Robert H. Nelson died suddenly last December, while he was in Helsinki, Finland, to give a talk. Nelson was a respected—and unconventional—economist. In preparing a memorial essay about him, I read through many of his writings and saw how an economist can use history to gain insight. In this short space I’d like to concentrate on just one topic—federal land management in the United States.
In the early 1980s Nelson worked for the Interior Department’s Office of Policy Analysis (otherwise known as the “Office of Smart Guys,” according to my husband, who directed the office at the time). Part of his research involved reviewing the history of federal land ownership.
He made two important discoveries.
First, he discovered the utter failure of federal “scientific management” of land.[1] The federal government owns large swaths of land in the West because the Progressive movement of the late nineteenth century halted its dispersal to the private sector. Suspicious of big companies (the trust-busting Theodore Roosevelt was a hero), Progressives thought that big projects like managing land should be in the hands of the federal government, which would hire experts and leave them free to manage “scientifically” without political interference.
For the most part, it didn’t work.
Whether their responsibility was leasing coal, managing grazing land, or selling timber, government managers did not operate as scientific specialists. Nelson found that the major force was political pressure, often motivated by ideology.
Another insight was especially interesting to me, and I do not see much attention paid to it. (Please let me know if it’s more widely accepted than I think.)
Nelson found that the federal government usually lags behind decisions made locally. The Homestead Act, for example, was not an idealistic law to populate the Midwest and West or give poor people from the cities a better option. Rather, it marked congressional recognition that people were already living on land they had not bought, and Congress (hundreds of miles away) was not going to change that. So, as did two other laws, the Preemption and Taylor Grazing Acts, the Homestead Act “ratified and gave further impetus to squatting and other practices that had already developed outside the law.”[2]
This was a common pattern for federal land policy, Nelson found.
Why did that happen? My view is that it’s difficult for political bodies to take action on anything unless it is unimportant (so that the details can be written by special interests) or broadly accepted (declaring war against a hostile power, for example). That fact lies behind Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel’s statement that “you don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste.” Congress simply couldn’t handle the complexities of how to deal with squatters, so it endorsed what was already happening, rather than change it.
This idea may explain why we have amnesty for illegal immigrants. When the time is right politically, it’s easier to accept their presence than to try to send people “home.”
That’s not necessarily bad. However, the Homestead Act was bad, even though it ultimately led to private ownership.
By the time the act was passed in 1862, much of the fertile land of the Midwest had been taken. While some people could simply confirm ownership of the land they were already sitting on, many other people were inspired to leave home (where they may have been tenant farmers) and seek their own land. But the 160 acres promised by the act could not provide a living as one moved into the arid West. Even 640 acres (which, as time went on, the government did allow) was not enough to raise cattle or grow wheat west of the 100th meridian. Only about one-third of all who staked claims were able to “prove them up.” The Homestead Act made promises it could not deliver.
These are a couple of the lessons that Robert Nelson has left us.
[1] Robert H. Nelson, Public Lands and Private Rights: The Failure of Scientific Management. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995.
[2 ] Nelson, Public Lands and Private Rights, 33.