51–60 of 564 posts
The audacity of the thing and sheer impossibility of doing anything remotely like it in today's America makes it seem like a relic from an ancient civilization.
It felt like visiting the pyramids in Egypt.
Vague 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?
This reflects in health care as well. American health care costs about twice as much as it does in every other first-world nation. Those systems run the gamut from fully socialist to mostly privatized, but they all share a common feature - they provide universal coverage at half the cost of the American system. That says there's something uniquely broken in our model. Infrastructure? Same thing. There's something dis…
So she will be working on the project for 30 years; her entire career... something is pretty broken about the government structures around these projects.
The fastest that I've seen infrastructure put up in the US is where there are toll roads being built. I suspect this is because there is a high incentivize to get a toll road up quickly and start generating revenue to pay back the initial investment. Residents generally hate tolls, but its a good motivator for infrastructure to go up quickly. I never understood why similar incentives wouldn't kick in for mass transit…
My 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 cultu…
I 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…
That suggests that U.S. costs are high due to general inefficiency [...] 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. There's a general effect in political systems, that if a law takes $20 from 1,000,000 people and gives $100,000 to 200 people, the people who lose money won't have enough incentive to put up a big fight;…
Milton Friedman: "The beneficiaries are concentrated, and the payers are diffused"
It'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.
for instance: countries X, and Z could both have the same list of rules on the books, but folks in country X actually comply with the rules even when nobody is looking, whereas folks in country Z just look at the rules and ignore all the ones they think are stupid.