Politicians reap higher electoral benefits from doling out disaster relief money than they do from spending money beforehand on disaster prevention. According to a new paper by Andrew Healy, an economist at Loyola Marymount University, that creates an incentive for governments to underprepare for natural disasters.
So if voters reward poor preparedness, Healy writes, the American voter “bears some responsibility” for the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina and other disasters that were made worse by poor prevention efforts.
Healy finds that, on average, every $1 spent on disaster mitigation prevents roughly $8 of disaster damage over the following five years. But in most cases, voters shun politicians who call for more investment in infrastructure and other disaster preparedness efforts when the skies are clear.
Politicians routinely run on pledges to prevent crime by putting more cops on the street. Why don’t more candidates run on preventing future floods by putting more levees on the river?
(Hat tip: Overcoming Bias)
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There are tangible/high visibility changes when the schools get new buildings, roofs and computers or more cops patrol the st. But levies made stronger could as well be a pie in the sky, voters won’t see immediate benefit from them.
Crime is much more of an immediate threat than floods typically are. If floods happened all the time, politicians running on a flood prevention campaign would likely succeed. But running on a campaign to spend money on an event most people don’t foresee happening anyway won’t lead to electoral success.
It’s actually a quite rational decision: people have evaluated their individual risk associated with different events and the likelihood of them occurring and vote accordingly.
“voters shun politicians who call for more investment in infrastructure”- is this total bunk, or is there a reference?- I would assume the opposite is true
Because there’s never money to do things right, only fix things that went wrong.
It’s a problem of the feedback loop. Crime is much more tangible. Larger disasters are more abstract to most of us, specifically because they’re more isolated incidents.
A HUGE number of problems have comparable disconnects between spending now vs. spending later. For example, high education leads to lower crime, but we spend more on punishing crime than making sure everyone has an education. Likewise, drug prevention and treatment is vastly more effective than military intervention in Colombia. Yet we spend $5 billion there instead.
I won’t even start on infrastructure spending…
Part of the problem – why we pay for relief and not prevention – is that many people (myself included) distrust their government’s claims of the potential benefits of their proposed projects. It doesn’t take many Bridges to Nowhere to ruin credibility.
If you live in a flood prone area, you have probably already made rationalizations about your choice. You probably do not want to be reminded you have made a risky decision.
Perhaps this is related to the fact that a business that makes a mistake, but quickly makes amends garners more loyalty than a business that never makes mistakes.