Earlier this week Alex Tabarrok highlighted the opposite trends in the numbers of fires and firefighters. Despite the 40% decrease in fires over the past 35 years, the number of career firefighters has increased 40%. With the huge increase in firefighters per fire, a lot of them spend more time tagging along with ambulances or finding other city busywork.
Many commenters denied this was proof that firefighters are oversupplied, but I think they either have to be oversupplied now or very undersupplied 35 years ago. Given the apparent lack of a fire apocalypse in the 80’s, and the increasing non-firefighting work of firefighters today, I think the evidence is pretty strong. Some argued that it’s useful for firefighters to answer medical calls as they often arrive quicker than ambulances, but that doesn’t prove that firefighters need to be the ones doing that, especially if “it costs $3,500 every time a fire truck pulls out of a fire station in Washington, DC.”
If firefighters are oversupplied, who is to blame? It’s easy to pick on pushy unions taking advantage of budgets in good times, but maybe we need to look no farther than ourselves.
In a new CBS/NYT poll, 45% of respondents were willing to have many local government services reduced if it meant lower taxes, but it was a lot harder to fill that “many” with specifics:
Firefighters are the least popular category for reduction. Ironically, the service with the most support for cuts is the one I would be least excited about. Crime and fires are down; the needs for easily accessible exercise and information are not. But it’s clear that lots of Americans who think they’re OK with reducing local services in general also don’t like the idea of reducing anything in particular.
This is not the first poll suggesting that a good chunk of the country generally wants less government but likes most of the specific things the government does. A Pew poll in February found that 52% “believe government regulation of business usually does more harm than good,” but no more than 20% wanted to reduce government regulation in any of five major specific areas.
And there are no shortage of polls revealing that “Republicans hate Obamacare, but like most of what it does.” Reduce government? Yes! Reduce Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid or Defense? Well, no. (Perhaps it is not surprising that Romney has general plans to reduce the deficit without offering specific cuts; these are the exact preferences of much of the conservative base.)
I call this the Paradox of Shrink. It’s saying you want to shrink the pie without shrinking or getting rid of any of the pieces. Liberals tend to view this cognitive dissonance as typical right-wing hypocrisy. From my bias, these conservatives are simply half-wrong (they realize government needs to be reduced, but they haven’t yet admitted it will require sacrifice), while the liberals who don’t want to reduce government at all are completely wrong (at least they’re consistent). I also think there’s a growing number of conservatives who are waking up to the consistent side of their position; in the pre-Tea-Party Bush years you hardly even heard from the half-right conservatives.
If the Paradox of Shrink continues, governments will continue to resist reducing budgets until money literally runs out. Hopefully, though, voters will begin to realize that many services need to start shrinking, generally and specifically.
This reminds me of Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. Individually, we all may have perfectly internally-consistent views. But try to aggregate those views (whether through polls, voting or some other method) and the result looks a lot like nonsense.
This reminds me of Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. Individually, we all may have perfectly internally-consistent views. But try to aggregate those views (whether through polls, voting or some other method) and the result looks a lot like nonsense.