It was both surprising and disturbing to read about how easily the Rand Institute was able to disseminate their false models throughout cities. Anybody looking at the equations for the Resource-Allocation and Firehouse-Sitting Models will realize that they are gross oversimplifications. It is extremely difficult to reduce human behavior to numbers and equations because there are so many variables that need to be taken into account. Even with relevant data, it would still be hard to develop a mathematical model. The Rand Institute solved this problem by simply ignoring the data and making simplifying assumptions that were extremely unlikely in practice. For example, the assumption that alarm rates were predictable is clearly false because there is no way to say, with absolute certainty, how many alarms there will be within a given period of time. Similar assumptions led to the two model equations which, since they were ostensibly “scientific,” were employed by unfortunate cities.

The Rand Institute’s false models directly led to the policies of benign neglect and planned shrinkage. At their core, these plans were politicians’ solutions to the issue of the urban poor. The policies basically took resources from certain target neighborhoods in order to save the government money and allow other neighborhoods to thrive. In the case of fire departments, the areas targeted were selected based on the inaccurate data supplied by the Rand Institute. Politicians then used this data to suit their own needs, which inevitably included getting rid of poor minority neighborhoods. These events are analogous to those described by Tom Angotti during his discussion of blighted neighborhoods. The neighborhoods that were considered “blighted” and were slated for urban renewal were almost always poor minority neighborhoods. Urban renewal is therefore similar to benign neglect and planned shrinkage, with one difference being that urban renewal bulldozed neighborhoods while the latter two plans cut them off from resources and allowed them to die.

These chapters provide a perfect example of how prejudices, generalizations, and oversimplifications corrupt the scientific process. The Rand Institute supplied the generalizations and oversimplifications, while the policy makers interpreted the data with a prejudiced mindset. Both groups are to blame for what happened. The Rand Institute performed bad science, which the politicians would have recognized had their judgement not been clouded by personal prejudices against the urban poor. The result was disastrous, but it at least provided a cautionary tale about the dangers of misusing data and trying to reduce a complex situation to two equations.

Discussion question: Compare and contrast urban renewal and planned shrinkage/benign neglect. Although Robert Moses was a proponent of urban renewal, would he have advocated planned shrinkage or benign neglect?