I don't know the answers, but as someone who works in the industry (on the design side). I think a big unmentioned factor is probably liability and the prospect of litigation.
If you look at old blueprints for projects in the past, they are a LOT less detailed. They had to be, because it was physically more difficult to produce them since they had to be drawn by hand. A lot was left to the contractor to figure out in the field.
Now, drawings are more detailed and contractors are incredibly reluctant to make even the smallest decisions on their own. They don't want to assume the liability and risk getting sued if they do something wrong, so they push that off on the engineers and architects.
This means every time there's a question, it has to be submitted through a formal process, tracked, answered, documented. And if the change has any cost impacts, the contractor tacks on a hefty premium because they know they can get away with it (and they probably underbid in the first place to win the job). Delays pile up, every clarification becomes an expensive change order, construction workers twiddle their thumbs while designers get around to addressing questions and this all costs money and time.
Anecdotally, having moved to Western Europe, I get the sense that this is the major factor as well.
If I walk down the street and there is a group of workers excavating a road, there's a lot more of a relaxed attitude about fencing, walking underneath construction equipment, etc.
After all - use your common sense - don't fall into the hole. If you do, isn't it kind of your own fault? Nobody's going to sue anybody.
Additionally, it's not a big deal to close or severely impact a road due to construction - just shift around the fantastic public transit infrastructure, and everyone carries along. A bus only needs one lane in both directions. Another thing that would never fly in North America.
Both of these problems are deeply cultural. Lawsuits have become a form of welfare. Sure, you might not have government healthcare if you get hurt or sick, but maybe you can sue somebody and get paid for your suffering?
And America's love affair with the automobile is a well-known abusive relationship that America will never have the courage to leave.
The abusive relationship love-affair is the best explanation I've ever heard of cars in the USA.
Just like a an abusive relationship, the car love affair still produces some good things. It's not all dark and dreary.
"I hate that he comes home drunk and hits me, but he's so loving and apologetic the next morning."
"I hate that I get so stressed from my daily commute, but being able to drive to the countryside on the weekend is so nice."
You can be in a relationship without dealing with abuse, and you can get to work less stressfully and still have the freedom to explore the world.
That's what makes the relationship so sinister; it's Stockholm syndrome.
"How could I ever live without him, even though he hits me sometimes?"
"How could I ever live without driving everywhere, even though the country on the whole is getting more unhealthy, we continue to use up our limited resources, and the ability to walk around and individuals' quality of life is reduced?"
Of course you can live without those negatives. There are ways out. There is a better life possible.
> And America's love affair with the automobile is a well-known abusive relationship that America will never have the courage to leave.
It's pretty much impossible to leave this relationship unless you live in one of the larger US cities. If you live in a suburb, rural area, or city that's not in the top 10-15 in terms of size there's literally no other option that exists or that could easily exist.
I know you couldn't resist injecting an anti-car barb in there but it makes no sense - the problem in the US isn't our "abusive relationship" with cars, it's insufficient infrastructure. Your magical public-transportation future will be ever bit as bad or worse than cars today if the government similarly underfunds it. Which they will.
As a counter-example, Japan is one of the best in the world at infrastructure while at the same time being incredibly thorough about safety and external impacts. They can do a complete overhaul of the busiest train station in the world with zero downtime and solid walls around all construction.
Those liability problems exist in every advanced Western country. It's true that litigation is more costly in common law countries, in some cases twice as high, and that this cost can be internalized in the ways you suggest. But those costs only account for single-digit percentages overall.
What you describe could also be understood as an inefficient way of organization that is peculiar to the United States, and a by-product of American business and economic logic. Firms (i.e. vertical integration) exist to reduce the comparative inefficiencies of having separate, independent entities. Most other countries still have huge conglomerates (e.g. Japan, Korea), or contractors enjoy closer and longer-term business relationships.
With rare exception (Berkshire Hathaway, Elon Musk, etc) Americans have systematically shifted toward looser organization of smaller, independent business entities. One of the downsides is the exploding cost of orchestrating these entities for big projects, and the loss of knowledge about how to manage such projects.
