The solution is shrinking the state to the bare minimum and making as many transactions as possible voluntary.
The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure
41–50 of 564 posts
Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure
#42I-85 in Atlanta was repaired in just over 6 weeks. So things can get done quickly if the incentives are right.
Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure
#43Durability. Its one thing to quickly and cheaply add infrastructure, and I've traveled the world to places where this is accomplished at a dizzying pace. Its another thing altogether to engineer and build projects that can endure over time and in the face of natural and unnatural disaster. Yes, the US is overdue for infrastructure investment. Yes, its costly and unproductive Federal and State entitlement obligations…
It doesn't fit.
Railway systems in Japan and France (taken as example in the article) are high quality and last long as well. Yet construction railway is way less expensive there.
Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure
#44Vague talk of inefficiency in construction isn't really very informative. Has anyone ever done a study where they take two very similar projects — building a medium sized office building, for example — in the US and China, and following them both from beginning to end, auditing exactly how much money and time is spent on each stage? It seems like this would provide a useful basis for comparison.
Wouldn't they vary wildly due to OSHA and other requirements like permits and bribes?
Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure
#45Vague talk of inefficiency in construction isn't really very informative. Has anyone ever done a study where they take two very similar projects — building a medium sized office building, for example — in the US and China, and following them both from beginning to end, auditing exactly how much money and time is spent on each stage? It seems like this would provide a useful basis for comparison.
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Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure
#46Bureaucrats, allied with progressives and public sector unions, work vigorously to make government as expensive and inefficient as possible. In the United States, they are succeeding very well.
The opposite argument is rather popular as well: Conservatives work vigorously to make the government as expensive and inefficient as possible in order to get people to continue to vote them into office, by convincing citizens that government is the enemy and they are the solution. The worse the government, the more likely they are to be elected (Outside of an actual revolution occurring).
I suspect both arguments give each side too much credit. This issue seems deeper than the partisan divide.
Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure
#47I have been wondering lately if we have become so dependent on certain sectors of the US economy (housing, infrastructure, healthcare, education) that risk aversion is suffocating innovation. No one wants to send their kid to an unproven, experimental university. No city wants to beta test a new style of road building. No patient wants to be the first to try a new treatment. We are so dependent on these things that t…
I don't think this is the problem. I think that PENSIONS are the problem. The risk aversion comes from municipalities that are flat broke because they over-promised.
Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure
#48From my perspective infrastructure is politically driven in the US. Projects are debated for decades, over this time changes are made to placate some groups and buy the support from other groups, and create jobs for some politician, until it baloons into something that is many billions of dollars. Then it is built as a one off mega project. At this point it should be killed but this is seen as the only way to get stu…
I think the one off nature of projects is the problem. There is no coherent long term plan.
According to Peter Thiel (in CS183), this lack of long term plan is a symptom of people believing that the future is indeterminate[1].
1. http://blakemasters.com/post/23435743973/peter-thiels-cs183-... (Section I. The End of Big Projects)
Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure
#49It's not that we have forgotten. It's the fact that regulation, time to get approval, and other red tape make the timeline longer. Gone are the days when things just get done.
But, from what the article was pointing out we're comparing place like france and japan which have as many if not more regulations.
It's not how many regulations there are, it's more about how much time and effort it takes to conform to the regulations.
Re: The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure
#50My brother and father (concrete construction) would probably lay the blame on onerous regulation. They regularly complain about nit-picky engineers with their insistence on (in their words) unreasonable slavish devotion to engineering specifications. I'm not on the jobsite so I don't actually know. I wonder is our construction regulations are much more stringent than other western nations?
Count your blessings. Construction can be much harder in other countries for reasons beyond engineering and safety.
Italy, for example, is a real estate developers nightmare. Every rock or patch of dirt has a decent chance of sitting atop an Ancient Greek or Roman ruin, and the process to ensure that construction won't damage any heretofore unknown ruins is agonizingly slow.
It boils down to political power and cultural preference. Americans are fine with tearing down almost anything (except designated landmarks) to build something "better" than before.