Eight years ago, American film producer Barry Josephson moved into a hilltop home in Pacific Palisades, the affluent Los Angeles neighborhood nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains.
Josephson, whose film credits include Enchanted (2007) and Aliens in the Attic (2009), loved his home. But one issue was a source of chronic unease: the extremely combustible vegetation that choked the nearby public lands.
“We all take a risk living here,” Josephson recently told the Wall Street Journal; “That land should be maintained.”
The problem was the government was not maintaining the land. So according to Josephson, several residents in the area decided to risk $150 fines (the penalty for removing brush from state parklands without a license) and removed the highly flammable brush on their own.
In the wake of the Los Angeles fires, which have claimed more than two dozen lives and already destroyed 10,000-plus structures, debates rage over the cause of the blazes. While many argue that the wildfires stem from climate change, an abundance of evidence suggests a simpler explanation: bureaucratic dysfunction.
More than four and a half years ago, the New York Times reported that government agencies in western states were struggling to properly maintain public lands, which was creating a wildfire crisis.
A big part of the problem was fire aggressive suppression, which was causing dry vegetation to build up in heavily forested areas. But another problem was that government forest services weren’t thinning out forested areas fast enough. When these deforestation efforts did happen, they were often poorly targeted.
Five years later, reporting from the Journal shows a similar pattern. The newspaper, which reviewed public records and interviewed officials, identified “a slow-moving tangle of government agencies that own or regulate Los Angeles’s undeveloped land.”
The inefficiency of bureaucracy is something so well known we take for granted. It’s been widely discussed in not just economics, but pop culture.
In The Empire Strikes Back, when Han Solo realizes he and his companions are inside a giant alien creature, he orders Chewy to fire up the Millennium Falcon and “get us out of here.” Princes Leia objects, correctly pointing out that Empire goons are still out there looking for them.
“There’s no time to discuss this as a committee!” Han retorts.
The lesson is simple. When something must get done, the last thing you want to do is have to take it to a committee. Because bureaucracy is to action what kryptonite is to Superman.
For generations, economists have highlighted the inherent problems of bureaucracy. But none have done so with more effect than Ludwig von Mises, who wrote an entire tome about it.
“The bureaucrat is not free to aim at improvement,” Mises wrote in Bureaucracy. “He is bound to obey rules and regulations established by a superior body. He has no right to embark upon innovations if his superiors do not approve of them. His duty and his virtue is to be obedient.”
Bureaucracies tend to struggle for various reasons — a lack of knowledge, bad incentives, irrational economic calculation, over-centralization — but the situation in Los Angeles was even more complicated. The lands were not being managed by one unwieldy bureaucracy but by many.
“In the Palisades,” the Journal reports, “the city and county of Los Angeles, the state parks department, the California Coastal Commission, and the National Park Service all have a say in what happens on land surrounding residential areas.”
It’s hard to imagine a better formula for inaction and dysfunction, which was so bad that the LA Fire Department, according to the Journal, was writing “citations to the state parks department for not clearing vegetation from its property.”
Did you catch that? One public department was writing fines to another public department. Yet nothing was happening, something that even public officials simply couldn’t understand.
“How can the state of California spend so much time and money on fire mitigation, but you don’t do the most basic thing, which is to clear brush on your land that’s near homes?” Maryam Zar, former president of the Palisades Community Council, asked.
What Ms. Zar doesn’t understand is that a lack of funding wasn’t the problem. The system of management was the problem.
In economics, there’s a concept known as the Tragedy of the Commons, which explains how property that is not privately owned and is instead collectively managed tends to be poorly maintained since no single individual has a direct incentive to care for it.
This is a particular problem in California, where about 52 percent of the land is publicly owned. But things were made worse in Palisades, where the lands surrounding residential properties were subject to not one bureaucracy but five of them.
The result is predictable. Nobody is taking responsibility for these ‘public’ lands.
All of this explains why Barry Josephson’s neighbors had to take it upon themselves to clear out highly flammable brush. By removing the dry, dense vegetation the parks department could not get around to clearing, Josephson’s neighbors risked getting fined — but they may have saved their homes.
The Journal reports that most of the homes in the neighborhood are still standing even though investigators believe one of the fires started “just a few hundred feet away.”
It’s a Kafkaesque twist to the story that shows bureaucracy is often not just absurd, but deadly.