No not really, once you study the legal system of other advanced countries you will realize the US system is completely insane. The verdicts are wild, and we use juries for complex civil litigation. A bunch of regular Joes are supposed to understand torts and then even calculate damages! The result is trial lawyers succeed by playing on emotion, class, race, playing a character, etc., and a bunch of bored confused Joes and Janes sees an injured person and thinks "Okay, this sucks, give them $50 million."
But those costs only account for single-digit percentages overall
How do you know that? It seems like a really difficult number to account for like the cost of medical lawsuits. Sure, you can look at malpractice insurance, legal fees, and damages awarded to plaintiffs - but how do you properly count the extra tests, procedures, pharmaceuticals, man-hours, etc. that result from the increased defensive posture of doctors and hospitals?
Perhaps also Back In The Day, Big Picture things were over-engineered.
I guess also, ever do a home renovation on a house > 40 years old? You usually walk into a disaster of things not up to code. These days, it would just be done correctly, just as cheap as possible, and not built to last. Most recent housing developments near here are just ways for developers to make money and run, as the infrastructure (housing, not utilities, etc) is not going to last all that long. The developers don't care - they'll be enjoying their profits States away, as the city that is home to their developments are quickly crumbling.
Not that I'm bitter on the changing landscape of my city, or anything. But a housing boom has dark sides.
To be fair, houses and engineering projects in the olden days probably suffered from exactly the same problems. I've read multiple accounts of people complaining about just this in the late 1800s in the UK...
>This means every time there's a question, it has to be submitted through a formal process, tracked, answered, documented.
I don't know why you think proper change control is a bad thing. In both software and systems engineering you submit change requests that are tracked, reviewed, assessed for risk, approved and documented. You do this to create an audit trail to identify "how we got here". Any concerns? It's documented in the ticket.
Now when it comes to civil engineering projects, where bridges can collapse, you should WANT that kind of rigorous change control of tracking, approving, and documenting.
Yes, documenting change control requires more work, but it also saves lives and creates an audit trail in case of a grave error.
I'm not saying changes shouldn't be documented. I'm saying the people on the ground doing the work should be more empowered to use their judgement. They can do that and still document what gets changed.
As it stands now, some unforeseen circumstance in the field will necessitate a minor modification to the design. The contractor knows perfectly well what needs to be done, but instead of simply doing it, they will ask the designers to tell them to do it, so they aren't the ones responsible for it. The designer of course can't simply rubber stamp whatever the contractor says, so they have to spend time figuring out what the issue is and whether the contractor's solution is adequate. All that adds up.
> I think a big unmentioned factor is probably liability and the prospect of litigation.
There was an article shared to HN some time ago arguing that the kinds of cost overruns that we see so often on infrastructure projects in the US are almost endemic to common-law countries, and radically less prevalent in civil-law countries.
I haven't been able to find that article again, but its conclusion has come up in many similar discussions since.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend some years ago. My friend comes from a family of home builders. None of them do it professionally anymore, but they all spent every summer growing up helping dad do everything from digging the hole to putting in the carpet.
From time to time, each of the siblings has built a new home, and they just do it themselves in their spare time. My friend was telling me about helping his sister with her home. His sister has moved into a very rural community in the western U.S. When the family showed up to pour the footings, they asked for a copy of the footing plans. Their sister handed them an 8.5x11 sheet of paper with a hand-drawn floor plan.
"Where's your official plans? The plans you submitted for your permit? The ones with the footing details?"
"That is the paper we submitted for our permit. See the stamp that says 'Approved'?"
All the other siblings live in Clark County, Nevada. The permitting process there is excruciating. They looked at the paper, looked at each other, shrugged, then built the house. They know how to build a footing. They know how to frame. They know how to build a house. The sister's house was built with the same quality as the other siblings' in a fraction of the time.
But if one of the big builders tries to put in a subdivision in that little town, I hope the municipality watches them like a hawk. Big builders don't build homes. They cheat and connive and do everything to push product at the lowest possible cost.
In a world without trust, you cannot afford to let people self-manage.
