As we have seen with other forms of urban renewal, there is a sort of sick cycle associated with benign neglect and planned shrinkage. When Fire Alarms are ignored, or when fire services are actually withdrawn from certain neighborhoods, there is an increase in the spread of fires. Instead of a single house burning down, entire blocks and subsequent neighborhoods are reduced to rubble. With a lack of housing, those displaced by fires are forced to rely on mutual-aid networks to help them find housing, often in already-cramped housing units in other neighborhoods. With denser populations come a rise in fire causing factors, such as higher densities of smokers, electric appliances and greater accumulations of trash. Thus, fires arise again, burn down even more neighborhoods, people are displaced, rinse and repeat.
I think one of the many faults of this whole idea of benign neglect and planned shrinkage can be blamed on incredibly faulty logic. Moynihan uses the idea that since there are many more arsons and fire alarms in neighborhoods full of people of color and the poor, it must be these people who are setting the fires and triggering the alarms. I have never taken a statistics class in my life but I do know that correlation does not imply causation. Just because there is some sort of correlation between two distinct variables, in this case primarily poor and black neighborhoods and the number of fire alarms, does not imply that one is that cause of the other. Moynihan casually dismisses the fact that fires in abandoned buildings, cars and piles of trash are not always deliberately set and the fact that landlords and business owners commit arson as an insurance fraud. Instead, he labels most fires as arsons and the blame is on poor nonwhites.
What bothered me most about the reading was the mathematical model that was proposed. As an engineering student, I’m fairly familiar with mathematical models and what they set out to do. They’re meant to provide some insight into real-life situations using different mathematical concepts and other fun stuff. What they’re not meant to do is completely replace any actual research. Mathematical models do not stand on their own; they simply summarize and illustrate known phenomena. What Rand did with his proposed model was calculate a number, make some assumptions and then construct some relationship because “analyzing the real data would have been ‘too laborious.’” Models used to dictate Resource-allocation and Firehouse siting are not like my old physics lab reports; when lives are at stake, you really should avoid falsifying data to make your “findings” seem more reasonable or correct. Also, when your model is too difficult for a layperson to make sense of it, it really fails at being a proper model at all.
After doing a little further reading, its crazy how much of an impact the ideas of benign neglect and planned shrinkage had on the communities that were affected. Not only were entire neighborhoods destroyed, but research has also shown that planned shrinkage has played a role in the “rising number of violent deaths, deviant behaviors implicated in the spread of AIDS and the pattern of the AIDS outbreak itself” in the neighborhoods affected, all of which have been recognized to contribute to the plight of nonwhites in America.
Discussion Question: Is it ever ethical to use a mathematical model to analyze and predict solutions to social problems that are dynamic, as in they are not defined by concrete factors?
