toward a theory of infrastructure brain

this is why we don't want nice things

I continue to be easy to bait, it appears; in a speech announcing what look like some fairly minor bits of financial deregulation, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has decided to have a go at the poor bloody bats and newts again. (As someone on social media who probably doesn’t deserve to be dragged into this said, there are actual Shakespearean witches who bang on about bats and newts less than some speechwriters).

Apparently, “The same flawed judgment that has seen newts and bats block major infrastructure projects is the one that requires almost 140,000 finance professionals to certify they are fit for their roles on an annual basis”. There is something funny going on here, in my view, with this determination to blame all our infrastructure problems on the habitat regulations – there is surprisingly little evidence that it’s the case, so there’s something else at work. Part of it is simple politics – it is much easier, rhetorically, to blame unidentified tree-hugging environmentalists, than to face up to the fact that voters don’t like having their views spoiled. But I think there’s a deeper pathology of understanding.

“Treasury Brain”, in my formulation, is a form of myopia toward long term consequences of underinvestment, created by a training process which emphasises the risks of over-optimism and stigmatises “spending departments” as presumptive liars trying to maximise their budgets in a parody of public choice economics. I think there’s a similar problem in the understanding of environmental regulation which I’d tentatively call “Infrastructure Brain”.

Basically, Infrastructure Brain is the implicit or explicit tendency to regard natural habitats as luxury consumption goods, rather than as part of what makes land able to act as a factor or production. The language used helps promote this kind of myopia – protected environments in the UK are called “Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty” or “Sites of Special Scientific Interest”. This definitely inclines one to think that they are only there so that floppy-haired aesthetes can sigh over them, or boffins can satisfy their academic curiosity. If they were called “Wetlands Which Prevents Flooding Further Downstream”, or “Reservoir Of Predators To Prevent Mosquitoes From Taking Over”, they might be better protected.

(In passing, I’ll reiterate that whoever coined a name for “already overpolluted river system that is a hair’s breadth away from toxic algal bloom catastrophe”, and decided that it should be called a “nutrient neutrality zone” deserves whatever the opposite is of a Nobel Prize for Literature).

Like Treasury Brain, there’s a real danger that this kind of blind spot is going to be counterproductive. It starts of with chortlesome lines about bats and newts, and ends up with cases where a wetland gets drained or paved over in order to get some fairly trivial project rushed through, leading to land becoming unusable for a much more important project somewhere else. Or you chop down the trees for a housing estate, then wonder why nobody wants to live there. If you think of natural environments as a consumption good, you’re not going to be in the right mindset for including them as constraints on the engineering problem, to solve optimally.

We seem to have a recurring theme on this ‘stack of the way that in complex systems, thinking in terms of “tradeoffs” is both necessary and dangerous. If you’re not careful, it quickly drags you into a model in which regulation is a nice-to-have, protecting the things that you want to do with all the money you make from growth. That’s not a good mental model of the relationship between regulation and growth at all; the question is always whether the regulatory regime is intrinsically well-designed for its purpose, and whether it’s adapting sufficiently quickly to change in the world. Which is true of financial deregulation too.

“The same flawed judgment that has seen newts and bats block major infrastructure projects is the one that requires almost 140,000 finance professionals to certify they are fit for their roles on an annual basis” is a sword that can cut both ways, I think.