viable population alive. We were long past that time in the 1960s, but the Park Service still opposed hunting. When Wyoming Senator Gale McGee held hearings to hear the hunter viewpoint, Park Service director George Hartzog promised McGee that he would put a temporary moratorium on government hunting.
The temporary moratorium turned permanent as Park Service biologists came up with a new theory called Natural Regulation, which held that wildlife populations would be controlled by nature. They had to know that this idea had already been Kenya’s Tsavo National Park, which resulted in an overpopulation of elephants that turned the park into a “moonscape.”
It wasn’t quite as bad in Yellowstone, but elk overpopulations at most of the willows in the park, which eliminated beavers, which eliminated marshes, which reduced or eliminate habitat for numerous species of birds and mammals. This had led to a running debate between Charles Kay and Park Service officials.
Kay is what I call a “natural man,” someone who is highly principled but who has few social graces, something like George Hayduke from the Monkey Wrench Gang. Despite being highly articulate, Kay alienated enough people with his outspoken nature that he probably made himself unemployable in the wildlife profession. Randy Simmons added him to the faculty of Utah State’s political science department as an “adjunct professor,” which I suspect means he had the title but wasn’t actually paid anything.
Anyway, we were lucky to have Kay join us on the tour. We learned that wolves had killed an elk near the highway in the northern part of the park, so we drove there and found a carcass and a few coyotes but no wolves. I started driving up and down the Lamar Valley hoping to spot a wolf from the car, which was stupid.
“Fuck this, stop the car,” Kay finally shouted. He got out, pulled out his binoculars, and said, “There’s a wolf. There’s another wolf. There’s a whole line of wolves.” Sure enough, there was a pack of wolves making their way through a herd of elk and an occasional bison, all of whom carefully got out of the way.
While we were watching the wolves, a couple of young Park Service employees stopped to watch with us. After a few minutes, they sidled up to me and said, in a slightly awestruck tone, “Is that. . . Charles Kay?” On talking with them, it was clear that they didn’t entire buy the Park Service’s claims about wildlife, but they also didn’t want to be seen consorting with a pariah.
Everyone (except for the elk and bison) was thrilled to see the wolves, especially Brian and his wife. Later, during one of our eating stops, I noticed that Brian always ordered a salad for lunch or dinner, and asked him why. He wasn’t used to restaurants, he said, and was overwhelmed by all of the choices, so he always limited himself to the first page of the menu. Of course, most restaurants put soups and salads on the first page, so that was all he got. I hope he has branched out to the second page by now.
When I wasn’t teaching, writing, or bringing in guest lecturers, I often went hiking with Vickie and our dogs in the mountains above Logan. Utah was a wonderful place, and if ever I move out of Oregon, Utah is high on my list of places to move to.
