The Law of Concentrated Benefit Over Diffuse Injury

Some ideas are so elegantly simple and they explain so much with such efficiency that their ingenuity creates an "Ahh" of amazement and satisfaction — the Peter Principle is one of these ideas. Another is the Law of Concentrated Benefit Over Diffuse Injury, an axiom articulated in 1993 by John Grohman and Egan O'Connor.

They call it "humanity's most harmful law" because it explains how things can turn out so badly when most people are so well-intentioned. If we want peace, fair democracy, honest markets, abundant wildlife, plentiful fish, healthy food and a clean environment, why do things turn out otherwise?

Grohman and O'Connor think they have the answer. This is how they describe the Law of Concentrated Benefit Over Diffuse Injury: "a small, determined group, working energetically for its own narrow interests, can almost always impose an injustice upon a vastly larger group, provided that the larger group believes that the injury is 'hypothetical' or distant-in-the-future, or real-but-small relative to the real-and large cost of preventing it."

No one should be surprised "that narrow, special interests are always at work for their own benefit at the expense of others." Neither should it be surprising that the victims, in order to prevent the damage, "select what appears to be the strategy of least cost to themselves." The combination of these two factors creates two near inevitabilities. First, each "special interest" working for a "concentrated benefit" has a better chance of succeeding than failing because the public must expend a vast amount of energy to stop such endeavours. And second, the aggregate result of innumerable enterprises of narrow self-interest eventually creates huge problems.

"Why do people tolerate the severe abuse," ask Grohman and O'Connor, "when they so vastly outnumber the few beneficiaries?" Because, by the time people decide they won't tolerate the abuse any longer, "the costs and personal dangers of reversing the abuse have usually grown, too. Moreover, there is no inherent limit to the scope and number of attempted abuses, whereas citizens have inherently limited resources to resist." The sheer bulk of self-interested projects undermining the public good overwhelms the public's energy to thwart them.

Consider a few local issues. A small group of investors proposes to drill for coalbed methane in the Campbell River area, with possibly serious environmental consequences. Citizens from the community form an action group, expending huge amounts of time and effort becoming informed, writing letters, and appealing to the city council and the provincial government. How long can citizens sustain this effort of opposition, particularly when it closely follows a proposal for a Wal-Mart in the city's treasured estuary, and then a high-rise on the foreshore of its scenic waterfront. Meanwhile, Quinsam Coal proposes to expand its mining operations while it continues polluting — with government accommodation — its namesake watershed.

The Comox Valley has had its own version of coalbed methane drilling — with more likely to come. And the community is still stinging from the disastrous copper mine on Mount Washington, a self-interested fiasco that killed a vibrant river ecosystem. Meanwhile, a permitted mine in Strathcona Park — in a "Class A" provincial park, of all places — continues to consume the attention and concerns of citizens. Now, a proposed LNG terminal and power generation station on Texada Island promises to be a major headache for everyone in the Strait of Georgia.

As Grohman and O'Connor point out in their enunciation of the Law of Concentrated Benefits Over Diffuse Injury, such undertakings of narrow, self-interest can occur by force (a bank robbery, the illegal discharge of toxins), by deceit (smoking does not cause cancer, these products break down into harmless components, the mine will not pollute), or by enticing governments to work on behalf of the proponent. This last method is particularly insidious because it creates public cynicism.

Examples are obvious and legion: a government relaxes pollution restrictions, or allows special exemptions, or permits continued operation while further studies are done, or changes laws to accommodate special interests over public well-being.

Or consider the court injunction. If granted, the court essentially places itself as an intervener between the proponent and the protestors, making any further overt public objection a violation of the court's authority. The wider civic right to protest is obstructed by the domination of "concentrated benefit" over "diffuse injury".

But the legal system works in more subtle and devious ways to accommodate the Law of Concentrated Benefit Over Diffuse Injury. Legal processes do not concern themselves with trivia (De minimis non curat lex ). If a polluter can claim its pollution is trivial, then the law sides with the polluter. The onus of proof then shifts to the public to establish that the effects will be calamitous, an almost impossible task if these effects are slowly accumulative, do not occur for decades, or, in the case of mutagens, are not apparent until the next or subsequent generations.

"Polluters worldwide," contend Grohman and O'Connor, "will actually release more (not less) of their total poisons by the simple technique of sub-dividing them in time and space, so that the consequences of each proposed release, by itself, can be convincingly presented as 'too trivial to count at all'."

But the cumulative effect is anything but trivial. Mercury, a neurotoxin, now contaminates many of the ocean's fish. Plasticizers, known hormone disrupters, are now found in virtually all water and soil. Insignificant but innumerable emissions of carbon dioxide are now warming the planet's entire biosphere. Over time, the sum of inconsequential effects is proving to be calamitous.

Until people are willing to summon enough energy to thwart narrow acts of self interest, and are unified in demanding that governments exercise precautionary measures, then "concentrated benefit" will continue to win while everything else loses.