Planning for the next Sandy: no relative suffering would be socialist

The river Waal at Nijmegen, The Netherlands. The original river is to the left, which was a bottleneck and extra dangerous due to the curve. This problem has been resolved by a bypass (right), which has made part of the old dike into an island. In this way the river got more space and flood risks are reduced.

The New York Times Magazine has a beautiful article on a Dutch water manager, Henk Ovink. He enrolled with Shaun Donovan, the United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, serving in the cabinet of President Barack Obama to make the USA fit for the next Sandy.

The Dutch approach to water management is very different and looks for inexpensive regional collaborative solutions. Whereas the Americans prefer expensive local isolated solutions, because solutions that would help everyone would be "socialist".

I do not know about socialism, but the American solution sure reminds one of the relative suffering mechanism, I recently proposed to understand the climate "debate" in the post: "Do climate dissenters like climate change?"

Relative suffering is an evolutionary mechanism where you do not optimize your own absolute fitness, but rather how well you and your kin are doing relative to outsiders. It can be an evolutionary stable strategy suffer more yourself, as long as others suffer more.

Some excerpts from the article.

The funniest quote is:

Beyond that, Ovink feared that politics might undermine any chance to encourage new thinking about water management. “When I mentioned climate change to one official,” he said, “she almost hit me.”

The irrational response to climate change of some Americans is really unbelievable. Is there a smiley for someone shacking his head?

For all the unexpected support Ovink and his ideas have received, some observers still maintain skepticism about how much change can be effected here, and how fast. “When I heard about Room for the River, and that Dutch farmers said, ‘O.K., we’ll allow our fields to be flooded in order to protect the city,’ I thought, you’re going to have a harder time with that kind of thing in the U.S.,” said Armando Carbonell, a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. (My link)

I wonder whether Carbonell realises that the farmer will naturally be compensated for his "socialist" behaviour. In that case the behaviour would be economically rational as it would maximise wealth. Sounds like being a good capitalist is socialist in the USA.

A prime example of the American resistance to regional thinking is New York City’s response to Sandy: a 438-page report packed with 250 recommendations, which would achieve many of the goals that Ovink champions. But the report said little about cooperating with the wider tristate region. In an ideal Henk Ovink world, it would have been written in close consultation with neighboring jurisdictions. As it was, the city’s report, as well as one issued by New York State, “express this fantasy that New Jersey doesn’t exist, not to mention Connecticut,” said Eric Klinenberg, director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, a research center that works closely with Ovink.

This reminds me of the English dredging fetish during this winter's floods in the south of England. Dredging the river next to your village will reduce water levels for your village, but will speed up water flow and make the peak river level for the next village worse. That village would be forced to dredge even deeper to save itself, hurting the next village. Relative suffering madness. Assigning non-populated regions to be flooded to shave off the peak flow would help everyone, but would require collaboration and I guess that makes it "socialist".

Samuel Carter, an associate director at the Rockefeller Foundation, underscored that the very concept of regional planning is still a work in progress in the U.S. “A lot of people feel that it goes against the American character,” he said. Ovink experiences that pushback on a regular basis. He told me that not long ago he was in New Jersey talking with residents hit by Sandy who were raising their houses on stilts. He laid out for them a future situation in which, rather than have each homeowner undertake such difficult and expensive work, the community would embrace measures to protect an entire region from flooding. The response, he said, was, “That would be a socialistic approach.”

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Photo credits: Room for the Rivier. Ruimte voor de Rivier.