There is two problems with this theory. The first is that governments have immunity from litigation. They can only be sued where they consent to the lawsuit. The second is that in most states, employee-related injury claims must proceed through a worker's compensation system outside the normal litigation channel where the costs are much less.
I always say there are not too many lawsuits, but too many laws. Legislatures think they are making something better by passing more rules, regulations, and laws. But, for every rule, regulation, or law, you have an opportunity for a lawsuit. Use more common sense? Sure, but then don't pass a multitude of laws regulating the subject.
Why are infrastructure projects' costs higher here? I don't know really. My guess would be that compared to say Germany and Japan, everything here is the U.S. is huge. I mean probably 10-30% larger in size than those other countries with the resulting higher costs. But, this is just my personal observation.
The government and its workers are not immune from litigation either, both have been sued, and successfully held responsible for damages.
Actual construction is performed by contractors, corporations that are contracted by the government. In the US, it is rare for a construction project to be built, or even be designed, by government workers. These corporations and their workers can be sued, and take on additional liabilities due to the contracts and laws that apply specifically to them.
> But, for every rule, regulation, or law, you have an opportunity for a lawsuit
What? Two women suing McDonalds because they got fat from eating too many cheeseburgers is not a regulatory issue. A canoe company being sued for not having lifeguards posted every mile of the river they serve is not a regulatory issue. Parents suing a city because their idiot kid fell off a slide is not a regulatory issue.
America is lawsuit-crazy. Anybody can sue anybody for anything, regardless of whether regulation surrounds the issue or not. If anything, regulation acts as a legal protection against lawsuits, and many regulations are enacted in response to frivolous lawsuits from assholes who think the world owes them something because they can't take personal responsibility.
The government is not the entity that would be sued, this is not about personal injury claims. The contractor or design engineer would be the one who gets sued for design flaws or implementation flaws that lead to costly re-work. They would be getting sued by the government or the owner in the case of a building.
This is an interesting theory, but any attempt at explaining why the US in particular is bad at large-scale infrastructure also has to explain why other countries are so much better at it.
The litigousness argument seems to be interesting from that perspective, but I'd be hard-pressed to believe that France or Germany are less detail-oriented in their planning, given that the same tools that allow better blueprinting are available everywhere.
American exceptionalism might have a place in the discussion, as the USA is exceptionally big. Furthermore it is notable that the only countries that are likely to have similar quality infrastructure with lower population density are the Nordic ones.
I don't think I've seen any evidence that the US has any less regulations than Europe. On the contrary I get the impression that the US has far more detailed regulation than, e.g. Sweden. Americans seem to love being a NIMBY, and corporations have a lot of power to get regulation in place to lock out competition.
This is an argument for vertical integration in the construction industry, which I suppose might even include state-run construction companies. If the architects, engineers, and construction workers are all working for the same entity, then there's no troublesome legal issues to deal with at the boundaries between entities, and everyone can simply do the right thing as efficiently as possible.
You have identified a incentive towards vertical integration. But then we might ask ourselves what is stopping it. Is there some counter-incentive that causes the hierarchy of contractors? Is there some regulation that forces it?
You might claim that there are no state-run construction companies because of free-market ideology or some such bogeyman. But that doesn't explain why the private contractors don't integrate vertically.
My own guess is that even a vertically integrated entity would be risk averse and have to create expensive, slow, internal sign-off procedures.
This is correct. I wonder if anyone has tried doing "design and build" contracts where this becomes an internal cost center instead of a profit driver, and would theoretically get optimized out.
I am on the developer side on a project with a design-build contract with a major contractor. the architecture side and contractors are pitting against each other internally, because the architect is still liable for his drawings being correct, and the contractor is still liable for the work being complete to the contract documents. Seeking to align efforts to minimize detailing costs is a recipe for very costly mistakes down the road when something doesn't satisfy fire code, building code, ADA, insurance, lender requirements, hotel brand standard (in my case). Theoretically, I suppose you would only see streamlining if the Owner-Architect-Engineer-GC-Regulator was one entity, like a government maybe.
>Now, drawings are more detailed and contractors are incredibly reluctant to make even the smallest decisions on their own.
