This article tries to blame diversity and other efforts for a number of unrelated events. I consider it to be a hit piece.
The actual causes of these events are elsewhere.
The East Palestine derailment is due to insufficient maintenance and inspection.
The PG&E fire was due to a lack of maintenance and inspection, leading to a 90+ year old part failing.
The backup in the LA ports was due to a supply shock due to Covid, and rule sets that greatly depleted the availability of transport out of the port into the US.
The Colonial pipeline shutdown was the result of a ransomware attack.
The Navy incidents are caused by an over-emphasis on administration, and a lack of actual hands on training and practice.
We've optimized all resilience out of our supply chains in the name of profit. This backfired during the pandemic. We've failed to maintain our infrastructure. We've allowed corporations to cut corners far beyond prudence or reasonable safety, in the name of short term profits.
Hint: if you’re ever reading an article that pins America’s ills on “the Civil Rights Act of 1964”, you’re reading some bullshit.
The idea that America has problems because black people get to have important jobs is such a blatantly fucked up idea that I have no idea how this is on the front page…
The genius of targetting "diversity" is that it's both intuitively easy to understand (whether you believe it), and absolutely unfalsifiable. There's no way to demonstrate that an influx of "diverse" people are the cause of a decrease in competence, but it's an obvious correlation that plays into lingering bigotry. Well done, Harold.
I am trying to figure out if "escalating rates of failure" is at all true, and of course it will depend on what you measure, but not seeing a lot of evidence.
This is not to say that there are not critical societal issues, but a general loss of reliability in cases where that reliability is truly desired? Not seeing very much of that.
I am first one to throw stone at diversity, but I disagree with this article.
- Problem is a widespread corruption, not diversity specifically. Soviet union, Iran, Saudis, even Nazi Germany had this common problem. Healthy society would fix inefficiencies, unhealthy society promotes them. Diversity can improve efficiency if done right!
- Complex systems will survive, even thrive! Societies like late stage Soviet Union could maintain complex industries, electric grids, space program etc very well. Even 3th world countries are capable of maintaining complex infrastructure while society starves. For example North Korea develops satellites, nukes and rockets... It is connected to ruling class and essential for its power.
- End result is that "non essential" will decline. Stuff like life expectancy, fertility, health care... We can already see that.
> The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity.
Really? As fewer people than ever are dying in plane crashes. Medical malpractice claims are declining. There are far fewer errors in banking, communications, convictions, far fewer deaths in fires (and fires in general). There are certainly some things getting worse such as homelessness and drug addiction, but most things have dramatically improved over the past generation.
It is great to have anecdotes, but you need to demonstrate that reliability is declining in some numerical way, as "increasing regularity" is by definition somehow numerical.
> Following three completely avoidable collisions of U.S. Navy warships in 2017 and a fire in 2020 that resulted in the scuttling of USS Bonhomme Richard
The US Navy has a pretty lengthy record of hitting things, losing boats to stupid, and killing its sailors for want of training.
Is it all that unusual for the US armed forces to lose dozens of people in accidents a year? Admittedly anecdotal from Wikipedia reading, but it doesn't seem to be so.
> Recently, the tremendous U.S. record for air safety established since the 1970s has been fraying at the edges.
A bunch of people have died due to ATC failures between now and the 1970s.
It is obviously not good that these incidents have happened, but they are not exactly new. The "tremendous record for air safety" still has a lot of bodies attached to it.
> Shortly after releasing the 737 MAX, 346 people died in two nearly identical 737 MAX crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia.
Exactly as many people died when McDonnell Douglas (the real predecessor to Boeing in terms of organizational culture) cut corners on cargo doors. Boeing corporate ethical challenges are not new if you consider MD.
Airline manufacturers killing people due to being sloppy is not new. They are arguably killing the fewest flyers per capita in history.
> The modern U.S. is a system of systems interacting together in intricate ways. All these complex systems are simply assumed to work. In February of 2021, cold weather in Texas caused shutdowns at unwinterized natural gas power plants. The failure rippled through the systems with interlocking dependencies. As a result, 246 people died. In straightforward work, declining competency means that things happen more slowly, and products are lower quality or more expensive.
That is not lack of competency at all. That is a deliberate choice by Texas to not spend extra money on a resilient system. They deliberately keep their grid disconnected from the rest of the USA so they do not need to comply with Federal standards. Texas is well aware of the issues. They just prefer the free market with cheap power.
