In the interview and article for the Atlantic monthly magazine, "The Fires This Time: Joe Flood on Managing New York City" Joe Flood said this: One of the big appeals of using numbers to understand complex problems is getting counterintuitive results, which by definition go against common sense. After all, why spend all the time and money on a study that will only tell you what you already suspected? And we love surprising, counterintuitive takes on the world--it's one of the reasons we like reading Freakonomics, or Malcolm Gladwell's work or Michael Lewis' Moneyball, where the numbers reveal that the chubby guy who strikes out a lot is actually incredibly valuable to a baseball team. Those are the kind of results the city hired RAND to produce, and that's what they got. According to the models, they could close busy fire companies in fire-prone areas without much impact on overall service. For the city, that meant saving money, focusing budget cuts in politically weak areas and supposedly not losing much fire protection. That was exactly what everyone wanted to hear, and they ran with it. It just happened to be wrong. It wasn't the first time it had happened and certainly wasn't the last. Think of Robert McNamara's Pentagon during Vietnam, or Wall Street computer models alchemy that turned no-money-down mortgages into AAA-rated securities. Modelers usually come from a purely scientific background, but things like finance and government services aren't sciences--there's a human element. The models will never be perfect, and people who make and use them need to take a humble approach and second guess their own work. Bill James, one of the heroes of Moneyball, once said something along the lines of, "Any new metric should tell you 80% what you already knew, and 20% what you didn't. Less than 20% and it's not very useful, more than 20% and there's probably something wrong with the numbers." That "more than 20%" part is where RAND got caught. They believed their own studies, the fire department and mayor's office believed in RAND (and in the political usefulness of RAND's findings) and no one bothered to question whether the results were too good to be true.
The Wall Street Journal: In his new book, Joe Flood writes about a New York City governed by a technocratic, data-driven mayor facing a crippling budget deficit who is forced to close firehouses. “The Fires” chronicles the deteriorating 1970s New York of Mayor John Lindsay, when an epidemic of fires destroyed huge sections of the Bronx, Lower Manhattan, Harlem and Brooklyn. Sure, vast swaths of modern-day Queens aren’t about to go up in flames — we hope — but the book underscores undeniably eerie parallels between Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s well-run city and Lindsay’s New York. Like Bloomberg, Lindsay prized the notion of applying rigorous metrics to analyze the performance of city agencies. Faith in data-driven technocratic solutions led Lindsay to embrace the RAND Corporation, a military think tank brought in to make city services more efficient. The FDNY, led by a brilliant, modernizing chief named John O’Hagan, eventually adopted RAND’s reforms and closed dozens of firehouses in some of the city’s most run-down and fire-prone neighborhoods. (RAND, for it’s part, disputes the book’s characterization of its role. “The book’s central contention that fire companies were reallocated based on race or economic conditions in the neighborhoods where changes were made is not supported by the facts,” a RAND spokesman said.)
: It was game two of the 1977 World Series, a chilly, blustery October night in the South Bronx. The Yanks were already down 2-0 in the bottom of the first inning when ABC’s aerial camera panned a few blocks over from Yankee Stadium to give the world its first live glimpse of a real Bronx Cookout. "There it is, ladies and gentlemen," Howard Cosell intoned. "The Bronx is burning." The scene quickly became a defining image of New York in the 1970s, a fitting summation of the decade perfect in every way but one: It never happened. Cosell, tapes of the game show, never said, "The Bronx is burning." Fire fatalities in New York City doubled in the 1970s, as President Jimmy Carter, Mayor John Lindsay and Fire Chief John O'Hagan faced a disaster of the government's own making, a new book claims. "It’s a great quote, if it had been a real one," says Gordon Greisman, who co-wrote and produced ESPN’s "The Bronx is Burning" mini-series based on the Jonathan Mahler book. "But we got all of this footage from Major League Baseball, including the entire broadcast of that game, and we went through all of it and it’s not there, because God knows if it was there we would have used it."
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