Having lived in Shanghai during 2005-2012 and seeing the construction boom there, I noticed some differences immediately after arriving in the US. It's common to hear about transportation projects taking decades to expand a few stations here. Mean while, since the time I left the Shanghai subway station has opened 21 new lines composed of 516 stations.
Certainly, the air/water was worse in China but workers also had to work much harder (later nights, weekends, etc). But perhaps most importantly, the government would waste no time in getting land that it needed, and it certainly wouldn't ask for your consideration if it needs to do construction on a Saturday morning.
While I appreciate that there is an inherent trade off between environmental consideration and speed, I think the author makes it clear that it's reached comic proportions in the US. The article is short, but I think the main premise is overwhelmingly accurate: The system exists to protect the status quo.
I live in China, I think the best way to summarise everything we do at all level is: the end justifies the means.
Need to seize power ? Murder all members of the former power. Need to make poor peasants rich middle class ? Build entire cities, put them there, and done. Need to build a metro station ? Take the land, build it. Need to make Hong Kong a more physically integrated part of the country ? Build a gigantic bridge to Zuhai even if nobody actually need to use it.
The problem ofc is that sometimes the means is more costly than the benefit of the end result, and also that the goal of the end result is never debated, but I suppose that will change eventually, once we've incurred too high a cost for too little a benefit overall.
In China, authority overcomes any friction and drives a project forward. In the US there is no authority and there is no common purpose or enemy. So thousands of self interested parties abuse the system in a very time consuming way.
If a major war was to break out, that would provide powerful common purpose and mountains would be moved in weeks, as history has shown. Same would apply in the case of a major environmental catastrophe.
Encapsulating innovation inside a corporation is the one way in the US to create a common purpose and shield a group from bureaucratic capture.
The risk with the first method is that if the authority is wrong, no one can correct its course. One unlucky dice roll and you have 30 years of a dangerously incompetent maniac. Some will only judge such countries by their lucky rolls.
While a war unites a nation, it’s offset by the waste and destruction it creates. The cold war didn’t build more school and hospitals. All those resources went elsewhere, with the occasional dividend for civilians.
Mountains do get moved quickly when you sign blank cheques, but at a greater cost, with more waste and corruption. We put way too much faith in crash programs.
I think this is why authoritarian governments can be more effective at economic growth when they're behind; they just follow the path that a more economically advanced power did, but with more focus and less concern for individual welfare. Hence China's rapid industrialization.
If that's true, then it'd fall apart when the central authority either becomes too inept or corrupt and the path to follow becomes less clear. Essentially, when the low hanging fruit is gone, the corruption/inepts of the authority would become clear.
If China only had higher standards for its wet markets and disallowed the wild trade all together, this whole pandemic would probably never have happened. At some point, Chinese medicine (which the wild animal trade supports) is doing much more harm than good (if pseudo medicine does any good at all).
Yes what s ironic is that they now try to push traditional medecine as a remedy caused by a virus maybe originating from abusive use of traditional medicine material.
However now I think they just fucked up at the lab, importing bats from all over Asia as a mad rush towards cataloguing everything. The end, then, justified the means and safety was secondary.
Whatever hypothesis anyway, this tendency we have in China only to care about the goal, will end up in tears. Taiwan is prob our next fuckup.
My understanding is that the lab studying coronaviruses situated in close proximity to the wet market is the much more likely source than the wet market itself. And as labs in western countries have had similar leaks (see for example Foot & Mouth disease in the UK), I'm not sure we can really blame the Chinese.
The best info we have is that it was a bio lab release, just an unusual transmission from wild bats to humans in a wild animal market. And really, for all the authoritarian power they seem to have, sanitation standards are shockingly low, and with their density, these kinds of things will keep happening until they basically go with Japanese level cleanliness standards.
Given its situation, china really had no choice but to go with a zero COVID policy. If they tried to handle it like the Americans did, 10s of millions of people would have died, if not more (because their density is higher with lower hygiene standards, not a good combination).
> The best info we have is that it wasn't a bio lab release, just an unusual transmission from wild bats to humans in a wild animal market
That's not my understanding at all. My understanding is that there are two competing theories, neither of which there is categorical evidence for:
1. A bat coronavirus jumped to an unrelated species (e.g. pangolins) that were sold at the wet market. Which then jumped again to humans. But we have not been able to find a close viral match in the intermediate animal population.
2. A bat coronavirus was accidentally leaked from a lab that was known (they have published papers on the topic) to be studying and actively mutating in gain of function research bat coronaviruses.
To me 2 is much more likely. The idea that the epicentre of a coronavirus epidemic was ~100m from the only lab in China that studies these coronaviruses, but that the source wasn't the lab is preposterous. It's possible, but it seems like far too much of a coincidence to me.
Does the waste and corruption cost more than the checks and balances though?
Looking at government IT projects, it feels like the overhead and paperwork make everything 10x more expensive, and taking a risk that some of the projects will end up "stolen" would still be cheaper. Especially if particularly egregious cases of corruption would be prosecuted after the fact.
> Same would apply in the case of a major environmental catastrophe.
I disagree. The current major environmental catastrophe is unfolding right before our eyes. But because there is a lag of years between cause (positive and negative) and effect, the United States has been an example of how to do absolutely nothing substantial.
Sure, when earthquakes level bridges the US pulls out the shovels and starts collectively digging. But mention climate change and suggest that V8 daily drivers might need to change their habits, and they double down on hurting their progressive neighbors:
> I disagree. The current major environmental catastrophe is unfolding right before our eyes. But because there is a lag of years between cause (positive and negative) and effect, the United States has been an example of how to do absolutely nothing substantial.
Right. This is a major failure of US and British culture in particular: the failure to understand how to grasp future exponential disastrous consequences and the exponential impact of our small individual actions in combatting them.
At the beginning of the Covid pandemic I spent a lot of time trying to explain to people that "but it's been weeks and there's only been a few hundred cases" is not a sufficient guide to what is going to come or how to respond to it.
Trying to urge people that they should be more concerned when they have not been taught about things like survivorship bias, the small-world experiment, have never heard of grains of rice or wheat on a chessboard, and were so rushed through school biology that they've missed key demonstrations of exponential growth, etc., is very difficult.
It was not long before we had people and even politicians saying that people like us were over-blowing things when we worried about Y2K, not out of any wise retrospective assessment of real risk but because "after all that, nothing really bad happened". And that is before we in the UK get to the B word.
Basically people need to see real world consequences for themselves or for those they love before they are galvanised into action, and then they galvanise themselves into action in part by blaming those people who tried to warn them and were not listened to, for failing to act pre-emptively to save them.
Edit to add: I don't mean to say that other cultures don't fail at imagining consequences. And indeed in the Covid situation it might be that some of the cultures that did significantly better had more exposure to SARS or bird flu and learned from that. But there is a general lack of cultural understanding of the risks of severe outcomes in the UK and USA
The common purpose is that we're about to ruin the planet's climate if we don't allow more people to voluntarily live in cities and live less car-dependent lifestyles but still we prohibit apartment buildings in many urban neighborhoods and can't build transit projects anymore.
The USA has an adversarial political system: half the people associate with Democrats, half associate with Republicans. But in China, you are either for or against the CPC, and being against it almost means being a traitor. The other political parties exist just for appearances. Unity then is just the default.
Most people in general have a short term cost/benefit analysis period. What China seemingly does different is they have 10, 20, 50+ year plans which in the time horizon of their multi-thousand year history even seems short term.
Your example of the bridge may seem like no one uses it today but most likely in the future, it will be used and the scale will tip towards it being vastly beneficial compared to its cost.
When countries like the USA have an entire history (not including native americans) of ~300 years, planning anything for 30 years out seems relatively crazy in comparison.
Trying to use a 50 year plan is also a weakness. Technologies developed between now and then will make many goals obsolete before their finished.
China the county younger than the US. Linking the history as a monolithic entity is really propaganda more than anything else. They are sure trying to create a culturural identity across a country with multiple cultures and languages.
> Trying to use a 50 year plan is also a weakness. Technologies developed between now and then will make many goals obsolete before their finished.
It's not that simple. If something changes within the 50 years (and it certainly will), they can pivot away and work on something else.
It's more that they have a relatively unified, authoritarian government with absolute power and no external checks and balances.
At our other extreme, we have a two-party deadlock stretching back decades, and every major policy gets turned back after 4-8 years when the other party regains power. It's impossible to plan or build for the future that way.
We used to be able to send people to the moon, develop nuclear power, build interstates and dams, win not just wars but hearts and minds, rebuild Germany and Japan... and now... we can't even evacuate Afghanistan, can't stop our citizens from being so pissed off they storm the capitol, can't do anything about climate change, can't have a sane discussion about educational curricula, can't maintain infrastructure, can't keep our people off the streets, can't deal with a pandemic...
We've become good at one thing and one thing only: allowing private actors to optimize for massive short-term profits at the expense of society and the future. That's no way to run a country. We've turned citizens into gladiators fighting over scraps.
Not saying we should emulate Chinese authoritarianism, but having a national vision lasting more than one election cycle isn't a bad thing. Being able to unite a country behind a major social project isn't a bad thing. Being able to even THINK of a country as a country, instead of warring factions, isn't a bad thing.
Pivoting away still costs the initial investment. Creating canals seemed like an obvious win being a useful technology for hundreds of years which justified extreme investments. Until suddenly rail took over in a relative blink of the eye.
Authoritarianism tends to efficiently solve the wrong problems which results in an overall inefficient system. Private actors aren’t limited to only optimizing for today. Going to collage is a great example of long term optimization as is getting a 30 year mortgage etc. The difference is simply one of scale where private actors may not optimize the global problem, but global optimization is really difficult.
Private actors optimizing for their local maximum is in and of itself a sort of inefficiency.
In any case, it doesn't have to be an either-or situation (and arguably shouldn't be). For most of the last century we were able to juggle private needs with public works, using private talent to cooperatively tackle problems of national scale.
It was only in the last 2-3 decades that we really stopped believing in the country, and the government became increasingly dysfunctional. Then the last 5-10 years we really started circling the drain. I don't know what happened. Some of it looks to me like deliberate sabotage, a concerted effort to decrease public faith in government so that deregulation can benefit the elite. Some of it just looks like sheer incompetence.
Maybe it's just the natural end of our golden age. We've hit the limits of the sort of problems our system can reliably tackle, while the nationalists are still on the upward trajectory -- for now. China is especially scary because they've managed to invent a whole new sort of capitalism hybridized with nationalism-authoritarianism. It has the hallmarks of a free market at the lower levels, but the government has the final word on any business and can nationalize/co-opt corporations whenever they want. In that way they get the benefits of private innovation and enterprise along with the ability to essentially eminent domain entire businesses and sectors at will. It's worked scarily well for them, and they are on the verge of eclipsing our model in the next few decades. The severe cost of it, of course, is measured in lives and liberties, something that West would not (and should not) accept.
But the thing is, we have no answer to that at all. We don't really even discuss it anymore as a nation. There is no national debate about public works or long-term planning from anyone except a tiny portion of the left, while the rest of the political class argue about gender and race and toilets and guns and abortions. It's almost like all the culture wars are an intentional distraction from our failing system of government and economics, where the rich keep getting richer every year -- especially during covid -- and everyone else falls further and further down the ladder. We're so fucked without some sort of forward thinking. Wish we could see some actual leadership for once...
> Maybe it's just the natural end of our golden age.
Alternatively, America simply lacks obvious large scale investments to make.
High speed rail seems like a winner, but is it? We have a very efficient national train network for goods and both an interstate highway system and airlines. As a practical matter HSR is unlikely to change much and is really expensive to build and maintain.
Similarly rural high speed internet is pushed as a must have, but 5G and Starlink are much cheaper solutions to the same problems. Getting wired high speed internet to central Alaska for example is extremely expensive and probably not worth it. Where to draw this line in pure economic terms probably isn’t exactly where telecom companies picked, but there wasn’t a clearly better option.
Bridges and Dams have similarly been added to all the obvious locations. Should we build X is again a really difficult choice.
I would rather have a government that tries and builds solutions that are not the most optimal rather than giving up and not doing anything. Solutions do not have to be the best all the time, just better than what exists. Constant iterative improvements over time
The political will to do it, fund it properly just is not there.
Many want private entities to do it, many do not and that logjam has gotten in the way of a lot.
And there are teardowns. The Post Office has been damaged for politics, for example. Private entities want more of the business and do not want to compete with the PO. Or, they want the PO to work for them at a loss or as a subsidy.
There is a reluctance to make big public investments. There should not be.
Those are more complicated than just building infrastructure. Take healthcare, having more hospital buildings or equipment isn’t a fix. Same with education we don’t need more school buildings. Cybersecurity is again not solved by building more servers.
Carbon sequestration is an open technical problem without any known scalable solutions.
Under grand power lines and roads run into the same issue, building more means you need to maintain more. The solution to pot holes and old bridges are to remove old bridges and roads until we can afford what’s already built.
Renewables are the only pure infrastructure problem, but we are actually building a lot of Renewables. Look at the ratio of new wind/solar vs new coal/natural gas and the grid is only going in one direction. We could spend a lot more going faster, but the end result would be the same.
In term of infrastructure: I would be happy with roads without potholes that are large enough to damage my car, schools, and a semi resilient power grid.
> China the county younger than the US. Linking the history as a monolithic entity is really propaganda
If you know anything about Chinese mentality and how it deeply affect all level of its society, you'll know that it didn't start from 1949. While the government initially tried to suppress China's historic roots in 1960s and 1970s to install a communist utopia, it failed miserably, and they have stopped trying since and embraced it.
As it stands, the first statement quoted is hilarious.
People defiantly get taught to make such connections and people therefore do feel a connection. But all that proves is propaganda works.
It’s no more accurate to trace China’s history through prior empires covering it’s approximate borders as it is to it through the British empire which ruled some of it’s current territory, subjugated them, and still has a huge influence on current culture. The obvious reason to do so is to suggest a shared cultural identity.
Germany, with its 200,000 year history,[1] has for its transport infrastructure at least 15 year plans, which are only moderately legally binding. They are readjusted approximately every five years. New 15 year plans are being developed before the new ones expire, and there are is also some overlap between the plans. With this in mind, the current government has a transport infrastructure plan for 2040 on its agenda.
In this bridge example, not only did it cost $19 billion to build, but the tolls collected actually do not cover operating costs. Doubt their 20 year plan included having to dump more money into the bridge to just keep it working. There are a lot of Youtube videos about China's similar problems with their large high speed rail network.
I don't understand your point. The US may not be old, but European and other histories are taught. Meanwhile, how much impact do the war of the three kingdoms have on modern China?
It isn't so much that I disagree as I think the frame is a bit skewed. When America is operating at its peak everyone has similar complaints (switching "end justifies the means" with "you can do whatever you like if you have money" because historically the US operates using money as a medium).
Whenever anything happens people complain that some interests aren't represented or that resources aren't being used in the way they'd like. The point of the article is more that the US has systemically made it illegal to deploy resources quickly and effectively.
Need to stop a student uprising ? Roll the tanks. Once I understood that about the country, I stopped discussing morals and instead focus on debating cost.
The following wikipedia article contains hundreds of sources for war crimes committed on both sides (Yugoslav and KLA). KLA were officially NATO allies, and a lot of video evidence and official UN evidence exists regarding alleged locations, witness intimidation, and failure to prosecute KLA's top commanders.
There is a 3 hour documentary produced about the whole war in which Carla Del Ponte was featured.
Your first citation references a woman forcibly removed from her post and then goes on to make unorthodox claims about both the Yugoslav and Syrian wars, neither of which are supported by evidence.
Now you’re moving the goalposts - I said a citation was needed that NATO was harvesting Serbian organs. You’ve yet to supply one and are apparently unable to do so.
From the Wikipedia article I linked, here is just one of the sources which states that the EU issued a report stating that "organ trafficking did take place on a limited scale by a few individuals".
I am not moving the goal posts. Hashim Thaci intimidated witnesses who were supposed to testify in the organ trafficking trial.
How do you live with yourself knowing you are not debating in good faith?
I would hardly bring the Balkans as an example of "the West". That's a mix of Soviet / middle Eastern cultured countries.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised to hear about racism, rape or organ trafficking in any war zone.
No-one fighting a war is innocent, not even if you control the media like the West does.
There was no evidence, only allegations brought up by the prosecutor you mentioned.
at all levels ? there must be limits to this approach right ???
otherwise this way of thinking gets terrifying fast and rapidly descends into conspiracy theory land
example: "need to find a socially-acceptable solution to a demographic time bomb caused by decades of one child policy, while still maintaining ethnic homogeneity ? perform gain-of-function research to develop a vector that disproportionately harms the elderly"
to be absolutely clear, I don't believe this was actually the case in 2019 at all - but as an no-limits "end justifies the means" thought exercise - it is easy to arrive at inhuman dystopian nightmares
It should surprise nobody that an authoritarian, centrally planned, and massively resource-rich country can perform infrastructure miracles. You don't have to stoop to conspiracy theories to understand this.
Some of the infrastructure has lead to extra economic benefit beyond just the infrastructure stimulus. But other infrastructure might not - and i would call them economic waste (but not political waste).
The building of those rail networks is meant to achieve a political purpose, rather than an actual productivity increase. Perhaps their leadership thought it was worth the spend, but this sort of spending would unlikely work in the US imho.
With freight, if you consider all factors, road is much more efficient for all but bulk loads or edge cases.
You can make more economical runs per month with trucks than with trains, meaning you get to have less stock on hand as a buffer on both ends.
This has many knock-on efficiencies - fewer resources tied up in goods, lower insurance expense, lower warehousing cost, and above all: a more flexible and responsive supply chain.
China expanded high speed rail that can't be used for freight. It makes perfect sense to connect megalopolises with such a network. But when you start building out to Podunk provincial towns when the passengers can't afford the high prices, they'll continue to take the bus. Meanwhile your shining example for modernity and progress turns into a debt bomb.
No, since the previous fast trains aren't run on the old tracks any more. Due to stopping distances etc, you can fit several freight trains in the space needed for one express train.
The maglev in Shanghai isn’t very usable: it doesn’t go to the city center, just somewhere remote in pudong. It is fast, but if you need to get to the airport from somewhere except one or two places in Shanghai a taxi would do better. But definitely ride it once.
> The building of those rail networks is meant to achieve a political
> purpose, rather than an actual productivity increase. Perhaps their leadership thought
> it was worth the spend, but this sort of spending would unlikely work in the US imho.
You might want to read a bit about the Space Launch System, a well-known political jobs program that many consider a hindrance in advancing the art of space flight.
Yes at all levels, do you want me to tell you what we do to kill a virus ? :D
For natality dont just think today, think 50 years ago when the goal was to reduce it: forced abortion, abandonning your newborn at the nearest wet market (high volume of people) was very common. It's harder to force people to copulate, but I trust our overlords to find a way ahah
The virus however, I m more of the opinion that to fix SARS we decided to import thousands of vietnamese bats to study or such thing and fucked up one way or another. I dont think it was made to kill old people, it was a crazy large scale risky project to prevent the next SARS - the end justifies the means, but this time the means were very costly to foreigners. We dont care yet, or at least we managed to pretend our costs were still low enough not to execute every single person involved, as one should have done if millions of Chinese had died.
China’s ZeroCovid policy worked pretty well, but it’s failing with Omicron. And unfortunately, the nonMRNA domestic vaccines aren’t terribly effective. So it’s possible millions of Chinese people will still die. (I hope not.)
You're right, I think we dont prepare for the worst case. Im in HK and just today our dear leader said nobody could have predicted 2 millions HKers would be contaminated (5000 deaths).
Well, let s give her that but then the central gov, surely NOW they can predict 25% of China being contaminated ? How are they preparing ?
>China actually solved the excess men problem problem via ethnic cleansing.
How would the US behave if it had Wahhabist extremists near one of its borders? We've only seen how the US responded to some 6000 miles away in Afghanistan, most of them were brutally executed, not deradicalized or reeducated.
The US did not, in fact, brutally execute most of the population of Afghanistan. Remember, it's the Ugyur population as a whole that China has "deradicalized or reeducated" - not just active terrorists, not even religious extremists, but everyone.
The Uyghurs being targeted for deradicalization are Wahhabist (an offshoot of Salafism) that have a lot in common with, and in many cases directly trained by, Al Qaeda.
Granted, the net may be slightly larger than it needs to be due to China's high population density and the resulting fact that terroristic acts have a high human cost... but it's nowhere near the scale of our (US) net across Afghanistan, Syria, and Pakistan.
The vast majority of muslim communities in China have nothing to do with this kind of extremist ideology, don't commit acts of mass terror, and are not part of these deradicalization programs.
The net worth a cast really broadly, and a Uighur doesn't have to be a Wahhabist to be labeled as needing re-education through labor, just expressing dissent is good enough. China has already done this with the rest of its population, even many Han were subject to these camps. The party has a lot of practice here and is only doing what it knows.
I'm sure you are aware of that entire cultural revolution thing? Just read up on laogao and laojiao. They never really went away, they just moved the camps from east China to west.
According to the Wikipedia description, they sound like US prisons. Prisoners in the US can spend years in solitary confinement (like Kalief Browder from NYC, an unconvicted minor), are forced to work for pennies an hour (same as UNICOR and other such US orgs), and the amount of violent deaths of inmates within the US prison system that generally have little to no followup investigations are alarmingly large from my understanding.
>The United States Department of State called the conditions in prisons "harsh and frequently degrading," and said the conditions in re-education through labor facilities were similar, citing overcrowded living spaces, low-quality food, and poor or absent medical care.Detainees in camps are required to work for little or no pay; while Chinese law requires that prison laborers' workday be limited to 12 hours a day. In 2001, sociologist Dean Rojek estimated that detainees generally worked six days a week, "in total silence." Much of the labor done by re-education through labor detainees is geared towards agriculture or producing goods, many of which are sold internationally, since re-education through labor detainees are not counted as official "prisoners" and therefore not subject to international treaties. They also perform work ranging "from tending vegetables and emptying septic pits to cutting stone blocks and construction work."
