You Had One Job

Don't count on a sea change in the electorate despite the evidence of mammoth administrative incompetence all around us.

Imagine you run an American airline. Your job is to make sure your passengers can fly from point A to point B, safely and reliably, for a reasonable price, enjoying a comfortable experience. That’s it. It sounds simple, doesn’t it?

It’s incredibly hard.

You have a global network. You have a fleet consisting of seven different types of aircraft. You have partners, ranging from regional jet operators flying under your banner to other large carriers focused on different parts of the world. You have unionized staff with a dizzying array of work rules constraining your operations. You must comply with onerous safety requirements overseen by multiple regulatory agencies. You need to convince people to book with you instead of one of your competitors. Make no mistake. It’s a cutthroat world. Plenty of airlines have gone out of businesses. Many CEOs have decided to leave to spend more time with their families.

Nobody remembers Braniff or Sir Freddie Laker.

The logistical complexity of this operation is daunting. Many airlines use (or used until recently) mainframe computers to handle the task, given the need for always-on, five nines consistency. The moment something goes wrong, your company name is a bitter punchline all over the press and social media. The longer it takes for you to fix the problem, the greater the backlog of waylaid passengers you’ll have to accommodate at great expense.

Not only do you have operational challenges, you have financial problems as well. You need to figure out a way to pay for all those planes and routes and gates. You run a capital-intensive business.

Most importantly, your customers expect you to deliver. They expect to arrive at their destination on time with their bags waiting for them. They take it for granted.

Your job is difficult enough.

Nobody expects you to solve the problems of income inequality or criminal justice reform or climate change. That’s not why they buy the ticket.

What’s going to happen to the airline that descries environmental degradation and vows to add fixing it to the corporate objective function?

You can have three guesses and the first two don’t count.

The whole thing is going to fall apart. Your business is difficult enough as it is without trying to do something that isn’t part of your mandate and for which you lack the skills and resources to make any kind of meaningful impact.

If people are concerned about the environment, they can change their lifestyles. They can donate to causes. They can put a solar panel on their home. They can hector people for littering. They don’t need their airline to do it. One problem, one instrument. Keep it simple, Sally.

And yet.

This is precisely the problem we see in so many jurisdictions. The tragic Los Angeles fires is just the most recent example. Here’s Nat Glazer, quoted in National Review, talking about the decline of New York City in the 1960s.

‘“New York,” Glazer said by way of example, “stopped trying to do well the kinds of things a city can do, and started trying to do the kinds of things a city cannot do.” The city subordinated “keeping its streets and bridges in repair, building new facilities to accommodate new needs and a shifting population, picking up the garbage, and policing the public environment” to grander objectives. But in the pursuit of those lofty goals, cities stopped doing the things cities know how to do and started trying to do things that no one knows how to do. “Among the things it can’t do are redistributing income on a large scale and solving the social and personal problems of people who, for whatever reason, are engaged in self-destructive behavior,” Glazer added.

‘Even if America’s municipal officials did know how to end the scourge of racism, eradicate poverty, and change the weather, that is not within their remits. Glazer concluded his lecture with the prophetic observation that cities can quickly restore elementary governmental functionality if that’s what the people vote for themselves. New York City’s trajectory would bear that observation out in the years that followed Glazer’s talk. But to get there, urban polities had to abandon the high-minded abstractions that led them to convince themselves they had to endure discomfort and hardship lest they tacitly sanction some evil somewhere in the world. Only when voters no longer accept excuses from their elected leaders does the public see proficiency in municipal government again.

‘Democratic elected officials at the highest levels of local, state, and federal government excel when they are tasked only with waxing grandiloquent about the metaphysical ills that plague American society. That is their core competency. Indeed, they’re often prone to subordinate the elementary functions of government to virtuous abstractions. And when those misplaced priorities give way to a level of maladministration their constituencies resent, those abstractions provide a convenient excuse to justify their failures. The scourge of climate change, the rapacious capitalist enterprise, the prejudice that lurks in men’s hearts — it’s all just too much to overcome.’

It’s as if the elected officials just assume that the garbage will pick itself up, the water will continue to flow, the streets will continue to be safe because, hell, haven’t they always? Once you take everything for granted, it’s liberating. You can pursue all manner of lofty goals, or at least you can talk about them and throw money at them.

Scarcity? That’s the other guy’s problem.

In many instances, these are deeply complex problems that will not be solved easily, certainly not by the type of administrator who underestimates the difficulty in providing the services voters take for granted.

New Orleans is notoriously corrupt. If you’re elected mayor there, it’s almost certain that you will end up in prison. There’s a reason the roads are full of potholes until you head into Jefferson Parish at which point they are smooth and safe.

The tragedy of Los Angeles is yet another example. Not enough firefighters? Check. No water for the firefighters? Check. Complete lack of any land management policies including controlled burn of chapparal? Check. A mayor who decides to go to Africa despite the well-understood risk of fires this week? Check. A governor who thinks that now is the time to go on podcasts to characterize criticism as misinformation even while the mayor interprets calls for her resignation as racist in origin? Oh yeah. All wrapped in a state government hell-bent on single-handedly fixing a global problem using local tools. By the way, the climate becomes a convenient, unprovable scapegoat, undoubtedly leading to more money spent on the kinds of green initiatives that distracted government from its core mission of safety and security.

One wag on social media compared the Governor’s call for an independent investigation into the loss of water pressure to local hydrants to OJ Simpson’s vow to find the real killer of his ex-wife.

Perhaps the issue is that the electorate assumes administrative competence when they indulge politicians who go off on their tangents. There is the belief that, well, the garbage will get picked up and, um, we’re wealthy enough to take on the big problems of the world.

Ironically, there is the potential that this whole LA bonanza of ineptitude was attributable to a cascade of policy failures. The state of California has thrown billions at the homelessness problem only to see the problem get worse. At least the NGOs got fat.

There is some speculation that these fires were arson events, with the guilty parties being homeless people like this guy caught with a blowtorch. There are rumors of fires being lit all over the city. At this rate, it’s going to look like the crack-era Bronx.

John Lindsay was an ambitious man with great hair who had visions of the Presidency. Unfortunately for him, New York City services failed massively after a large snow storm while he was Mayor in 1969. His political career was done like dinner after that.

Are we about to embark on a cyclical upswing in which we elect local and state politicians based on their administrative competence and not their optics or their virtuous visages?

I wouldn’t bet on it. We haven’t hit rock bottom yet. Things at the state and local level can get much worse.

You’ll notice that there aren’t a lot of resignations from the people with the big salaries and the security details. They know what the score is.