Photo credit: The Jardine water plant with the Chicago skyline in the background. Wikimedia/Sea Cow Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. How can the benefits of technology be harnessed to serve the public good while minimizing harm? What factors stand in the way of realizing those benefits? Of course, answers to both sets of questions—how we can use technology to benefit the public, and why we don’t—are the subject of reams of academic research and regularly debated by politicians and regulators.
Rather than reflexively accepting the need to cut budgets, services, and investment, let us take the time to critically examine the logic of austerity.
While the answers to the “how” question vary, the answers to the “why” question usually boil down to some combination of power, politics, public communication, and engagement. Who receives the message, and how it is communicated, can outweigh evidence and reason in setting public policy, meaning that academic research often does not create the outcomes researchers expect.
Researchers have always faced challenges in achieving real-world impact, but the current U.S. administration’s rejection of evidence-based policy and gutting of regulatory agencies marks a particularly painful moment. This retreat from evidence-based policy brings real harm, notably in public health and safety.
Reliable infrastructure, safety regulations, and empowered scientific experts are largely responsible for the prosperity and health that most countries have recently enjoyed.
Set against a backdrop of deportation, violence and detention, and attacks against minority groups, the turn away from evidence-based governance is far from the worst of this government’s excess. While I decry the brutality and the waste—of lives, expertise, and decency—that subject is being powerfully addressed by others. This turn away from evidence-based policy, driven by a logic of government austerity, trades away public health and safety for the sake of economic gains that rarely materialize.
Government austerity initiatives stem from the claim that there are not enough resources to go around, and therefore, costs must be cut wherever possible. But is this even true? Rather than reflexively accepting the need to cut budgets, services, and investment, let us take the time to critically examine the logic of austerity. In the presence of massive, hoarded wealth, perhaps, we should not accept such a presumption of scarcity, at least not without a little digging.
In fact, the underlying core argument for austerity initiatives tends to be a belief that government spending is itself a waste–and no real benefits flow from collective spending for provisioning public goods. Like the claim that austerity is necessary because there is not enough to go around, we should spend some time evaluating these attitudes about government spending. In truth, public spending, particularly on infrastructure, provides massive benefits for a fraction of the cost of providing services privately. In some cases, such as preventing the spread of contagious disease, there is no effective way to accomplish public protection as a private service.
Take childhood vaccination, and the public health benefits associated with this public health intervention. Childhood vaccine provision is sometimes private. The key question is this: can the private provision of this service replace the benefits of public provision? On an individual level, the answer is sometimes yes. But, vaccination strategies depend on community immunity. The benefits of having overall high rates of vaccination include protecting those who cannot be vaccinated, including the immunocompromised and infants. Private provisioning of vaccines cannot wholly protect individuals, much less the public.
Cost-effective public health interventions extend far beyond vaccinations. Public provisioning of drinking water through water and wastewater treatment has radically changed the face of human life; these interventions have eliminated cholera and vastly reduced childhood mortality. Diseases prevented by water treatment share a common trait with vaccine-preventable illnesses: they cannot be prevented by individual action alone. Infrastructural solutions are effective at disease prevention precisely because they are public, broad, and distributed [1].
In some cases, individual benefits can be achieved when public-level interventions are not implemented. Municipal-level fluoridation programs1 are extremely effective at preventing tooth decay in children [2]. Here, individual fluoride treatments can protect people from tooth decay. With increasing opposition to public-scale fluoridation measures, the role of individual dental interventions is becoming more crucial [2].
Similarly, adequate childhood nutrition is foundational to good health, and access to healthy food varies depending on individual family circumstances. School breakfast and lunch programs, along with home-targeted nutrition supplement programs, all vastly improve childhood health outcomes. But cuts to food programs, both within the United States and internationally, along with cuts to cash benefits, put millions at risk of hunger [3].
Provisioning health to the public through infrastructure, policy, and choices has tremendous power to overcome structural barriers in health and educational achievement.
We know what works. Reliable infrastructure, safety regulations, and empowered scientific experts are largely responsible for the prosperity and health that most countries have recently enjoyed.
While the relationship between policy decisions and research has been tenuous and fraught, the recent breakdown of evidence-based public decision-making (particularly but not solely within the United States) has created a kind of existential crisis for researchers and the broader community of policy makers and government workers who have developed specialized expertise and dedicated their lives to serving the public good.
Austerity measures in academia and government have led to the loss of wages, stability, and jobs around the world; threatened austerity policies are likely to lead to more cuts [4], [5], [6].
This reality pairs especially poorly with the realization that our collective work is more relevant and urgent than ever.
If researchers, government workers, and the broader public are to resist calls for austerity, and if, collectively, we are able to create a public good in which most members of society can share in the collective benefits of technology innovation and infrastructure, we must at least acknowledge these basic facts.
- Incredibly effective policy tools exist to prevent harm and boost the public good.
- More than enough wealth exists to implement these policies.
There is so much good, productive, and helpful work to be done. I do not know the magic trick that would focus the work of government on sincere attempts to serve the public good. However, I do know that we must focus, both as researchers and as individuals, on doing what good we can by removing the barriers that stand in our way.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This piece was significantly improved thanks to several reviewers. I am grateful to all of them, and especially want to thank Shrouk Gharib for her excellent comments and insights.
Author Information
Ketra Schmitt is an associate professor at the Centre for Engineering and Society and an associate member at the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering, Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science, Concordia University, Montreal, QC H3G 1M8, Canada. She is Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine and serves as a board member for the IEEE Society for the Social Implications of Technology. Email: ketra.schmitt@concordia.ca.
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