>Although drug abusers are ostensibly placed in re-education through labor to be treated for their addictions, some testimonial evidence has suggested that little "meaningful treatment" takes place in at least some of the centers, and that drug abusers often relapse into addiction upon their release from detention.
Chinese prisons are completely separate things. These are more like concentration camps for people who aren't branded exactly as criminals but somehow need re-education through labor or indoctrination.
I have no idea why you are comparing them to US prisons. Chinese prisons compare to US prisons, and both are inhumane.
i agree that is disturbing but it is not what i was referring to, sorry I meant excess old people - age demographics - not excess men.
based on projections china's population peaked ~last year. it is a shrinking population from here, and while this will be a huge problem in most of the world (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735230 discussed recently) but it is happening MUCH sooner in china, and at an unprecedented scale.
it is an existential threat and i am sure their government sees this, and it is scary to think what an "ends justify the means" way of thinking leads to with this problem
Yes, my point was that’s a looming problem but not currently an issue so we can only guess how their going to solve it. But, the options considered are anything up to including say romanticizing elderly suicide.
If we're lucky they'll pioneer growing babies entirely in vitro, no humans needed besides their DNA (which is branch of research I'd really like to see but morals in the West prevent that)
Forcibly re-education and forced jobs(read: labor) is more accurate. Graceful isn't the right word. They're certainly more efficient, but their efforts are not without vast international condemnation. As much as I deplore the US response to terrorism, China's response isn't exactly a breath of fresh air
what do you propose? because this all just sounds so naive. obviously the methods are horrible but there is no feel-good response to terrorism. can you really blame a nation for taking a zero-tolerance approach?
"international condemnation" is hardly a meaningful metric. It comes from 1. countries that have done and are doing far worse (slaughter, invasion, fomenting regime change), 2. countries that are sitting there wringing their hands as internal strife mounts over the increasing culture clash, and 3. countries that are lucky enough not to have these problems.
Yeah, I'm not really sure what they're talking about. If anything, the development of the vaccine for COVID impressed with how quickly we were able to iterate from proof of concepts to actually getting the vaccine distributed and given out. That's not to say that the process was perfect, but overall, I think the end result was much better than I would have predicted if asked hypothetically how long it would take to from the appearance to a new virus until when vaccines were actually administered nationwide to whoever wanted them. Unless that's what GP is saying, that the availability of vaccines for a wider variety of diseases were being artificially suppressed? I'm not sure I'd consider that to be much of a conspiracy theory though. I think it's clear from efforts to squash stuff like polio and smallpox have made it clear that it's practically possible to mass distribute vaccines without gatekeeping based on who can afford it, but in general it would require either an extremely benevolent entity who came up with the vaccine and is willing to forgo profits or some sort of government intervention; I don't think it's really surprising that this doesn't happen more often.
Man, this shadowy cabal was so good, they started a global pandemic that brought the world economy under its control, made everyone fall in line behind pandemic mandates, shut up all dissent and turned everyone into zombies who now work three times as hard.
It kind of happened? Many countries established new levels of censorship and control. People installed tracking apps and got used to constant surveillance. All sorts of things. But not good enough, hence the need for WW3.
Anyway, not saying it was or is a master plan. Just saying that if you were hypothetically thinking about a reset button, a pandemic would be a clever approach, and within technological reach.
"The Great Reset" was the official motive of the World Economic Forum. They absolutely do want a reset.
Yeah, this framing was taken in a piece a few years ago about the failure to revitalize a rail project [1] in New York, which ultimately pinned the blame on tipping the balance too far in favor of private property rights. A single person/holdout can grind a project valuable to millions to a halt. It's the most compelling explanation I've read.
In short, if private property has absolute veto power, you can never get big public projects done. (This is why eminent domain exists) There's a balance between private property rights & public good; in the times of great public works, the public good was given more sway, while recently private property rights have been given more (and stifled public works).
Then the important thing is that a process of weighing those rights/costs/benefits and so on exists. e.g., if they needed to tear down a couple of apartment buildings and disrupt hundreds of folks, I could see an argument against that. But for just one guy? Eh...
---
That article has a lot of disturbing things in it- 200 extra workers (that even the union guys said weren't needed), inflated costs, low competition driving up bids, gifts given to government officials from contractors, and so on.
This bit is the most concerning:
“Is it rigged? Yes,” said Charles G. Moerdler, who has served on the M.T.A. board since 2010. “I don’t think it’s corrupt. But I think people like doing business with people they know, and so a few companies get all the work, and they can charge whatever they want.”
If you gotta play semantics on whether you're in a rigged system or a corrupt one...
> In short, if private property has absolute veto power, you can never get big public projects done. (This is why eminent domain exists)
I wish they'd modify the language of eminent domain to reward double, triple or even quadruple market rate. I want people being _happy_ to have their property seized.
This would be a great way for corrupt politicians to funnel large sums of real estate money to their friends and donors (or to trigger wild speculation bubbles anywhere people think eminent domain is likely to be applied).
I do think these payouts need to be well in excess of market rates (in order to properly compensate people for inconvenience / related expenses / opportunity costs, but tripling or quadrupling property values is a bit far fetched.
Whatever, pork-barrel corruption is already an everyday part and parcel of our system. Paying 2x-4x for some piece of land is still waaaaaaaay cheaper for society than drowning in decades-long quagmire while infrastructure falls apart everywhere.
Any time you have a massive building project you're going to get corruption. If you can't even eminent domain it through useful areas, you're just going to get developers buying land in the middle of nowhere and selling it back to the government as the only remaining viable route.
>Paying 2x-4x for some piece of land is still waaaaaaaay cheaper for society than drowning in decades-long quagmire while infrastructure falls apart everywhere.
Eminent domain is not only used to acquire owner occupied homes for infrastructure. In some cities it is used to purchase poorly maintained properties from slumlords.
Landlords get what rent they can and don't invest anything in upgrades because they know they can cash out with the city government or public land bank. Promising to pay 2-4x may make the problem worse.
If a building is nearly fully depreciated, and has $0 building value, and the landlord invested closed to $0 in maintaining it, but the land is worth $200K, why should they get 4x whatever they claim the gamed comparables are and $800K from the public for doing nothing?
Maybe 150% of the building replacement cost for owner occupied homes makes sense, but ideally absentee investors holding depreciated properties and vacant lots wouldn't get paid a dime for the land value.
Because otherwise it'd be a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good? That scenario would happen anyhow even at market rate.
As a taxpayer I'd rather see some money wasted, and some progress being made, rather than nothing getting done ever.
Corruption and waste are tolerable to some degree, IMO. "Government wastefulness" is too often code for not letting the government do anything at all.
I just don't think our current societal bottlenecks are due to a budget or GDP crisis. There is so much wealth locked away, I'd rather it be spent on public works even if it means losing a few cents on the dollar to corruption along the way.
It's not like the private sector is risk free, or that the government doesn't waste money on wars and questionable foreign aid already.
There is such a backlog of infrastructure to build, whether roads and bridges or prisons and schools and climate change mitigation or renewables or nuclear... we gotta do something about that. If that means a slumlord getting rich, I guess it's a cost of doing business?
I used to know a former state senator, who would say "the road to riches in this state is cheap land and cheap politicians."
She had a background in forensic accounting, was instrumental in getting a particular state senator convicted of corruption, and lost the support of the state party in the process.
> She had a background in forensic accounting, was instrumental in getting a particular state senator convicted of corruption, and lost the support of the state party in the process.
You point out a different, and arguably way more important, problem in our politics: we have no real pathway for domain experts to become powerful representatives and provide meaningful oversight. Instead you just have corrupt lawyers vouching for other corrupt lawyers, writing corrupt laws and appointing corrupt judges, all with the active approval and participation of the two major parties. It's just evil all up and down the chain.
I think it's just an acknowledgment and acceptance that the system is thoroughly fucked, and there's no public will to overthrow it or clean it up, so seeking incremental gains where possible is better than nothing.
If you do nothing, there corruption will still be there, but nothing will improve.
If you try to push things through, the corruption will still be there, but maybe small things will get built here and there.
What do you think is a better solution to corruption? Starve the state? We've been doing that for decades and that just further empowers private interests, the same people who've benefited from and furthered corruption in government. shrug No easy fix. Every country has corruption, but the highly functional governments tend to have less of it because they attract more well-intentioned career civil servants instead of powermongers.
You could make it conditional on some things. The goal is to compensate for discomfort, not to compensate lost income. So you could say you only compensate primary residences and self operated businesses, both occupied for 3+ years.
Or you could approach it from a different angle and compensate each resident and business operators with $10,000 relocation cost (in addition to buying their property with a 5% extra). That has the added benefit of eliminating more of the market price risk from projections.
I think the optimal course is to have a very painful eminant domain process that pays a crappy above market rate so that government is incentivized to offer actual market rate (big project wants your land so market rate is vastly increased as a result). I have seen corn fields sold for millions because a state college wanted it for a new campus. The market rate was well under $1MM. For that land eminant domain would have been a nightmare because of the particular politics and unimproved nature of the site....so they had to offer actual market rate...which is the rate demanded of someone when they know it's a monied developer that wants it.
Exactly. "Market rate" is ridiculous, and justifiably private property owners should be able to hold out sine market rate doesn't factor in switching costs, both financial and emotional.
I think 3x market rate is a decent starting place.
I think the amount paid should be based on the average market rate of properties where the person must move to have the same commute and amenities. If the government wants to destroy the poorest area, at least folks there can move somewhere nicer without much inconvenience.
The current model enables the same behavior and makes it harder to track. Stalled projects have ongoing costs that make the project developers real money in exchange for no real effort. The same donor simply says “hey mr politician, give my company the exclusive contract and never mind that my aunt owns a building in our way. I’ll only charge you 30% for each year we are stalled.”
We burn money on these projects either way. A good windfall to property owners gives regular families a chance at enjoying some profits… and makes donors who block progress just a little easier to track!
Graft is just one problem out of many though. Lack of public investment in public institutions, I'd argue, is another, bigger problem.
I'd like to see graft tackled by more competitive elections (multi-party, ranked-choice, easier voting processes, etc.) rather than simply gutting the government so it can't do anything at all... I think the conservatives call that starving the beast? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
That just puts government in a death spiral and drags huge swaths of society down with it.
By comparison, a small degree of graft is an inefficiency inherent in any large organization. As a taxpayer or customer, it doesn't necessarily matter to me whether $20 of my $100 goes to a politician's vacation home or the CEO's yacht, as long as the shit gets built effectively. If it gets to $50 or $80 of that $100 though... yeah, shit's broken.
Given how the sheer amount of money wasted when even one property owner holds out, it shouldn't be terribly difficult to justify a serious premium on the amount paid to those whose property is seized. In most cases I imagine it's just a small part of the overall cost of the project.
What happens historically that if a government has a choice between destroying wealth in a minority neighborhood or destroying wealth in a non minority neighborhood, it’s usually the minority neighborhood.
New York has an interesting History of projects being ramrodded through dubious means (at the expense of the public) under Robert Moses in the early 20th Century, I imagine stops were put in place to prevent that from occurring again.
The Moses story is more nuanced than that. Read the Caro book.
Ultimately the triumph of Moses was understanding the nature of power and making key friends and allies who helped him wield it. He got shit done. In the beginning, this was enormously beneficial - the state and city park systems, key bridges, and the framework of competent engineering that blunted the impact of the depression… New York was uniquely able to benefit from New Deal programs, because of Moses. We remember the exclusionary bridges of the Northern State Parkway, but forget that these highways broke the Dutch legacy of quasi-feudal great estates and baymen who kept the public from the seashore.
The problem is that his acquisition of power transitioned from triumph to tragedy. His friend Gov. Smith gave him ironclad control of key public authorities - he held 100 different jobs at one point. As in all cases, unchecked, unlimited power corrupts. Only Gov. Rockefeller was able to break the guy, and only because his family was his bankers. Moses’ empire ultimately saved NYC, as the subways would have been bankrupt without the toll bridges supporting the rail system.
Today, New York has a murky soup of laws that give certain unions a lot of power, and require that projects are bid out with multiple prime contractors, etc. Between that and the political dynamic from the transportation system being controlled by the State (the governor controls the MTA) and the complex home rule of NYC, it’s a complicated mess.
That said, NY is more functional than most other places when it comes to transit.
> Moses’ empire ultimately saved NYC, as the subways would have been bankrupt without the toll bridges supporting the rail system.
Moses did the opposite. As detailed in the book The Power Broker.
He looted mass transit to fund sprawl. At one point, he even had a secret deal with the Republican leadership in Albany to redirect subway revenue into some bond finance scheme. (I don't recall the details.)
He did much the same with the toll booths. That revenue was used to finance bonds, which were then spent on more sprawl. Very little of it was spent on improving the city's core. He worked very hard to hide the details.
In fact, my hunch is that Moses' various finance schemes and exfiltration of monies is directly responsible for NYC's financial troubles, which almost caused that government to default on its debt. I really wish someone would followup on Caro's work, connect those dots.
Moses' strategy of looting urban centers to fund sprawl was then replicated everywhere.
Complex historical men need deep layers of evaluation (See also: Columbus, Washington, etc)
Layer 1: This is a great man who did great things (Moses: public projects)
Layer 2: He was discriminatory, racist, and optimized for his ilk/kind whether it's racially, genderly, socio-economically, etc. (Moses: Focus on white people or at least those of sufficient socioeconomic class)
Layer 3: Progress for SOME people is better than nothing. Improving public access and transportation for poor whites is better than not having anything at all.
Layer 4: Partial progress is often used as an excuse to stop further progress. And if you promote one group at the expense of another, you arguably create MORE inequality not less.
It’s common wisdom to say these projects were dubious. There’s no question they came with costs—-but would we rather not have the BQE, Cross Bronx Expressway, or Brooklyn Battery Tunnel? I don’t think we would. It’s easy to fantasize about public transit alternatives but even with Robert Moses NYC is a significant outlier in the US for public transit both in the city and in the region.
There’s a tail wagging the dog factor to the highway stuff. The FHA sealed the fate of those neighborhoods by cutting off the oxygen.
I live in a small city that was carved up by redlining. My block was in the “yellow” zone, and the houses built after 1935 or so are very different than the houses on the next block, which is in the “green zone”.
Yellow = Italians and Greeks, 1 and 2 family small houses. Green = old money types, bigger houses on fancy lots.
BQE and Cross-Bronx Expressway definitely not. Building highways through cities is extremely damaging and exist only to ferry suburbanites into and out of the city. Moses wanted to build a highway through Greenwich village. That would have been devastating for lower Manhattan. Intra-city Highways destroy the very vibrancy required for them to adapt and change.
Brooklyn Battery Tunnel? That is a good project. Connecting different areas across bodies of water is good.
IMO the problem is why such stubborn holdouts exist and why can't the government work with them (are those holdouts being paid or otherwise motivated to hurt public good? organized? do they have pathological distrust to the government, how can that be worked out? etc.) rather than the governments not having the crazy power to just do anything they want if they think it is "public good". The latter is horrifying, I fail to see how it is ever desirable (even if it occasionally leads to positive outcomes, it cannot be trusted to do so reliably).
Usually they're trying to profit by being the last holdouts, hoping they will be able to get more money this way. It may not be worth paying everyone 3X, but if everyone except one person agreed to X, then paying the last holdout 3X is not a huge expense and gets the project going. At least that's what they're hoping for.
There was a case in my city where they wanted to build a shopping mall and offered the people who owned homes on the plot a deal. Only 1 person refused and asked for much more money (in his words "Who accepts the first offer??"), and since this plot wasn't critical for the project, they never even contacted him after that and just built it without his plot: https://www.vecernji.hr/media/img/38/97/a9f29b9fca44602d5b41... (the lone house in the "corner"). He got mad, sued them, etc.
This was a private company; I'm not sure why the government would have this problem, since they can exercise eminent domain for stuff like infrastructure, it's literally why it exists.
> why such stubborn holdouts exist and why can't the government work with them (are those holdouts being paid or otherwise motivated to hurt public good? organized? do they have pathological distrust to the government, how can that be worked out? etc.)
A highway extension here in Ontario was blocked for years by homeowners who, as far as I can tell, just didn't want their community bulldozed to put in a highway. An entirely reasonable position to hold, regardless of whether the highway is to the public good. There is no reasonable incentive you could give to get some people to give up land they have been on for their whole lives. When one is talking hundreds of properties as in the case of that extension, you will absolutely find a stubborn person who will say no.
The cool part of that story is where they seized property with eminent domain, built the toll highway with tax money, then sold the whole thing at a discount to an international conglomerate, to be a toll highway for the next 100 years.
What’s wrong with toll highways. The tax money is still needed to build it, the company operating it isn’t making so much money as to negate that, and eventually the money is replenished through usage fees. By making it a toll way, the people who use it will pay for it eventually, and it discourages low value usage of the road.
In this particular example can't the holdout see how it would benefit the economy (as roads do) that they're part of, possibly reduce emissions into the environment they live in, etc.?
If the government provides them with replacement property, why would they object so strongly?
And doesn't the fact that everyone else agreed make them consider that perhaps it would be public good for some reason?
> In this particular example can't the holdout see how it would benefit the economy (as roads do) that they're part of, possibly reduce emissions into the environment they live in, etc.?
Zou are trying to use logic here, but the simple truth is that a lot of times people don't care about that. They are emotional beings. They simply do not care about any of the points you made, they want to keep their house/property/whatever. They don't care.
Smoking is bad for people and the people around them, yet many don't quit. Wearing masks is great for the public good, yet many do not. One could go on about vaccines and other topics but the simple truth is: They do not care.
That is why laws exist to take these properties from them. If they are absolutely opposed to the offers made, unwilling to sell and can't be moved then you take the property, hand them what others agree is a fair price (or at least the fairest they can come up with), and go through with it anyways.
Please don't miss understand, i do agree with you. In an ideal world one should be able to reason with others, people should care about their surroundings and the society that they are a part of.
However, in the world that we live in you also need to keep in mind that we want to get things done. In my experience things such as eminent domain are only used after quite a while of failed negotiations.
The simple truth is that we expect our institutions and governments to get things done. We want them to eventually build a road, not argue with people for years on end whether or not they should sell their property. In many jurisdictions around the world eminent domain or similar is also tied to court proceedings, making it truly the last option.
The current status quo is a compromise nobody is happy with:
* People expect governments to actually get thing done
* Some people cannot be reasoned with in a timeframe that is acceptable to society
So they came up with the easiest solution: Negotiate with them until it's clear they won't budge or it takes too long, then force it your way.
If there was a way to get everyone to see reason in a reasonable timespan we might not need the status quo. However, as of right now nobody around the world has achieved that. If anyone manages to do so then we might be able to get rid of things like eminent domain, but until that's the case we are stuck with it, for better or worse.
If you don't feel strong emotional attachment to some particular property, I'm not sure I can explain it to you. There is no monetary value that can replace the living room where you watched your kid take their first walk, or the field where your grandparents are buried, if you happen to be that kind of person.
An analogy: why not make taxes voluntary? (Eminent domain is conceptually most similar to taxation, after all.) Surely after you explain that it's to the public good, you won't have any holdouts, right?
I understand emotional attachment to property. I also understand that nothing is permanent and it may be necessary to let go.
Since I was a child, family moved and sold previously used estate/flats more than once. Yes, there are memories and my grandparents built and lived there. Now other people build and live there. Life goes on.
We are not talking about somebody persuading you to sell your property to satisfy their fancy. It is a cause that will have positive effects on the region and the country.
And you personally, meanwhile, get a free chance to move and find an even better spot that doesn't have the shortcomings of the previous one. I recall that's sort of how USA started.
Framing emotional attachment as an overriding motive and purpose strikes me as an excuse for complacency, aversion to change, laziness.
> why such stubborn holdouts exist and why can't the government work with them
Because if the government can't exercise eminent domain then those people are incentivized to extract maximum value from the government over the land. They may not want to sell it, or they may charge an exorbitant price.
It's kind of strange how the law recognizes that land ownership is a source of power yet does absolutely nothing against it. If the government has to override the law, just imagine how much they distort the private economy, where there is no easy way out. So many apartments couldn't be built and so many people could not be housed.
There's a host of problems. A simple example is a holdout who sees they are the only remaining obstacle to a project, and demand ten million dollars for a fifty thousand dollar plot of land the government needs for the project. A very capitalist mindset! But poison to public works. There's no "working with" someone who thinks they are sitting on a winning lottery ticket.
Another simple problem is that of guarantees. If the government is certain to be able to secure the land in a reasonable timeframe, they can structure the whole project on top of that certainty, planning from start to finish, establishing financing, signing contracts... If acquisition is an open-ended negotiation in which the holdout can linger for decades, either nothing can be done until every last square foot of land is secured, or else you risk suspending everything halfway (very expensive).
It's not that simple when the plot of land is developed, because you can't build an expressway without also buying whatever structures sit on that land, which aren't rateable for an LVT and may genuinely be worth much more. Holdouts argue the lot is the same low value land it always has been for LVT purposes but they want $10m to sell their beautiful ancestral family home that sits on it...
A traditional property tax rating encompassing the value of the lot and everything that sits on it works much better for compulsory purchases.
IMO the problem is why such stubborn holdouts exist and why can't the government work with them...
I suspect the legal system is one of the reasons. Judges and precedents carry more weight than in other countries, where parliaments can just pass a law that's unassailable.
On the other hands I read here news about authorities summarily seizing (not just freezing) assets from people that are only accused. That's unconceivable in other jurisdictions.
Your comment about the Shanghai subway sparked my curiosity. Wikipedia says the Shanghai metro consists of 396 stations across 19 lines, and has been operating since 1993. How does that square with "since [2012] the Shanghai subway station has opened 21 new lines composed of 516 stations"? Especially when Wikipedia also says "During Expo 2010 the metro system consisted of 11 lines, 407 km, and 277 stations." Seems like they opened 119 stations and added 8 new lines since 2012.
