Tales Of Our Times:
By JOHN BARTLIT
New Mexico Citizens
for Clean Air & Water
Numerous times during the long run-up to the Nov. 5 election, I noted a trend toward news that was more about what might happen than about events. One day the news would say Harris had gained three points in a key battleground state. The next day some other big state gave Trump a three-point jump. Week after week the news kept us up to speed, within assorted margins of error.
Polls proliferated in new forms—cheap and briefer forms. The forms increased chances to design polls so the results upheld campaigners’ wishes more than they told us voters’ thinking. We often heard “new poll shows X”, while seldom hearing who did the polling, who was polled, how many were polled, and how questions were phrased.
Why were these tides of press releases never able to say definitively who was going to win the election? Individually, human nature is mighty slow to factor in truths other than ones that help our own goals.
Predicting doom of some sort has always been a handy tool for working lobbyists. In contrast, sorting out strong points and weak points of choices has always been a helpful tool for finding the best policy options. Looking back, the times changed while few noticed. Debating pros and cons of issues fell from favor. Politics lost interest in deliberating. Rivals thought they had simpler means of winning; filling the news with offhand predictions seemed easy and good enough to make-do as policy news.
As election results took shape through that busiest night, the difference between conjecture and real news grew clear.
Perhaps little harm was done other than having us miss out on more weighty news. Yet, I have seen the troubles that brew from predictive news. Related problems pop up in all fields, such as the environment. The first time I saw the trend at close range was in the 1990s. I learned a lot as a public member of the Grand Canyon Visibility Transport Commission.
In 1990, amendments to the Clean Air Act established the Grand Canyon Visibility Transport Commission (GCVTC) to advise the U.S. EPA on strategies for protecting visual air quality on the Colorado Plateau. The GCVTC released its final report in 1996.
I was one of a half-dozen engineers from different sectors tasked with gathering data for a given section of the final report. Since we met from time to time, we knew each other well. A couple of my cohorts were from the power industry, one was from the copper industry, one was from a state agency, and I was a member from the public.
As our final report came together, the copper man proposed that we include a new riff on business prospects. He thought the report should add, “These actions to save the visibility might cause lost jobs in the copper industry.” His prediction showed his built-in blind spot: He left out many factors that affect copper futures.
I proposed an alternative version: namely, “Actions to save visibility may, or may not, cost jobs in the copper industry.” The rest of the committee backed my version, because they knew it was also true, and told more of the real possibilities. After another try, which also failed, the copper man dropped his approach.
In the next four years, I predict a likelihood that the deliberation of policy issues will keep on shriveling further. Rivals may or may not compete via inventive predictions of what will happen next throughout every sector in the U.S. and across the globe. Keep a sharp lookout for a groundswell of “evidence” by prediction.
Imagine the ghost of a chance that more predictions by boosters for pure X, Y, or Z will give us better policy tools than would come from mixing in ample old-school deliberation.