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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday June 11 2017, @04:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the it-costs-money? dept.

Last week, Bloomberg's Noah Smith wrote an article titled "The U.S. Has Forgotten How To Do Infrastructure" that asked a lot of questions that would get us to a [David] Goldhill like analysis of our infrastructure approach. Just like on Healthcare Island, on Infrastructure Island we have our own way of talking about things. And we never talk about prices, only about costs. And as Smith suggests, costs go up and nobody seems to understand why.

He goes through and dismisses all of the usual suspects. Union wages drive up infrastructure costs (yet not true in countries paying equivalent wages). It's expensive to acquire land in the property-rights-obsessed United States (yet countries with weaker eminent domain laws have cheaper land acquisition costs). America's too spread out or our cities are too dense (arguments that cancel each other out). Our environmental review processes are too extensive (yet other advanced countries do extensive environmental reviews with far less delay). I concur with all these points, by the way.

Smith concludes with this:

That suggests that U.S. costs are high due to general inefficiency -- inefficient project management, an inefficient government contracting process, and inefficient regulation. It suggests that construction, like health care or asset management or education, is an area where Americans have simply ponied up more and more cash over the years while ignoring the fact that they were getting less and less for their money. To fix the problems choking U.S. construction, reformers are going to have to go through the system and rip out the inefficiencies root and branch.

Much like health care, our infrastructure incentives are all wrong. Until we fix them -- until we go through the system and rip out the inefficiencies root and branch -- throwing more money at this system is simply pouring good money after bad.

Source: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/4/this-is-why-infrastructure-is-so-expensive


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 11 2017, @04:50AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 11 2017, @04:50AM (#523692)

    So you're saying the US needs a change of government? :)

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday June 11 2017, @10:14AM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday June 11 2017, @10:14AM (#523747) Journal
    No, a downsizing in bureaucracy in US society. For example, one big warning sign is the huge increase in federal regulation that has happened over the past fifty years. Currently, it's being created faster than one can read the regulations. For example, last year over 95k pages [cei.org] were added to the Federal Register - a crude measure of the amount of law added. Such a regulatory environment favors large businesses over small (a key contributor to bureaucracy IMHO). In the future, I think the problem will get worse as large businesses will be able to afford the automation required to keep up with the legal environment.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 11 2017, @12:49PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 11 2017, @12:49PM (#523782)

      Wait, you skipped over the key step.

      I agree additional layers of managements are a problem. There's a lot of that everywhere, skimming a few % and adding paperwork down the chain.

      Regulation per se is not the problem. Regulation ensures minimum standards. It's inefficient enforcement through layers of management that balloon costs.

      Go and binge watch a few Holmes on Homes episodes. He is the biggest proponent of regulation in building - because he likes paperwork? No, because he is re-doing other people's botched, unapproved building work. For infrastructure, spend the money 1 time and have it last a century.

      • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday June 12 2017, @02:19AM

        by Reziac (2489) on Monday June 12 2017, @02:19AM (#524092) Homepage

        The oldest still-in-use structures in the world, including some private homes, were built centuries before there was any such thing as a building code or zoning regulation...

        --
        And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.