An Easy Way to Forecast Disaster
And another way of looking at the federal government
Cassidy Steele Dale writes to equip you with the forecasts, foresight skills and perspectives, and tools you may need to create a better, kinder world.
And one of those ways is to demonstrate and teach a futurist skill – or how a futurist thinks – on a topic so you can learn to do it yourself.
It’s been said that the United States Government is an insurance company with an army. What they mean when they say this is that federal non-interest spending is pointed toward Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid (“insurance”), and defense (“an army”).
But more broadly the departments and agencies of the United States Government can be understood as a set of defenses and insurance policies against disasters or as launch pads or engines for future growth. Surprised? Think back a bit…
The Department of Agriculture was formed in part to prevent a repeat of the Dust Bowl and to establish and enforce food safety standards to prevent the repeat of an era when the market decided whether or not the food it produced as cheaply as possible sometimes poisoned people. Frequently. The reason you don’t worry that your food might kill you? The United States Department of Agriculture. (Bonus secret: when another country is too poor to research and establish its own standards for something, what does it do? It adopts ours. Your civil servants don’t just work for you; they work for the world.)
Much of the United States Intelligence Community was established to prevent repeats of Pearl Harbor or the 9/11 attacks, etc.. And federal law enforcement agencies? All of them were created in the wake of blockbuster attacks or incidents to prevent more of the same.
The Interstate highway system, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the United States Postal Service, and the Defense Department’s ARPANET — which became the Internet — are some of the infrastructure backbones and engines for economic growth not just for the United States but for the entire world. Did these civil servants and policy makers know that’s what they’d be doing? ABSOLUTELY YES.
The Department of Defense? Self-explanatory.
The GI Bill gave us the middle class. FHA home loans gave us the suburbs. FDIC insures banks so your money doesn’t vaporize if your bank does (or gets robbed). Safety standards on elevators gave us skyscrapers.
The Library of Congress and the National Archives are ‘strategic information reserves’ for the world. The Copyright Office and Patent and Trademark Office protect Americans’ — and American companies’ — intellectual property and integrity in the marketplace.
You get my point: the departments and agencies of the federal government are there to thwart disasters and to establish platforms for, in the Constitution’s term, “the general welfare” of United States citizens.
What happens when one of the disaster-prevention or disaster-mitigation agencies gets defunded, strangled, or sabotaged? Remember Hurricane Katrina? Remember FEMA Director “Heckuva job, Brownie?” Remember bodies floating in the streets of New Orleans? Need a reminder of what was and what could have been? If only Federal Emergency Management Authority (FEMA) hadn’t been hobbled at the time.
As a futurist one of the things I watch is for which U.S. departments and agencies are being weakened. Then I imagine what disaster could occur that — without a relevant “defense” department or agency in place, strong, able to warn, and ready to reckon with it — would sail right through and cause widespread agony and ruin to the largest number of Americans possible. That’s an easy way to forecast a disaster: forecast what we can’t warn against or aren’t set up to handle. Then do the same with your company, your church, and your life. (There’s another way to do this. It’s called a premortem. I’ll talk about that in another newsletter.)
Some critics of the federal government argue that particular departments and agencies are no longer needed because no repeat of a disaster has happened in living memory… without realizing that the very reason no repeat of that disaster has happened in living memory is because that department or agency was effective in the first place.
Want a list of federal departments and agencies? Here it is. About every fourth or sixth one you’ll say “We do THAT? That’s amazing!” or “What on Earth happened that we need THAT… and what are they preventing or helping with now?” (Fiction, TV, and movie writers, this is your mother lode for drama.)
Want a good recent book on this? Read Michael Lewis’ The Fifth Risk. It’s deeply harrowing and even more hopeful. Then go to your freezer, get some ice cream, your favorite kind, stare blankly at your kitchen table for half an hour while you eat it, then get up and thank the Lord for our civil servants. If only because the ice cream you just ate didn’t give you botulism.
Good write-up!