Unintended Consequences

One of the trickiest problems facing policymakers is the risk of unintended consequences. Even policies passed with the best of intentions can produce very negative outcomes, often to seemingly unrelated issues. Good policy decisions rest both on proper diagnosis–that is, a thoughtful and informed analysis of the problem to be solved and its causes–and on recognition of the effects a proposed policy change might have on other areas of American life.

Those two requirements of sound policymaking–proper diagnosis and an understanding of what we might call the “inter-relationship” of policy areas–require policymakers to be competent and informed. Enormous damage can be done by ideologues impatient with pesky realities, or self-important ignoramuses acting with limited understanding..

Considerable harm can be done unintentionally by people who lack the knowledge necessary to see the probable consequences of their ignorance. What makes the coming Trump administration so terrifying is that it is composed almost entirely of such people.

Trump himself is clearly unable to understand the logical outcomes of his threats–think his love affair with tariffs, which would vastly increase inflation, or the effects of his plan to deport millions of immigrants, many of whom American farmers rely upon to pick their crops.

I thought about the problem of unintended consequences when I came across an article focused on the unfortunate effects of even well-meaning legislation passed by thoughtful legislators. 

Richard Rothstein wrote The Color of Law, a book I heartily recommend. It was an eye-opening history of the many laws that created America’s residential segregation, and any reader who comes to it while laboring under the misapprehension that such neighborhoods arose by chance or choice will discover otherwise. (I will admit to being shocked when I read it, and I did know some of what he covered.)

In the linked article, however, he takes analysis a bit farther, and shows how that shameful history led to a seemingly unrelated bill that worsened the negative outcomes of residential segregation.

I was recently asked how I came to write The Color of Law. The answer is this: In the 1990s and early 2000s, I had been a journalist and policy analyst studying public education. At the time, it was conventional wisdom that the “achievement gap”—black students having lower average performance than white students—was caused by lazy or incompetent teachers of low-income children. In 2002, this view, shared across the political spectrum, was enshrined in federal legislation: the “No Child Left Behind” law. Its theory was that if we shamed teachers by publishing their low-income African American students’ test scores, the teachers would work harder and the achievement gap would disappear. Residues of this law continue to this day. If you wonder why elementary and secondary schools are so obsessed with administering standardized tests and reporting their scores, it’s because of that policy.

Rothstein eventually concluded that lower average achievement of these pupils wasn’t due to deficits of instruction, but to the

social and economic challenges that children brought with them to school—for example, greater rates of lead poisoning that resulted in damaged cognitive function; living in more polluted neighborhoods that led to a higher incidence of asthma that kept children up at night wheezing and coming to school drowsier the next day; lack of adequate health care, including dental care, that brought more children to school with distracting toothaches, and on and on…

Looking back on this now, it’s remarkable that the book treated these all as individual student disadvantages, and made very little mention of segregation. But I soon thereafter realized that it was one thing if individual students came to school with one or more of such challenges; it was quite another if many students in a school did so, overwhelming the ability of even the best teachers to overcome them. We call such schools “segregated” schools and so I began to think of school segregation as the greatest problem facing American public education. And as I thought about it further, an obvious fact struck me: the reason we have segregated schools is because they are located in segregated neighborhoods. For me, a logical next step was to view neighborhood segregation as a school problem, one that writers about education policy should consider more carefully.

That insight led Rothstein to write The Color of Law. It should caution us to recognize the complex and inter-related nature of so many of the issues modern America faces.

We will soon see what happens when the government is run by people who don’t understand H.L. Mencken’s observation that “For every complex problem, there’s an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

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The Costs of Rejecting Reality

Thanks to the information environment we inhabit, we Americans increasingly inhabit alternate “realities.” I’ve put quotation marks around the term “realities,” because it has become very clear that the universe in which too many Americans have chosen to reside is at odds with–indeed, incompatible with–empirical reality. The amount of propaganda, conspiracy theories, and other varieties of mis- and dis-information readily available online greatly facilitates the very human desire to indulge in confirmation bias–and the failure of civic and scientific education has facilitated widespread acceptance of “realities” wildly at odds with fact and credible evidence.

It seems pertinent, therefore, to ask: what happens when people choose to deny empirical evidence and facts they find inconvenient or annoying? What, for example, might we expect from RFK, Jr’s refusal to understand the science of vaccines, or the demonstrable benefits of a fluoridated water supply?

History is instructive. I did some (very superficial) research, and found fascinating (and depressing) evidence of humanity’s past experience with the denial of science and empirical inquiry.

Before acceptance of germ theory, for example, many people believed diseases like cholera were caused by the presence of  “miasma” (bad air). As a result, governments took no effective measures to control cholera outbreaks–and doctors who warned about the dangers of contaminated water were ignored. The result was thousands of unnecessary deaths.

