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When did New York start building slowly?

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Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#131

Post by machina_ex_deus »

nicbou wrote: post #128
Arainach wrote: post #6

Speed is affected by process, and process evolves in reaction to abuse. In the beginning, it's quick to do everything, but as people take advantage - routing contracts to friends, taking safety shortcuts - rules get put into place and those rules affect the time to complete. For New York specifically there's another factor that it's strange the article omitted: Robert Moses. Prior to the mid-1960s, it was fairly simp…

This reminds me of what Dan Carlin called "rolling the monarchy dice" in his Hardcore History podcast. If you get a good dictator, things get done with little friction, because the power rests on a single person's shoulders. But if you get a bad one, you're stuck with it. Democracy might be slower and less inefficient, but it's reliably slower and less efficient.

The key is having an accountable "dictator". There are two interpretations to democracy: you can emphasize "representation", and parliamentary system, or you can emphasize "accountability" and singular leaders. The idea being, if you rolled the dictatorship dice badly, you minimize damage and reroll it.

The U.S. was clearly designed with the second interpretation in mind. The revolution was a result of taxation by the British Parliament, and their anger at the British crown was that the king did not stop the parliament. The president / executive branch is a single person, and it represented their view of preferring an accountable monarch over distributed accountability dispersing Parliament.

They also designed the house seats with very lower upper bounds on the number of people represented by a single person, and the design of voting districts reflects a view of accountability over representation.

However, the prevailing meta game of politics is using the representation interpretation. And the design of the U.S constitution is quite bad when that is the understanding. It's just not designed for it. And the pubic has been trained, in almost pavlovian way, to interpret the "accountability" interpretation as "populism" with negative connotation.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#132

Post by lifeisstillgood »

Mission vs resignation

If there is a mission, a shared common goal and a belief that the benefits of the mission will be as fairly shared as the effort then you get the "magic". Corruption is looked down upon, stupidities are challenged.

But if there is no mission, no expectation that the benefits will accrue to "society", then "getting paid" is the most obvious and sensible response - one is resigned to the stupidities of the project and just accepts them.

Basically, a society with a safety net people trust will find it easier to have a mission that everyone believes.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#133

Post by troad »

cyberax wrote: post #87
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cities that allow for lots of sprawl (eg Houston) are not very nice places to live in many people’s viewpoints. They definitely never make the list of nicest cities. People aren’t clamoring to live in Houston, they are trying to live in Seattle. Turning Seattle in Houston would probably just make less people want to live there (well, that’s one way to solve Seattle’s housing crisis). Roads are a bad value for wha…

> The cities that allow for lots of sprawl (eg Houston) are not very nice places to live in many people’s viewpoints. "Many peoples' viewpoints" is a cop-out. You can apply it to ANY phrase: "In many people's viewpoints we should drop a nuke on Manhattan and rebuild it from scratch". If you look at objective data, Houston beats NYC handily in pretty much any important metric. Houston commute is 26 minutes vs 33 minut…

Just wanted to chime in and agree with cyberax. I’m living in a dense, beautiful European city, in a heritage listed building near the historic centre.

If I got a US visa tomorrow I’d be on the first flight to the Houston or Dallas suburbs. Judging by the growth rates of Texas cities - compared to the growth rates of old European ones - lots of people agree.

Pretty =/= functional. There are costs to density that aren’t immediately apparent, and advantages to having space that people who are used to it may not appreciate.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#134

Post by [deleted] »

zdragnar wrote: post #59
klooney wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alon Levy and the transit costs project are a great source of actual hard analysis on this- https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/02/25/the-issue-of-c... has a great concise breakdown, pasted here because no one will click through: Based on around 100 interviews and many diagrams and reports, we managed to decompose the New York construction cost premium over low-cost countries, which is about a full order of magni…

I can't speak too much to the first several points, but noting - agency micromanagement of contractors - general red tape is very fitting and a direct contribution to - too little competition I worked with a startup company ~8 years ago that wanted to go after government contracts. According to the owners, everyone they demo'd the product to said it was very clearly superior to what they were currently using. Unfortu…

[deleted]

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#135

Post by [deleted] »

nmfisher wrote: post #96
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s not just that we hire construction companies, we hire companies to manage the construction companies and then another company to manage the managers. None of those people have an incentive structure that rewards building fast and on budget. this is a giant issue in the angloshere And noone own the outcome for quality of the result. When an issue arises, before anything is foxed there are 15 years of lawsuits b…

Exactly the same thing happened in Australia. We lived in an apartment with flammable cladding in Melbourne that would have cost $50-100k to replace. Luckily we were just renting, so it wasn't our responsibility (we moved out shortly thereafter anyway). Having family members who worked inside government and having (briefly) done so myself, I completely agree with the grandparent. Government departments are basically…

[deleted]

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#136

Post by HPsquared »

zo1 wrote: post #125
nmfisher wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly the same thing happened in Australia. We lived in an apartment with flammable cladding in Melbourne that would have cost $50-100k to replace. Luckily we were just renting, so it wasn't our responsibility (we moved out shortly thereafter anyway). Having family members who worked inside government and having (briefly) done so myself, I completely agree with the grandparent. Government departments are basically…

My pet theory, not fully fleshed out yet, is that it's a consequence of "job creation" being a fundamental task of government. Or at least one we assign to it by virtue of constantly holding it accountable for "the unemployment rate" and other such statistics.

