Bonfire of the Elites—edition MMMDCXXIII

Who will win the battle of narratives over the Los Angeles wildfires?

If there were one thing I wish I would have the privilege of teaching everyone in the world, it would be the concept of “stochastic dominance.” Even the ancients had figured it out, hence East Asian proverbs like, “Sometimes even monkey fall from tree!”

The idea, of course, is that monkeys are good at negotiating their ways through tree canopies, but even a very good tree climber will sometimes make a mistake. Or sometimes that same monkey may just experience some bad luck. A tree branch gives way, and the monkey takes a fall. Other creatures, of course, will not be so good at racing through the canopy, and they will also have to negotiate experiences with bad luck. Indeed, even certain species of monkeys will not be so good at it. Spider monkeys, for example, would dominate howler monkeys in a tree-racing competition, but on some rare occasion, the howler monkey will win.

Or take sheepdog competitions. Border collies dominate those things. They’re smart, they’re athletic, and they like to compete! But, every border collie or spider monkey has a bad day now and then. They will sometimes lose.

Now take city managers. When bad things happen, they will appeal to their own version of stochastic dominance. It might be in the spirit of, “We’re competent technocrats! We’re like Spiderman! But, the system has been overwhelmed. (We drew a very bad card from the deck today.) No one with any degree of competence would have been able to resolve the problem before it had become a catastrophe.”

The managers of Los Angeles County have had more than a day now to make their appeals to stochastic dominance: “We’re super competent, but we drew an extraordinarily bad card from the deck.” As of the writing of this short essay, about 29,000 acres (12,000 hectares) have burned. Click on the map below:

That burned acreage includes a five-mile stretch of $20-million beach-front properties along the Pacific Coast Highway just east of Malibu. That burned acreage also includes a lot of other high-end real estate, because people of modest means tend not live in the Santa Monica Mountains much less along Mulholland Drive or the Pacific Coast Highway. Those folks have been concentrated in the flats like in Compton.

This last point illuminates something that I think is at work here: We’re not hearing (yet) too much about how we can attribute the LA fires to “climate change.” One reason may be that the kind of people who have been burned out of their $20-million homes are the kinds of people who would have assigned blame to climate change, but right now they are too distracted. And maybe embarrassed. And, if you’re comedian Adam Carolla (himself an LA fires refugee), you’re wondering if they will soon get red-pilled once they experience a good and hard encounter with the vast bureaucratic apparatus that will complicate or even frustrate their efforts to rebuild.

With proponents of climate change narratives having ceded the field of battle (for now) to everyone else, we are hearing counter-narratives that revolve around the incompetence of the technocrats. We are hearing, for example, about how reservoirs had not been filled and have since been depleted notwithstanding the fact that California has experienced two years straight of above-average precipitation. We’re hearing about how fire fighting services are understaffed because of DEI and vaccination requirements. We are hearing about how the system has been undermined for some years now in order to make way for politically-correct initiatives. Such initiatives have included the removal of some number of reservoirs and dams in the state notwithstanding the fact that residents have affirmatively voted for initiatives to expand reservoir capacity.

The unifying theme of these counter-narratives might be that politically-correct policy has rendered mission-critical services more susceptible to catastrophic breakdown. There is a story of stochastic dominance here: A competently run city and a competently run fire-suppression system could yet be overwhelmed—sometimes monkey fall from free—but incompetently run systems are more likely to be overwhelmed and to allow formerly manageable problems to turn into catastrophes.

No one notices when mission-critical systems work. Being competent can be thankless. But, when things fail, the incompetents may strike a heroic pose and make a show of pretending to solve the problem. Will they succeed this time?

Meanwhile, how much stock should we put into the counter-narratives? I can image that public officials could credibly—if not correctly—make the argument that the system really was under duress for reasons beyond anyone’s control. I note, for example, that these fires have broken out in January. By January, the semi-arid country that is California is usually well into its second month of its rainy reason. That rainy season usually runs until about April. The weather turns drier, and by September or October, fire hazards become very serious. Throw in these infamous “Santa Ana winds”—heavy, dry, sustained winds coming out of places like the Mojave Desert and into the LA Basin—and you get conditions under which wildfires are more likely to become an issue. It is no accident, for example, that places like Topanga Canyon (just east of the Pacific Palisades which just burned up) burn up every decade or so. And then, after the fires, you get the wet season, and the sequence of a good burn and an especially wet wet season will yield catastrophic mud slides.

Now, there have surely been mud slides, wildfires, rainy seasons, dry seasons and Santa Ana winds millennia before there had been any human habitation in the LA Basin, so no one has the excuse of saying that these phenomena amount to surprises. It’s not obvious that anyone drew an especially bad card from the deck. Indeed, modern society has had well more than a century to come up with schemes for managing wildfire risks in Los Angeles. Those schemes will have included building capacity to store water through the dry seasons. So, the idea that public officials have been actively tearing down water-management capacity in order to serve politically-correct initiatives like saving the smelt fish—that idea can’t be immediately dismissed. There is something to it. Public policy really may have made the system more fragile, more susceptible to catastrophic failure.

Meanwhile, there is one very, very good bit of evidence suggesting that public policy is largely at fault here. We see reports that insurers had just this last year declined to continue insuring those $20-million homes on the beach front and in Topanga Canyon. Insurers had applied to state regulators for approvals to raise rates, but regulators turned them down. So, insurers declined to renew insurance just as the dry season was approaching.

In other words, people who have a professional interest in ascertaining wildfire risks had already signaled that public policy was aggravating those same risks. It looks like they were on to something.

Insurance rates must of have been high already. What else could a homeowner in Topanga Canyon expect rates to be for expensive homes built in areas naturally subject to wildfires? But, reports are that insurers had demanded the right to increase rates even further, because recent changes in public policies have made the system more subject, in their view, to catastrophic failure. Hmm…

Meanwhile, in Europe: The rain in Spain falls mainly in the high plains before running down through the canyons to the sea. A system of a few hundred dams comprised an elaborate flood control system. The authorities could use the dams to buffer the release of waters through the canyons and thus spare the cities and towns situated at the ends of those canyons the prospect of flooding. Granted, rains in a given year might be inordinately heavy, and flood control measures may be overwhelmed once in a century or so, but readers will know that public authorities in Spain had made a very ostentatious point of removing a few hundred dams so that the waters might return to their natural flow.

The public authorities have had spectacular success meeting their objectives. The waters now flow unvexed to the sea, and cities and towns have experienced spectacular, catastrophic flooding. The authorities blame “climate change.”

Why do our elites in the West suck so much, and why do we keep voting for them?