Parent misspoke. It's been 21 lines consisting of 516 stations in total since inception (really since 2000 since there was a long lull of little activity in the 90s). The discrepancy in lines comes from whether you count certain rail-based transportation lines as part of the subway system or not. The discrepancy in subway stations is mainly due to whether you count interchange stations as single stations or multiple stations. I think the former is the one that is usually quoted for other subway systems in the world so makes more sense (so ~400 is probably the more appropriate number of stations to state).
I also wonder if the Wikipedia article may be out of date? IIRC there were some new stations added in the last few months. But even if that were the case it's just a couple of stations, so the numbers should still be close.
More impressive to me is the pace of construction in smaller cities which have also been rapidly building out subway systems (e.g. Hangzhou comes to mind, getting around Hangzhou on public transportation has drastically improved in the last five years, likewise I've personally seen the same immense improvements for Harbin).
I'm sure Japan is not at China's levels but in the time I lived there are I saw several lines get completely, several stations get rebuilt (A good example would be Shinagawa Station) and an 11km underground highway built. Meanwhile it's taken SF 10 plus years for SF to build a tiny 4 station line (the Central Line) and it's not done.
The thing is, Europe, where the environment is a significant consideration, also builds subways (and other things) at significantly faster speeds and lower cost than the US.
If you look in any detail, it's not a matter of some magic the Chinese or whoever have, it's matter of the corrupt nexus of interests that have come to soak up any transit spending in the US, in particular.
Those are just anecdotes. You can google up ten articles verifying US transit construction costs are higher per mile - and the US is much more spread out too.
"an inherent trade off between environmental consideration and speed"
It's not just environmental consideration. Speed also incentivizes corner cutting, nepotism, and all sorts of corrupt behavior. Evergrande is a great example of speed. Banks in China made the same mistakes that banks in US made in 2008. If banks in China had tight regulations for the last 20 years, real estate growth would be significantly hampered.
China should be given credit in that their leaders learned from other countries and leveraged their population size to grow with incredible speed. However, I would argue that China's rise to power has less to do with their efficiency and more to do with laws of growth. If we exclude Covid, I am willing to bet that China will not be able to sustain double digit growth ever again. In fact, I am willing to bet my house that when China achieves US's per capita GDP levels, China will never achieve double digit growth ever again.
I'm not familiar with this so if you can help me understand, I would appreciate it.
From my understanding, one of the causes of slowness in US is waiting for bids. Government related work is required to open projects up for bids for a period of time, review all the bids and document the process. In many other countries, the project goes to the company with better relations to the project manager or the companies with the best bribes.
The longer something takes, the longer it is expected to take. Delays compound on themselves, it becomes harder to plan further into the future. Costs skyrocket. More opportunities for bad actors to enrich themselves.
Maybe. The way I see it, transparency and fairness takes far more time than nepotism and corrupt behavior. How would you suggest that the government be more fair, transparent and fast?
More time for obstructionists to find footing, increased chance of loss of political will, and more opportunities for public opinion to sour among other things.
While rushing isn’t good, protracting the process is also a likely death sentence for the project in question.
Many have reached US levels of economic output per hour. The key difference is that while Europeans have opted for better work-life balance, Americans are increasingly worked to the bone. There seems to be no end to stories about people working 3 job, never having vacation, sometimes not even weekends.
The other challenge is that many other countries are more aggressive about keeping resource usage to a minimal. Compare e.g. usage or resources, water, land and energy per dollar of GDP and the US is really high.
European countries, Korea and Japan may not have as high GDP but is often on a far more sustainable path.
Japan has better WLB than the US? Are you sure? This sounds very anecdotal.
> Americans are increasingly worked to the bone. There seems to be no end to stories about people working 3 job, never having vacation, sometimes not even weekends.
My counter: I don't know a single person working like this
You have the people upset that their big tech employer won’t do their laundry anymore. Then you have the underclass of people who can lose everything if they get hurt or show up late for work a few times.
I've heard a few like that. They are in the early years of founding a business, their day job is unpaid, the 2nd job is so they can eat, and theweekend job is more money to invest in the main one. The plan is in a few years the first job makes money and they quit the others.
Or sometimes someone who is laid off in a downturn and works like that for a year while waiting for things to improve so they can return to their previous high spending lifestyle with lots of vacation to enjoy the toys they are now just able to make payments on.
Exactly. Most people only work one job. You hear stories, they are true, but they are the exception. Or they are about a problem unrelated to poverty. (Child support is a big one, courts are sexist in many cases)
I know some poor people. They live in poor neighborhoods, and have little. However the vast majority are not working two jobs.
Or maybe it doesn't occur to you that in the middle of the country it is possible to afford a (small!) apartment on minimum wage jobs. We hear stories about how high the cost of living is in CA, but it isn't that bad here.
Is GDP per capita appropriate metric? Japan has higher median salaries than US does.
How much of thay GDP is down to US being a global center of finance and location of corporate HQ of most gl9bal firms, pulling in wealth from across the world?
Also how much of that GDP remains if you remove the top 0.1% of richest people?
You may argue those things shouls not be remoced from GDP, but if we are discussing working life on an average person, this GDP number might not be reflective of it
> Also how much of that GDP remains if you remove the top 0.1% of richest people?
those richest people don't personally contribute that much to GDP (their companies they own do). Removing them would make not much difference - their spending might be 10x or may be even 100x the average person, but there's so few of them that barely worth mentioning. It's not like they eat more food than normal people, nor wear out cars more than normal people. A few yachts and fancy cars notwithstanding, GDP is a measure of output, not wealth accumulation.
Wages are the minimum people accept for their labour. GDP is a measure of productivity, which can increase with investment in plant and equipment (and tech via R&D).
If a worker is more efficient, but every worker is also made more efficient (because of the equipment or tech), then their bargaining power doesn't grow with their productivity increase!
The exceptions are where their individual output is higher - aka, skill. Tech workers getting higher wages is evidence of this. At some point, the number of tech workers would saturate as it is such a lucrative profession compared to many others - it's just the 2000 dot-com pop caused a huge drop in enrollments in universities and the lack of graduates is still felt today imho.
Meanwhile, a services industry worker still outputs the same amount of "work" as they've done before in yester-century (not much tech can improve their output). The pay for them have not really grown, because there's no room to grow. Only mandates like minimum wage increases cause it to grow, and those hardly come by.
I'd honestly prefer the hard working ethic of Americans over lassie-faire hierarchical orthodoxy in EU. No one works to the bone, hard work is also rewarded. They choose to do it. The ease of business is amazing.
I lived in the USA for 32 years, after growing up in the UK for 24. I don't see a "hard working ethic" in the USA. What I do see is a relentless, frequently unrealistic optimism that both diverts people from taking coherent political change seriously and also empowers them to believe that their lives will be better tomorrow than today.
Lots of people in the USA work to the bone. Maybe you don't work with them, or see them when and where they work, but many books and articles have been written by people who've been deep inside this phenomenon. "Nickel & Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich is a great example.
Yes, entrepeneurialism is easy here, and that's a good thing. However, I refuse to believe that this requires the rest of the system to remain as it is, or that by itself it justifies the suffering of the majority of people who do not "make it".
I should perhaps note that I did "make it" here in the USA. I have tried hard to to allow that to blind me to the fact that it was mostly luck, nor to the immense, unnecessary suffering that our economic and political system imposes on millions of people (even just within the country).
> What I do see is a relentless, frequently unrealistic optimism that both diverts people from taking coherent political change seriously and also empowers them to believe that their lives will be better tomorrow than today.
I disagree with your premises. I love the way things are. I do not agree with current progressive agenda, I stand by the old liberal values.
> I should perhaps note that I did "make it" here in the USA.
Sorry about your situation. I am an immigrant that came from a place I never want to go back, this land has given everything I asked for in return of honest, good day's work.
Most importantly, I enjoy the freedoms that other nations do not grant.
I think you misread what I said. If you look back up up the thread, you'll find there is absolutely no reason to pity my situation at all.
Sure, I got a LOT back from the USA, much more than anyone deserves really. And even without that stroke of good luck (sure, maybe it favored my prepared mind), a lot of people can live "like kings" in the USA compared to the life they would have led elsewhere.
But I do not believe that the suffering of those who lead much worse lives in the USA can justify my own comfort (or that of anyone else's). Nor the opposite. The fact that it is possible to succeed here in ways that might never have worked "back home" does not justify the oppression that continues to affect millions of Americans.
I’ve met quite a few executives at US companies who emigrated from Europe. At the high end, America kicks the shit out of Europe in every regard. The high end people create the new companies, and thus America has far more equity value than Europe, and new innovative companies, and cutting edge research, etc. etc. Europe might be better for the average person but the hyper successful generally opt to leave.
We don't need the hyper-successful, certainly not the way you're defining them.
In a society of 350 millions people that is vaguely capitalistic, there will always be people who "win big". The "high end" people are just the living manifestation of serendipidity. If it wasn't Bezos, it would have been someone else.
Also, "the high-end people create the new companies" is almost complete BS. The mythology of the exceptional individual that dominates the USA promotes this story, but the reality is that successful companies are the result of the collaborative, cooperative efforts of many different people (many of them not "high-end"). A company like Amazon was created by a constellation of people with very different backgrounds, socio-economic status and intent.
> Saying Bezos just won is simply dishonest. His ideas and approach had an impact.
If Bezos never existed, or chose to become a theoretical physicist,there would have been another company filling the niche(s) with some other founder who didn't screw up the company.
"Not screwing up the company" is a necessary but insufficient condition for startup success.
I did not say that "Bezos just won" nor that his ideas and approach had no impact. As has been noted by others in this sub-thread, the point is that if it had not been Bezos (because he stayed at D.E. Shaw, or fucked up early Amazon) it would have been someone else. Capitalism abhors a vacuum.
(1) by definition you cannot be better than the best.
(2) "someone will win" is a description of a competition. If it was a marathon, and your goal was to win, and you knew that there were 500 runners capable of running more than 30 minutes faster than you, why would you enter the marathon. You will NOT win.
(3) there are other goals in life besides winning (for example, what i've done since leaving amazon after just over a year). you can pour almost unlimited amounts of energy, time and love into something without the need to be declared "the winner", and indeed, this is what most people do with most of their lives. you may choose to run a marathon despite knowing that you cannot possibly win the race. you may even choose to run a marathon knowing you will be slower than the last time you tried. running is not a good metaphor or analogy for business "competition".
(4) there are lots of contexts that are nothing like a marathon. you don't know who will be participating. you don't know how good they are. you don't know how good you are. you may not even fully understand what the criteria for "winning" are. nevertheless, you will still be "competing" with others, and you may choose to participate in that for reasons that are much more complicated than "i want to win" (though that might be one of them).
(5) if you do not have intrinsic motivation, you will likely be unable to show sufficient dedication to succeed in a competitive business environment. so you'd better have at least that. maybe it comes because your arrogance makes you want to prove to the world how good you are. maybe it comes because you're really, deeply convinced that your idea will make the world a better place. but it had better be some sort of motivation beyond "i just want to win" - that's almost never enough to succeed.
(6) so let's assume that you do have an excellent level of intrinsic motivation. let's say you have an excellent idea. let's say you have excellent ideas about to build a company and a product/service. these are all necessary ingredients for success. but will any of them guarantee it? no, they will not.
(7) if you're the kind of person who matches (6) but believes the success is purely a result of what you (and perhaps others) bring to the effort, you're likely to be rather surprised. the chances are that despite your motivation, excellent ideas and management, you will fail. you will fail in a very ordinary way: the way that most people fail - a combination of bad luck, perhaps a handful of minor errors, maybe one or two major ones. if you're aware of this, and it stops you from even starting, that's probably for the best in the contemporary US economy. not wanting to do something without a guaranteed win is likely negatively correlated with actual success.
(8) on the other hand, if you're aware of this, but your intrinsic motivation is still high enough to make a go of it, then go for it. this will not change your chances of success (at least not much) - chances are you will fail. but you're the type of person who is OK with this. you know that every once in a while, someone (probably someone like you) will succeed beyond anyone's expectations, and that adds to your own intrinsic motivation sufficiently to make it worth the risk - the likelihood - of failure.
(9) people like the ones who match (8) are why we have amazon and its ilk.
The problem is [ EDIT: NOT ] that people like this exist, nor that they behave as they do. The problem is believing that:
(a) the results of their own self-belief and efforts to validate that are always good for society
(b) good things only arise from this sort of person
(c) the corrollary of (b), that people who are not like this can not create things that are good for society
a, b and c are all demonstrably provably false, both in modern times, and throughout the span of human history.
I simply can't understand your point(s). I'm honestly trying, and re-read this 3 times.
Should no one ever try? Or is it only in the context of business?
Furthermore, who are your heroes, and why do they fulfill the criteria of your success metrics? Or is every single successful person merely an unthinking automaton living a preordained existence?
Having family wealthy enough to invest in his early business is a kind of talent I guess. As is being in the right place at the right time. If Bezos lost all of his money tomorrow he could never make it a second time.
Having followed what Bezos did and pushed as company culture, I disagree completely.
I wouldn't want to work at Amazon (there are certainly better pay / stress jobs out there), but I believe the way their individual teams work is the key to success and what most large organisations get wrong.
I just think the teams should get more bonuses / equity tied in their team success in order for it to be fair for team members.
It's basically build-your-startup level of stress but you're working for Bezos.
Similarly the general strategy of reinvesting in Amazon and spinning off AWS was just pure genius.
Plenty of people can get investment. There is only one Amazon. If things are so easy, go do it yourself.
Starting a company and growing it to the size of Amazon is extremely difficult. It doesn’t happen by luck or happenstance. It takes highly skilled management in addition to market timing.
Luck isn’t what makes people successful. Hard working people put themselves out there and increase the opportunities for lucky events, but without the hard work and effort the luck wouldn’t be able to happen.
Looking at successful people and pointing out some advantage they have is just a coping mechanism. Assuming you don’t have some disability, no one is stopping you from succeeding except yourself.
> Starting a company and growing it to the size of Amazon is extremely difficult.
That is almost certainly true. But what you don't get is that there are dozens (maybe many more) constantly striving to do just that. When some of them of succeed, why would you be surprised? Why would it be surprising or special when a system designed to cause people to strive for this kind of success actually results in it happening to some of them, and not to most of them? There's nothing remarkable about the fact of a particular corporation's success: there was always going to be a corporate success, just as there were always going to be way more corporate failures. That's how the system is designed. That's what it is there to do. It's not a reason to idolize or even respect those who happened to be on the winning team.
Before you say much more, you should probably be aware that I was the #2 employee at Amazon.
And I’m the CTO of a unicorn I helped build from nothing! We have different opinions yet lived similar experiences.
I do respect and idolize the winners. Saying “someone would have done it if we didn’t” is defeatist. No one does anything unless someone does it. So we respect the people who actually do it rather than critique from the sidelines. It’s depressing to me that you were part of something amazing yet you view yourself as a replaceable cog and the success a meaningless byproduct of a system outside of your control.
Nobody within a particular human organization is a replaceable cog (well, at least that's an ideal that I think it is reasonable to aspire to, even if it's not technically true in a great many instances).
But just as you shouldn't be surprised when you visit a forest that there are some really big trees, some not so big, and some dead trees because that's how forests work, you shouldn't be surprised that when you survey the American corporate landscape, there are some huge successes, some moderate ones and lots of failures.
Sure, there was something about that much larger tree that made it nearly twice the size of its neighbors. But it was just as likely to be luck of where it germinated, luck of when it germinated, and yes, perhaps some good genes. Still, the idea that it was all the genes and that we've just discovered the uber-tree is mostly absurd.
And so it is with companies. The successful ones are most the product of an intersection of different kinds of luck with some necessary-but-insufficient features of their people. We've built a mythology in the USA that mostly all that matters is the nature of a few early founders (or perhaps the occasional turn-it-around later hire). I think this is demonstrably false. That doesn't make success a "meaningless byproduct of a system outside [your] control". It means that idolizing particular instances of success as being based on people distorts our understanding of how success actually happens (and how it doesn't).
I believe in intrinsic motivation - especially having worked with Bezos for a little while - and I do not think that we should, as a society, be providing motivation to people through the promise of fame and fortune. This is typically something that distorts and misdirects human effort and imagination. I also don't believe that we need to offer that motivation, at least certainly not to the extent that we currently do.
To whatever extent Amazon is amazing, it is also a mixture of good and bad, and I strongly regret that as individuals our society tends to focus so much more on the good and ignores the bad (the media over the last few years have begun to rebalance this, but it needs to go much further).
It is interesting to me to read your thought process. I still cannot disagree more.
No one discovers a scientific breakthrough until they do. That breakthrough may have been an inevitable result of multiple independent teams working on it, the prior research hitting a certain point, technology advancing to provide the tools, and so on. Yet we praise the team that actually discovered it.
Similarly I don’t care if “an” Amazon was inevitable. It was Bezos that founded it and Amazon that did it. I am an individualist and I appreciate that we have superstars in all manner of art, academia, and business as well. These are what move society forwards. The moment I’m forced to start giving my stuff away to the collective is the moment I leave. I’m happy Bezos is rich as I’m happy sports stars and musicians are rich - it’s great they made our lives better.
A scientific breakthrough is intrinsically more meaningful and valuable, in every important way, than a business monopoly. The monopoly necessarily exploited a momentary, conditional weakness in the business and regulatory environment and then defended itself against what should have been competition.
We are all much poorer for as long as any monopoly holds onto its market power.
A successful business is not prima facie a monopoly. Leftists like to cast all rich business people as monopolists who don’t deserve their money, yet glide over musicians, athletes, artists, writers, and all others in the creative professions who are rich yet are somehow more “deserving” of their wealth as they talk on their iPhones and type on their laptops.
I see starting and operating businesses as not only extremely difficult but arguably more valuable to society than another play or book. Yes, I love books. But in terms of usefulness to society a cheaper taco or a faster diaper delivery is on the whole a huge gain for society.
Soviet Russia made some good literature. But I don’t want humanity to live under the boot of communism so that a few books are written.
Is there no one on earth you respect, historical or current? Those are the “winners” in the context of my comment.
Either you respect people who accomplished great things, or you don’t. I choose to respect and appreciate the fine things created by hyper talented people.
> It doesn’t happen by luck or happenstance. It takes highly skilled management in addition to market timing.
Market timing is just a euphemism for luck.
> Luck isn’t what makes people successful. Hard working people put themselves out there and increase the opportunities for lucky events, but without the hard work and effort the luck wouldn’t be able to happen.
Bullshit. Hard work without luck is often just hard work.
> Looking at successful people and pointing out some advantage they have is just a coping mechanism. Assuming you don’t have some disability, no one is stopping you from succeeding except yourself.
This just sounds like self-help seminar platitudes. I'm recognizing Bezos had advantages lots of other people did not have. He's was a well off white male with connections in the US. He would be notable if he didn't have some manner of success.
Discounting the luck of circumstances is foolish. Idolize Bezos for his business acumen but there's no need to white knight for him if someone points out he started off on second base when you're claiming he hit a home run.
And a famous musician had parents with the means and ability to purchase lessons and encourage them to practice. I still say the musician should be respected and praised. We can play this game all day. Some will say no one does anything on their own, but I say creating Amazon is an incredible accomplishment worth of praise and study.
USAmerica's great successes are largely in wealth transfer from lower class to upper class, and selling vices. That's why GDP is so much higher than quality of life -- the economy is largely people paying each other to hurt each other.
America’s greatest success is the rule of law, stable republican government, and the protection of private property. America continues to outdo the rest of the world because it is better.
It's greatest success was in killing or driving off native populations or smaller groups of other settlers (French, Spanish, Mexican) to get 7 million sqkm of prime real estate only found to the same scale in Europe (where it's divided among 40+ countries) and China (surprise-surprise, the main rival).
A place like Germany, for example, I find in no way inferior to the US, population wise, but it's geographically much more constrained and in much less defensible position.
Plenty of native empires, such as the Aztecs and Mayans, enslaved, murdered, and worked to death numerous other groups of people, which are well documented in primary sources.
The US did evil, as did the Germans in Africa during their colonial period, and so did African empires that sold their enemies into slavery.
Nothing is black and white. Although many on HN like to pretend so.
America’s greatest success used to be the rule of law, stable republican government, and the protection of private property.
Now, the US has the greatest degree of high-level corruption in the world, second perhaps only to China. In China, corruption is technically still illegal, but permitted to the Party faithful. In the US, it has all been made explicitly legal.
I would counterargue that corners are often cut just as terribly in the US. The corners are simply cut slower, because everything here is done slower.
For example, electronics built in the US are typically shittier than electronics built in China, despite taking significantly longer to build and employees being paid orders of magnitude more (as noted by companies like Apple, Purism, etc.)
Within our culture in the US there is a clear and comically obvious problem of bureaucracy and red-tape. This doesn't really exist in software yet, but the day our government gets its claws into the software industry is the day that innovation in the US can be put to rest. (Well, it's already happening - if you try to create a software startup that processes user data, you are probably breaking tens of laws you don't even know exist.)
There is also a cultural difference. One thing I have noticed when working with my Chinese coworkers is that they do not bullshit nearly as much as my other coworkers. They get straight to the point, deal in metrics and facts, and don't try to inflate their accomplishments. Maybe that's just my current work environment, maybe it's a cultural thing - I suspect the latter.
> "I would counterargue that corners are often cut just as terribly in the US."
I would agree with you. The bay bridge had issues with the steel[0]. The millenium tower[1] also has corner cutting problems. The question is the frequency. I believe corner cutting happens far less in the US than say China.
As a Chinese person in the US, I would bet dollars to doughnuts that people in China would prefer foreign products over Chinese ones across the board. The last time I was in China, my friends tell me that they prefer products from Korea over ones in China. The problem is the cost.