I also wonder about the effect of building codes, etc.. It might be interesting to plot construction costs and number pages of building code vs. time for the U.S., Japan, France, etc., and see if there are any correlations. That type of plot seems like it might almost be doable.
The United States is consistently ranked as a top 5 most litigious country by various metrics. This may not be the main cause of the problem, but it certainly doesn't help.
Depends on the software. In general infrastructure has a much higher liability associated with it, as a failed bridge, road, or building, will quickly kill/injure those making use of it. I could see a similar situation arise for, say, embedded software for medical devices like pacemakers etc.
Yeah but the bureaucracy makes a lot of money for itself and grows ever larger. Basically you want to treat the people executing the plan as smart adaptable agents rather than dumb robots.
That suggests that U.S. costs are high due to general
inefficiency [...] Americans have simply ponied up more
and more cash over the years while ignoring the fact that
they were getting less and less for their money.
There's a general effect in political systems, that if a law takes $20 from 1,000,000 people and gives $100,000 to 200 people, the people who lose money won't have enough incentive to put up a big fight; but the people who receive money will have more than enough motivation.
For example, if a big irrigation project will force taxpayers to subsidise corporate farms, the corporations have a big incentive to spend on ads and campaign contributions. Or if you have to give $60 to a private company for tax filing software, they have a big incentive to lobby and make campaign contributions to keep the tax system complicated.
I'm sure construction projects are subject to the same pro-waste incentives.
I'm not sure what the solution to this is - campaign finance reform, perhaps?
Abso-fucking-lutely. I think in order to run at any levels of office, you should be using public money. For simplification, let's say if one wants to run for president, they can only use whatever is in the FEC public coffers. In return, we levy a federal FEC tax to boost it way higher than its current rates. We replicate a similar tax at state and local levels. Completely remove private donations and PACs and all that shit from the lawbooks. A fuckload of people want to run for president? Well, you better get creative with your tiny slice of the pie. Show us how fiscally responsible you really are.
People would scream and holler about it not being American, but it's one of the only ways, I think, to really take a large stab at our chronic corruption.
Expecting Washington to determine who is a serious candidate (and then policing their use of federal funds) is a major conflict of interest, because policymakers will almost certainly set standards that benefit the two entrenched parties. I've toyed with an alternative concept, though, that might achieve the same effect with less required oversight.
The idea is a sort of non-partisan "un-PAC" -- a fundraising organization explicitly dedicated to combating corporate political donations. If a presidential candidate or his affiliated PACs recieved eg. $5MM in fundraising from oil executives, the un-PAC would spend $5MM on negative advertising linking him in the public's mind with that industry. If the un-PAC raised enough money, eventually a large multiple of corporate donations could be spent counteracting them, and at some point it would become uneconomical for politicians to accept those donations at all.
We spent about $6B on the 2016 federal elections (https://www.opensecrets.org/overview/cost.php). That comes out to about $20 for every American. That's a big number to beat, but not impossible, and every bit along the way helps.
If businesses have a hundred different ways to gain special market advantages by simply having political influence then 100% their money should not be able to influence politics.
This should be more obvious in US (and Canadian) politics than it is. But politicians are rarely willing to admit their malleability when it comes to both businesses and non-profit organizations (or special interest groups) influencing them. So the problem persists.
This is a big thing many small-government conservatives seem to miss. They think that capping financing of political parties is anti-business. But in reality it's only incumbent businesses who fleece the government for contracts or exploit government policy to create barriers of entry for their competitors who back ending these policies.
Even though small/medium business represents 60%+ of employment they are largely ignored policy-wise. Then when big-corps exploit market dynamics then ever more regulation are put in place that only hurts the small businesses rather than the big corps (see: minimum wage).
So those of us who support small-government, we're often left with only choosing between big government liberals who are indifferent to the ROI of ever-expanding government power/tax base or small government conservatives who let corporate influence in politics run free. It's difficult to tell which one results in the most abuse these days.
