Fri Dec 22 07:31:03 EST 2006
Published by EH.NET (December 2006)
Karen M. O'Neill, _Rivers by Design: State Power and the Origins of
U.S. Flood Control_. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. xxi +
278 pp. $23 (paperback), ISBN: 0-8223-3773-8.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Brooks A. Kaiser, Department of Economics,
Gettysburg College.
U.S. flood control grew in stages that correspond generally to what
one might expect in a nation-state that was experimenting with
democratic, decentralized approaches to providing public goods and
resolving the burdens of externalities. In regions as seemingly
disparate as the Mississippi and Sacramento valleys, political and
economic forces worked in similar ways to drive a reluctant federal
government into the business of engineering rivers for a variety of
uses. In this book, O'Neill illustrates the parallels between river
valley development in the West (Sacramento Valley) and the South
(Mississippi Valley), and the political machinations that evolved
into a wide range of river-management programs, in particular flood
control. She provides well-researched descriptions of who captured
political control of local and state flood control as federal
intervention grew in response to both disputes and disasters, showing
how the physical responses to floods and the threat of flooding, in
particular levee-building, moved from the domain of the individual
property owner to first local, then state, and finally federal (Army
Corps of Engineers) hands.
The synonymity of pork barrel politics and public water works makes
this comparative political approach valid and informative. The book
does not, however, make any use of economic theory to aid the
explanation of how these two phenomena came to be so intertwined.
This leads to "blame" placed on political failings and vaguely
defined "economic development" for the current state of
over-engineered rivers that continue to flood and cause dramatic and
extensive damages, rather than an illumination of the underlying
economic framework upon which these failings were predicated. In so
doing, many opportunities for interesting insights and broader
conclusions are lost. The book's final chapter, for example, which
argues that the future of rivers will require a more holistic
management system encompassing environmental quality and addressing
the changing demands Americans are placing on their river systems,
leaves the reader wondering whether such solutions can ever be
achieved, and if so, how.
Grounding the story in some context of Coasean economics would
increase the explanatory power of the book's argument significantly.
The case studies of the two river valleys are thoroughly documented
and described (the bibliography and notes cover the legal and
political evolution of rights well) but the core economic challenges
faced in the presence of imperfect property rights is never
articulated, and so the evolving political grabs for those property
rights, which constitutes much of the meat of the book, is stripped
of its greater potential use in evaluating the outcomes of those
grabs.
In the South, land along the Mississippi was of much greater economic
value than other land in great part because of the reduced
transportation costs. Protection of this value, however, depended on
both the strategic actions of others with property along the waterway
and the physical reliability of the waterway and its path. Levees and
other engineering techniques for directing the unruly river system
served to reduce the uncertainty in an individual parcel's land
value, while simultaneously increasing the overall spread in property
values by more clearly delineating the "haves" from the "have-nots."
Once entrenched, the wealth generated from the higher land rents seem
to have been directed at political efforts to maintain them. This was
predominately a local and state phenomenon until western expansion in
the late 1840s, and then Reconstruction, aggravated regional tensions
for federal spending, but the economic underpinnings for the
evolution to the federal level stem from the difficulties in
establishing property rights to a river whose course and flooding
patterns generated so much uncertainty.
The Sacramento Valley's case broadly pitted agriculture against
mining in its origins, and again economic theory, this time of
externalities (not formalized at the time), would have predicted that
without clear property rights to the water and its quality, the water
could not be efficiently used across multiple (and to varying degrees
competing) uses. Indeed, the evolution of western water law that
stemmed from these early conflicts, and its economic implications,
have been studied by economists (e.g. Michael Hanemann) and lay
writers (e.g. Marc Reisner) to great effect, and I recommend these
authors' works for more insightful economic history on the same topic.
Technological change, state and local regulation to resolve
externalities, and changes in demand and supply for both mining and
agricultural goods eventually reduced the conflicts between mining
and agriculture and turned both groups toward flood control concerns
that again reduced uncertainty and increased the industrial potential
of the region.
With incentives in place for the West and the South to simultaneously
demand federal action, there becomes more room for the political
punch-line, which is really about the separation of powers in
controlling waterways for different purposes. This piece-meal
outcome, where the Army Corps of Engineers oversees flood control
while the Bureau of Reclamation oversees irrigation and the Fish and
Wildlife Service oversees species habitat, for example, is unlikely
to be economically efficient and reduces the benefits of federal
intervention as each bureaucracy engages in its own, often competing,
agendas.
O'Neill demonstrates that the current breadth of this separation was
almost avoided in proposed changes under the New Deal, and also that
those proposals were doomed by longstanding political lobbyist
interests originating in much earlier policy fights. The details are
copious, with almost every paragraph summarizing an entire research
agenda.
To place these details in a more supportive and enticing format for
economic historians, what should be added is that while the outcomes
were political, those lobbyist interests formed chiefly due to
economic failures that stemmed from attempts to capture returns from
missing or imperfect property rights. The successful seizing of these
property rights by certain groups determined the balance of wealth
between competing interests, and today we seek to redistribute that
wealth so that it includes new interests. The ability to do so will
be limited by the resulting inability to plan across the divided
agency mandates, the origins of which pre-date both useful economic
and environmental theory and application that could increase the
overall wealth available for redistribution.
Brooks A. Kaiser is an Associate Professor of Economics at Gettysburg
College and Affiliate Graduate Faculty member of the department of
economics at the University of Hawaii. She conducts research on past
and present problems pertaining to natural resource use. She is
currently working on several projects on Hawaiian ecosystems and
resources, some of which are outlined at
http://homepage.mac.com/ondinebak/, as well as public goods provision
in ancient Greece.
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