LA Fires Illustrate a Nationwide Competency Crisis California’s fires expose systemic neglect, where poor leadership, declining standards, and ignored maintenance have left a first-world city vulnerable to chaos. By Christopher Roach
https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/14/la-fires-illustrate-a-nationwide-competency-crisis/
Los Angeles is burning, and the raging fires appear to be some of the worst in recent memory. Entire neighborhoods, fancy and regular alike, have burned to the ground. Harrowing video of people trapped in their homes convey some of the human cost of the fires and foretell the inevitable deaths that will be confirmed in the weeks ahead.
There are a surprising number of obstacles challenging the emergency response, considering that we are supposed to live in a first-world country. Fire hydrants ran dry for reasons not yet fully explained, and there were cuts to statewide firefighting budgets in advance of the fires. It now appears that the ongoing homelessness crisis in Los Angeles was a harbinger of third-world conditions across the board.
The political leadership also leaves a lot to be desired. Governor Gavin Newsom shrugged and pinned empty hydrants on locals. In spite of extreme risk warnings, the Los Angeles mayor was away on an overseas junket and went catatonic when reporters asked her some basic questions about events. She is now back and facing sustained criticism from her erstwhile supporters.
Multiple Failure Points Contributed to Disaster
There are lots of theories about what went wrong, and everyone is reaching for their well-worn hobby horses. Some say it’s affirmative action destroying once-competent institutions. Others blame generic incompetence and mismanagement.
Another factor may be changing patterns of home building. Apparently, building on the hills and in the canyons—which are periodically subject to fires—is inherently risky. The recent dry spell, coupled with heavy winds, only made things worse.
Finally, at least some of the fires appear to be a result of arson, whether by the mentally ill or the malevolent.
My intuition is to blame all of these things in combination. While I do not know enough to have a strong opinion about the relative weight of one cause versus another, I start with the prejudice that most failures in life arise from systemic failures, which themselves result from the accumulation of smaller errors similar to the stacking of tolerances in engineering.
A well-designed system can withstand incompetent executives, some affirmative action appointees, and even a shortfall in funding for one year. But most systems cannot withstand all of these things, year after year, which seems to be the unifying factor in Los Angeles’ current predicament.
This is not just a question of mistakes but rather reflects a deeper, almost spiritual crisis. I am reminded of something Robert Kaplan wrote in An Empire Wilderness: “Maintenance indicates settlement rather than nomadism; faith in—and thus planning for—the future, rather than the expectation that what is here today might be gone tomorrow. Maintenance indicates organization, frugality, and responsibility: you don’t build what you lack the money, the time, and the determination to maintain. Maintenance manifests a community and a system of obligation, without which substantial development is unlikely. Maintenance reflects the prudent use of capital.”
Leaders Need to Be Held Responsible for Outcomes
For most people, it’s not emotionally satisfying to hear that a lot of acts and omissions over a long period of time by many different people caused a bad outcome, even when this is the most accurate explanation of events. For leaders at the top of the heap, even if they are not directly the cause of a disaster, the failure to identify and uproot these risks in advance should matter.
In other words, when you’re given the titles, honors, and pay of a prestige job like mayor, governor, or fire chief, then you have to take the blame for what happens on your watch. This creates good incentives. Otherwise, bad leaders would be handsomely rewarded merely for concocting a flood of excuses.
Presumably, California’s governor and Los Angeles’ mayor had the power to do things that would have mitigated a disaster on this scale, such as marshaling resources or sounding the alarm about maintenance shortfalls before a full-fledged disaster was underway.
Sadly, both locally and nationally, campaigning for prudent investments to forestall disaster is not the path to political success. Such leadership requires a long view and concern for the future, both of which are lacking in our disconnected, unserious society.
So, instead, politicians focus on fundraising and flattery, always seeking short-term benefits. The people, though they bear the brunt of the costs of this mismanagement, tend to be fickle and forgetful, often focusing on style over substance.
We get the government we deserve in many ways.
The Climate Change Alibi
The one thing I am confident had absolutely nothing to do with the recent Los Angeles fires is climate change. For believers, climate change is uttered like an incantation, completely devoid of specificity or even basic logic.
What changed and how did it contribute to the fires? They never make a rigorous argument with data, nor acknowledge naturally varying cycles of temperature, rainfall, and other aspects of climate.
Were there no fires before this year? Actually, there were a lot of them. They have been happening for hundreds of years, often burning tens of thousands of acres.
Is drought something new? No, not that either. Droughts have been common, with some of the worst happening many decades ago. Even in good times, Southern California is dry. This is the reason so few people historically lived west of the Mississippi; there is a lot less water available in the West.
Are the roaring Santa Ana winds new? No, they’ve been around a long time, long enough to have a name. Steely Dan even sang about them.
I assume no one will argue that climate change caused antisocial people to commit arson, but you never know.
Just as we are probably wired at a deep level to blame leaders when bad things happen, there is probably a deep cultural need to divine meaning and ascribe justice to a capricious natural world. Even primitive man hypothesized about the gods and Mother Nature, who rewarded respect and punished hubris.
The modern climate cult has a whiff of this same thinking. For them, if we are not pious, occasionally making small sacrifices to appease a jealous Gaia, then punishment will ensue. A similar superstition surrounded COVID, where wearing a mask and observing ever-changing expert guidance became a mark of virtue. Apocryphal stories of deathbed regrets among the unvaccinated proliferated.
No one seems inclined to blame the victims of the fire, and that’s probably a good thing. It does not seem like most of the people who lost their houses did anything particularly risky. In some cases, they only had a moment’s notice to evacuate. More important, even foolish people deserve some compassion when the punishment is so disproportionate to whatever choices got them into trouble.
Maintenance and Civilization
There have been big and recent fires in California, including the deadly 2018 Camp Fire and the 2017 Southern California fires, which led to this memorable footage. For California, fires are not an “unknown unknown” but a predictable, periodic, and significant risk that should preoccupy government officials. Unfortunately, for the reasons listed above—bad leadership, lower standards, prioritization of diversity, and a failure of imagination—necessary maintenance of the firefighting system was neglected in the years leading up to today’s fires.
We see such neglect everywhere, from a collapsing condominium in Miami to giving away the military’s limited reserve ammunition to virtue signal in Ukraine. Things do not work anymore. Things that used to work function less well than they used to.
An important essay on complex systems and the competency crisis made the rounds last year, and it remains very relevant to what has happened in California. The author argues that “Americans living today are the inheritors of systems that created the highest standard of living in human history. Rather than protecting the competency that made those systems possible, the modern preference for diversity has attenuated meritocratic evaluation at all levels of American society. Given the damage already done to competence and morale, combined with the natural exodus of baby boomers with decades worth of tacit knowledge, the biggest challenge of the coming decades might simply be maintaining the systems we have today.”
In other words, maintenance and high standards are the keys to civilization. And the people now responsible for maintaining these systems are too stupid, callow, short-sighted, and incompetent to ensure this happens.
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