> "Within our culture in the US there is a clear and comically obvious problem of bureaucracy and broken red-tape."
People often complain about bureaucracy and broken red-tape in the US but after thinking about this deeply, I'm beginning to suspect that the US government is one of the more efficient governments in the world:
1) How many people in this world can honestly say "Wow my government is so efficient that it's more efficient than the corporations in my country."
2) The US has some amazing departments. National parks, military/CIA/FBA/NSA, federal reserve, state department, FDA, CDC, DOD (research), public universities, community college, consumer protection, USPS, etc. What they actually accomplish is amazing and is at the top of the world or near the top.
3) The US accomplishes so much while maintaining a democracy. The US pioneers human rights around the world.
> 1) How many people in this world can honestly say "Wow my government is so efficient that it's more efficient than the corporations in my country."
Quite a few. This isn't unique to the US, and quite a few corporations do not drive themselves to bankruptcy being extremely inefficient or even malicious for multiple years. We've seen plenty of examples in the last few decades.
> 2) The US has some amazing departments. National parks, military/CIA/FBA/NSA, federal reserve, state department, FDA, CDC, DOD (research), public universities, community college, consumer protection, USPS, etc. What they actually accomplish is amazing and is at the top of the world or near the top.
You could replace "the US" with any Western/Northern European country, Japan, Korea, Oceania, Canada and quite a few other countries and they would fit the bill pretty well, give or take a few aspects.
> 3) The US accomplishes so much while maintaining a democracy. The US pioneers human rights around the world.
Same as the above. The US isn't the only country maintaining a democracy. The US has also been leagues behind on several countries in some aspects for decades.
Meanwhile, most of these European countries face the exact same problem the US will in the future if things continue the way they are. Doing things "better" or "best" is not a cop-out for letting problems continue to the point of a crisis. Housing in Europe is a prime example of this, where regulations are arguably hurting us more than they are helping, but the majority of the population still believes we'll be living in rundown apartments if we don't keep these regulations (often citing the US as 'evidence', ironically).
> People often complain about bureaucracy and broken red-tape in the US but after thinking about this deeply, I'm beginning to suspect that the US government is one of the more efficient governments in the world:
In a lot of cases, I think US complaints about "bureaucracy and broken red-tape" are more a function of anti-government ideology. It's not like businesses don't have annoying bureaucracy, but the complaints tend to be selectively directed at the government, because for many people government is a boogeyman.
For an example, take Google. Wouldn't it be light-years better if they had customer support that was as good as the the worst DMV's?
Which DMV? I've been to several different offices in my life. Some were worse than Google, (you have a chance of your story getting noticed and Google helping), some were very nice and friendly.
Government processes tend to be open and accessible so people can see how they work (or don't). Large corporations are closed and secretive so out of sight, out of mind.
The Bay Bridge faults have non-trivially been blamed (rightly or wrongly is unclear) on Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries Company who provided a lot of the materials [1]. The Wikipedia article doesn't talk about the steel itself (surprisingly!) but does mention they did the deck work, the automatic welds, and so on. There was plenty of blame to go around though.
When’s the last time you were back in China? That used to be the case, but increasingly less so. Especially after Trump’s trade war. Chinese people I know proudly buy Huawei and Nio cars. Even American products that Chinese people love like iPhones and Tesla are produced in China now…
Also 1. I don’t think people generally say that.
2. CDC made a huge mess of the pandemic (eg not stocking enough PPE). USPS is in big financial trouble.
3. This is huge topic but I’m inclined to say US messes up as often as it succeeds. Afghanistan will have 22 million people starving this year because of US sanctions. They promote democracy, but not human rights.
But overall I think you’re right to say the US government is one of the “more” efficient ones.
"USPS being in big financial trouble" should be considered a crazy idea. To me, it's like saying the "Senate" is in big financial trouble or the Federal Reserve is in big financial trouble. USPS should be a federal entity. They should be managed just like the State department.
What the USPS accomplishes is amazing. For a few dollars, you can send anyone a letter or a package to anywhere in the United States. The amount of productivity and the improved standard of living they provide incredible.
I always find that argument hilarious because the USPS was required to actually have conservative, healthy funding for their pensions - something no other state or federal agency does! And this is supposedly a bad thing! Just look at Chicago for an example of unfunded pension liabilities - a ticking time bomb.
A point of contention: Democracy is the surest way to safeguard human right long term in a nation. Historically speaking, there isn't even a second place when it comes to other forms of rule operating effectively on the necessary timescales.
Promoting democracy is promoting human rights the same way promoting exercise is promoting health and well-being.
Democracy is far from the surest way to safeguard human rights. It's just a game of definitions that whenever a democracy commits atrocities, it retroactively stops being a democracy, even when the people are on board with it.
Or maybe they do actually stop being democracies before the bad stuff happens? Care to share an example?
Literally all of the countries that have had continuous constitutions + liberal human rights (that is a long running government that hasn't violated its citizens rights) are democracies right now.
Right, that's exactly what I'm talking about. You're defining it as "a long-running government that hasn't violated its citizens rights". By this definition, you could exclude the United States as one of its minorities wasn't able to vote until recently. You're begging the question.
That was a bad definition because I was painting with broad strokes an hard lines.
Maybe this is a better way to phrase my statement: The countries that treat their constituents best are all democracies. Additionally, they tend to promote or retain rights better over time.
The US, and most of Europe are great examples. It's not perfect correlation, likewise people drop dead running marathons sometimes, but the correlation between democracy and human well-being is very strong.
You'd have to define "democracy" in some meaningful way. Is Russia a democracy? Was Iraq under Saddam Hussein a democracy? Elections were held, he won about 100% of the vote. Is the US a democracy? The winner of the presidential elections doesn't always get the most votes, and is in practice obliged to be a member of one of only two parties.
I think this might be true. But the USA is not simply a democracy. It’s a liberal hegemony, and that brings a whole set of other problems.
I believe that an objective look at US foreign policy shows that US always looks out for #1 (itself).
It helped overthrow an elected socialist leader in Chile in 1973. It made up reasons to invade Iraq. It defended Kuwait, a monarchy. It interferes in other countries all the time. When the dictator supports US interests, it leaves them be. When a democratically elected government resists them, they try to tear it down.
So I think what you mean is democracy is good for advancing human rights for CITIZENS of that country. The empirical evidence is not super strong for advancing human rights in general.
No government is as efficient as corporations (hard to get anything done when you're eating doughnuts on tax-payers' money and you can't fail or be fired!) but I agree the us government is not the worst.
If you want to see real bad go to some southern European country.
I can honestly say that many agencies of my goverent are more efficient than the private alternative.
As far as pioneering human rights around the world, a few million dead innocents disagree. People who say the US is good at human rights always limit it to within their own borders. Internationally, the US has caused more death and destruction than almost any country.
While acquiring the property takes more time in America, I can't help but notice once construction starts it also takes a ridiculously long time too. It really seems like the interests of the power brokers in various areas are far outstripping the interests of the utility to society in multiple areas in America.
The problem is the massive bureaucracy / government we have today. Massive swaths of government workers literally being payed to sit all day in zoom calls on "meetings" talking about approving projects and budgets, from local infrastructure to schools, to medical, etc.
Source: Live with someone with said job. See them in meetings all day long, accomplishing nothing other than getting their paycheck.
It’s funny. My partner has a government job and works much harder than anyone I know in private industry (as do her co-workers). Also, it is a better organized place to work than most enterprises I’ve consulted for.
Goes to show YMMV and it’s not worth making sweeping generalizations about a sector of workers.
Of course "sweeping generalizations" aren't always right. That's obvious.
It doesn't mean that generalizations themselves aren't worthwhile, and sometimes accurate enough to frame a problem. Exceptions to the rule shouldn't completely invalidate the rule.
In this case I also never said anything about them working hard per se. No doubt they work very hard, but seem to accomplish nothing. Working hard, not smart.
In private industry, the owner(s) takes on the losses of such people who get paid doing nothing. With enough losses, the owners will run out of capital and go bust.
In public service (and academia i guess, which is often funded publicly), the "owners" don't get a choice and have to eat a loss - it's not as if i can stop paying my taxes. A gov't does not go bust.
Yes, environmental bureaucracy like the article is focusing on is only one of many which have continuously strengthened as they circled the wagons around the status quo more and more in so many other areas besides just public works projects.
But public works projects in particular are handled by government bureaucracies, one of the least accountable kind.
Environmental is just one of the obvious bureaucracies that was not there for the older ones of us who remember what life was like before the EPA was formed.
Lots of other little bureaucracies had already been established decades before anyone living at the time had been born. People were just expected to accept those because no remaining person could say whether things were better or worse beforehand. It could often be seen that they were still in the relatively flat portion of a multigenerational exponential growth curve, and so it goes.
Remember people have to build things and after the mid-1970's there was no more money to do that with inflation.
Before then people who worked manufacturing or construction jobs in the US had never been getting ahead at all very often unless they were unionized, but this was the straw that broke that by driving manufacturing to other countries and construction to unskilled workers from other countries.
It was strong enough to break the unions so you can imagine the devastating effect it had on everyone else.
At this time it was still accepted that an American manufacturing worker, maybe with overtime, would be earning more than an average office worker since it was just plain harder work. University education was not yet common enough to be structured into the systems as very much of a ticket to higher pay.
And government office workers had always had to accept lower pay than their counterparts in the private sector, since less skill & work was actually required and these were the candidates who couldn't quite get hired by bureaucracies like Sears or big insurance companies.
Either way the need for people sitting in offices accomplishing nothing can spiral out of control, even without the occasional effort to consume increasing yearly budgets or risk losing the yearly increases. And government workers got the upper hand with earlier formalization of university requirements for so many positions, at the same time the private sector had so many challenges to survival of its revenue streams that the governments did not face.
By now this trend has government workers making more money than their counterparts in the private sector, plus having more institutional power dedicated to preservation of the institution itself rather than what the institution should actually stand for. Much less what the institution should accomplish if that means physically building something.
Stagnation became the acceptable foundation on which to instead build virtual structures ever more resilient to change.
At one time the people who built stuff had generations of bulding legacy and knew how to do it already, they were the backbone of society, and got paid more than the people in the offices who shuffled the papers which expedited the process.
Now the people in the offices who don't know how to build stuff get paid more than the unskilled workers who try to do it anyway, after the bureaucrats finally finish shuffling the papers needed to delay or derail the project according to somebody's agenda in a chain of command that didn't previously exist when things could actually get done only a few decades ago. Bureaucrats can be most skilled at building more bureaucracy, and they are good at it after making multigenerational efforts, so that's what they more often build.
I'm curious if it's not time to solve the chronic manageritis in large workplaces. It pains me to know end that resources are wasted on babbling while people doing the work are on their knees.
It's not the massive bureaucracy. It's that civil service-style systems (as in China) and pay-for-performance are both basically illegal in the federal government.
Big government is not necessarily flawed, but big govt as we have structured it is just incompetent.
Undoubtedly some people greatly benefited from the land purchase, when such offers are made. I've also heard of stories (friend of a friend kinda, I do not directly know one) of people actually getting rich (not middle class, like rich rich) by having properties in areas that the government happens to like. (more so in suburbs of big cities like Shanghai or Shenzhen)
However the point is even one forced eviction is one too many and the people who come out better for it (good for them) does not justify the poor treatment of people who simply dare to say no to the communist party.
Well, I've had cops break into my house in the US and mace my sister and I when we were little. So, I won't say I stand on much of a high ground here in the US. But yes, local governments in China should do better with this kind of thing.
You don't get to simply say no to eminent domain in any functioning country in the world, and neither should you be able to. I don't see the problem as long as you are properly compensated.
Saying no to just block a public infrastructure project is just malicious.
As long as people are paid for a new property and inconvenience it's fine. Nobody should be able to block a project that benefits the society as a whole.
Communist party or not, a person should not be capable of blocking a project that benefits the whole country just because <insert random reason here>.
Romania does have a lot of issues with motorway developments because of speciments like this. After the first major one that blocked the Bucharest-Constanta motorway for years, the gov't passed a law that allows them to just take the property and pay market prices. As it should be.
This is a good question. Where do we draw the line at human rights? Should land ownership be a protected right? It would cost a lot less if the government just took the land instead of paying fair market value.
It would also cost a lot less if we forced all criminals to work for free (though right now, they practically work for free). The problem is that we would quickly run out of criminals since there are so many projects that needs work. We could just randomly enslave people to do work for free.
Enslaving citizens wouldn't be fair or popular with the citizens of our country. Another option is to use our military might to subjugate other countries and bring them over to work, say to work on our farms. That would allow for very high gdp growth.
So where do we draw the line and who gets to draw that line?
We draw the line where there's an obvious problem. For every reductio ad absurdum looking at slavery and trying to put down another country's citizens at the benefit of our own, there is a counterexample looking at how ridiculous it is we have ultra-rich deciding their little game of looking at numbers going up and people living in McMansions just to show off being more important than a giant middle class unable to afford housing where their grandfathers and grandmothers could living a lower class lifestyle.
Surely somewhere we can accept that a bunch of wealthy playing the investment game on very limited resources instead of the realm of producing solutions or improvements isn't the way to further society as a whole. We don't have to put down those already in the ditches further, we got a swat of people above to look at.
I think we both agree that we shouldn't be protecting the wealthy. I just think we should do it another way. IMO, high housing prices exist because of the lack of supply. I think it's possible for the government to increase housing stock and have reasonable property rights.
There is a balance between letting a single individual stall progress for all of society, and respecting human rights. A single individual certainly should not be able to block the construction of a public transit system that will bring jobs and improve the livelihood of millions. At the same time, the government can provide reasonable alternative accommodations or pay market value (not decided by the individual in question.)
Eliminating NIMBYism and individuals' selfish obstinacy does not need to lead to a global hegemony enslaving billions.
Oil gas pipelines? Sure. The reason I say this is because it seems to me that democracy is a system designed to favor the majority over the minority. So why not for public projects?
That depends on how you're defining "small number of people". If a big fraction of the people in the way of a segment object, then that's probably not small. If a couple family farms object, then that's not very important.
That's an awful solution. Some small fraction of people in the way shouldn't get an enormous multiplier over market value, in some kind of giant prisoner's dilemma auction.
If you offer the group a certain percentage of market value, that could work out well. But unanimous consensus is not a reasonable way to get land for big public projects.
“Market value” requires willing participants. If a seller doesn’t want to sell at a particular price and the good isn’t fungible (which housing is not), they aren’t getting market value by being forced to sell at a price determined solely by the buyer.
If you think it's impossible to assess the value of a property, the whole legal world disagrees with you.
And yeah, the point of eminent domain is to force the sale on unwilling participants. If used sparingly and without discrimination, it's a good power, and part of living in a community that will undertake community projects.
* the underlying assessed value, excluding artificial caps like prop 13
Sure, go with “taxable value”, but let’s not pretend it’s market value any more than the market value of a human life is what an insurance company values it at.
Well market value plus some premium for inconvenience of not being able to choose sounds fair, perhaps FMV + 20% or perhaps up to 30%. These are large amounts of money so perhaps the premium should be an absolute not percentage value.
FMV +10% for tolerance of estimate of FMV + 6 months average salary in the area would be generous enough to recompense the hassles of relocating.
Remember surrounding society, that is hundreds of thousands of other people, benefit from the infrastructure being developed.
> Should we let a small number of people hold hostage over public projects?
I think by phrasing the holdouts as "hold hostage over public projects" is misguided if not disingenuous. This is a common propaganda used by authoritarian regimes to paint anyone they don't like in a bad light: surely they're not victims of government brutality if they're "enemies of the common good."
But if we accept we can discard one individual's (or a small group of individuals') rights, then it's not long before everyone's rights become disposable. That's how people like Putin and Xi justifies their aggression (surely I can kill millions of people in Taiwan if it stands in the way of "progress" of 1.3 billion mainlanders!)
P.S. As someone as pointed out, this is not a China/US or eastern/western issue. The U.S. has its own fair share of blatant violation of private rights too.
But my point is that it's wrong when U.S. does it, it's wrong when China does it, it's wrong when anyone does it and it shouldn't be something we aspire to.
"While I appreciate that there is an inherent trade off between environmental consideration and speed, I think the author makes it clear that it's reached comic proportions in the US."
The quote I think that encapsulated it best was:
"And this is where I feel that lawmakers of the 1970s made a huge mistake. Rather than accept the need for general rules, or choices by accountable elected officials, the lawmakers built a dispersed power structure filled with veto points that lends itself to analysis paralysis"
Given how trash the environment is becoming due to various forms of intransigence, there is an interesting trade off to be made in more ambitious projects that actually move the dial, which ironically might require tinkering with same said systems that currently are at the root of (a phrase change I would make) "decision paralysis".
I’m trying to build a house on empty land in Los Angeles. It’s about 15mins from downtown in Mt Washington. We bought the land in April of 2019 and started on the design and permitting process immediately. Despite it being in populated Los Angeles, we need a septic system, to widen the road and add curbs, move a power pole, relocate 3 trees, and extend a water line. We won’t have gas as we want to go all solar. All of this the city is making us pay for.
Our permit for a small septic system took 14 months to approve.
The power department has told us it will likely take 12 months for them to approve the pole movement (the city is making us move it as part of the road widening).
The water main needs to be extended 12 feet, and it’s mandated that the utility company must do that work and it will cost us $75k.
The tree permit took us 12 months to get and requires us to get a bond too.
We still haven’t got approval for the road widening, it’s been almost 18 months. Keep in mind this is just the road in front of our house in a residential area of Los Angeles. There are lots of homes on our street already.
I’m originally from Australia. The American bureaucracy is insane. The agencies don’t talk to each other. Often times we have been acting as the go between for different departments that worked in the same building!
Los Angeles has a huge housing shortage. If my experience is anything to go by, it’s because the bureaucracy is so dense it takes years to just get the permits in place. It would be cheaper and better if I could just pay a bribe and get it done quickly.
Americans seem to know what the problem is, but just accept that nothing can be done about it. Like you all know the DMV sucks and the USPS sucks, but everyone has just accepted that’s it’s just the way it is and decided to live with it. Why?! Hold your officials accountable to actually run government effectively.
You're in one of the worst ran cities in all of America.
I rant here often about how horrible LA is, wonder why they're so few new homes getting built in LA. Well now you know.
The cost to build anything is so astronomical. The only thing that gets builts are luxury apartments/condos are multi-million dollar McMansions.
To see an extreme example of this, just look at how much money was spent per each homeless shelter unit. Each of these units can only house one family or so, the city somehow spent $600,000 to $700,000 on each one. This source article uses a high estimate, some of these units are costing 800k.
I wish you the best of luck with finally getting your house built, but just factor in you're going to have to deal with these problems in every single aspect of living in Los Angeles.
I decided to leave, and in every aspect of my life I'm doing much better. I make more, my housing is cheaper, I don't need a car, and frankly everyone's nicer.
PS: If you want know WHY things are this bad, look at Prop 13. This allowed home owners to lock their taxes to when they purchased their homes. So say you currently own a house worth $800,000, you bought it 15 years ago when it was worth 200,000. You have no motivation to ever move, even if it would be better for you aside from the taxes.
So You end up with a very large contingent of homeowners who are going to be in their properties for their entire lives, and are extremely resistant to any change. NMBY level Max. Many people in LA don't want you to be able to build your house in any efficient manner, the easier it is to build a house. The cheaper houses are. If I'm a home owner, I don't want competition.
Really all across California, there seems to be this huge battle between the status-quo and the demand for change.
On the one hand you have the obvious demand for change. Housing if far too expensive, far too difficult to build and thus costs and astronomical amount which skews the economics of home building to the higher end of the market.
The top wants this change. The citizens want this change (for the most part). The solutions penetrate down levels of government until they are stopped dead at the lowest level. The bureaucracy at a certain level realizes they are on the chopping block and halts progress on change. They push back, their unions push back, the works.
So what you end up with is a bloated government agency, bloated for the sake of being bloated, making life miserable for the majority of residents, all of the sake of keeping itself in it's current bloated state.
The only thing that i see fixing the mess in California is if the guys at the top eliminate these many of these agencies. But they won't, because these agencies workers have unions, lobbies, the works. So the system will likely stay. Politicians will stay in the good graces of bloated government agencies which will only become more bloated and oh...the citizens? Who cares them.
No it does not. The USPS freaking rocks and comparatively trounces the competition. It delivers better and more reliably on time than any other carrier in the nation. The drivers are friendlier and more accommodating. They also deliver at sane hours and no matter the weather.
Amazon? Absolutely hands down the worst delivery retail experience. I've almost been run over by more than one amazon driver.
FedEx? Don't honor delivery instructions, regularly mark things delivered without delivery, leave ridiculous 'missed you' notes for signed packages, inconsistent service across the nation.
UPS Probably the better privately run one, but way more expensive than USPS and the drivers aren't nearly as friendly as postal delivery people.
USPS is great. I run a small ecommerce business and each year a package or two is lost (out of hundreds, maybe this year thousands). So far USPS has been responsible for one and UPS the rest (I don't ship on any other carrier). As you mentioned, the USPS carriers are almost always friendly and helpful.
It is stunning to me that people within the same country hold such opposite views on things.
I live in NYC and USPS is worse than useless. They’ll leave shit on the porch (in NYC), lie and say they put it in your mailbox, or lie about attempted deliveries. It’s usually easier to just order it again than it is to get USPS to make a second attempt at delivery.
If I need a local letter or package delivered I would prefer to hand deliver it than entrust it to USPS. If I have something important to deliver I would never even consider USPS.
For me USPS is just spam delivery service. The only thing I reliably get from them is junk, and it’s a weekly chore to move junk mail from my mailbox to the recycling bin.
USPS regularly leaves mail in the wrong mailboxes in my location. FedEx and UPS never do. And the people delivering the mail here are incredibly rude. My neighbors and I have to regularly swap mail. No amount of complaining fixes anything.
