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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: 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.