The tendency to ignore and reject scientific evidence hasn’t been confined to America. In Russia, in the early 20th Century, a Soviet agricultural scientist named Lysenko rejected the science of genetics in favor of pseudoscientific ideas like Lamarckian inheritance (the belief that physical changes made to an organism during its lifetime would be  passed on–inherited by the organism’s offspring.) Stalin’s government embraced Lysenko’s theories, suppressed the scientists who supported Mendelian genetics, and based its agricultural policies on Lysenkoism. The result was widespread crop failures and famines that caused millions of deaths.

I found plenty of other historical examples: delays in accepting the science of plate tectonics that hindered advancements in understanding earthquakes, volcanic activity, and geological hazards. Initial medical responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis that were hampered by widespread stigma and misinformation. Vaccine disinformation (especially the consistently debunked claim that vaccines cause autism) has led to reduced vaccination rates, and the resurgence of diseases like measles, polio, and whooping cough that medical science had virtually eradicated.

Numerous studies have confirmed that the MAGA movement’s resistance to masks and vaccines during the COVID pandemic cost the U.S. thousands of lives–a far greater percentage of American citizens died than the percentage of people living in countries where the population had more respect for medical science. Delays in lockdowns, resistance to public health measures, and vaccine rejection caused millions of preventable deaths and significant economic damage.

And I don’t even want to theorize about the likely consequences of climate change denial…

Ironically, MAGA’s stubborn resistance to empiricism and fact flies in the face of what actually made America great.

America’s founders were students of the Enlightenment, especially the philosophy of John Locke, often considered the father of empiricism. The Founders committed themselves to unleashing the power of reason to advance knowledge and to build an effective and responsive government. They believed that science and democracy worked together, and often expressed their intent to base government policy on the best available data and the most up-to-date, empirical understanding of the world.

As the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote in 2012, “science and democracy, working hand in hand, have proved a powerful combination that has helped our nation to prosper and thrive throughout our history.”

That partnership of science and government is what enabled America’s economic “greatness.” The country’s economic growth  has significantly depended on empiricism and technological innovation; advances in industries like aerospace, computing, and biotechnology have all been dependant upon rigorous science and empirical evidence. Respect for science and empiricism has also been crucial to the development of the military defense technologies that have made the U.S. a world power. (Think radar, GPS, and nuclear energy.)

Trump and the MAGA movement are the absolute antithesis of the respect for science, evidence and expertise that is actually at the base of America’s global preeminence. The collection of clowns, buffoons, and know-nothings that Trump has nominated for his cabinet make a mockery of MAGA’s promise to return America to greatness.

What is that famous Santayana quote? Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.

Welcome to Lysenkoism.

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About Those Grocery Prices….

Lately, grocery prices have figured significantly in America’s political argumentation. A number of Trump voters cited them as justifications for their votes, for example. (Excuse my skeptical belief that this “reason” was generally given to mask the racism/misogyny that actually prompted those votes.)

Biden had little to do with grocery prices, but those prices are legitimately relevant to arguments about Trump’s moronic devotion to tariffs, and his threat to impose them on pretty much every country from which the U.S. imports. Every economist who has weighed in has pointed out that tariffs tax American consumers, not the countries exporting to us. And it’s hard to ignore the inevitable effect of his fixation on mass deportations, which–if successful–would leave crops rotting in American fields and set prices soaring.

Prices aren’t the only grocery problem. There’s also maldistribution– the growing incidence of America’s food deserts. A friend recently shared an Atlantic article that shed light on both issues. Titled “The Great Grocery Squeeze,” it highlighted the importance of government policy–very much including the enforcement of policy.

The concept of the food desert has been around long enough that it feels almost like a fact of nature. Tens of millions of Americans live in low-income communities with no easy access to fresh groceries, and the general consensus is that these places just don’t have what it takes to attract and sustain a supermarket. They’re either too poor or too sparsely populated to generate sufficient spending on groceries, or they can’t overcome a racist pattern of corporate redlining.

But these explanations fail to contend with a key fact: Although poverty and ruralness have been with us forever, food deserts arrived only around the late 1980s. Prior to that, small towns and poor neighborhoods could generally count on having a grocery store, perhaps even several. (The term food desert was coined in 1995 by a task force studying what was then a relatively new phenomenon.)

Affluent folks tend to think of food deserts as a feature of low-income, primarily Black neighborhoods, but it’s also a problem in very White places like North Dakota. In 1980s, almost every small town in North Dakota had a grocery store, and many had two. Now, nearly half of North Dakota’s rural residents live in a food desert.