Mail delivery to my home has gotten worse over the past ten to fifteen years. I complained to the local post office about this, and they said part of the reason is that this route no longer has dedicated carrier.
It depends on where you live, I am in one of the cities around lake tahoe. USPS here doesn't deliver mail to your residence, however UPS/Fedex deliver just fine.
Instead everyone in town rents a USPS PO box, to which USPS delivers and everyone goes to the Post office to collect their mail from their PO boxes.
Whats worse, USPS has some PO boxes in some condo complexes, residents of which rent PO boxes that are at their physical residence and USPS delivers mail to these PO boxes. Its also sprung a private business who collects mail from PO boxes amd deliver to physical addresses for a small fee.
> It depends on where you live, I am in one of the cities around lake tahoe. USPS here doesn't deliver mail to your residence, however UPS/Fedex deliver just fine. Instead everyone in town rents a USPS PO box, to which USPS delivers and everyone goes to the Post office to collect their mail from their PO boxes.
Do you have to pay for the box? I was under the impression that the USPS was legally obligated to deliver mail to your residence. I wouldn't expect to pay for their shortcoming.
This sounds fast for California. It's taken me about two years to get a site development permit to edit my roofline a bit to make it better at shedding water. I don't have a building permit yet. I desperately want to move out of this state, but my wife (who isn't handling any part of the project or our costs of living) likes the weather and so we're stuck here.
I think we could fix the housing shortage turbo-quick if we passed a constitutional amendment that offered property rights to landowners. But owning land right now is almost meaningless. It's the right to ask for permission to do something on that land, and local governments exist seemingly for the sole purpose of preventing any change whatsoever.
It's probably one of only a handful of root causes of American ossification and cost disease.
Completely agree. I bought land in 2019 with the hope of building. Not only is the government painfully slow, no builder will take on the project unless the budget is north of $5m. That’s what I was told. $5m and they’ll sign a contract to start in 2025. Anything less than $5m and they aren’t interested. This is the case for around 6 builders I’ve talked to. I’m probably going to just end up selling the land.
There isn’t anywhere for them to live. Luxury ski towns are feeling this pretty hard throughout Colorado.
Get this. If the average rent is north of $3k/month for a 1bd. And the average house costs $3.7m. Where is a ski lift worker making minimum wage supposed to live? Or the person running the only local gas station? Or the food service workers? They can’t live outside of these towns because the prices are still within 50% of the prices above. It’s just entirely unsustainable.
Now take this and apply it to larger cities, where even teachers making $50-$80k/yr can’t afford to live within an hour commute.
I’m all for a free market, but at some point you need to protect critical workers, and the only way I can think to do that is through rent control and special housing programs. Most places have neither unless you’re borderline homeless poor. Middle class continues to be gutted.
>the only way I can think to do that is through rent control and special housing programs.
This is a part of the problem. Rent control is such a half assed solution that makes everything illiquid and worse for anyone not already locked into a good deal. It's similar to the deal that incumbents have in ownership. Look at SF. Rent control or not, you will have to pay 3k+ for a 1 BR in a 100 year old building with no appliances, poor heat, and no parking. Only people who have been living in rent controlled apartments for their whole lives have a good deal. It doesn't facilitate liquidity at all.
Yeah I probably misused rent control there. I didn’t mean anything specific, or to imply the way it currently exists. It could even be as simple as the government subsidizing housing for critical workers. Doesn’t have to rent control for everyone.
Anything you subsidize gets more expensive due to supply, demand, and availability of money. We see the same inflation in college tuition (cheap loans), home prices (mortgage subsidies), and health care (myriad things, but e.g. pre-tax HSA accounts).
Rent control breaks the market and subsidies pour fuel on the dumpster fire. There is exactly one good way out and it's making it easier to build.
Ski towns should have prioritized apartments and condos in dense villages to make proper transit in town and from the city make sense. Instead they allowed mostly large single family homes.
House them where though? CA is short housing, that's one of our worst problems. And local homeless people have already put up tents and parked RVs everywhere.
Could we have avoided this problem by building housing while labor could still afford it? Sure. But we didn't, and now we reap what we sow.
Sounds bad but objectively Los Angeles has the fastest permitting process and the lowest fees of major California cities according to data compiled by the UCLA Lewis Center. Not to say you are lucky, only that this problem is actually much worse than you've described.
The median time to get planning approval for residential construction in San Francisco is 47 months!
I had a similar experience. After 20 years off the power grid, we wanted to connect to the grid and the nearest line was about 1/4 mile away. The state and PG&E wanted ~500k and several years to extend the power to the home.
Ended up finding a private company to put in the poles, line and transformer for <50K, and they could start within a month. It was still hell to connect it to the grid, but vastly faster and cheaper than the alternative.
I think bureaucracy is broken generally. It is a fallacy that all problems can be avoided or solved by "due process" since life is infinitely more complex. How many people have been told by a Local Authority that something is 5mm too wide or 30cm too close to the road?
I think the only solution, like we have in UK Courts, is that you need people who are trusted with an amount of knowledge and wisdom (i.e. the Judges) who are permitted to, for example, visit a property and take a holistic view. "Is the drain slightly too close to the road? Yeah but realistically 90% of the other properties have a contravention that is not enforced so just get on with it".
We used to have something similar in Local Authorities in the UK where the "Borough Engineer", pretty much had the last call on roads, street lighting etc. If you wanted to make representations, you wrote to them and they decided whether they cared about what you were complaining about. No appeals.
As the article says, where this gets unfair, people think that by adding process or sign-off, you get the best of all worlds but the truth is, that only works if everybody wants the same thing, otherwise as OP says, people game the process even if they can't win as some malicious act to cost the builders money.
"Americans seem to know what the problem is, but just accept that nothing can be done about it. Like you all know the DMV sucks and the USPS sucks, but everyone has just accepted that’s it’s just the way it is and decided to live with it. Why?!"
They do not want new construction in LA. You're lucky so far you only have red tape to deal with, when the neighbors know you're building on that plot you will have much more to deal with.
By building a new house in that area, you're taking away everyone's "forced" savings account or asset that has accumulated so much wealth that can makes everyone a millionaire due to forced scarcity. The red tape you're experiencing is why there is that scarcity.
You're also in California. It is not the same in the majority of other states, or major urban cities from personal experience, it is much less than two weeks or a week for all the pain points you stated.
Real change is not meant to happen in the US system, unless it is pushed forward by the handful of very powerful special interests that hold the reigns, and that is by design.
Switch from FPTP to RCV or any other and the system will fix itself.
> Switch from FPTP to RCV or any other and the system will fix itself.
No, it won't. Any system with single member districts as the sole basis for representation in the legislature has minimal impact on the problem. If you want to fix it, you need a system that structurally promotes proportionality. That doesn't have to be a party list system; I personally prefer small (5-ish) multimember districts with STV.
(Incidentally, I find the way Instant Runoff Voting proponents have shifted to preferring the name Ranked Choice Voting for the very worst of ranked choice methods annoying.)
Splitting it by Democratic/Republican is a bit of a trick because nearly all urban areas are Democratic and nearly all rural areas are Republican. So talking about "Republican run urban areas" is a bit of an inside joke, Republicans can't/don't/won't run an area with any concentration of people.
As someone in a very Democratic run city in a very Republican state, believe me when I say, the Republicans who run this place are absolutely pathologically insane. They have lost their minds and our legislative sessions are mostly full of rank conspiracy theory and foreign agit-prop. What little work the Republicans do here revolves around attacking the successful city to placate the poor rural 52% majority, usually through as much wealth transfers and cancellations of urban development as they can.
Toilets must be permitted to ensure they meet local standard for water conservation.
Obviously this isnt a problem that cant be solved by controlling sales, because people will just drive to neighboring counties to get toilets that actually work. Mine takes 3 flushes.
You have to live in a red state to build anything at all. I want to move to one to quit wasting lifespan trying to work my parcel. Sure I disagree with many of the social values, but those are abstract problems. I'm male, so I will never need an abortion. But I do need permits, so I want out of CA.
I wonder what the cost of the fines would be if you built anyway. If they didn't make you tear it down and the fine was less than the difference in costs, it might be optimal to skip.
My girlfriend's parents have been trying to build a house on undeveloped land in LA county for over five years now. It wasn't until one of their kids got a job that made them connection in county government that they started getting things approved. It is absolutely ridiculous here.
>Los Angeles has a huge housing shortage. If my experience is anything to go by, it’s because the bureaucracy is so dense it takes years to just get the permits in place. It would be cheaper and better if I could just pay a bribe and get it done quickly.
No. Los Angeles has a huge housing shortage because most local voters and active participants in local politics are homeowners. They want a housing shortage, so they get a housing shortage.
The problem is that there is no incentive for a government service to perform as its existence is not at risk.
There is no competition to the DMV, so there is no incentive to run it well.
The USPS will always exist due to being a federally funded service, so there isn't a massive incentive to compete with FedEx, UPS, etc.
Since these organizations do not live in competitive environments there is no drive for them to ever improve.
They cannot be improved with elections because the political state of America is so polarized that it is broken. Elections are decided on one thing alone - whether you run as red or blue. Platform objectives (eg "fix the DMV") are irrelevant because they no longer sway voters. All that matters in an election at this point is whether you are Republican or Democrat.
> The USPS will always exist due to being a federally funded service, so there isn't a massive incentive to compete with FedEx, UPS, etc.
USPS is not federally funded. The federal government mandates the USPS to serve every single address in the US, even if it causes them to lose money, but does not give USPS any money. So they have to subsidize that with their other pricing, but FedEx/UPS do not.
The USPS may not technically get congressionally allocated tax dollars each year, but they do have
1. A federally protected monopoly on the delivery of all mail smaller than a manila envelope or parcel. This is why FedEx can't mail a letter for you.
2. A federally protected monopoly on the use of mailboxes. This is why Amazon must park their truck, get out, and walk up to your front door to leave a tiny box.
3. An exemption from property taxes on all post office locations. Competitors must pay tax on their offices, distribution centers, and retail locations.
4. Interest free zero covenant loans from the federal government that only must be repaid in theory.
It's "not" funded but gets politically motivated emergency loans and sometimes one-off funds from the Treasury, or it couldn't run a deficit. It's probably quite corrupt in how it spends money.
I agree with your sentiment with the DMV, but I would remove USPS from your example.
That specifically is not federally funded, does have alternatives (FedEx, UPS), is under both economic & political pressure to compete, AND outcompetes the private alternatives by serving all addresses in the continental US. In fact, FedEx and UPS often add USPS to their routes for last-mile deliveries when it is economically advantageous - so it is those private carriers who are being subsidized by USPS
The other side of that coin is that they are not driven by profit motive, so the cost of improvement is not passed on to the users as "what the market will bear", but instead "at cost" so improvements are much more likely to be worth it for users of the service instead of just a new and exciting way to justify price increases.
As for "no reason to improve" well, there's no reason for people to do more than the very bare minimum, and yet they do it all the time. Sometimes organizations improve because they want to. I might even argue that it's harder to improve under existential crisis, not easier.
I think it's become a bit of truism that private businesses are more efficient than government run organizations. I wonder if that holds up under scrutiny?
> Sometimes organizations improve because they want to
or that there's an alternative reason for their action other than maximal profit.
There's darwinian natural selection at work in the private sector (where reproduction can be taken to mean profit). Such a force doesn't exist in gov't funded entities providing a service. That doesn't mean there's no force to make those services improve - it's just not the darwinian natural selection force (may be a politician decides to make it his/her objective to improve XYZ as a promise for votes).
I generally agree but also the local residents (who do vote in local elections) don't want permitting to be speedy. In fact they want it to be slow because there is a lot of NIMBYism and protectionism around property values. So in this case I think it actually is what voters want.
The CA DMV is way better now than it was a few years ago (it was horrible). Nearby, there's a massive driver license / renewal center and you can do more online than before. And some positive stories here:
https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/03/16/grieving-parents-get-...
It also doesn't make sense that you need competitive elections to fix something like the DMV. There are humans in the seats of government and why wouldn't they want to do a good job?
I'm not convinced it is under funding. It could also be too many managers and not enough front line staff. Or it could be too many regulations making the process need far more time (time=money).
I watched pretty closely while I was changing from a KY vehicle registration to a CA registration. The staffer was plenty quick, there was just an absolute heap of stuff to do that all seemed pointless. I'm sure each of those little legally-mandated whatsits was well-intentioned, but in aggregate they bedraggle getting anything done. Similar story in zoning / planning. And in both arenas the result is that doing things is slow and expensive. Please, government, spend some tiny modicum of effort on deregulating and streamlining for the sake of not wasting my limited lifespan.
The military is very incompetent. It has bases that it neither needs or wants and are just make work projects. But this is the fault of the civilian government.
"There is no competition to the DMV, so there is no incentive to run it well."
I have been to the DMV in Ca, NV and NM in the last few years. All of them had appointment systems. In all three states I got there at the appointment time and had my car registered and a new license in between 30 and 60 minutes. I would rate the service better than at most private companies, competition or not.
Post-pandemic CA DMV has moved a lot more online, including things like title transfer which used to be in-person only. So you mostly don't need to go to the DMV anymore.
And if you do, since most people aren't going, it is now quick. A handful of years ago I remember appointments were a couple months out. Last month I needed an appointment and got one for the next day (and it wasn't a one-off, there were times available every day of that week) and I barely waited 5 minutes when I got there.
Sure, once you get an appointment. Last time I tried they were booked a month out. Then when I got there I forgot one piece of paper and another month before I could get the next appointment.
Before appointments I just walked in, and worst case was only an hour wait.
"Residential Construction Permits require an average of 5 to 7 working days for approval or response. Commercial Construction Permits require an average of 14 to 21 working days for approval."
First I am sorry to hear this. In Florida you could be plowing over a wetland in 5-7 days. Take your cash and walk to a better run state.
One of the primary goals of homeowners (one of the largest voting blocs) is to prevent the decrease in the value of their homes. In this way, government is fulfilling its purpose beautifully.
I’m curious why you are putting yourself through this? Given this is a multi million dollar project, why not purchase an existing home? I know inventory is tight, but you’d close on a place within 6 months.
Sure, but the cost of a permit is cheap, and the certified contractors are charging a fair price. I think you are allowed to install yourself if you have certified plans that you work to.
For public transit in particular, the US has billionaires and politicans who actively campaign against such projects [1]. The effect of this cannot be overstated. People buy into the propaganda that their taxes will go up and/or it will bring crime to their idyllic locales (where otherwise property prices keep the riffraff out).
Landowners in the US have very successfullly voted in measures that limit further construction (including higher density housing and public transit systems) and increase the value of their holdings.
I've mentioned housing here because it directly impacts a lot of potential construction, particularly public transport. You cannot build anything other than single-family homes in much of the US. This lowers population density and makes public transport less viable. It also diverts tax revenue to build infrastructure for the required cars: highways, parking lots, etc.
There are a lot of local problems here too eg NYC's scaffolding laws [2], corruption in NYC construction projects [3] and CEQA in California [4].
> People buy into the propaganda that their taxes will go up
That's not propaganda. State and local taxes in Wa state have gone nowhere but up for the last 40 years I've lived here. Sound Transit has gotten themselves huge tax increases.
It's related since there's a very strong argument you (and Americans in general) aren't paying enough taxes and some things should be outright banned (single family homes on 75% of built land, in a country with an ever-growing population and a housing affordability crises and some of the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions; maybe that percentage should be 50% or 33%)).
But that's political suicide to say out loud as a politician.
Propaganda can be true and factual; perhaps what the parent comment meant is that a minor detail can be exaggerated to dissuade / influence a voter's behavior.
I never thought about the length in time it takes to build things in the US today when compared to previous time periods in the US.
I had to double-check this but it did really take 4 years to complete initial construction of the NYC subway system; however, what's failed to mention in the article is that a plan was approved to build the NYC system 6 years prior. In total, it took 10 years of planning and construction to actually have an initial system in place.
Even though the author failed to mentioned the planning period in that instance, it doesn't take away from his argument that things are slower today in getting large projects built or renovated due to legal and political structures that stop each of these from happening through procedural delays.
I have a great local example of this. My interstate bridge has been in need of repair for the last 30 years, but nothing has been done of it due to so many groups getting in the way. It's been a nightmare and that bridge is very much needed for the local community to stay as strong as it is. I believe the political will to do anything has vanished out of frustration.
Note that the 4.5 years cited for the NEPA process is just the average time to reach an initial decision. It doesn’t include the years of litigation challenging that decision that inevitably follows for any significant project.
My kid’s school tried to convert a declining golf course in a residential area into athletic fields. We’re not talking about a Texas high school football stadium—its some ball fields and tennis courts for an artsy school where sports doesn’t exactly attract big crowds. They were tied up in litigation for the better part of a decade. They spent half as much on the litigation as in purchasing the property.
Coincidentally I've been supporting trying to keep around a local golf course over letting a local private school expand athletic fields on it in my area. In my eyes the golf course is better for the community. People from all ages from the local area come there to play cheap golf or tennis and get reasonably priced lessons. Meanwhile if this plan were to go through, suddenly that area is private and reserved for rich people who can afford tuition at this private school, and all those opportunities for local people to get some activity outdoors vanish for good. Plus that school in question already has athletic facilities, these would just look more collegiate looking I guess...
I've just been trying to reach out to my local representatives and express support for preservation of the course. There are already a number of grassroots campaigns that have been keeping me current on developments. I can only hope it all works out though and this space remains for the public; the bad guys seem to win more often than not and the sitting councilman whose district this course falls into certainly has an amicable relationship with the school.
That was 6 years of planning mostly what to do, presumably.
Another problem with the US legal environment is that all this "planning" effort we do now goes into the whether, not the what. That means despite 1000s of pages, final designs are often lousy and ad-hoc, rather than a plank in a longer term integrated vision.
Public transit makes the problem especially clear, as the benefits for integration vs random flashy projects to hype up the Andrew Cuomo du jour is extremely stark.
When I think about American infrastructure projects in the 70s I think about all the minority neighborhoods they ploughed through and all the roads they closed during the entire construction livetime.
I don’t know how accurate that historical perception is, but if it is that is not how things are done today (thankfully). E.g. I’ve been observing the planning of ST3 in Seattle, and they indeed compromise on design all the time in order to displace as few people and businesses as possible, and they often end up with a much more expensive and much longer building times in order to allow traffic to flow (mostly) unhindered during construction. Without those constraints I bet building would be far quicker. (that being said neither of those are excuses for why it has taken over 2 years to fix the West Seattle bridge).
Interestingly those two constraints clash in the new International District/Chinatown station. One of the alternatives would displace and disrupt more minority owned businesses on the 5th Ave. while the other would disrupt traffic flow for 5-6 years on the 4th Ave. Curiously this is one of really few portions of the ST3 plan where they don’t have a preferred alternative.
In Los Angeles the two closest lessons I took were the 210 Freeway in Pasadena (which literally cut through poorer, Blacker neighborhoods) and the 710 Freeway which was supposed to connect to it.
The last part of the 710 Freeway was meant to go through a richer, whiter neighborhood. Some houses were purchased, but the connector was held up in lawsuits from at least the 1970s, and remains unfinished to this day.
For the ID station, I think the idea to bring Union Station back to life and use existing infrastructure to connect the multiple rail options at the same level is by far the best solution. It will pay dividends long-term.
Believe it or not, New Hampshire does pretty well with building bridges, I saw them build a large bridge within 6 months and it seems roads are kept in a decent shape. In a nearby state where I am, I think it can outdo what you see in your state. Took 10 years to replace a very small bridge across some railroad tracks. That road was closed for 10+ years.
Over rivers ? Where I am, I suggest before you cross, open all your vehicle windows and wear a life preserver, I am serious.
I’ve wondered about state level differences too. Most of the east coast has terrible roads. That’s especially true in NYC where I live. But I did a trip down to Delaware and was on freeways like I’d never seen in the US. Just really nice. Are some states just run much better?
It varies county by county too. “Conscientious Republican” counties—like in Northern VA when I was growing up in the 1990s, or California from the 60s to the 80s—are the most well run. I live in a traditionally red county in Maryland (went Romney 2012, split evenly in 2016) and everything is super well run.
Alternate take: most places where people actually live are governed by Democrats, because Democrats dominate urban areas, and most people live in urban areas. Places with single-party dominance tend to be poorly governed (for instance: the Illinois Democratic party, the Kansas Republican party). When Republicans survive in Democratic areas (for instance: Massachusetts Republican governors) they tend to do well; presumably, Democrats managing in red states do well too, but we don't hear so much about them, because people tend not to live in red counties (they tend to be rural, not urban).
It's mostly party machines that are the problem, not the particular parties.
I grew up in a super-red county in California. Things were horribly run. The area has been under Democratic leadership for the past twenty years and it is a world change in terms of how much nicer, better, and more efficient everything is. The roads are better, the schools are better, the neighborhoods and people are better.
It turns out than when you have people believe that government should exist, and that government can do a good job, you get people who do good work. And when your government consists of people who think it shouldn't exist...you get morass.
Contrast blue counties with red counties in most states and you'll notice a huge difference in how much nicer things are in the blue counties. There's a reason so many Republicans retire to LA and NY: after they've made their money railing
"against the libs" they just want a nice place to live out their golden years.
Did your county see a change in significant improvement in socioeconomic status during that time period? Because that’s not a fair comparison. Note I said I was talking about places Northern VA in the 1990s, or Silicon Valley in the 1970s. I’ve never seen these places get better under Democrats.
Also, virtually no republicans “retire to LA and NY” lol. Maybe billionaires who can insulate themselves from the dysfunction of those cities. For middle class people, the major internal migration trend in the country is people leaving those places for Texas, the Carolinas, etc.
Yes, as soon as the Republicans were kicked out of office, the Democrats that replaced them made the area nice, and within a few years the socioeconomic status of the area improved.
