The invisible cost of the state capacity crisis is increasingly invisible no longer
UPDATE: In the Pacific Palisades, fire hydrants ran dry around 3 AM last night. "The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) confirmed they have received water shortage reports but could not confirm how many hydrants are effected."
One of the saddest parts of working on public technology projects is seeing 1) incredible world class talent want to tackle important public problems like the climate crisis and 2) the struggle at best for the public sector to deploy that talent.
In the early years of the California Water Data Collaborative, we collaborated with a talented Netflix data scientist who helped improve water demand forecasting. That project helped our water partners save over $20 million, improving the climate resilience of that local community, and became water conference circuit famous as the "Netflix story, not a movie."
That volunteer data scientist was super interested in working full time on that type of public interest technology project. There are a lot of technical talent that wants to work on the climate crisis, with water at the frontline of adaptation.
Yet despite the obvious importance of the mission, the clear desire of talent to work on the issue, and the ample amount of funding, such talent often goes elsewhere. Why? A million reasons. For one big one, see for example this excellent blog post from civic tech maven Jennifer Palka on the insanity of federal hiring.
Getting people in the door of course is only part of the issue. There are also the many layers of procedures, policies and sometime honestly pointless box checking that frustrates top talent. Too often rather than reform those arcane institutional layers, the public sector just adds on new initiatives and positions, ignoring the deeper structural challenge. From a tech leader:
Until a crisis, such costs are largely invisible. Economists talk about the invisible graveyard from painfully slow approvals of life saving drugs. Covid and the clear benefit of quicker life saving vaccines made the cost of delay clear. Similarly, the costs of state capacity shortfalls grow invisibly as we neglect to use top talent to effectively address climate issues at the speed and scale required. Until a crisis comes up.
Right now my hometown in Los Angeles is burning. It’s wild and something out of an apocalyptic film, with fire moving at unprecedented speed, whipped up by incredible wind. From a Martian perspective, having humanity's brightest minds optimize movie recommendations while our cities burn in hurricane force hell-fires is... suboptimal. To say the least.
We need to treat this crisis like the all hands on deck moment it really is. That means not just dropping everything in an acute emergency but courageously confronting the systemic barriers that prevent action at the speed and scale requisite to realistically address the climate crisis.
