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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: 2) by kaszz on Sunday June 11 2017, @09:16AM (1 child)

    by kaszz (4211) on Sunday June 11 2017, @09:16AM (#523733) Journal

    I would say continuous institutional memory. So while China has existed for thousands of years. The policies of 1949 and later is a gigantic break with previous traditions. Constitutional reform is not deep enough to really change the core as a nation.

    Germany has existed for hundreds of years but only as small countries. They didn't get their real shape until the unification in 1871 (or so it seems). And so on.

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  • (Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Sunday June 11 2017, @04:17PM

    by linkdude64 (5482) on Sunday June 11 2017, @04:17PM (#523854)

    Then I would say Denmarks' institution of a Constitutional government for the first time in the mid-1800s would be the starting point - still after America had one. The point is that it didn't appear the historical record had really been consulted.