Notably, this always happened after the Republicans were kicked out.
Generally, "competent" and "Republican" are diametrically opposed terms. Republicans like Mitt Romney are the exception to the rule.
In fact, every area that has been taken over by Republicans has seen a marked decrease in socioeconomic status following Republican takeover: see, for example, Ohio and Florida, which were once blue states that are now red.
The change of guard is most important from what I can tell. Both parties have their own corruption. Change often and each will stop the other's bad practices before they get too bad.
It isn't perfect, but it is the only thing that seems to have any long term success .
Not just roads. Northern VA’s excellent educational system was built under republicans, with a few conservative democrat governors. Building and permits are much easier. Even just efficiency of government offices. Getting a copy of my kid’s birth certificate in my county took like 10 minutes. In bored strokes, at state and local level, republicans tend to focus on serving the majority, while democrats are focused on equity and redistribution for minorities.
It's not just state level, the same thing happens at the municipal level. There's a trip I take a few times a year, and I always notice the transition from one town to another by the sudden deterioration of the road.
Winter and salt are both hard on roads with lots of freeze thaw cycles putting cracks in the road. So Delaware is an apples and oranges comparison. Delaware is going to have a lot less winter wear on their roads.
It's less "how well states are run" and more that some states just get way more money. Delaware gets approximately 50x as much money as California or New York does from the federal government on a per-mile basis.
Delaware is in large part a drive through state as people go from NYC/Philadelphia/New England to DC. So the roads there tend to be used more by out of staters. Look at the person I'm responding to. That makes it easier for other senators to want to contribute cash. Plus, Delaware doesn't have nearly as many roads, so the total number is still fairly reasonable.
There may be some fixed costs per state. I don't know.
There is a risk that if Delaware got too little money, they could forgo it, lower their drinking age to 18, and have state liquor store sell to everyone under 21 in the surrounding states.
One thing they do now is get a half of a plan in place without any idea of how to fund the rest, so that ends up drawing things out.
"Hard to argue that promises were not kept, but something has to be done with an already started project. In that light, one thinks of former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown’s principle, “In the world of civic projects, the first budget is really just a down payment. If people knew the real cost from the start, nothing would ever be approved. The idea is to get going. Start digging a hole and make it so big, there’s no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in.”
"
The I-5 Columbia river replacement bridge just recently got a ton of funding from the WA state legislator, so maybe things are finally moving forward. However I guess delaying the project has been bickering on what to actually put on the bridge. E.g. they want to more then double the car lane count, then they also want light rail on there, and potentially even high speed rail. This feels like a classic case of overdesign.
I do not see how incorporating mass transit is over design for something expected to last 100+ years. Especially for a region that has been adding tens of thousands of people per year for 10+ years, at an increasing pace.
Neither do I, however WSDOT has not released any details on the project but their renderings indicate they want to widen the freeway to some 10+ lane monstrosity[1]. Meanwhile Cascadia High Speed Rail has ideas about replacing the existing BNSF/Amtrak bridge with a double deck four track + four care lane bridge in addition to the I-5 bridge[2]. This combined makes a ridiculous amount of car lanes and railway tracks, plus a redundant bridge. There must be a better—and cheaper—way to cross this river.
An absolutely enormous number of people in our western societies are employed in making reports. They don't do technical things, like engineers. They don't decide things, like management or politicians. They make a living by "contributing" to reports that actually do need to be written, essentially by ballooning the size and time taken to make the report. There are legitimate reasons why doers (engineers) and deciders (mgt, govt) need reports, but like advertising there's too much of it and we don't know what to cut once it's there.
The reason there's these 575 page reports as mentioned in the article is that it's never enough just to say "the bird sanctuary will be harmed by this windfarm, let's think about that". You need a sweeping survey of how many birds there are, how many people visit the sanctuary, how much they spend at the shop, and so on. If you try to head this off by saying you want to just summarize it, you are the bad guy who wants to trample the rights of the kids who enjoy counting the birds.
As mentioned, for large projects this naturally ends up in court as well, and that of course takes a long time.
We also live in the age of PR, so it's not really in anyone's political interest to make a bunch of enemies. Even if those enemies have a relatively small claim to veto a project, it will inevitably loom large in the public debate about it. If TV news manages to find that a kid who likes the birds, they will put him on TV and you will have to find an appropriate face for the interview.
They write reports to facilitate communication between people who are disconnected by the large number of people in a large organization who write reports. Get rid of people who write reports (managers first) and magically you will not need reports. Of course if you hire badly you'll need this, which means the cost of a bad hire compounds.
- Wages are high, so labor for construction is very expensive (not unique to the US)
- It's difficult to acquire property to build new stuff in existing cities compared to building in new places.
- It is also incredibly slow/expensive to build subways if you try to prioritize minimizing inconvenience to nearby residents above all else (cut-and-cover is MUCH faster/cheaper than tunneling).
- The US is also not very interested in trying to learn from what construction techniques, etc. have worked for public transit in other countries
Aside from the first point, a lot of this comes down to the fact that even in places in the US that have decent public transit, transit is treated more as a toy that is nice to have than a serious priority by the government, and it is only built when it doesn't cause any inconvenience to residents/drivers/etc.
The US has historically been willing to demolish low income areas and force people to move in order to build highways, however.
I totally agree, though I think these primarily stem from one thing, which is that America hasn't been seriously tested for a very long time. When you're not challenged, you can easily settle into what is adequate, even if you support progress and innovation on paper. America is a great place to live despite its faults, but it's also stuck in the past. Take for instance our major cities; somehow much older cities around the world ironically have more modern elements than cities like Los Angeles and New York, which for all intents and purposes aren't significantly different from where they were in the 1970s (besides greater population and in the case of LA much less smog).
If we want to build quickly and actually begin to address problems rather than just accept things as the way they are, we need to be knocked down a peg. I don't think that means getting nuked or whatever, but it would mean that our "too big to fail" status would need to actually be jeopardized in a meaningful way. Once the current generation of grey-hairs in government finally croak and pass on the torch, then there would be the chance to garbage-collect excessive regulations and better pick and choose what should be regulated heavily or not, rather than regulate with a broad brush. Laws and regulations should be designed with exceptions in mind, and not just for fat cats in the club.
> somehow much older cities around the world ironically have more modern elements than cities like Los Angeles and New York
Somehow? Shouldn’t this say “Much older cities around the world have more modern elements than cities like Los Angeles and New York because they were razed to the ground during the world wars and rebuilt in modern times.”?
Nah, Thameslink beats any US line and it’s from 1988. Lizzie line will be better too.
Oedo line too. And Fukutoshin like.
Blackfriars is over the Thames. I don’t think there’s a US station that is as creative in use of space.
Not to speak of the overground or DLR.
I think it’s just trade offs. The US gives individual power, those other places give state power. Former excels in certain places but provides veto when you achieve steady state. So things stall here.
Notice that in things which can be done with individual power, like developers making housing developments in Texas, outcomes are good.
I think power to execute is definitely a big part of it. A neighborhood can't afford a major work, or organize one, so it won't, but when a government entity can afford a major work, the neighborhood often has the power to stop that. Even though the major work is likely part of a larger orchestration of infrastructure, that one neighborhood can put a halt to it.
They tried to replace a level crossing with an overpass in my city, arguably good for everyone. Well, they did argue it, and it didn't happen. Even though there is already a train line there, apparently an overpass was too much infrastructure for them.
That wouldn't explain why Phoenix and Seattle and Austin and Las Vegas (and other recent-growth cities) lack the amenities of similarly-sized European cities.
For discussion's sake, can you enumerate the amenities you're alluding to?
If it's solely in regards to public transit, I think this is largely due to cultural differences. The US still has the remnants of an individualistic frontier mentality. I don't know, but tend to think it's not by coincidence, that the better public transit systems tend to be near the eastern seaboard.
> public transit . . . individualistic frontier mentality
A century ago, most American cities had some kind of tram system. And the cities were connected by railroads - actual passenger trains. People were sold the idea of automotive independence. That notion was completely manufactured for our consumption. We didn't have the bureaucracy in place to keep mass transit in place, so when people used it less, it lost money and was largely torn out. Without bureaucracy in place to give people time to think, we're stuck with the swift wisdom of the market.
When I lived in Seattle, I was half a block from an old commuter line that's buried in asphalt now. The city just installed "innovative" light rail a few blocks away. Progress! /s
That's the point I was trying to get across. The automobile created fostered an individualistic culture related to transport that is very hard for people to give up. Most cities still have bus routes, but people generally don't want to use them if they can use a car instead.
It’s not just public transit. Walkability. Bike paths. High density - potentially mixed use types. No emphasis on lowering noise. Etc.
Basically anything you’d normally see in a Not Just Bikes video…
It’s not cultural btw. It’s corporational. It’s corporations which are driving these things - which don’t seem to have as significant of a voice in other countries.
Certainly corporations drive some of it. But I do think there's also a cultural element. I've lived all across the US and the places that lack those amenities simply don't want them from my experience. Even when they do get implemented by well-wishing civil servants, they are often openly mocked as a waste of money.
Do you think social media influencers are what drives the selection of gas stoves? That...is a very new take I've never heard.
Most people prefer gas stoves because they are better for cooking than electric. They are generally considered better for cooking because they burn hotter than electric. It's been a long time since I've worked in food service, but I can't remember a single kitchen using electric stoves to good with and for good reason. This was when gas was much more expensive than it is now and I doubt the natural gas lobby has much influence on those choices.
Gas stoves get hot faster and respond quickly when you turn the dial, that's their big advantage. But electric is hotter. Even plain resistance coil electric elements put out much more heat than gas. Try to boil a pot of water on gas vs electric and it's no contest, electric wins.
And of course, modern induction electric elements are better in every way as long as you don't mind throwing out all your cheap alluminum pots
In what sense? Both have BTU ratings to determine their capacity. Just for kicks, I looked at a few units online at a mid-range price point of about $1500. The gas ones had 18-20 kBTU burners and the electric were around 10 kBTU burners, so the gas has considerably higher output. As you say, gas is basically instantaneous once the flame is present while electric has a lag, so it's going to take longer to get to that capacity for the electric. Maybe your point is that electric transfers heat better? I couldn't find any sources on that. Add to it that the colors of the flame/heating element as a general rule of thumb for temperature, the gas is higher on the temperature spectrum.
The thing is - induction is shown to be better now. It’s faster and more powerful and doesn’t create the waste heat. There are specialty ones for woks now too - that are curved and all.
So really it is the gas lobby that is fueling this resistance to the switch. I myself used to buy into the cooking with gas was better because of all the media, my partner, and so forth. But the truth is - cooking with gas sucks for the most part. The newer induction ranges with temperature sensors and what not are actually better. And no waste heat and no toxic fumes except for what you’re cooking.
Honestly - I’m a big convert. I just need to move into a non-rental so I can install 230v induction instead of having to use 120v stuff. (Which is still good but obviously 5000w is much better than 1800w)
And if we compare shit electric to a gas stove then yeah - gas is better. But once you start using decent induction… it’s not really a problem unless you like to move your pan around a lot and even then - you can learn a different technique to get a similar effect.
I agree and almost put in discussion about induction in my first reply. But I think the difference is one of economics for most people. I realize HN probably skews towards the higher income range, so sometimes I feel like this discussion comes across as tone deaf when the median household (not person) income in the U.S. is about $67k.
The newer induction ranges are awesome. But they are very expensive by comparison to a comparable gas range. For an average person, they are probably out of range (ha) in terms of price point. Add to it that your existing cookware may not work with it, and it's a deal breaker for a lot of average people. For someone like a landlord, they will almost always go with the cheaper option. If I was renting and had the choice between an cheap electric range or gas, I'd always prefer the gas. I hope the tech progresses enough to bring the price down to be competitive in the future.
It's a lot like the discussions around heat-pumps. I love the ideas of heat pumps in homes. But I also realize the initial sticker cost is too much for people to bear. When natural gas prices have been as low as they have been in the last decade, it's hard to blame people for selecting a natural gas furnace.
I love the more efficient options, but I do think people don't always recognize they are, to an average consumer, a luxury and a hard sell when they are just trying to make ends meet. That's partly why some of the talk comes across to some as elitist and it hurts the ability to convert people.
I think the idea of walkability isn’t that you spend hours having to walk everyday to do menial tasks. It’s that you’re within very short distances of places.
What if there is an overarching malaise of dysfunction, inefficiency and apathy towards ambition to build a better nation? 1950’s USA was very different than today.
I've worked with some brilliant government orgs (NIST) but more often than not, many have the problem of top-down management and bureaucratic class that has no checks and balances, that is impossible to get rid of, and perpetuate dysfunction, overbilling, etc. No one questions them, media is busy with other things, and we always talk about funding the gov, but never asking "Can we do more with the same amount?". At least, private enterprises have skin in the game and they'd be toast if their products and services does not perform or is overbudget. Similar to government agencies, as private enterprises get larger (GE, Lockheed, IBM, P&G, Mitsubishi), they have exact same problems as governments.
The solution is to completely start over. We did that in 1950's when many new agencies were formed. They were vibrant and well functioning. Without a garbage-collector process so-to-speak, government agencies tend to become dysfunctional.
I love Eli Dourado's blog, particularly these two articles:
Re-orgs are often partially a garbage collection process, I have noticed. Lots of talk about "efficiency" and "better alignment". All fluff you expect, but in practical terms, a lot of people get let go, projects and org units disappear, and priorities are reorganized. The whole operation is expected to work as if the re-org never happened, and often it will.
Yeah. The major slow projects I can think of in recent years; Second Ave. Subway, East Side Access, Crossrail, etc. all involve deep bore tunneling through some of the most densely occupied land on Earth. Utility relocation, minimizing disruption to residents and businesses, etc. are the "hard part" here. If you could just nuke Midtown, East Side Access would have been easy. If you could demolish half of the Upper East Side, build a subway in the crater, and then cover it with new buildings, it would have been ready sooner. But, that's impractical. People are emotionally attached to their homes and neighborhoods.
That said, future projects can probably done more cheaply. IBX and QueensLink won't involve much underground work, and the right of way is already clear. The problem is that the benefit isn't clear enough to actually fund the projects and get them started. (That is an even more complicated problem. The MTA is a state body, subway lines entirely within the city are not something people on Long Island and Westchester want to pay for. Maybe there should be some sort of Independent Subway that the city itself pays for ;)
The low cost leader in subway construction is Spain and they use deep bore tunneling, and they even use larger tunnels than most everyone else (one large tunnel is more expensive than two smaller ones)
I remember when I was in Boston a discussion of how to expand one of the T-lines under Tufts Medical Center without causing vibrational problems for the equipment in the hospital right above.
I don't disagree with most of that, but some places in the US do put some priority on public transit. Much to the annoyance of local neighborhoods, for example, Tri-met in Portland regularly proposes and then eventually builds out new light rail lines through existing neighborhoods. The bus network could be better in outlying areas but in the city proper it is pretty useful for many people, not a toy. And Portland builds new highways rarely. Aside from small extensions, there hasn't been a new interstate-size highway created in decades. It all stopped in the 70s (though the final bits didn't get finished until the mid 80s).
Edit:
IMO Portland could really justify another interstate and Columbia river crossing to the east of the city, but probably won't do it. It would primarily serve lower income people who've migrated out that direction, and they don't really have much voting power. I don't envy their commute since so much of it has to be on surface streets before they hit a major arterial. The light rail has a leg that direction but it's slow, and there's just one out there.
Highways do not serve low income areas, public transit does.
Portland is entirely justified in not building expensive and low density transit solutions (highways) to service communities. A BRT or Light Rail line will justify the cost significantly better and lead to denser, transit oriented development along the path: All of which better serves the poor.
Maybe, but I think it's more that the managers/owners are greedy and need big profit margins, especially to pay back their political connections who gave them the contract to begin with.
Corruption exists in some form at every step of a publicly funded project. People are too apathetic to care, and the process for getting a road repaved or whatever has been made almost entirely opaque to the electorate. Especially at the county and state levels, where serious cash gets gifted or grifted all the time.
>the process for getting a road repaved or whatever has been made almost entirely opaque to the electorate.
Most government contracts use an open bid process which is much less opaque than what happens in private contracts. What transparency are you specifically looking for?
I’ll add one more: there is a strong preference in a large percentage of the population for suburban and rural style homes and light business areas. We build a ton of that and often very quickly. We are very good at building that type of landscape.
The HN crowd tends not to be the target market for this though so it gets criticized and downplayed here.
There has been a shift toward urbanism in the last 25 years though, and prices exploding in the cities show that the market is lagging in satisfying that demand.
One needs to consider, however, why people prefer this kind of homes in the US, compared to most countries. It is probably because life is so hard and expensive on most American cities. And I say this as somebody from another country, where cities are livable and provide lots of advantages -- something that we associate in the US only to New York City and its high associated costs.
Just putting in a quiet vote for Chicago, that most underrated and magnificent of American cities. If you don't mind the risk of getting murdered once in a while, the city is affordable, beautiful, walkable, full of great food and good people, and has arguably one of the country's best public transit systems. It also has household garbage collection, unlike NYC's trash mountains. It reminds me a lot of the great metropolises outside the country.
It really makes other US cities like Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, etc. seem like quaint little backwater neighborhoods. Most of those have become little more than traffic-ridden strip malls, preserving a tiny downtown district but everywhere else is mostly just a bunch of drive-up destinations with little pedestrian activity and not much liveliness. Chicago's neighborhoods are still super vibrant and full of festivals, and even in the deep snow of winter people will bustle on the sidewalks and converge on the fun pubs and music venues and such. I've never seen anything else like that in the US.
But, yes, walk a few blocks in the wrong direction and you'll soon be dead. Despite that, millions make it their home. It's an amazing place to live.
The poor shape of America's cities is both a cause and an effect. There are numerous other reasons. Here's the big ones in no particular order:
(1) America's very old and ongoing racism problem, hence "white flight" and cycles of re-development due to segregation.
(2) The "law of rent" and the connection between the growth of the middle class and the use of suburbanization to escape high urban property prices and eternal rent to a landlord class: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent -- This one is tough to solve and is still a problem. There's a new re-suburbanization trend driven in part by young people realizing it's hard to build wealth if you can only ever rent. This is also a major driver of remote work. COVID just accelerated the remote work trend.
(3) A cultural legacy of preference for the outdoors and the frontier and a desire of a large number of people to have at least some land. This is a romantic idea in American culture that is not as strong in Europe or Asia.
(4) Cities were horribly polluted during the early to mid industrial era. Even those who lived in cities often maintained country homes or vacationed in the country whenever possible if they could afford it, with a major driver being to get away from the noise and pollution.
(5) Lastly, cars were invented in the USA and the automobile industry was and still is a major economic engine and employer in the country. America is where car culture really took hold if not originated. Car culture is still quite strong even though younger generations seem less enamored by it.
Fear of racism is a bigger problem than racism itself. Most people don't care, but the fear of that minority that does causes all sorts of bureaucracy to fight it (which in turn needs to feed racism to justify its existence). Also fear of that minority is causing lots of people to not buy near the out races for fear of not being able to sell, thus driving prices down.
Racism is like crime. It takes 0.1% violent criminals in a neighborhood to make it a "bad neighborhood." It takes just a few determined racists to make the entire neighborhood racist.
The people who are not racist generally don't know racism is even a problem if it's not affecting them. Fighting it would require bureaucratic trench warfare, and most people don't have time for that shit. There is probably an inverse correlation between people who have better things to do and racism anyway, since the racists tend to be the types who... lets just say have enough time on their hands to be actively racist because... well... lets just say there's probably a reason they don't have better things to do.
What are the net advantages of being in a city? It used to be access to good employment was the main thing but with remote work this often isn't as much of a factor anymore. Access to better restaurants, music and sporting events are definitely advantages but limited access to nature, traffic congestion, etc. are disadvantages. I'd say it is more of a lifestyle tradeoff.
>What are the net advantages of being in a city? It used to be access to good employment was the main thing but with remote work this often isn't as much of a factor anymore.
This is only really true for the type of privileged person posting on HackerNews (me included), other groups don't have that privilege in the same way.
>Access to better restaurants, music and sporting events are definitely advantages
Add to this the potential to live without having to own a car. The transportation infrastructure of good cities beat having to drive all the time.
One other popular thing I've heard is a much larger dating pool, which is probably true.
>limited access to nature
Good cities include good green spaces. I can access at least two major hiking trails that stretch for about a week with public transportation, and also a huge archipelago.
>traffic congestion
This is an issue unique to car-oriented development, though, because of how poorly this category of development scales. Cities with high-quality public transportation and bicycle infrastructure don't suffer from the same amount of traffic congestion, and the issue is less relevant as good alternatives for getting around exist.
> there is a strong preference in a large percentage of the population for suburban and rural style homes and light business areas. We build a ton of that and often very quickly.
Because that's the only thing you can build. The zoning regulations don't let anything else happen easily. You can't reason from this that this is what people actually prefer.
You can't reason that that's what most people prefer, but it likewise seems clear that if most people in some town/city did prefer something else, the zoning laws would be changed.
No, that isn't clear at all. Bad and unpopular laws can remain on the books for a long time if there is a politically powerful minority who benefits from them.
Also it might just be that most people don't even know about the problem.
In a world where there is little to no friction and no incentives to prolong the changing of those laws, yes. Unfortunately, that is not the world we live in. Even something as simple as wanting to change it but seeing the immense amount of effort to try and get it noticed is enough to dissuade most people from trying.
They might not care about it being compulsorily acquired at a decent price. They'd be less likely to have an emotional attachment to an investment property than to their current or ancestral home.
