The Cause of Our Discontent

So far, we have read about two types of problem definition in the polis: symbols and numbers. Generally, the numbers and symbols we use to make a policy argument are meant to tell, or at least imply, a causal story. When we are unhappy with the status quo, particularly when we feel that things have gone very wrong, our "nature" as humans is to try to find the cause. Quite a bit of our recent politicking has been consumed by the so-called "blame game" in which one politician attempts to claim the other is responsible for the problems we face. We see this phenomenon now, with Democrats blaming the economic crash on the trend of Wall Street deregulation and Republicans blaming the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac. Like most problems in the polis, the "true" cause is likely attributed to all of these, plus many other contributory factors, some of which could have at least been partially mediated by policy and others which were out of government's control.

Turning to this week's substantive reading and documentary, another recent instance where things went horribly wrong was the 2005 response to hurricane Katrina. We can establish certain facts about what happened in this case. On  August 29th, 2005 Katrina, a category 3 hurricane, hit the southeastern Louisiana coast. New Orleans, LA a southern city, built below sea-level, with large low-income and African American populations was in the path of the hurricane. New Orleans was (and is today) protected from storm surges by a series of levees built by the Army Corps of Engineers. One day prior to landfall, the Mayor of New Orleans ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city. After the storm hit, the levee system failed causing areas of the city of New Orleans, many of them historically Black and lower income, to flood. Thousands of residents who had not left the city were stranded in flooded homes and neighborhoods for days. Those who had evacuated to the Superdome and Convention Center faced overcrowding and resource shortages. Aid from local, state, and federal governments was slow to arrive, and much of the food and water aid did not arrive until seven days after the hurricane hit. Over 700 New Orleans residents lost their lives in the flood and hundreds of  thousands were displaced. An estimated 100,000 have yet to return home. The government response to hurricane Katrina has generally been considered a complete failure. Controversy over who is to blame and for what, continues even today.

In her chapter on causes, Stone presents four general types of causes: accidental, mechanical, inadvertent, and intentional. We have seen arguments for all of these causes in the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Least satisfying, and least likely to be true, is the accidental cause argument. Basically, this argument would posit that a hurricane is a force of nature and no one could have anticipated or predicted what the effects of such a hurricane could be. Alternatively, one could argue that even with complete preparation and "mitigation", the levees would have failed and people would have lost their lives. In other words, what happened was out of anyone's control. I believe that evidence from the documentary and the reading shows that this explanation is incorrect in this case.

We often see the argument that FEMA's response was ineffective due to mechanical causes. The federalist system required the state and local government to authorize a federal response, and such a response was never received by the federal government from the state of Louisiana. Of course, state and local officials vehemently dispute this fact. Many have also argued that the reorganization of FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security caused the agency to lose a substantial number of highly-trained experts and funding for disaster response. The employees of FEMA were, in this story, doing their job to the best of their ability, but were hampered by systemic issues. A similar story has been told about the National Guard response to Katrina. There is more about both of these mechanical explanations in the reading and documentary.

There is also an inadvertent story at play in the Katrina story. Many have argued that the people of New Orleans would have left the city if they could but were either uninformed or unable to do so. Many lacked correct information about flood zones and the likelihood that the levees would burst. Public transportation out of the city was lacking. By the time the evacuation order was issued, it was too late for many to coordinate sufficient transportation. There may also have been an unwillingness to believe that this was "the one" or that their usual hurricane preparations would be inadequate. Some argue that the existence of government emergency response agencies was itself an inadvertent cause of the devastation, creating a false sense of security among those affected.

Finally, we heard a substantial number of intentional causal explanations for the devastation caused by Katrina and the botched government efforts to return residents to the city after the storm. As Kanye West famously stated in the televised fundraiser for Katrina relief, "George Bush doesn't care about black people." This sentiment underlies many of the arguments that the devastation caused by the hurricane was intentional. Some believed that the levees were purposely blown to flood low-income neighborhoods and preserve wealthier white New Orleans neighborhoods. Many believe that the bureaucratic red tape surrounding the Road Home program was created to keep poor African American former residents from returning home. Stories of intentional causation are sometimes labeled "conspiracy theories". While they are often untrue, the tobacco settlement discussed by Stone illustrates that some conspiracy theories contain at least a degree of truth. If you have not seen the film "The Insider", it is worth a watch to see how an intentional causal explanation evolved from conspiracy theory to truth.

In reality, the causes of social problems and natural disasters are complex and multi-faceted, but "It's complicated" is rarely a satisfying explanation in the polis. Politicians try to avoid blame for problems by shifting the blame to their political opponents. This occurs with any problem, whether it is a devastating natural disaster or a long-standing persistent issue. How would you use these causal theories to explain a longstanding problem, like poverty or health disparities, in the polis? Have you seen politicians use these theories to explain problems in the presidential primary debates?

