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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
(Score: 4, Insightful) by idiot_king on Sunday June 11 2017, @04:20AM (25 children)
Crony capitalism at its best (i.e., worst, since there is no "best" when dealing with Capitalism). Inefficiency is the big moneymaker. F-35s, aircraft carriers, nuclear power, Trump University- it's all greedy, fat officials using their fat fingers to scrape as much pie out of the pan for themselves.
Ever hear of Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Norway, Finland, or for that matter China have these problems? No?
Hmmm, makes you wonder why, doesn't it? (Hint: what do all these countries have in common???)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 11 2017, @04:25AM (1 child)
>China
Gee, I wonder if having an all-powerful one party central government would help? We should try that.
(Score: 4, Informative) by deimtee on Sunday June 11 2017, @09:36AM
You already have that, with a "Democans Vs Republicrats Giant Grudge Deathmatch Circus" every four years to distract you from that fact.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Sunday June 11 2017, @04:45AM (14 children)
Need a bigger hint than that. I'll note that they all have young governments. Finland is the oldest, established in 1917. Every one of the rest was established after the Second World War.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 11 2017, @04:50AM (3 children)
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)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 11 2017, @12:49PM (1 child)
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
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.
(Score: 4, Informative) by kaszz on Sunday June 11 2017, @05:42AM (7 children)
Denmark - 800, old
Sweden - 1150, old
Germany - 1871
Norway - 1905, there's structures as a nation back into 872
Finland - 1917, but they had institutional memory from before that as a country of their own from 1809
China - 1949, their principle seems to be "fuck you, we get yours"
So no young governments. Rather they figured out what the bad and good alternatives are the hard way.
But what they might have is a sense of community and not drive individualistic interests at every corner. Budget overruns is however not restricted to USA in any way ;), maybe the magnitude differs. I'll suspect national virtues and beliefs influence too. Like being knowledgeable, straightforward, just, efficient, mutual trust etc.
What happens when no one cares and the only way to get responsibility is to sue is obvious.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by linkdude64 on Sunday June 11 2017, @08:39AM (2 children)
How on Earth you can list Denmark's government as existing since the year 800, and listing China's government as existing since 1949 in the same comment is beyond my imagining.
Denmark underwent major Constitutional reform in the early 1950s, though they had a Constitutional government in the 1800s.
China as a country has existed for thousands of years, but the "Communist Revolution" completely changed their government as well.
So which is it? What is the consistent reasoning you are using to evaluate the age of governments? Foundation of the country, or inception of the current form of government?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday June 11 2017, @09:16AM (1 child)
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.
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Sunday June 11 2017, @04:17PM
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.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by khallow on Sunday June 11 2017, @09:51AM (3 children)
Which I believe is a symptom not a cause. The US in comparison has very high mobility with effectively the entire population moved every eight to ten years. High population movement would IMHO lead to the above described effect. It certainly would undermine the federal state-level cohesion which was common in the US prior to the Second World War.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday June 11 2017, @01:16PM (2 children)
Germany) The Nazi movement is unlikely to go that deep into the character as the unification of 1871.
US) You think that high population movement undermines the federal state-level cohesion? Better work stability is the fix?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 11 2017, @01:21PM
The defeat of Nazi Germany however has gone that deep. Germany along with France are the principle advocates of European unification.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday June 11 2017, @01:34PM
Perhaps, but it may be a poor way to attempt to fix the problem of social cohesiveness. For example, one way work stability has been attempted is by creating more government jobs. I think that has been a principle driver of the bureaucratic parasitism we see discussed here.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday June 11 2017, @07:25AM (1 child)
They've all aggressively invaded and overrun other countries in the past (admittedly Finland when it was still a Grand Duchy). So they did a fine job of destroying infrastructure, requiring it to be rebuilt later, providing workers with lots of experience in (re-)doing infrastructure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 11 2017, @09:40AM
The Duchy of Grand Fenwick?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 11 2017, @04:51AM (1 child)
Hmm, only one hit for OMG Socialism! Hitler! Stalin! Mao! Pol Pot! Venezeula!
So it can't be OMG Socialism! either.
My next guess would be people who don't elect government officials whose only qualification is a deeply held belief that government can't work and a conviction to prove it by making sure that government can't work.
Perhaps the involvement of corporate money in politics would be something we can quantify, but I don't know enough about any of those countries to begin to speculate beyond that.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 11 2017, @01:41PM
That's typical crap that those sky gods pull. The voice of a doubting Thomas drowns out the voices of a hundred faithful.
(Score: 2) by number11 on Sunday June 11 2017, @06:43AM (2 children)
Funny you should post that a few hours after the NYTimes posts an article about problems caused by massive highway and bridge construction in China, much of it driven not by need but by corruption.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/10/world/asia/china-bridges-infrastructure.html?mcubz=1 [nytimes.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 11 2017, @09:17AM (1 child)
But they still did it faster and cheaper than the US, even with the corruption.
(Score: 2) by number11 on Sunday June 11 2017, @04:31PM
That's not at all clear. Faster, though some of that is because they don't care as much if there's environmental damage or a workers get killed on the project. But it's very difficult to know whether it was "cheaper", between the uncertain cost of payoffs and kickbacks, and the Chinese propensity to keep stuff secret. As you presumably saw, the headline was "China’s New Bridges: Rising High, but Buried in Debt". China spends way more (9% of the economy, vs. 2.5% in the US, so there's a lot of money at stake. One official was arrested after pocketing $4.4M in kickbacks in 2 years, and we can assume that people who have the proper connections (a close relative, say) to high government officials don't generally get arrested.
One big difference is that in China, the corruption tends to be more of government, because everything big has government connections. The biggest corporations (such as the companies building the bridges) are government-owned. In the US, corruption is more corporate (and from the last few financial crises, we know that big corporations are treated with kid gloves when they commit crimes).
The plaints of "this bridge/highway is never going to finish being paid for" from Chinese sound so familiar to US ears.
(Score: 1, Troll) by VLM on Sunday June 11 2017, @11:39AM (1 child)
They're not (or not until recently) multicultural.
That drives up expenses and friction in general.
Also they're white or Asian which implies high IQ and cooperative social behavior.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 11 2017, @01:29PM
There's a lot of thinking on the society as a whole there and less screwing anyone they can. And those that become to attached to self interest soon finds themselves ostracized to a varying degree. Being rational and forward thinking are virtues, with the exception of a few sectarian psychopaths.
As you have observed there's turmoil in the path ahead. But it can be solved with some harsh solutions which the politicians soon will find themselves forced to execute or be overrun be reality.
(this doesn't apply for China, they are something completely different)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 11 2017, @12:06PM
North Texas Tollway Auth. has it under control. Tolls are going up again.