Even if this stops being a problem it has existed for decades and these 'gray' connections between politics and business is everywhere in North America. It would take decades to reverse their influence which is a shame because it's very existence is self-reinforcing (much like those organizations whose very existence depends on the continuation of government financing as opposed to depending on their utility to the public).
Or do like every sensible country does, cap individual donations, forbid companies from donating, create a government entity whose goal is to ensure donations are respecting those rules, candidates having to deliver their list of donors to said entity. Make it actually illegal to get private money from PACs and other complex setups. And eventually reimburse part of the campaign past a certain percentage of votes.
But that requires to unfuck the entire american political system and weird fascination for corporations being people, so this might take a while.
The only meaningful campaign finance reform would require a constitutional amendment, because SCOTUS has said a corporation is a person and persons have free speech and money is free speech therefore corporations can spend any amount of money on behalf of a candidate. So you'd have to rip that up with an amendment. There are two paths to an amendment, via 2/3rds agreement by both houses of Congress, or 2/3rd of the states calling for a consitutional convention (which has never happened). There is no chance such an amendment gets proposed by this or a foreseeable future Congress. Both of the major parties prefer the existing system.
Which leads to the other possible amendment, up ending the monopoly the political parties have on the primary voting system. One way that sounds nice, but is specious, is destroying the political parties - simply disallow their existence. Probably better is to change the voting system:
a. Range or preferential voting in a single election rather than the current tribal primary system which is not controlled by law but by each political party. Primaries encourage members of the tribe to vote in a reactionary way, the extremes of each party tend to win.Range or preferential voting is better than runoffs, it's basically an instant runoff system.
b. Get rid of the Electoral College. The idea it will keep us from getting incompetent presidents is pretty much proven wrong, plus it's been broken again by the two political parties who have gotten states to enact laws that require electors explicitly to not vote their conscience, under penalty. So it doesn't at all do what it was designed to do; and it comes from our racist slave history, the southern slave states wouldn't ratify the constitution without this provision. So get rid of it. The only thing worse than tyranny of the majority is tyranny of the minority.
Anyway, it's not going to fix itself. People will have to want to fix it.
If the explanation is some fundamental law of economics/politics as you seem to be suggesting, what is the reason the USA is afflicted more by the problem than other first world nations, or than the USA of a century ago?
The U.S. political system is remarkably vulnerable to pressure from interest groups because power is so fragmented. We have three branches of government at the federal level, with a bicameral legislature, and 50 individual states, each with three branches of government and plethora of local governments. And you need them all on board to do anything big.
Imagine that you are the Sierra Club and you want to block construction of a new highway. You can lobby:
* The President, who signs the appropriations bill
* EPA, Department of Transportation, and any other three-letter federal agency that gets to weigh in on the project
* Congressmen and Senators of affected regions/states, and remember that Senators can filibuster legislation to make it require a super-majority
* State governors
* State legislators
* Local governments whose land the road will pass through
* Indian tribes, if their land is affected
And if above doesn't work, you can sue in federal/state court.
All that adds to the time and cost of a construction project, assuming that it will be even approved. And once its approved? You still have a million ways to delay/obstruct the project through lawsuits and lobbying the bureaucratic process.
That's why there are no 'shovel ready' projects. We'll never be able to build another Hoover Dam or the Interstate Highway system.
Obviously other countries have division of power too. But the effect is much less pronounced.
EDIT: As for why the U.S. of a century ago wasn't as paralyzed, well, that's partly because of the growth of the administrative state (bureaucracy), growing importance of interest groups as sources of campaign funds, more regulations in general (which makes lawsuits possible), and fragmentation of party discipline.
This is a feature of democracy. The solution is not campaign finance reform, it is reform of democracy itself. Place additional separation between the people/corporations and the purse-strings of the treasury, and you will reduce this problem. Alternatively, you can take power & responsibility away from the government so that market forces come to bear upon the issue.
Democracy is, after all, a system in which a determined voting majority can use the hammer of the state to extract wealth from the rest of the population. Many people vote in self-defense.
I know that arguing for smaller government and less democracy is an unpopular position, but it is the only way to achieve long-term success. The areas of the economy with the most government involvement and regulation are where we find costs ballooning out of control: healthcare, prisons, infrastructure, student loans, military. Continuing on the present course is not sustainable.