My Thoughts on Stone Ch. 8 - Causes

We talked a little bit about causation in the policy process in Peters' chapters on policy formulation and implementation. As usual, Stone has a different take on causation. While Peters believes that causation can be determined in the policy process, which leads to better policymaking, Stone believes that this mechanistic understanding of causation does not exist in the polis. She believes that establishing cause in the polis is about burdening certain groups and creating political alliances. The symbols and numbers we discussed in chapters six and seven are combined to create these causal stories.

In the polis, we generally try to attribute cause to social forces. Although there are some scientific innovations that attempt to control nature, we tend to believe that we have more influence on events when their causes are social. One of the reasons that I assigned a documentary on Katrina survivors for this week is this debate over the cause of the devastation. If it can be attributed to the natural disaster of Katrina alone, then there is nothing that possibly could have been done to improve the situation, and there is not much we can do to prevent similar devastation in the future. If causation can be attributed to social or political causes like extreme poverty, corruption, incompetence, or bureaucratic red-tape then we have significantly more control. We can create policies to help reduce suffering in the future.

Stone lays out a table on p. 191 with four types of causal stories: mechanical, accidental, intentional, and inadvertent. The first type of cause she discusses is the accidental cause. These are used to explain any incident that is caused by fate - this can include natural disasters, disease, famine, car crashes etc. Many of our torts and class action lawsuits are attempting to prove that causes we thought were accidental are actually intentional or negligently inadvertent. Defenders of the status quo often try to claim that any major problem can be attributed to an accidental cause.

This brings us to intentional causes, which are the converse of accidental causes. An intentional causal story states that someone or a group of people acted willfully, knowing the consequences of their actions, to cause harm to a group or individual. This is the story that tort and class action lawyers want to be able to tell. In the tobacco lawsuit, the plaintiffs were able to prove that the tobacco companies knew full well that their cigarettes were addictive and causing cancer and they took no action. All conspiracy theories, true and untrue fall under the intentional cause story. Stories of oppression can also fall under this category. For example, radical political scholars have argued that the true purpose of welfare reform is to intentionally keep low-income people in poverty to ensure that there is a desperate low-wage labor force for employers.

We often hear about inadvertent causes in policy. Sometimes policy is the cause of unintended consequences. This is the crux of the welfare dependency thesis, which argues that rather than helping the poor the provision of goods and services keeps them dependent on government. Policy can also be the remedy for inadvertent causes of social problems. Obesity is often explained as a problem that is caused by inadvertent actions. It is argued that consumers don't know how bad cheap processed food is for them, and if they knew they would make better choices at restaurants and the grocery store. Negligence and recklessness can also be considered a nefarious inadvertent cause. In this case, individuals or groups should know better but do not act in ways that avoid causing a problem. Often, we punish recklessness or negligence if it is discovered before anyone is hurt. If someone is caught driving under the influence, they are charged even if they didn't harm anyone because they are acting recklessly and could cause harm to someone.

Mechanical causes are often systemic problems, and can be the hardest to address. They can also result in horrible consequences. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, racial inequality has often been attributed to a mechanical cause. While some individuals and institutions still intentionally discriminate, it is more often the case that systemic factors lead to inequality. Whites tend to have more connections, more wealth passed down across generations, and more soft-skills that help them succeed in the labor market in comparison to minority groups. A lot of effort is exerted to transform a mechanical cause into an inadvertent cause so that policy may address the issue. If, as this podcast suggests, these soft-skills can be traced back to early childhood development then policy can intervene and provide pre-schools to help African-American and Latino children develop these soft-skills.

Generally, we cannot establish a single cause of any major social problem. The obesity epidemic is likely caused by a combination of all four types of causes: a desire on behalf of individuals to eat fatty processed foods (intentional), a lack of information about how bad these processed foods really are for us (inadvertent), government subsidies to corn producers which subsidizes foods containing high fructose corn syrup (inadvertent), droughts or other natural disasters that raise the price of produce relative to processed food (accidental), the systemic problem of food deserts (mechanical), changing socio-economic conditions that require both parents to work and/or increase the number of single parents leaving no one to cook at home (mechanical),  and so on. Of course, we rarely hear about all of these causes in the polis.

Instead, we are generally offered a strategic causal explanation. On page 204, Stone gives us four reasons why policymakers and analysts would propose a single causal story, "First, they can either challenge or protect an existing social order. Second, by identifying causal agents, they can assign responsibility to particular political actors so that someone will have to stop an activity, do it differently, or possibly face punishment. Third, causal theories can legitimize and empower particular actors as "fixers" of a problem. And fourth, they can create new political alliances among people who are shown to stand in the same victim relationship to the causal agent." There are always multiple individuals and groups to whom cause can be attributed, and multiple stories we can tell. By singling out one cause, policymakers can strategically choose who to benefit and burden, and they can gain some semblance of control over the problem.