Food deserts are not an inevitable consequence of poverty or low population density, and they didn’t materialize around the country for no reason. Something happened. That something was a specific federal policy change in the 1980s. It was supposed to reward the biggest retail chains for their efficiency. Instead, it devastated poor and rural communities by pushing out grocery stores and inflating the cost of food.

In 1936 Congress had passed the Robinson-Patman Act, essentially banning price discrimination in the industry.

During the decades when Robinson-Patman was enforced—part of the broader mid-century regime of vigorous antitrust—the grocery sector was highly competitive, with a wide range of stores vying for shoppers and a roughly equal balance of chains and independents. In 1954, the eight largest supermarket chains captured 25 percent of grocery sales. That statistic was virtually identical in 1982, although the specific companies on top had changed. As they had for decades, Americans in the early 1980s did more than half their grocery shopping at independent stores, including both single-location businesses and small, locally owned chains. Local grocers thrived alongside large, publicly traded companies such as Kroger and Safeway.

Studies tracking grocery prices while Robinson-Patman was being enforced found that large independent grocers were less than 1 percent more expensive than the big chains.

In the 1980s, convinced that tough antitrust enforcement was holding back American business, the Reagan administration set about dismantling it. The Robinson-Patman Act remained on the books, but the new regime saw it as an economically illiterate handout to inefficient small businesses. And so the government simply stopped enforcing it..That move tipped the retail market in favor of the largest chains, who could once again wield their leverage over suppliers.

Once independent stores closed, “the chains no longer had to invest in low-income areas. They could count on people to schlep across town to their other locations.”

It wasn’t only groceries–lack of anti-trust enforcement affected the entire retail sector. Between 1982 to 2017, the market share of independent retailers went from 53% to 22%.

The problem of food deserts will not be solved without the rediscovery of the Robinson-Patman Act. Requiring a level pricing playing field would restore local retailers’ ability to compete. This would provide immediate relief to entrepreneurs who have recently opened grocery stores in food deserts, only to find that their inability to buy on the same terms as Walmart and Dollar General makes survival difficult.

Policy matters. Just not in the way MAGA voters think.

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An Uninformed Electorate

Over the years I’ve been writing this blog, one of my more frequent laments has been the collapse of America’s local newspapers. The last time I looked, the United States had lost a over a quarter– 2,100 – of its local newspapers, and that number doesn’t include the “ghost” papers that are theoretically still functioning, but no longer able to adequately cover local news.

What do we lose when we lose local newspapers?

We lose “news you can use” about local government agencies, schools and the goings-on at the State legislature. As I’ve previously noted, we also lose a common information environment that builds community and is more trusted than national media sources. And that trust matters.

Research confirms that the loss of a properly functioning local paper leads to diminished participation in municipal elections, which become less competitive. Corruption goes unchecked, driving costs up for local government. Disinformation proliferates because people turn to social media to get their “facts.”

A recent study confirms the importance of local newspapers to the maintenance of an informed citizenry. I’ve previously reported on a statistic I found stunning (and depressing)–the fact that people who follow the news (presumably including Fox “News”) voted for Harris by a considerable margin, and people who reported seldom or never following the news voted for Trump by a much larger margin. But that finding didn’t distinguish between local and national news sources.

This study–cited by the Local News Initiative-– did.

Donald Trump won the 2024 election with one of the smallest popular-vote margins in U.S. history, but in news deserts – counties lacking a professional source of local news – it was an avalanche. Trump won 91% percent of these counties over his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, according to an analysis of voting data by Medill Journalism School’s State of Local News project.

The study didn’t confuse correlation with causation; researchers were careful to note that Trump’s dominance in the country’s news deserts isn’t a simple matter of cause and effect.

That is, people didn’t necessarily vote for Trump because they lack local news. Instead, a simpler and more obvious correlation may be at work: News deserts are concentrated in counties that tend to be rural and have populations that are less educated and poorer than the national average–exactly the kind of places that went strongly for Trump in 2024 and in 2020….

But news deserts do have the potential to affect voting behavior in important ways. When voters lose access to local news, they tend to gravitate toward national news sources, according to research by Joshua P. Darr, a professor of public communications at Syracuse University. This kind of news, by definition, focuses on broad national issues—abortion, immigration, the economy, etc.—without regard to local conditions.

Individuals exposed only to national news are thus unlikely to know how a given candidate’s priorities will affect their cities or states. They base their votes on a few national issues that tend to reinforce basic partisan identities. Voters in news deserts are also more likely to engage in ballot “roll off”  – that is, vote for president but leave local and statewide races blank. Others will simply vote a straight ticket for candidates who share the political party of their presidential choice.

Those practices can hardly be considered informed votes by thoughtful citizens–those needed by a democratic system.

