Policy Failure and the Truth

While no era is immune from public policy failure, ours feels particularly egregious in this respect. Not only are we staring in the face of threats to democracy itself (e.g. massive public indebtedness and the housing affordability crisis), we are also dealing with issues that are existential to civilization (e.g. climate change and nuclear proliferation). I’ve long believed that the core problem of our era comes down to this: we are so busy in our private lives—pick your flavor: optimizing and maximizing, making money, thriving holistically or whatever…—that we have forgotten about our responsibility to our communities and governments. We’ve allowed this cancer of indifference to spread across our land for so long that now we find ourselves in the unfortunate position of having to sit across the table from doctors with the bad news.

In my view, our policies are failing for one of two reasons:

1. We’ve been unwilling to confront the full truth of a situation (usually a function of willful blindness and cowardice in leadership)

or

2. We’ve been unwilling to address a need at its source (usually under the pretense of an ideologically influenced moral judgment).

In either case, the end result is yet further unfairness in society and/or an unintended consequence that makes things worse.

Let’s walk through this logic of failure with a few examples.

Why do we keep looking to rent control as a policy to address the housing affordability crisis? Whatever you may think about the issue from an ideological perspective, the data is clear as day. Rent control just hasn’t worked anywhere that it’s been tried. New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles remain the priciest rental markets in the country despite decades of ever-more onerous rent control policy.

The fundamental issue here is that people just cannot afford the rent. The obvious answer would be to meet the need at its source by either providing subsidized housing or providing people with a flexible cash rental subsidy. In our capitalist system, what makes the most sense is to provide the rental subsidy. Either can work though.

But for all kinds of historical reasons, we have been reluctant to really commit to either option. Instead, we do a little bit of this and a little bit of that coupled with some rent control and wonder why things keep getting worse. At the end of the day, rents are still too high and our system even more unfair. What happens with rent control is that some private renters pay way more in rent than they otherwise would have paid to subsidize the lucky few who gain access to rent control units. It introduces yet another insider-outsider / have-have not dynamic to our society and makes the affordability problem even worse. We would be way better off to just design a rental subsidy program large enough to meet the actual need out there.

What about climate change? Why are we failing here? It comes down to this: we have been unwilling to accept the truth that we have absolutely zero chance of reducing carbon emissions unless we institute a tax on carbon. In a capitalist system like ours, with an intensely short-term bias and incentive structure, there’s just no other way. In the US, while we’ve been doing a lot of climate change virtue signaling, our policy, if you can all that, outside of a few decent incentive programs, has been to rely on the good will of private citizens. This is so obviously not going to work.

What about homelessness? Here things have gotten so bad because we’re guilty of a double failure in our policy response. Not only have we failed to confront the truth—that unhoused individuals need our full support and they need it immediately—we’ve also been unwilling to meet the need at its source—people who are unhoused need a completely individualized emergency intervention that often goes way beyond just getting a place to stay. Policies like housing first, while noble, miss the mark because they fail to account for the complexity of the situation.

Yes, providing housing to someone that doesn’t have housing is good. But is it enough? Another way to think about it is this: if we didn’t have a housing affordability crisis, would homelessness go away? I don’t think so. To use a medical analogy, with homelessness we’re dealing with something that is both a symptom and a contributing factor. Imagine for a minute what it would be like to sleep on the streets of Los Angeles for just one night. Pretty terrifying really. Indeed, the data we have suggests that even very short experiences of being unhoused can cause serious PTSD, mental health crises and substance abuse. For casual observers of street-visible homelessness, this seems like a mental health and substance abuse crisis. And it is, but what comes first? We don’t actually know and that’s why what’s called for is more akin to a humanitarian emergency response than anything else.

I could go on and on with this. Every single issue we have, from gun violence to systemic racism to mass incarceration to poverty itself, is ultimately a function of our profound failures to accept reality and/or meet need at its source.

Now, I’m not one for doom and gloom. I believe too much in the power of action and the possibility for change and progress for that.

What can we do today to make a difference?

That’s the question we need to be asking ourselves.

For me, what feels right is to ask the hard questions, to challenge the status quo with new ideas and ways of thinking and to be that courageous voice in the room. I have come to believe that the task of my generation and perhaps those younger ones just behind is to find both the courage and the power to move our society beyond policies of incrementalism towards decisive commitment for systemic change.

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