> The areas of the economy with the most government involvement and regulation are where we find costs ballooning out of control: healthcare, prisons, infrastructure, student loans
Come on. Really? Healthcare is heavily regulated, yes, but a lot of that comes from regulating a fucked up mix between public and private institutions along with insurance companies thrown in the mix. Single-payer would absolutely lower these costs substantially. That's the opposite of less regulation.
And prisons? We have private prisons...as in, corporations that have a financial incentive to put more people in prison. Not just that, they lobby the government to create more laws or have stricter penalties to keep more people in prison. You can't seriously tell me that's too much regulation.
Infrastructure? Absolutely needs to be government run. Private companies have no incentive here, unless heavily subsidized by the government, in which case they would just balloon costs as much as possible in order to squeeze as much blood from the stone as they could.
Student loans...if a dog put on a pair of glasses it could get a student loan. That's a lack of regulation. The only real regulation making it balloon out of control is that bankruptcy doesn't absolve your loan debt (whether it should or shouldn't, that's another issue).
Military, I agree with you on! Less military spending! We can use the money for (public) schools and make sure our country isn't made up of complete imbeciles in 20 years.
This problem still occurs in countries that are far more stringent in their fundraising and campaign spending regulations. While I wouldn't say that campaign finance reform is a bad thing, it doesn't really fix this problem.
The US has the most money in politics per capita in the western world, and yet, given how much a company can get per dollar spent, lobbying and donations are an absolute bargain. Handing money to a politician directly is very effective, but in practice, even a lobbying group that didn't spend a dime in elections would still be worthwhile for industry groups.
The dynamics of collective action don't even need government to be true: You see the same behaviors in large corporations, where departments can cause a lot of overall damage to a company by causing small inefficiencies to everyone else: Not enough to organize against. Having worked in government and in big enterprise, if anything government is better, as the lobbying and the cajoling is far more visible.
The solution to the general inefficiency problem in infrastructure in other countries is, against what you would think, is to align goals empowering government vs contractors. The places where we have more inefficiencies is where we are trading not money fork work, but knowledge for expertise: The more layers of expertise we borrow, the harder a contractor is to replace, and thus the higher the final markup.
There's a great study on this regarding the Madrid subway. The subway authority has a budget, and in practice it will go up if they have more ridership. It's in their very best interest to have a large, high quality network, so to keep costs down, they do most of the planning themselves, have a lot of the engineering in house, and most of what they farm out is basic construction and drilling: They'll go as far as to give different contractors different sections to drill, because different sections of tunnel are easier to handle with different techniques and machinery. It's not as if Spain doesn't have insane infrastructure inefficiencies overall, but in this case there's enough goal alignment, and enough decision making outside of the political arena, that they save an order of magnitude per kilometer and per station than the US equivalent, while typical highway construction, decided at the political level and handed to big contractors, aren't really any cheaper.
In software terms, it's the difference between handing the work to a small startup that lives and dies by its runway, or handing a project to big software contractors, healthcare.gov style: The big project handed to the big contractor will very rarely work right, and it will be incredibly expensive.
Am also a design engineer, I specialize in water and wastewater works. My clients are all municipalities, with tight budget and politics are a factor. Engineering productivity has climbed thanks to computers, but construction productivity continues to decline. In my experience on small jobs this has a lot to do with safety and regulations. It takes a team of 2-3 to enter confined spaces (manholes) for momentary inspections or maintenance, it takes extra workers to set up traffic zones to ensure travellers are less of a danger to the workers. Time is taken to ensure archeological, agricultural, and culturally sensitive areas are not disturbed. Minority and women owned businesses are given contractual preference, whether they are most qualified or not. It takes a special (read: expensive) team several weeks to document trivial wetland areas (most people call them roadside ditches), and another person weeks of labor to explain how impacts will be minimized. The government sets standard labor rates for construction labor.