Several of the studies I’ve previously cited have found that citizens tend to place more trust in local sources of news than in national media. The absence of a local newspaper doesn’t just deprive them of important information about their own communities–the disappearance of those trusted local sources leaves them with a choice between inadequate alternatives: they may stop following the news altogether, or they may ignore the so-called “legacy” media in favor of less credible sources that reflect their partisan leanings and biases.

I agree with the researchers that Trump’s victory in America’s news deserts is not a “simple matter of cause and effect.” The study’s results should not be reduced to “Trump won because people were uninformed.” But it would be equally wrongheaded to dismiss that argument entirely. It is at least plausible to assume that more information from a more trusted source might have influenced at least some of these voters–if not to withhold a vote for Trump, at least to consider their choices for down-ballot candidates. (The presence of a local newspaper has been found to increase ticket-splitting, for example, indicating more informed voting.)

Life in a news desert leads to more political corruption, higher taxes, lower bond ratings, greater social alienation, misinformation, and loss of social cohesion. It also leads to more votes for enormously unfit candidates.

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The Patriarchal Backlash

Supporters of the draconian abortion bans passed by Red states like Indiana like to pooh-pooh allegations that those bans are part of a “war on women.” But a woman’s ability to control her own reproduction is absolutely essential to her ability to participate equally in economic and civic life, and depriving her of that control is a major goal of those who want to take America back to patriarchy, to a time when women were subservient.

MAGA’s war against women doesn’t stop with abortion bans and restrictions on birth control. The Guardian recently reported on Republican proposals to cut a variety of federal subsidies that disproportionately help women.

As they prepare to take control of the White House and Congress next month, conservatives are eyeing cutbacks to federal programs that help tens of millions of women pay for healthcare, food, housing and transportation.

The ferocity of the backlash to women’s growing equality raises obvious questions: why is it that the United States, with our vaunted celebration of individual rights and civic equality, has never had a female President, as other countries have? Why are women still under-represented in our legislative bodies, compared to numerous other countries?

Recently, Yascha Mounk posed those questions to Alice Evans, a scholar who focuses on them. Evans has a book coming out titled “The Great Gender Divergence,” and her observations are instructive.

Evans noted that there are wide differences in labor force and leadership participation across the globe.

Across Scandinavia there is a very strong share of female representation. In Latin America there are 11 legislative assemblies which actually mandate gender parity, and you’ve just seen two women fight it out for the presidency in Mexico.

When Mounk asked Evans to speculate about why these differences exist, her explanation began with a history of women’s emancipation that was very similar to the one Morton Marcus and I offered in our book From Property to Partnership.

As she noted, in 1900, much of the world was very patriarchal.

Our Enlightenment, our scholars, our scientists, our parliaments, and our judiciary were incredibly patriarchal, a total sausage fest. But then there is a big disruption, and I do think economics and politics are important here. So over the 20th century, skill bias and technological change are ramping up demand for skilled labor. That happens across the world. These factories open up and women seize the economic opportunities they create. It’s also mediated by technology: When women have contraceptives they can control their fertility, further their education and then build careers.

So what accounts for the striking differences in female political and economic participation across the globe? Culture. Especially the persistence of patriarchal cultures, where male status depends upon “protecting” women and keeping them submissive, and where a “husbands’ status is contingent upon them being the breadwinner and women remaining at home.”

The interview is wide-ranging, and focuses largely on the situations of women in countries where male resistance to female empowerment is far more powerful and effective than in the U.S. But Evans’ observations about culture–especially patriarchal culture–have obvious pertinence to America, where our citizenry includes a wide variety of subcultures, many of which are patriarchal to a greater or lesser degree. 

There has been a lot of hand-wringing over the fact that Trump pulled more than the expected vote percentage with some traditionally Democratic-voting constituencies. Pundits have offered various theories, almost all based upon policy differences, ignoring  the likely effect of the “macho” elements of some of these cultures, and the corresponding belief that women are unfit for the Presidency. Then there is the influence of fundamentalist religions, virtually all of which circumscribe the role of women. The recent resurgence of White Christian Nationalism is at least partially a backlash against  the growing role of women and gays in American society.

Project 2025 proposes an agenda that is thoroughly paternalistic and patriarchal, and anyone who thinks the Trump administration won’t try to impose its provisions on American society is, as they say, “smoking something.” (The extent to which his chosen clowns, conspiracy theorists and buffoons will succeed is a different question.)

James Davidson Hunter coined the term Culture Wars back in 1992. It was an apt phrase then, and it is even more appropriate now. The divisions between modernists and “traditionalists,” between urban and rural Americans, between resentful Whites and people of color are all essentially cultural. 

Today’s “cold civil war” isn’t between Republicans and Democrats. (Face it, there aren’t any real Republicans anymore.) It’s a culture war between a MAGA movement that wants to reinstate a racist, homophobic, patriarchal society and those of us who want to live in an inclusive 21st Century.

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