> There are certainly some things getting worse such as homelessness and drug addiction
You sure about that? The US homelessness rate has been long-term declining for a while now (and it absolutely collapsed during the pandemic, which is the only reason the short-term seems like an uptick), and I've never seen any evidence that the opioid crisis was "bigger" in any quantitative sense than the earlier heroin and cocaine crises; it just hit more politically sympathetic populations.
The HUD data is a bit bulky and hard to share easily [0], but there has been a rise in unsheltered homelessness since 2015 from 173,000 to 234,000. You are right that overall homelessness is down over time (but not since 2015) and this is admittedly not indexed for population growth.
The problem is particularly acute in California, which had 171K homeless in 2022 and bottomed out at 114K in 2014.
I’m sure SF didn’t look like a big homeless camp in the 1980ies. It was supposed to be a dystopian future, where Westfield would close down because it were made illegal to lodge a complain on a member of the population that shoplifts.
>That is not lack of competency at all. That is a deliberate choice by Texas to not spend extra money on a resilient system. They deliberately keep their grid disconnected from the rest of the USA so they do not need to comply with Federal standards. Texas is well aware of the issues. They just prefer the free market with cheap power.
As a Texan who has relatives all over the U.S., and has been paying a good deal of attention to the frequency of power outages when in Texas, vs out of state, I dare say, Texas is doing something right, that winter incident notwithstanding. When I compare outages I've experienced to what I experience when I travel out of state, in most cases, other states have more frequent outages, with longer resolution times. Texas, in particular, went the direction they did in isolating themselves from the National Grid in large part due to the gain in resilience of their resulting grid becoming loosely coupled to other State's grids/cascading problems.
From a Systems point of view as well, the Texas grid is smaller, and stands a much better chance of being reasoned through once the chips are down. Even during the winter crisis; the power company still managed to make sure that the service area (divided into 4ths) got at least a 1/4 hour uptime to allow people to maintain some semblance of heat. Most of the worst stories amongst my peer group, came from people working in the cities, Austin in particular being a nasty piece of work.
Austin Power apparently had their emergency (non-load shed) trunk shared by many of the skyscrapers and office buildings dowm town, meaning that when it came time to load shed, you'd have entire blocks of residential area dark, but at no point did the 15+ story office buildings that people were very pointedly told not to go to deprived of either power or heat. It didn't help there wasn't a native Texan on the Public Utility Commission (ERCOT regulator), one of those on it was caught on a hot mic assuring Wall Street that their gains in terms of spiked energy prices would not be clawed back in any way by the state, and any efforts to do so he'd obstruct.
Texas has it's slieu of issues, many self-inflicted, most knowingly; however that doesn't detract from the point posited by the headline. Systems of greater complexity by definition will have higher demands on the competency of those operating them. Less population growth means fewer cranks on the slot machine that in time produces competent system operators.
And no, immigration doesn't fix it if the working migrants are still primarily invested in funneling capital elsewhere. In fact, it may be arguably deleterious if there's a glut in the number of short-term "oh well, this is a bad idea, but I'm not gonna have to deal with the long term consequences" types that are willing to just say "yep, okay, fine."
It's an ugly problem to even think about, let alone talk about/come to terms with in any meaningful way. Hell, I've tried to phrase my ciew of it uncontroversially as I can, but even I can point to at least two or three things that would instantly be perceived as dog whistles/intellectual stop points in certain circles. ... And I'm not even sure we've covered the full problem space yet!
Totally with you on the 737 MAX and McDonnell Douglas angle though!
I thought that neoliberalism and the shift to short-term goals for everything, business and beyond, was the cause of our inability to plan anything these days.
DEI just seems to give us managers who think and behave like white guys but aren't actually white guys. We applaud them for who they are while what they do remains the same.
The actual causes of these events are elsewhere.
The East Palestine derailment is due to insufficient maintenance and inspection.
The PG&E fire was due to a lack of maintenance and inspection, leading to a 90+ year old part failing.
The backup in the LA ports was due to a supply shock due to Covid, and rule sets that greatly depleted the availability of transport out of the port into the US.
The Colonial pipeline shutdown was the result of a ransomware attack.
The Navy incidents are caused by an over-emphasis on administration, and a lack of actual hands on training and practice.
We've optimized all resilience out of our supply chains in the name of profit. This backfired during the pandemic. We've failed to maintain our infrastructure. We've allowed corporations to cut corners far beyond prudence or reasonable safety, in the name of short term profits.