Why U.S. Infrastructure Costs So Much

Japan has what amounts to the retired civil service concrete construction complex. Lots of civil servants in their retirement get involved in the lucrative and salary cow that is pouring concrete everywhere including bridges to nowhere… yet, construction and infrastructure costs aren’t extortionist the way American infrastructure projects after the ‘70s have been.

Some reasons that almost certainly contribute to the ballooning costs of US infrastructure, although I cannot really tell what the impact is:

1) Not Invented Here syndrome. This pervades the US, not just in infrastructure, but it stands out in infrastructure simply because of how backwards US infrastructure is relative to most of the rest of the world (and not just rich countries). US infrastructure planning seems to exist in a vacuum, and pretends the rest of the world doesn't exist. Heck, it gets even worse and one district will pretend that a project conducted in a neighboring district didn't exist. Therefore American infrastructure planning never learns best practices from the rest of the world, repeat mistakes everyone else has made, refuses to use standard parts and products leading to much more expensive customized parts and products, refuses to use standardized plans, requiring expertise to build out customized plans, etc.

2) American infrastructure supporters are so starved of any infrastructure investment that they've made the spending of money an end in itself. So unlike infrastructure supporters in the rest of the world, who in addition to lobbying for more funding also try to ensure better plans so they get the most bang for the buck, American infrastructure supporters spend most of their time in just raising money. This has been shifting, thankfully, but it's still a process that's moving too slowly.

3) Not building infrastructure. The US simply hasn't built infrastructure in a while, so it lacks the expertise, logistics, and manufacturing capabilities to do this cheaply. Combined with #1 where the US refuses to seek help from outside, this is a recipe for bloated costs.

4) Patchwork of Regulations. But not the way you think. The US has far fewer regulations than many countries that build infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of the US. But the US has random regulations spread across every level. A tiny neighborhood will set standards based on no expertise whatsoever. Navigating this patchwork of regulations and approvals, etc., is a nightmare. Americans like to defend it as "democracy", but it's really a parody of democracy.

Absolutely. When people have aligned incentives, the appearance of organization may emerge from the system even when nobody has actually conspired or coordinated with anybody else. Manufacturing Consent describes something like this in the context of media and the government, but I think it's broadly applicable:

> Institutional critiques such as we present in this book are commonly dismissed by establishment commentators as “conspiracy theories,” but this is merely an evasion. We do not use any kind of “conspiracy” hypothesis to explain massmedia performance. In fact, our treatment is much closer to a “free market” analysis, with the results largely an outcome of the workings of market forces. Most biased choices in the media arise from the preselection of right-thinking people, internalized preconceptions, and the adaptation of personnel to the constraints of ownership, organization, market, and political power. Censorship is largely self-censorship, by reporters and commentators who adjust to the realities of source and media organizational requirements, and by people at higher levels within media organizations who are chosen to implement, and have usually internalized,the constraints imposed by proprietary and other market and governmental centers of power.

> There are important actors who do take positive initiatives to define and shape the news and to keep the media in line. It is a “guided market system” that we describe here, with the guidance provided by the government, the leaders of the corporate community, the top media owners and executives, and the assorted individuals and groups who are assigned or allowed to take constructive initiatives. These initiators are sufficiently small in number to be able to act jointly on occasion, as do sellers in markets with few rivals. In most cases, however,media leaders do similar things because they see the world through the same lenses, are subject to similar constraints and incentives, and thus feature stories or maintain silence together in tacit collective action and leader-follower behavior.

The republicans are happy to spend money on infrastructure where their constituents are. Of course they hate rail transit because it benefits blue cities. Look at what state and local republicans actually do and not what people say for effect.

I'm kind of inclined to agree that federal infrastructure spending is shit. The fed takes a bunch of money then gives it back with strings. The states should just be keeping that money and spending it as they see fit. This isn't exactly an uncommon opinion either.

Don’t agree with Elon Musk on many things but this one hit home:

"…it does not make sense to take the job of capital allocation away from people with a demonstrated great skill in capital allocation and give it to an entity that has demonstrated very poor skill in capital allocation"