I wrote software for an environmental consulting firm. It is the dark side of construction and permitting in the US. Basically, people that worked in government permitting would leave their job after 10 years in the public service then work for us in the private sector. Let's say you wanted to build a mall. You would need us to come in analyze the land check for vernal pools, cultural artifacts, rare species of salamanders... the list is 20 pages long. We would then run software (me!) to find places which you could pay to protect (the pay off)- in order to get a permit for plowing over that area. Our firm would spend months analyzing a rock to ensure it wasn't an arrow head or watch if bats would bread in your area. "Why can’t America build quickly anymore?" I would say permitting is a large portion of the answer. If you wanted to build without knowing this system or you fought it - your application would sit in some bureaucratic office for years.
permitting is indeed at the center of it; I suggest that if it wasn't bats and salamanders, it would simply be something else to stall about.. even with extreme stories, and their opposite where a real estate developer finds and kills the last flower or butterfly on the land (which is true also), I support saving bats and salamanders. You know how easy it is to mix and pour a portion of an acre of concrete? or run a chain saw? literally forty years of growth can be killed in a half a day.. easy..
I think the author is fundamentally correct on the main point: the interface for environmental review needs to change. The current interface is that you generate a report and anyone can sue to require that report to have additional details provided a court agrees those details are unaddressed environmental impacts. This leads to 4.5 years for just the environmental assessment and 575 page environmental impact reports. It allows for excessive detail and thoroughness at the expense of time and cost. I’m not sure what the better interface is but it’s quite clear we as a society need to figure it out and halt the current trend of building less and less for more and more cost. Other issues people raise are parts of the problem but it’s clear that 4.5 years on one aspect of planning for a single project is not reasonable.
the biggest reason is simply financialization, which infiltrates every nook and cranny of our socioeconomic perceptions.
it creates the perception that everyone else is getting ahead of you by hook or by crook (which is true in the minority but not the majority), rather than building stuff for the pride of having done it. that distorts all of our incentive structures for the worse, which is just one of the many adverse effects of financialization (which i define as economic activity focused solely on money itself, which includes most of real estate these days).
you're conflating financing with financialization, which are two very different points in a multidimensional spectrum. financing is certainly helpful to allow capital projects to shift forward (or backward) in time to deliver (and perhaps capture) greater value. and under the constraints of scarcity, it helps allocate resources more efficiently, price risk more accurately, and provides necessarily liquidity in markets.
we're way beyond the constraints of scarcity and the ideals of efficient resource allocation because we've decoupled finance and the money supply from the natural constraints under which our economic theories "work" (i use that term loosely, since economics has done a poor job of accounting for actual human behavior vs. the idealized). we're at a point where economic activity is about the money itself, rather than what it represents in the real world, things like bridges, restaurants, and dry cleaning. that's financialization, when it becomes decoupled from real value.
all that takes away from wanting to build real things, because the perception is that it's just easier to "get rich quick" via financialization schemes. if you can get the money without the hard work of delivering real value, why not? is the thinking. that's corrosive to social fabrics, not to mention economies themselves. that's why we're where we're at, rather than a simplistic demonization of 'financing' in isolation.
How do you determine the value of a "delivery" without a financial metric? Taking a laissez-faire approach doesn't change the need for financialization. At most, it changes some of the evaluated variables.
The contractors only need to worry about the contract price, which we arrive at through a market bidding procedure before the project.
What happens in reality is that contractors offer unrealistic prices to get the contract; and when the project fails they demand more time and money in order to complete. Government officials usually agree in order to save face and avoid public fiascos.
So you're back to square one. If you can't trust contractors to set a reasonable and realistic prices, then a solution should be a metric or set of metrics by which one can assess what is reasonable and realistic.
Are you sure? It sounds like you're applying a pet/fad theory to somewhere where it's not super-applicable.
Some of the biggest advocates for inefficiency in construction (at least here in Australia) have been Union members getting cushy jobs for their mates.
A problem with analysis like this is that these problems are in no way limited to the US or the public sector. All Western countries have these problems to different degrees and it also exists within private enterprise which do not face the same problems outlined here.
Boeing e.g. had been terrible at making pretty much anything from planes to space rockets. Everything is delayed.
I suspect there are deeper more fundamental problems. E.g. how companies are managed and organized. Companies used to be far more engineering oriented. Today they are very sales and MBA oriented. There is also way more outsourcing and fragmentation of business. Business used to be far more integrated.
Value extraction may be part of the problem. Competition would take care of a lot of inefficient private sector businesses. Duo/Mono-polistic profit margins leave a lot of room for waste. Resource constraints breed innovation.
Boeing for example competes with Airbus on commercial planes, that's about it. And SpaceX is eating into their profit margins on rockets. They need to innovate to keep up with SpaceX rockets, while the 737-max fiasco is a great illustration of waste and inefficiency on commercial airplanes. If they had to be more competitive to survive, they may not have cut so many corners.
One thing that's pretty easy to understand is the network effect of complexity.
You don't have to check many things if you have few things in place. Each item creates an exponential increase in complexity for the next one. Another reason why things slow down is that as you add things to a system, they have a maintenance cost, the more you add the more you approach an equilibrium of costs == capacity.
This is, in part, explains why it becomes inevitably hard to add to a very large codebase -- you might have many many scrum teams simply maintaining what is, and each Nth new item has to do N-1 compatibility checks.
What about Oroville dam repairs? It was a pretty successful and fast engineering project. I think that America can still build quickly if she wants to. But most of the projects are not that important.
That’s kind of a strange example. Fixing things that provide existential hazards is always a priority, not to mention that the scope of the damn did not change with the repairs (the dam did not get taller, wider, etc). There was no reason for nimby-isms, environmental impact reports of building/expanding the reservoir, etc, as it was already there. It was a huge, ongoing emergency that required action to be taken and only cost the state $1.1B, from which they’re trying to recover some portion from federal funds.
MacArthur Maze repair was also under budget and before timeline because of the novel contract.
The truth is that most US infrastructure is not required. We should let many of these roads rot and many of these super projects languish in design.
Notice how CA HSR had delays because they wanted to use “first of its kind state of the art signaling system”. Why “first of its kind”? There exist like a dozen HSR builders. Just copy them. But that’s because HSR isn’t required. So we just use it as a modern WPA-style jobs tool.
I think you're actually talking about Caltrain's CBOSS system, which while obviously related to the CAHSR, eventually, was designed and (not) implemented by a completely different agency at a prior time.
This comment box is too small to provide a proof ;)
I’m sorry, it’s not fair to make a controversial statement and then leave it at that but I only had the appetite to provide the hypothesis (easy) not the backing (I’ve got to collate my notes on this).
But, if you’re down to meet in SF one evening in April we could go over it.
This article is about a road diet in terms of restriping an existing road with fewer lanes, but the same amount of asphalt (and, given the additional markings, probably a similar amount of paint). I don't see what that has to do with the infrastructure being not needed.
The owners of money get to decide when they are paid and how much, if they prefer these low interest rates, then why would you care? It's not like it matters.
When interest rates are negative, you are basically in the sandbox part of a developed society. You already have everything, everything you do afterwards is as pointless as existence and the universe. Who cares? Artists don't care.
You know what interest rates also do? Higher interest rates punish longevity as future income is discounted, meanwhile lower interest rates promote longevity as future income is no longer discounted.
It's the opposite. Once there is less incentive to rush to completion, interest rates go down. If you are about to starve tomorrow, you must rush, interest rates are high because you are willing to borrow for food. If you have enough food to last a year, you won't borrow, you would prefer that it lasted 5 years instead.
Also consider this; for buildings/real estate, the market value of the finished construction may appreciate faster than the negative cash-flow from construction and financing. Just adjust rate of construction accordingly.
The pattern looks a lot like changing existing code vs writing code from scratch. We have accumulated vast number of laws where making any change in the world is uphill battle. The advantage of places like China is that they we’re able to throw away existing code quickly.
> The bigger problem is that urgency just isn’t there
Pretty much says it all. Unless it's something like replacing a critical bridge that collapsed ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge... ), there just ain't much of a constituency for quick, affordable, and competent construction of anything.
-People spend more time thinking about what they might lose instead of what they might gain by doing something. Partially, this is because wealth and prosperity are generally higher.
-People were more likely to ignore things they didn't like, and so building consensus was faster when dissenting people simply weren't talking. It's more common now to encounter people who feel it's their civic duty to search for things they feel are undesirable.
The eastside freeway in Atlanta doesn't exist because NIMBYs opposed it for years and the final stake through the heart of the project was when Jimmy Carter selected a site for his presidential library right in the middle of path the freeway was to take. Instead Atlanta got Freedom Parkway (most famous as the cover image for 'The Walking Dead'), a much lower capacity, much less useful road but also one that didn't destroy the surrounding neighborhoods like the Downtown Connector did with African-American neighborhoods such as Buttermilk Bottom.
NIMBYism stops many useful projects but it also protects a lot worth saving.
The problem is that any publicly funded initiative is immediately treated as a cash cow that has to be milked to death. Industry, lobbies, special interest groups, insider deals, etc. etc. Everyone has to get a piece of sweet sweet cake. The longer this takes the more money is needed and the more cake there is. This is true regardless of whether its for infrastructure, schools, or defense acquisitions. Its functional systemic corruption, even if no laws are broken (because those who make the laws are part of the system).
If America cannot continue to evolve, improve, and adapt, then its prosperity and leadership role will fade away. It doesn't matter how great our ideology or political systems are (or we think they are). It doesn't even really matter how many advanced weapons we have. You can't fight the whole world forever.
I guess people would literally rather take the chance of America falling apart or the earth melting than let someone build a subway or new building near them.
Before you wax poetic about this period, please read more on the complete disregard for the families and communities impacted by the large construction projects from that time. Replies comparing the US today to China would also benefit from the same. Public works has a lot of issues with cost and inefficiencies, but I think we should all be happy that eminent domain is not wielded with the same disregard for human life as it once was.
Interestingly, the Golden Gate Bridge pioneered worker safety measures while the Bay Bridge (built at the same time) followed the status quo of almost no consideration to safety.
The difference was, basically, how much management cared about the issue.
For a really rough comparison, you can look at the building of the east span of the Oakland Bay bridge. It's also worth noting how many people died while building them. (Disclosure: I've never looked this up or done this comparison myself)
>Sometime in living memory, the built environment of the U.S. began to freeze in place. I’d mark the time roughly at *1970*, but it’s a process, not a single seminal event.
> It is obviously fair for authorities to take some time to plan things out and weigh the costs and benefits. But they spend, well, an inordinate amount of time weighing the costs and benefits. In a 2018 study of environmental impact statements under NEPA, *the mean statement took 4.5 years to complete*
"The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA), *enacted in 1970*, established a policy of environmental impact assessment for federal agency actions, federally funded activities or federally permitted/licensed activities that in the U. S. is termed "environmental review" or simply "the NEPA process."
---
Things like unions and safety regulations had more of an effect on costs of projects. In terms of time to complete projects, what you see above is the biggest culprit.
I know the author can’t possibly include every cause of slowness but it seems disingenuous to not include the preservation movement, especially given the decision to talk about downtown San Francisco.
The 70s saw a change in how historic preservation was handled, I’d argue because of the success of Jane Jacobs. It became less about saving patriotic sites and more about saving the look and feel of the idealized early 1900s city. From the 70s to the 90s we stopped protecting battlefields and started protecting whole neighborhoods.
The big catalyst here was in 1972: State Legislation
The Advisory Council of Historic Preservation provides guidelines for State Historic Preservation Legislation. State Preservation Officers were established in 1966 as well, but each state had different legislation. While every state has its own priorities, the guidelines were meant to streamline the legislation.
Now, standards that were explicitly written to help preservationists maintain places like Mount Vernon apply to important chunks of our major cities. Sure Chicago and sfo have maybe 2-3% of parcels protected, but they are highly clustered in desirable areas. And blanket block or neighborhood designations cover parcels of dubious distinction. Additionally it seems like every time there’s a major project announced in major cities these days, someone is going to come out and try and protect the “landmark.”
In Milwaukee there’s a project proposed to tear down an early 1900s hospital on the college campus. The school doesn’t have funds to maintain it. It’s a minor project by a minor architect and is not particularly unique. The preservationists are trying to block the demolition and honest to god, the reason given is that some of them were born there. They’ll probably win.
I think the authors point on heavy handed but well meaning legislation from the 70s needs to be revisited is applicable here as well. I’m for preservation but the mechanisms seem to have gone completely out of whack with the realities of our cities and current needs.
What's weird is how common it was to have completely polluted rivers inside US cities.
And how Nixon needed to make it an Agency first because he didn't want Congress to have a Department of the Environment which would be out of control from the executive.
And how that has shaped the US environmental plans by making it a bargaining chip of the executive rather than a foundational aspect of our representative government.
Disband the EPA and create a Department of The Environment under Congress. Executive Orders do not have the gravitas required for a solid policy.
Regulations took previously externalized costs passed to labor and made them internalized costs to businesses.
A lot of that which is cheap is only cheap because a combination of exploitation that involves externalizing costs and pushing constant pressure on labor efficiency. Every now and then we get gains in reduced cost from a technological innovation where a simpler or improved process is able to shave things off vs passing them on. In these cases, gains tend not to be externalized but instead internalized unless competition can drive the gains to be externalized.
I am convinced that this cannot be the whole story.
The 'West' construction is not a mess because of bureocracy. It is a mess because of contractor disease and hollowing out of skills.
First come the contractors - UK government needed to do contract tracing, and has contracted a private company to get medical proffesionals to call travelers that were diagnosed with covid. The private conoaby has no expertise in anything other that writing bids and proposals for government contra ts, they subcontracted someone else. Those subcontracted a call center that has people with no experience or understanding of medicine reading from a script and earning minimum wage while 4x their salary is pocketed.
I see this all over the place, there are like 5 layers of subcontracting you must travel though before you find actual work being done.
Second consider alck of long-term planning - uk has not been building nuclear power plants for decades, then started hincley point C. There was noone in the coutry with the experience requires to run a nuclear project of this scale. Then the project will be complete, with difficulty and delays and people train in the job, and the people will be lost again.
The financing on that project was forced onto the company to keep construction costs off government balancesheet - they didnt want it to show up as debr for political reasons. So insted of government borrowing for 30 years at 0.3% interest the conpany has to borrow that money ar 3% interest, more than doubling the cost.
I frequently see evidence of China and other asian nations being more technically skills and agile, for instance they were desinfecting their busses with UV-C before UK managed to figure out hand sanitising stations. We have done nothing to sort out ventilation in schools, we are removing masks even though they don't hurt anyone, and we are forcing peolle back into central london to prop up the commercial real estate bubble.
Whilst I agree with a lot of your post (I am British), most of it was just a rant about the government's inadequate response to covid. It has pretty much nothing to do with this article.
It was an inaccurate rant about the UK's response to Covid too. The only part of calling up people with Covid to find their contacts which was contracted out was recruiting and employing them, fairly directly by the government, and of course medical professionals weren't used - those were busy giving medical care, and contact tracing was outside their area of expertise anyway. And the big reason it seemed inadequate is that the British press, quite frankly, outright lied about how well contact tracing worked in places like South Korea and about the downsides of their approach, which would not have been at all politically acceptable in the UK.
> of course medical professionals weren't used - those were busy giving medical care
I have no expertiese myself, but all the literature I have read on contact tracing was very clear that you should not use random people on minimum wage, it recommended retired medical proffeshionals, or people who worked in a related industry, so that they have a basic understading of the subject matter and the questions they are asking.
Also private eye reports that there was a wide gap between the skills and wages government thought they were buying, and what was provided at the other end.
Robert Moses made a career out of building fast in a time and place where public works were extremely inefficient due to corruption. He rose to power at a time when jobs were handed out as currency to collect votes. Robert Caro describes in great detail scenes where, for example, hundreds of city workers who were supposed to be working would instead camp out in parks passing around prostitutes and brown paper bags. The city was a wasteland of corruption and incompetence. Moses turned this around in a matter of years to build massive public works projects quickly and at a high level of quality.
I guess my point is that things were very bad in New York before the 1920s. And one man found a way to turn that around. So we shouldn’t act as if the status quo is our destiny. That we are somehow witnessing something that is new in this country. Things can change. We can change them. It happened before.
There is an entire economy within the economy, based upon slowing things down. This has become so ingrained, and people are so accustomed to it, that most can’t even see it.
It's always made me chuckle when I see Americans complaining about their 'high' gas prices, even more so before this current price rise started.
I'm in the UK and my nearest fuel station (which is pretty averagely priced in my area) is currently charging $10.50/gallon, and that's been steadily rising for some time now. I'm not sure it's plateaued yet either.
"A dozen lawsuits have targeted environmental aspects of the projects, including another suit by the town of Atherton that argued, among other things, that the rail authority had conducted an inadequate analysis of where the train should be elevated along the San Francisco peninsula. A court ruled that the analysis had been properly done."
Perhaps it's that disease of a profession named "project management". In the past we had engineers and architects running large projects. They knew the industry, the people, and how everything works. Now we have professional projects managers that don't really understand the details of what is actually required, or how things work, so they crank the process overhead up to almost fetish levels. Even in the IT world, a one year project just 10 years ago is now a 3 year project.
And on IT side people might not even stick with the 3 year project... But move over part-way and then developers might actively avoid 3 year old project... So no wonder any lessons are not learned and mistakes are repeated...
The problem of public input vetoing low-carbon energy projects (including transmission) is really a symptom or side effect of the fact that we don’t have coherent global to national to regional to local energy policy. There is no responsibility for regions or localities to reduce carbon emissions, so these communities are not forced to make tradeoffs when commenting on local impacts of projects.
What we need instead is to have carbon emissions reduction goals at all levels. Then a suite of efficiency and generation/transmission projects can be identified in each region that can contribute to those goals. Then, when those projects are being designed and approved (via an integrated process), the approval process can involve explicit tradeoffs. If the community, for example, has an exceptional wind energy resource, but doesn’t want to develop it for environmental or aesthetic reasons, then their regional climate action plan can be updated to use other mixes of efficiency and generation/transmission that would meet or exceed their goals. The community may then find that they would rather have the wind turbines than the alternatives.
The “problem” with this approach is that it requires a level of urgency and coordination that we have only been able to muster in the past using wartime central planning. Not sure how to get around this, and this is a major problem given ideological biases against central planning in the US.
The other problem is that in practice it will likely not
be possible for both global and local climate goals to be satisfied while also minimizing local displeasure with the tradeoffs required. However, no system is perfect, and perhaps this system could at least provide a framework for identifying who is getting the short end of the stick and therefore to whom some
sort of reparations can be made for “taking one for the team”.
> " This style of thinking is present especially in environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) at the federal level, or the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) at the state level. These laws both require the government to conduct an exhaustive review of government projects—sometimes even permitting decisions on private projects—that might have negative environmental impacts."
There's a reason those laws were passed, and it's because of all the massive groundwater and air and soil contamination problems created by unregulated free-for-all industrial development that have had to be cleaned up at great public expense. Those waste problems are solvable but solutions are often expensive, adding a large percentage onto the end-to-end cost of a manufacturing line for semiconductors, for example:
As far as large-scale public infrastructure projects, a lot of that is repair and rebuilding of existing installations (bridges etc.), so there's not as much environmental review there - just a need to devote resources to the task. I suppose a more autocratic country like China (which has rapidly built out high-speed rail) wouldn't bother about EPA reviews, but the air in China can be pretty bad.
As far as doing things quickly? The global supply chain problem is pretty evident right now, maybe offshoring and 'just in time' manufacturing wasn't such a great idea due to its lack of robustness under stress? Critical supply chains should be located domestically. Yes, that would either raise prices or cut profits due to increased domestic labor costs and pollution regulations.
> There's a reason those laws were passed, and it's because of all the massive groundwater and air and soil contamination problems created by unregulated free-for-all industrial development that have had to be cleaned up at great public expense.
OK, sure, but what does that have to do with building a bridge or a train station? A similar objection occurs on a smaller scale when we talk about opening up zoning laws to allow more apartments. "There's a reason those laws were passed. You're saying you want a chemical treatment plant built by your school?" No, what I said is that it should be legal to build apartments. Who said anything about a chemical plant?
Supporting quick approvals for less hazardous projects doesn't suggest support for more hazardous projects, but implying that it does is an effective opposition tactic.
What probably should have been done was to write a provision into the law for priority projects, allowing some activities to be waived or timeboxed.
It's a bit unreasonable to expect a process that efficiently handles $x million / 2-year projects to scale to $xxx million / 10-year projects.
If the risks of not having a port expansion / bridge or dam repair / rail transit / nuclear power are greater than the risks of not completing a comprehensive environmental review... well, there you are.
I don’t think blaming the supply chain is fair. Big transportation projects, big city’s housing problems all existed way before our current supply chain problems.
Clearly considering the environment is important. But the costs of over worrying about the environment is becoming clear too. Negative externalities like the homeless crisis in the West coast are affecting everyone.
One factor is workplace safety. We (rightfully) don't allow the kind of unsafe conditions that allowed us to build things so quickly in the past. We were very fast loose with human lives in the past. Look at Dubai, they're building quickly, but at great cost to the workers doing the building.
Can't build quickly because of all the middleman bloat. It's happening in IT...look at how big your product teams are. Software was so much better and faster before agile and product teams. Takes 50 coders a year to make a basic website.
A particularly absurd case of environmental review delaying a much needed project is congestion pricing in NYC. They are actually going to review the environmental impacts of a system that will decrease the number of cars on the road. What are they even reviewing?
One of the big issues with the California High Speed Rail is lawsuits dragging out the environmental review process. Ditto utility solar installations.
I'm in Arkansas, and I've been fighting the city for 2 years to get my power turned on and be able to use a building that I bought. It's freaking ridiculous.
You point brings up something, in the US there are thousands of planning departments. And each one is it's own little fiefdom. Some are fine. Some enjoy screwing over people. Some are incompetent. Some are corrupt.
If you bought a run down 6 plex and wanted to fix it up. SF the permitting would be a right pain. Berkeley would actively try to stop you. Oakland someone would want a bag of cash. Santa Cruz would allow it as long as you used a GC with proper connections.