But these are things we as a society have deemed important. Its not acceptable for lives to be lost. It's not acceptable for construction workers to accept low wages. It's not acceptable to recklessly degrade our environmental resources, and it's important to have diversity in this industry.
I don't know if it's true in other countries, but it seems the USA vascilates between priorities depending on the public administration. I am young so my experience is short. Bush saw a real estate bubble, Obama saw an insurance bubble, Trump et al aim for a construction boom. I would add that in New York my home state, a Democrat state, there is a large infrastructure program starting, so it's not just Republicans.
I have no experience building infrastructures in the US, but I have some in Europe, working in construction companies.
I will give you some (sparse, 1 every 10 years) datapoints:
1983 - 2 or 3 copies of any drawing or letter/calculation
1993 - 6 to 8 copies of any drawing or letter/calculation
2003 - 12 to 20 copies of any drawing or letter/calculation
2013 - 16 to 24 copies of any drawing or letter/calculation
And of course this increase of copies is due to the increase in permissions/authorizations/approvals/checks needed and due to "stricter" (actually only more complex) construction codes and changed calculation methods I would say that the number of documents (before making the copies) has increased by 1.5x every ten years, i.e. something that was built on 1,000 drawings/documents in 1983 was built in 2013 on the basis of more than 3,000.
The number of people involved (not labour, but management, engineers, surveyors, technicians, etc.) need also to be multiplied by a factor of 3 2013 vs. 1983.
The actual production (thanks to a few computer-related innovations and the availability of better, bigger machines) has increased, but all in all you do the same amount of work with less people (labour) and lots of people looking at what the workers are doing.
And yet, they can do this in Europe, where all these things are also considered important (so far as I know; but I've yet to see evidence to the contrary).
Google Translate:
>This tunnel under the A12 is one year old, and closely sealed
EDE - Just a year and a day, it's already waiting under the A12 at Ede: a large tunnel, intended for the Park Avenue, the route that must open in Ede East from the A12 to the N224. As it turns out, it will take another year for road construction.
I thought about this when I visited the Hoover Dam.
The audacity of the thing and sheer impossibility of doing anything remotely like it in today's America makes it seem like a relic from an ancient civilization.
#1 reason we wouldn't do things like that today: 112-154 people died during construction (number depends on if you believe that carbon monoxide poisioning during construction was purposely mis-diagnosed in order for the company to skip on paying death benefits).
You say that as though dams can't be built without killing people.
They aren't gifts bestowed by the gods upon the completion of sufficient human sacrifice. Deaths and injuries are minimal with construction equipment and safety techniques.
Dams specifically are... complicated. There are a lot of reasons why dams are more likely to be torn down these days than built. Some are necessary for flood control but dams often have very significant negative environmental effects.
It's also hard to imagine building the interstate highway system today but, in general, a greater concern about the environmental impact of infrastructure projects isn't really a bad thing.
> It's also hard to imagine building the interstate highway system today but, in general, a greater concern about the environmental impact of infrastructure projects isn't really a bad thing.
Yes, but Japan and Western Europe surely care as much about the environment as the US does, don't they?
Plus a lot of the times you have a incredibly amount of money spent on environmental review for things like, a housing complex in the middle of SF being torn down to make way for a taller housing complex. That's not going to impact "the environment" as the term is usually used. It's not dropping new development in a forest or building a dam.
They are not building many interstates, but existing ones are being expanded around cities. They are also upgrading a lot of little two lane country roads to freeways - except for the name they are interstates.
That reminds me a lot of watching my Dad and my uncles work on my grandfather's farm when we would visit there when I was a kid in the mid 70s. Lots of heavy equipment, no shirts, climbing w/o safety lines, cigarettes in everybody's mouth. Just an attitude of "get it done"
It is no wonder "farmer" is one of the most dangerous occupations in the US. They're the last to be impacted by health and safety regulations.
SpaceX is well on their way to re-inventing the Apollo program. Those rockets are huge compared to a Falcon Heavy, and they would literally need a much larger facility to build them, but they'll do it. And they'll do it with hard hats, shirts, safety lines, and in a smoke free environment.
