Selling Sno-Cones at the Beach

it's all about the science

Pat Gober, an urban geography professor at ASU, gave a talk here last Friday. Her group models the relationships between human decision-making and climate change, especially with respect to water supply and use, which as you can imagine in Phoenix, is a pretty big deal. For example, if a law was passed limiting turf area to 2% of a person's land area, what would be the effect on water supply and even possibly microclimate (due to changes in evaporation etc).

Also they have a wow-factor theater that superimposes images from seven projectors on a model of the city, so they can show off their work to graphically-savvyless people.

It was a pretty straightforward talk, not much new from a theoretical or even a policy point of view, but her last comment, sort of as a toss off, was along the lines of, "well, without the science to back you up, there's not much point in trying to advocate for policy."

It really caught me up short because in my former policy life, I advocated for things because I thought they were Right according to some implicit Giant Ethical Code, and never thought very much about trying to back up my proposals with scientific facts or other sorts of social science evidence. For example, "landscaping is good, therefore more of it is better and more attractive." Or, "our people can't afford the median home price, therefore we need a law requiring affordable housing on projects of a certain size."

I always have thought that my lack of analysis was driven by lmy perception of legislative inability or lack of desire to understand causal relationships. Elected legislators seemed instead to base policy decisions on that ol' political "gut feeling" or on some narrowly defined idea about constituent demands. Perhaps I didn't ask enough of those people.