It took us six months to have a local ISP run fiber for three blocks in a non-densely populated area. Spectrum wouldn't even touch it.
Delay after delay in the permit process. And spent almost as much on permits as actually running the fiber. Then to top it off, we're near railroad tracks (fiber doesn't go anywhere near it)
No wonder nobody wants to invest money in businesses in the city. And how can they attract any companies when there's no decent internet?
The downside of a system that allows to build quickly is that it allows to quickly build really stupid things as well. For example in the 70’s Brussels decided that the city should really look like Dallas and quickly destroyed complete neighbourhoods to build inner city highways and skyscrapers …
I guess high speed disasters like that are part of the reason why nowadays some people are afraid of going too fast with important things
Probably due to bureaucratic overhead. Everything needs to pass through ten layers of approval and every bureaucrat plays power politics the whole time.
I was once involved in a small city project, and the town liaison treated the project like we were in charge of the nation's nuclear arsenal. It's mind blowing how something so trivially small can become such a big deal when there are too many cooks in the kitchen.
there's no safety net in america, and no recognition for doing good things, so people do not want to take risks and people do not want to work for the benefit of others... it's a much easier and better idea for most people to do nothing, or if they're going to do something, do it for themselves.
Unions and safety. Quality of life and less risk for the workers which china et al has less of. Not a difficult question but this topic keeps coming up as some sort of indirect nudge to corrode those two components under the guise of an argument about global competitive advantage.
While private union participation has sharply declined, public unions are still quite powerful and present a virtual lock on substantial changes. Witness the teachers' unions. Particularly, their obstinance during the pandemic and reluctance to providing true school choice.
True school choice is an illusion as long as private schools are free to decline unwanted students that cost more to teach. The advocates of such policies tend to ignore the fact that it would leave disabled and other special needs students in a public system that no longer had enough other students to pay for their higher costs. That’s a problem that requires an adequate solution before any type of voucher is reasonable.
>The advocates of such policies tend to ignore the fact that it would leave disabled and other special needs students in a public system that no longer had enough other students to pay for their higher costs.
People already pay for public schooling through income and property taxes, whether they're children use it or not. I don't see how your theory prevents higher cost students from being taught. It just sounds like you're advocating for a crab bucket.
Every proposal I’ve seen for vouchers tries to tie the amount to average spending per student. My point is that’s fundamentally unfair because private schools are only interested in students that cost below the average to educate. They work hard to exclude and disqualify those with costly special needs. The result is you leave the public education system with all the high cost students but still getting the $X k they had per student when they had low cost students too. The net result of vouchers is raising the per capita cost of public education without raising the per capita funding. That’s unfair to everyone forced into using that system.
If you're issue is mainly with vouchers, then why not get rid of the need for vouchers in the first place by getting rid of limiting attendance by zip code? It's unfair for anyone, not just "high-cost" students, to be forced riders in an education system for which they have no agency. Fairness isn't determined on the basis of who in particular is negatively affected. Either the principle itself is fair or it isn't.
The only solution compatible with choice and public education is to allow all students a free-for-all to attend any public school within driving distance. Tuition isn't usually the biggest or first barrier to entry in attending better schools, it's bureaucracy.
I think the follow-on effects of delocalizing schools can be pernicious. In the extreme case you can look at districts in Vermont and Massachusetts where some towns provide vouchers to other education systems instead of having one themselves. Having non-local education systems almost completely disconnects costs from funding. It potentially creates a race to the bottom where districts lower property taxes and make their own education system worse knowing that everyone can use other systems. Of course if everyone does that we set the entire region/country backwards a great deal but prisoners dilemma systems are seldom successfully solved.
Stop holding 95% of students hostage to a tiny minority. They deserve better education. They deserve their teachers' focus instead of them having to devote inordinate amount of time to the mainstreamed special needs students.
Accept the 30% voucher that represents what a typical student getting into private school costs the system instead of demanding 50% as fair when that leaves the system too impoverished to deal with the students that remain.
The attendant should be tutoring the 95% of kids to keep them from falling behind. Only 35% of fourth graders read at grade level. Why do we spend inordinate resources on those that are incapable of ever reading at a fourth grade level when so many are effectively denied being educated?
A fair point. But the unions have been anything but reasonable on this issue. True, some have opened up to charter schools, but many have rescinded that option as soon as it was politically feasible. True choice can only happen when a different management of schools is in place. They have been obstinately against this.
In Ontario, the teachers ratified a three year contract in the spring of 2020 (i.e. COVID-19 was already raging), with the most notable feature being that remote learning would not be permitted, conceding to a paltry 1% raise in order to get the 'win'. Funny part is that they caved to the remote learning pressure in the end anyway.
The argument against school choice us utterly unreasonable to anybody outside of the teacher's union. Their argument against is essentially that their pet school would go out of business because nobody would choose to go there if there were alternatives.
Depends on where you live. Where I live the teachers union supported moving to remote learning overnight and remote learning continued until halfway through this school year. In fact it is still ongoing for those students who chose to do remote learning instead of in person learning. They plan on continuing offering remote learning as an option perpetually into the future. One thing they learned during the pandemic is that there are certain students who do poorly with in person learning but they excelled with remote learning. They want to keep supporting those students who learn better with remote learning than in person learning.
Perhaps in high school level. But little kids, grade-school level, need in-person. They also should not be scared witless by mandatary rules that do nothing but leave them psychologically scarred for years to come.
Children are not so weak as you seem to think. It was children at all levels that showed remarkable improvements through remote learning over in person learning.
I lean in your direction on this. However, I am worried that this evidence doesn't say what we think it says.
Is it that there was more growth in non union fields? It is conceivable that union work is still responsible for much in the building realm. That combined with a non growing workforce could easily explain slowness. Combined with basic supply/demand thinking can then explain costs.
> Is it that there was more growth in non union fields?
Most unionized labor in the US was outsourced during the deindustrialization of the USA.
More than 6 million manufacturing jobs were lost in the US between 2001 and 2010 (representing approximately 1/3 of all manufacturing jobs).
So yes: non union fields are growing, mostly because unionized jobs were busted by companies shipping production overseas. The jobs that "replaced" the good labor of industry are mostly poverty wage service jobs which require very little training. As there's little investment per-worker Unions have effectively 0 bargaining power: Scabbing a strike is simple when you only need 2 hours of training to do their jobs.
Funnily enough the USA manufactures more goods than ever in its history, accounting for ~6 trillion USD of our GDP in 2019.
But this really doesn't feel to be talking to my question. Local building of infrastructure isn't really offshoreable, is it? Such that I get a ton of things were shipped overseas. Not entirely clear that explains why building locally is so expensive.
Your last line indicates that robotics and other large scale industrialization can be pointed at. We manufacture more with far fewer resources?
But, back to my hypothesis that i would love to see shot down. Is the only labor left in large unions in a position that they are in the critical path of building? (Note, that if true, the answer isn't necessarily to bust unions, but to expand their base significantly. I could easily believe that their funds have been starved such that they aren't growing due to so much money being funneled away from them.)
amazing to watch entire generations stumble forward without understanding "retirement,healthcare,workhours,promotion" since you know, "I have never had a problem".. Everyone is protected now.. yeah, thats it
The unionization movement was built on solving the safety issues of the day for workers exposed to employers who found employees to be expendable. The topic here is about how those safety expectations once established by unions slow down construction. Labor laws now cover those concerns, so the decline in unionization is largely irrelevant. The entire workforce has become a member of the de facto union.
That's a rather limited view of the role of unions. One of their biggest accomplishments was the establishment of a standard 40 hour work week as the norm. That was mostly about work/life balance, not safety. And that certainly isn't codified in labor laws, given the remarkably loose overtime rules for most salaried employees today.
How does that pertain to the discussion? We’re not focused on talking about unions here, we’re talking about why construction projects take a long time, so what does that mean for project duration?
I remember the housing boom around 2005-ish in my area. They were throwing houses together at an amazing pace. Private building contracts with a friendly regulatory environment.
My state is ranked among the highest in fraud related to public works projects like building roads. Basically the game is: Start a company, bid so low you know you won't succeed, take your cut, start a build, declare bankruptcy, rinse/repeat. Easy money, no consequences.
I'm pretty sure the government/bureaucracy is in on the take because they do nothing about it. The mayor of my city was on the board of the company that manages the toll system.
Germany is absolutely the wrong example here (I am from Germany):
- the last U5 extension in Berlin (2.2km) took over 10 years to complete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U5_%28Berlin_U-Bahn%29?wprov=s...
- the Stuttgart 21 project was presented in 1994(!), started construction in 2010, was protected to end in 2019 and by now, the main station is expected to be finished in 2025, with more to follow. Of course it went massively over budget and was probably one of the more protested against projects in the last few years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21?wprov=sfla1
- the BER airport is probably one of the most "famous" projects. Planning began in 1991, construction in 2006(!). The planned opening was in October 2011, but the first plane landed in October 2020, nine years later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport?wpr...
- NIMBYs preventing wind turbines is a big issue too, the most recent discussion was about Bavaria preventing new plans with ridiculous requirements (sadly no English source here) https://www.br.de/nachrichten/amp/bayern/wie-viel-windkraft-...
Environmentalists tried to protect commercial forests (intended to be harvested for cardboard) in an industrial zone to stop the Tesla factory from being built.
I don't mind things going slower and costing more for good reasons - what concerns me though is the intentional graft, feet dragging, and insertion of middle men to extract as much money as possible from an important project. Unfortunately unions are a big and willing part of the problem in the US.
We seem to be able to throw up buildings pretty fast. At least here in Austin, but Texas as a hole works for years on anythign to do with roads. OMG it just takes so dang long. I suspect regulations and bureaucracy.
You know, your answer is the funniest one but also the closest to the truth.
This is a great article, but comes to a roundabout conclusion that endorses deregulation so that more community-affecting projects can get built. Which of course is the wrong solution since it merely doubles down on what we're already doing, so will only exacerbate our race towards environmental collapse.
I feel that the answer is in stuff like solarpunk. Specifically, helping someone else by solving our own problems. Every house off the grid reduces the demand for electricity, lowering its price so that others can afford it too. Backyard hydroponic/robotic gardens lower the price of food, and so on. After we pick ourselves up by our bootstraps, we have the resources to help others do the same.
Do they need to? They already have control over their populace (excessive policing etc.), so of course now they’ll spend more on controlling other populations (the insane military budget).
Not when anyone can sue because a certain detail is missing. The fundamental interface to environment work needs to change not just the length of the reports.
It all begins with the urban sprawl experiment in the 1950s. As people left the city for the white picket fence in the suburbs, cities around the country began to subsidize the wealthy SFH owners. Sewers, water, electricity, roads, and gas infrastructure; and fire, EMS, police services are not cheap.
The tax collected from a SFH suburb does not cover the expenses to build and maintain the infrastructure. So to help meet the increasing costs, municipalities need to raise property taxes for everyone. This increases the cost of living for everyone. So combined with inflation and the increased COL, the wages of your construction people on the ground (you know the people that actually build fucking thing you need) need to keep up with this trend so companies need to pay more.
This doesn't come free so this is then passed on to the American tax paying populace. It's a never ending cycle. Low housing supply, homelessness and substance abuse are all symptoms of an underlying cause.
Solution: it's a multifaceted approach - involving changes at the local, state, and federal levels. First, American cities need to get rid of SFH zoning entirely and re-zone for high density mixed use residential and commercial and get rid of any car-centric building policies (eg, car parking minimums). We need to get people out of their private vehicle. Second, need to introduce a luxury or inefficiency tax on existing SFH owners to minimize lost tax revenue and discourage people from buying a SFH (people that are poor can apply for waivers). Then earmark the luxury tax towards incentivizing developers and paying for infrastructure and enhancing public transit. Third, need to introduce extensive toll road fees for people commuting from the exurbs into the city. Why should cities continue to subsidize infrastructure for people that do not pay taxes within that county? Interstate travel will not be tolled.
Then at a state level, DoTs need to re-examine where IH traffic can be redirected. In America, the highways often cut through the cores of each city. This not only reduced the amount of land that is available to cities to build on but contributed to the displacement of poor and marginalized people; and decreasing air quality. We need to follow in the footsteps of Dutch cities like Amsterdam and move towards a more scalable way of transportation and city planning. Additionally, at the state level re-examine where it's possible to reduce dependency on O&G sources of power.
At the federal level, need to support states and cities through funding and providing research. Need to move the grid off of fossil fuel sources ASAP. Continue to provide green incentives and encourage people to make their homes more efficient (better HVAC units, solar power panel installations, ...).
It will definitely not solve the problem in 5 years or 10 years. But maybe our grandchildren might have a chance.
We need some free-for-all zones to build new cities. I know with the current political structure it's near impossible, but "Hamsterdam" from the wire ( uhh, sans drugs and killings... ), comes to mind. A libertarian paradise. Perhaps it could start with more landgrants on just a fraction of the massive bureau of land management reserves. Free from entrenched politics of existing cities, these zones, if done well ( technocrats, here's your chance! ) could serve as inspiration for exporting the know-how to the existing cities.
You might like to read the book “A Libertarian walks into a bear”. It’s about a group of hardcore libertarians who took over Grafton New Hampshire with the goal to do a small town version of what you’ve described.
I've also heard that bands were better in the 60's and 70's than they are today...or...oh wait, is it just survivor-ship bias? We do have examples of building big things fast in history, but do we also have examples of projects taking way longer than they should?
Not just America. I guess most (all?) countries have that problem.
In Germany, Hitler built the whole Autobahn system in a couple of years. Now it takes 8 years to upgrade a 5km stretch of the Autobahn from 2 to 3 lanes.
Yes, Nazi Germany was using lots of slave labor, but these days we have so many machines that it would require much less workforce to achieve the same result. Yet, you often see construction machinery standing idle next to the Autobahn for weeks, if not months, with no work being done
I made a similar comment yesterday and was rightfully downvoted so I’ll try again here.
The US military is a jobs program. Politically it is suicidal to support “socialism” but that’s exactly what military spending is.
So, what if we expanded that idea? What if we had a domestic infrastructure version of the US Military? Or at least a peaceful national service program?
The benefits seems clear to me. Opportunity, well lubricated gears of commerce, and a stronger sense of ownership among the electorate.
Agreed. Unfortunately “New Deal” language is also politically toxic. Not sure how to leverage the appetite for military spending to build infrastructure. Declare war on potholes?
the construction of the second avenue subway was slow because of hundreds of years of infrastructural technical debt in manhattan and reduced tolerance for utility disruptions in an affluent area.
you can dig a hole (as elon musk has done) in nevada in the space of a few months.
We knew we needed to replace it in 1989 after Loma Prieta. In 2001 the Nisqually quake damaged it and made its replacement mandatory. It wasn't decided to build the tunnel until 2009, it then took until 2019 before it opened.
IMVHO the ancient Italian proverb "presto & bene, raro avviene" (quick & well done, rarely happen) it's still valid:
- acting quickly, with emergency powers/needs etc is a recipe to a disaster, things MUST be done as much as possible with accurate reasoning, that means more cost at initial phases but far less for the rest of the life;
- when acting quickly is needed, things must be as much pre-digested as possible.
USA and IMVHO the entire western world can't build quickly anymore because it have build too quickly in the past and now we are in a messy state. Quick growth of the recent past have led to too dense cities, to little room to evolve anything and now both available resources, lessons learned and analyze-paralyze make anything complicated. The so called Great Reset is actually needed, while definitively not as neoliberals have drawn it so far.
Unfortunately such "reset", even if well driven at the slowest peace possible, will be (already is) far harmful anyway. IMVHO those who build quickly now because they can and they need (like China) know that well, but are locked-in in a state of things that leave very limited choices. For instance China can't nourish it's Citizens with internal resources, so it need to import many things, starting from food, and that's true for too many countries, and that's not only food. Not only oil. Not only other natural resources (metals, woods etc): people are constantly kept in semi-ignorant states to being able to drive them like a flock, that's true for all dictatorships and for formal (but not substantial) democracies, that's both the neoliberal idea of governing, the Chinese, Russians, Indian, ... idea of governing. Doing so *might* work under certain conditions but when you need to change it's a mess, most do not understand why they need to change. They fear (with good reasons) the change, they do accept being pastured under stable even if bad conditions but they react against any changes. To push a *quick* change the classic way is crisis/wars/disasters and the outcome is generally another big set of issues...
To build quickly AND being able to correct issues that *always* happen we need something able to evolve, for instance we need to abolish cities, they are too dense and complex to evolve. And that's an issue because, yes, with actual tech (transportation, communications etc) we can abandon cities while remaining modern but we are probably too numerous for the usable land we have and for the amount of resources needed for the transaction. Such change it's also not just in housing and transportation means but also in social structures and organization. It can be done in terms of experiments, but on scale... Probably on scale a big war is needed. Unfortunately doing so with today tech and state of things means a big disaster, probably big enough to destroy humanity...
It's because we have no national purpose because we are no longer a nation. Instead we are an empire controlled by a conglomeration of vested interests ( foreign and domestic ). We used to be able to build massive projects like cross country railroads in the 1800s. Of course it came with genocide of native americans, theft of their land and the wiping out of bison/animals across the continential US, but at least we had a direction. We are now captainless ship and instead of trying to take control of the ship and give it direction, the elites (foreign and domestic ) are simplying offloading as much cargo as they can before the ship sinks. How else do you explain legalized gambling, drugs, culture wars, fixation on lgbt, etc? Yahoo sports has the "Sportsbook" tab in between NCAAB and NCAAF. Gotta get the young college students addicted to gambling while they are young. That tells you everything you need about the US.
This is gratuitously false. US manufacturing output today is as high as it has ever been. Even low value add industries like steel production are at a significant percentage of their historical maximum output (they do tend to be relatively mechanized and automated and not job centers anymore).
> Right, but manufacturing's share of GDP is low as it has ever been.
That only means that we are creating more jobs than manufacturing can provide. There is no point in manufacturing more and more if current levels are enough. For an analogy, agriculture is only 2% of GDP but it is good enough to feed everyone. Increasing the percentage of GDP of agriculture is pointless.
That's different from having the "know-how", though. We have the knowledge and ability to manufacture a lot--as much as or more than any past point in time. We just "produce" a lot more stuff that isn't manufactured now as a share of our economic output.
Climate change is natural.To much thoughtless advancement of western countries try to sell that idea to imitate the East which is evolving with what is termed as"climate Change" ..All are bunkum...Live with it and enjoy life.
This is a very common strategy for those who get easily overwhelmed with big things in life: declare that it’s meant to be that way so that you’re absolved of any sense of responsibility.
The problem is that declaring “I am but a passenger” is self defeating: it inevitably robs you of agency to do anything meaningful in life.
Here's an inconvenient truth: Building itself is energy-intensive and depends heavily on emitting CO2 from the cement kiln to the trucks to the excavating equipment etc. Doing it quickly, more so. The answer is always to do less. Less travel, less building infrastructure for travel, less economic activity, and ideally fewer people alive. Nobody wants to hear that. Everything on the table in what passes for public debate represents one or more of the Kubler-Ross grief stages: bargaining, denial and anger.
the end result of "systems thinking" is that "balance" is found by smoothing out extremes.. it takes a combination of capacity, training, inputs and will to use a human mind to think in terms of systems, not just yourself, but many people are capable of that
One must remember the capex opex distinction. Building e.g. in electricity generation with fossil fuels can be net negative, and even necessary, to bootstrap more electrified activity.
I am not saying some sectors aren't just bad need to shrink, but other sectors are good need to grow. That is what Jason Hickel thinks too, incidentally!
An across-the-board slowdown of economic activity is a very stupid --- both in terms of political impossibility and also needless sacrifice --- way to fix our climate issues.
What if we need to build mass transportation solutions in order to get Americans off of single occupancy vehicles? What if we need to build more housing in our cities so that housing becomes affordable and the homelessness problem is reduced? What if we need to build solar and wind farms so that we can turn off coal and natural gas generators?
I don't know how you can propose doing literally nothing at all as the solution to the problem that has us on course for disaster.
Don't blame me for that "mass suicide" comment, that was someone else's unimaginative and disingenuous reduction of many possibilities (various ways population might shrink) into one -- the most ridiculous and easy-to-shoot-down one as a matter of fact, which is why I throw the "disingenuous" in there.
Nothing will be done to stop climate change. I'll bet you a million 2022 dollars, payable in 2050 in whatever units or quantity are used then. Nobody who actually makes or affects policy is reading what we type here, and they don't pay undue attention to how we vote either. So like I said, I'm not proposing a solution; climate change is happening; there's no rest of the sentence. (There's no "...unless we hurry up bla bla hey guys c'mon etc. etc.") Nobody was in charge of changing it and nobody is in charge of stopping it (because nobody is in charge, at all).
The only thing you can say with any certainty (and it's surprising how obvious it is to some and how unacceptable to others) is that since technology and human activity are what caused the problem in the first place, and since every single permutation of more of the same, including and especially those designed to make our activities more efficient (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox) will just make it worse, then the only plausible solution is LESS of that. Nobody wants to hear about less. Less is negative growth, less is a recession, and nobody wants to hear it, as I already said and as you and your fellow commenters and downvoters have amply confirmed. It's funny how smug you all are while being naive enough to believe that somehow the thing that caused it all will be the solution to it all. Bla bla same actions expecting different result bla bla insanity bla bla?
Certainly, the air/water was worse in China but workers also had to work much harder (later nights, weekends, etc). But perhaps most importantly, the government would waste no time in getting land that it needed, and it certainly wouldn't ask for your consideration if it needs to do construction on a Saturday morning.
While I appreciate that there is an inherent trade off between environmental consideration and speed, I think the author makes it clear that it's reached comic proportions in the US. The article is short, but I think the main premise is overwhelmingly accurate: The system exists to protect the status quo.
There's also the reliance of transportation agencies on consultants: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/21/mbta-o21.html