[sprainedankles]

> The challenge we face as a society is to build the structures of popular power to decide collectively which burdens are worth their weight, and how to distribute them justly. These are not choices we should leave to politicians, or even engineers.

I understand the allure of creating a system that allows the "popular power" to make decisions, but that in itself is a difficult problem to solve.

We couldn't possibly crowd-source how to solve this flooding problem until the majority of that crowd has been educated on several aspects of the issue. Perhaps what the author is implying is that there needs to be a better interface between Politicians/Engineers and the people such that the P/Es say "hey here's our plan, find the flaws" and the people say "here are the flaws"

But there's the difficult problem. There will always be flaws and trade-offs, and this kind of interface eats up large amounts of time that may be better spent implementing a short-term solution to buy a few more years until a long-term solution is reached. It's a catch 22.

The decisions must eventually come down to the P/Es, but maybe we just need to add a few more feedback points into the decision-making system.

[ialyos]

I took this quote to mean the following: Engineers are well equipped and positioned to understand the set of solutions that are available to them and the material negative impacts of those solutions (e.g if we build a dam at spot x, the region y might have an increase in floods). But engineers should not be given the ability to make decisions about which of set of negative impacts a society should bear, and that should instead be a decision made collectively.

So the interface between the engineers and the people is not to find solutions together, or to find flaws together, but for engineers to find solutions and flaws, and the people to pick the one that they are happiest with.

(I'm not certain my understanding of the quote is right, just sharing my interpretation / an alternative to the ones you shared)

[rramadass]

You have hit the nail right on the head!

The costs(in various dimensions) of an Engineering decision in projects of this magnitude is borne by the whole population itself. Therefore the populace must have a seat at the decision-making table to choose amongst alternatives.

[maximente]

this seems to ignore a crucial section of the article, which details how the engineers decide to in this case close particular sections of the drainage system to ostensibly protect the powerful, even when it affects neighborhoods their families live in.

if as you say,

> The decisions must eventually come down to the P/Es

then there's reason to believe that an entire class of people will always bear the externalities of these "solutions", which are solutions in the sense of out of sight, out of mind.

[jpollock]

Isn't "building structures of popular power" the definition of politics?