Engineers: Will You Be Someone, or Will You *Do* Something?
“All truth passes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
After World War II, the United States embarked on a grand experiment. Americans moved away from historical city design that had evolved over millennia. Walking had been the primary mode of transportation, but cities across North America adopted the car-dependent suburban development pattern.
Americans spread across the landscape as people bought larger lots on the edge of town and traveled everywhere by automobile. This shift dramatically increased the amount of infrastructure (roads, pipes, etc.) required to serve the same population. And it has come to mean the engineering profession is inextricably tied to maintaining and expanding a suburban development pattern.
Chuck Marohn and the Strong Towns organization are challenging the widely assumed success of the suburban development pattern and hope to reform the engineering profession.
Successful reform movements tap into a truth that poses a threat to the status of existing institutions, as we can see in another example: A relatively unknown reform movement occurred in the U.S. military during the 1970s. It was a story of an entrenched bureaucracy and individuals who dedicated their careers to shifting the status quo.
Colonel John Boyd was a fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force. During the 1960s, he developed the Energy-Maneuverability Theory to model aircraft performance. At the time, aircraft were designed with the assumption that bigger and faster aircraft are always better. Boyd’s theory held that aircraft performance was far more complex and required integrating a vast number of factors, such as pilot visibility and aircraft maneuverability.
Colonel John Boyd.
With the growth of the military-industrial complex in full swing, Boyd’s ideas were met with resistance from Air Force and Defense contractors. Over the course of a decade, however, Boyd’s persistence resulted in significant changes and advancements in aircraft design theory—bringing it to the last of the three stages of truth described above.
Aircraft design was only the first status quo shift that Boyd initiated during his career. After retiring from the Air Force in 1975, he developed a theory of conflict called Maneuver Warfare.
World War II was the foundational event that shaped the way the U.S. military thought about warfare. To win the war, the U.S. military underwent radical change and applied industrial principles to project combat power across oceans. The war was won through attrition because the U.S. military was capable of massing more hardware (bombs, bullets, tanks, ships, etc.) than any other nation. Fast-forward to the 1980s, and the U.S. military still believed that wars were won by optimizing for more hardware.
Boyd’s theory of Maneuver Warfare treated war as a chaotic and complex environment with human beings using their brains as the central unifying theme. Humans were the primary priority, followed by their ideas, and finally, hardware was a distant, third priority. This was anathema to a military-industrial complex built around the philosophy of attrition. Maneuver Warfare was treated as heresy within the U.S. military.
In a post-Vietnam era of reduced government spending, Boyd’s ideas found fertile soil amongst politicians, which posed a threat to the military leaders and defense industrialists. The U.S. military bureaucracy attacked his ideas and the reform movement seemed to fade without making an impact. Many said that Boyd’s reform movement had failed.
While the U.S. military as a whole rejected Maneuver Warfare, the U.S. Marine Corps took a different approach. During the 1990s, the Marine Corps adopted Maneuver Warfare as its foundational warfighting philosophy., and, despite some controversy over the past 30 years, the Marine Corps continues to teach the ideas of John Boyd.
What Does All This Have to Do with Strong Towns?
Returning to the three stages that truth must pass through before becoming self-evident, Strong Towns appears to be on the cusp of the second stage where truth is violently opposed. Chuck Marohn wrote a book titled Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, detailing the reforms he envisions for his profession. His ideas pose a threat to the status quo, and he is currently in litigation with his state licensing board over it.
Strong Towns refers to the suburban development pattern as the Growth Ponzi Scheme: When a city adheres to the suburban development pattern, it builds infrastructure on the edge of town based on the projection of future growth. The city pays for the infrastructure using a combination of debt and grants from state/federal agencies. If the future growth achieves the projections, then the city uses the cash flow to fulfill the maintenance obligations to serve the new citizens.
When the infrastructure needs to be replaced, the tax revenue from the previous growth is always insufficient to sustain this reinvestment. The city is forced to double down on the debt-financed infrastructure and/or dependent on a benevolent legislature in a distant capitol. This is described as the Growth Ponzi Scheme because the suburban development pattern repeatedly fails to generate sustainable local wealth to replace the required infrastructure.
Marohn has observed that the more infrastructure we build, the poorer we become. Just as the U.S. military is beholden to the military industrial complex, municipalities are trapped by the Growth Ponzi Scheme in an infrastructure industrial complex. These ideas are as dangerous as telling the generals and defense contractors they lost the Vietnam War because they had too many bombs, bullets, tanks, and ships.
Engineers hold a privileged position as trusted advisors to political decision makers. This privilege is earned when we help people live a good life in a productive place. For the last 80 years, that meant providing the infrastructure to facilitate unsustainable growth on the outskirts of every city in America.
Engineers need to reset the foundation of the profession. The goal of the profession should not be how much infrastructure can we design, but rather how we can build local wealth. Engineers should design infrastructure to serve society, not force society to serve the infrastructure they design. Adopting this new philosophy will threaten the livelihoods of many engineers who have spent their careers extracting wealth from the Growth Ponzi Scheme. The suburban development pattern took sustainably grown local wealth and transferred it to proponents of the infrastructure industrial complex (land speculators, engineers, developers, contractors, etc.).
Our local governments are functionally insolvent due to the suburban development pattern, but this theory has been roundly mocked for the last decade. Chuck’s legal struggles with the engineering profession indicate this could be shifting. Strong Towns ideas and the people that promulgate them could be violently opposed by existing institutions. This violent opposition will not be as dramatic as the Reformation of the Catholic Church—it will instead be the “smiley face” censorship of having a Twitter account shut down. It will be done in the name of protecting the public image of the engineering profession.
I do not know what the future holds. Maybe if we experience a cataclysmic event and local governments are required to fund their liabilities with local wealth, Strong Towns will rapidly become the central operating idea for local governments that intend to survive. On the other hand, maybe the Growth Ponzi Scheme will continue for another century.
On the subject of someone wrestling with the decision to change the status quo or remain silent and accept it, John Boyd said it comes down to the difference between being “a member of the club,” getting promoted, getting good assignments…or giving all that up for the sake of not compromising oneself. “And your work might [then] make a difference. … To be someone or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?”
I don’t want to be someone; I want to do something.
I was reading a blog post by Doomberg and he quoted a TED talk from 2010. Derek Sivers’ famous TED talk, titled “How to Start a Movement,” shows a video of a lone man dancing in a crowded park. Suddenly, another man, the “first follower,” joins the lone dancer and soon thereafter everyone in the park is dancing. Sivers says, “The first follower is actually an underestimated form of leadership in itself. It takes guts to stand out like that. The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader.”
Are other engineers willing to risk their livelihoods to reform the profession? Who’s going to be the first follower?
Patrick Quigley is a Strong Towns member and a Professional Engineer working in local government. Prior to working as an engineer, he served as an officer in the United States Marine Corps. He lives in Smyrna, GA, with his wife Caitlin and their three children. He blogs at neighborhoodecon.com and he can be found on Twitter at @quigleylocal.