I agree.

I think there's also an analogy with the way software gets slower as hardware gets faster. That is, pointless bureaucracy and wasteful work grows as technology allows a smaller number of people to get the "real work" done. As long as the final result is acceptable (company doesn't go bankrupt / software slowness is tolerable), nothing is done about the waste.

Edit: that includes overly complicated arrangements of sub-sub-sub-contractors with 5 layers of management, all passing messages around before the one guy with a hammer can actually do anything. Kind of like the modern web stack.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#137

Post by HPsquared »

janalsncm wrote: post #107
winter_blue wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's their secret? How do they keep their standards up, but still build so fast, and so cheap (compared to the US)? It would be amazing if someone could research this, and publish a paper on exactly what reforms the United States needs to make†. † to get to the same speed/quality/cost-efficiency as these countries

Part of it is the fact that they do it so much so they’re very good at it. China has laid more concrete since 2000 than the rest of the world combined prior to 2000. So the Chinese have a lot of expertise and a lot of the supply chain, and for example in Singapore the Chinese have built a lot. By the way, much of the same can be said about manufacturing. In the US a lack of construction has caused the industry to atr…

It's a bit like the baby boom. The US built a lot in the 50s and 60s. Especially road construction, most of the road infrastructure was built over a short period around the 50s-60s.

There was a long period where very little maintenance or construction was required.

Now we are seeing the structures all start to deteriorate at the same time.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#138

Post by dazc »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #49
klooney wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spain is the outlier for fast/cheap/good, but I hear that even Italy has gotten its act together, and the recent Rome subway was done quickly and cheaply. The Nordic countries also have a good reputation. England is pretty bad/comparable to the US in speed and cost. https://pedestrianobservations.com/ and the less feisty https://transitcosts.com/ are the canonical sources on comparative infrastructure costs.

Spain's high speed rail is criminally underrated. It is an amazing achievement.

Is laying rail across a desert that hard?

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#139

Post by dazc »

HyperSane wrote: post #108
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s not just that we hire construction companies, we hire companies to manage the construction companies and then another company to manage the managers. None of those people have an incentive structure that rewards building fast and on budget. this is a giant issue in the angloshere And noone own the outcome for quality of the result. When an issue arises, before anything is foxed there are 15 years of lawsuits b…

Britain feels even more corrupt than the US.

In Britain you can be based in any other country and still get a fair hearing in the courts, even if you are claiming against a British business.

I'm not aware of anywhere else in the World where this is the case.

Re: When did New York start building slowly?

#140

Post by eru »

machina_ex_deus wrote: post #131
nicbou wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of what Dan Carlin called "rolling the monarchy dice" in his Hardcore History podcast. If you get a good dictator, things get done with little friction, because the power rests on a single person's shoulders. But if you get a bad one, you're stuck with it. Democracy might be slower and less inefficient, but it's reliably slower and less efficient.

The key is having an accountable "dictator". There are two interpretations to democracy: you can emphasize "representation", and parliamentary system, or you can emphasize "accountability" and singular leaders. The idea being, if you rolled the dictatorship dice badly, you minimize damage and reroll it. The U.S. was clearly designed with the second interpretation in mind. The revolution was a result of taxation by th…

> The revolution was a result of taxation by the British Parliament, [...]

It's a bit more complicated. Colonials paid lower taxes than people back in England, too.

See also https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/12/bruce_bueno_de.html

> His stories about George Washington, none of which I knew, are even more fascinating. Bueno de Mesquita claims, quite plausibly, that a huge part of George Washington’s motive for fighting the Revolutionary War was to protect his substantial, and critically placed, landholdings in the Ohio Valley. I’m not saying that I agree with him, but his story made me realize that a large part of my belief in GW is romantic: because I learned about him so early in life, that romantic view is harder to shake and I’ve been less willing to put GW under the public choice microscope than with any current or recent president.

> An excerpt about GW’s wealth:

>> His last position, just before becoming President, was President of the Patowmack Canal Company–the Potomac Canal, as we know it, from the Potomac River. What that canal did was bring, make it possible to bring produce from the Shenandoah Valley–which George owned–up to the port in Alexandria, which had been built by Lawrence, by the Ohio Valley Company, in which George had a direct interest, and shipped goods out. So it was a very profitable undertaking–or so he thought it would be, in the long run, for him. And that’s what motivated him. Most people think of Washington as–besides a great hero, which he certainly was–as kind of a gentleman farmer. Economists have estimated the worth in real dollars adjusted for inflation, not appreciated, of George Washington’s estate, in contemporary terms; and it’s about $20 billion dollars. He is by far the wealthiest President. He is the 59th wealthiest person in American history. Three of the American founding fathers are in the list of the top 100 wealthiest Americans in all of history: Hancock, who was wealthier than Washington–made his money smuggling; and Ben Franklin, who was not quite as wealthy, who made his money because he had a monopoly on the printing press. These are the folks who led the Revolution. These were not the downtrodden. These were not the oppressed. These were people who stood to lose huge amounts of wealth because of the King’s policies. And so they fought a Revolution. Which was, by the way, not very popular. Sixty percent of the colonists either were neutral or opposed to the Revolution.

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