One of my favorite photos looks down on him running a small horizontal drill rig into a cliff while suspended on a rope several hundred feet above the river. Just a rope knotted around his waist, no harness.
Definitely would not pass today's construction safety regulations.
I agree about the relic-feeling. I guess there were giants in those days.
I get the same feeling even for smaller scale projects. I was looking at the I-90 at Snoqualmie Pass from below - it's effectively a very long bridge over the area there - and wondering whether I will see such infrastructure projects in my lifetime.
For the curious, here are some photos of that place:
Maybe not in the US but certainly in other countries. HK currently demonstrates that with their bridge to Macau and France's Millau Viaduct is at least as impressive as the Snoqualmie Pass [1].
Hypothesis: nicotine is a nootropic [0] good for say, 6 IQ points on average (Danish study I saw referenced, not linking unless I can find the original paper). The Hoover Dam and many other great infrastructure projects were created in the earlier 20th century when smoking was pervasive. Perhaps we were somewhat smarter in aggregate back then and that's why we can't engineer infrastructure at the same level anymore.
When they built the Hover Dam people lived in tents. In the desert. Without air conditioning. And, there was during the height of construction, (from memory so forgive inexactness) one day off a year. Christmas Day. And that was optional.
And people were happy to be working because they were in many cases about half starved. So they put up with it.
Contrast that with now. Medium articles about toxic passive aggressive workplaces from people making $120K/year and who spend a lot of that screwing around and in meetings. In air conditioned offices. And that's just the start!
Not suggesting we return to the bad old days, but that is one of the major differences. Nicotine is an extremely minor one.
There aren't 6 point differences between France, China, Japan, and the USA. It's more like 2 points. And if 2, or 6 points could double construction costs, then in the poorest countries like Africa everything would have to cost something like 100x more, which is definitely not the case.
I don't believe we are lacking of people not smart enough to construct a dam. It's simply come down to litigation that prevents large scale infrastructure from being constructed. It's very difficult to build infrastructure in California due to lawsuits from environmental groups for example.
That's an interesting theory, but the Flynn effect raised IQ scores way more over the same time period. But if it makes you feel better, I still see a lot of people smoking on construction sites, so builders may be keeping the flame alive, so to speak.
From my perspective infrastructure is politically driven in the US. Projects are debated for decades, over this time changes are made to placate some groups and buy the support from other groups, and create jobs for some politician, until it baloons into something that is many billions of dollars. Then it is built as a one off mega project. At this point it should be killed but this is seen as the only way to get stuff done.
Things like CAHSR instead of agreeing on a goal and deciding we should have a CA-wide rail system, so then establish a division of Caltrans which we fund to incrementally build/acquire/run a network through ROW acquisition, running DMUs on the routes in the mean time, making it compatible with existing systems, etc. instead becomes one giant $60b acquisition that is master planned for a multi decade time frame to be built almost entirely as a stand alone system the benefits of which can't really be enjoyed until decades in the future.
More broadly, systemically, the states still manage highway projects, for instance. The US federal government just funds them--although post-earmark programs (TIGER grants, federal freight projects legislation) have tried to address this. But, yes, there is no long-term plan because the federal funding system isn't set up that way. {Supply chain guy pet peeve; see also 'cooruption' comment below}.
I'm pretty sure we're so far invested in being crappy at government that we can't feasibly turn back without inflicting a lot of pain.
Admittedly anecdotal, but after having lived near two major DOE national laboratories (where >40% of my neighbors worked at the lab), I wouldn't be surprised if 60-80% of the workers at these labs could be eliminated under a combination of audit-based reform, regulatory reform, and management changes. Without any change in output or results. I've listened to descriptions of what people do at these labs, and it blows me away how low productivity they are compared to the private sector. I've known people who work entire workweeks that could be consolidated into 3-5 hours of work, and they're willing to admit it. In fact, those that would try to change from within have told me they would feel vulnerable to retaliation if they went through with it.
And that's before we get into the shitshow that is federal contract work. We've turned federal contract work into a goldmine for whoever has enough lawyers to win a bid. And we don't even know how many people are employed doing that contract work [0]!
At this point, meaningful reform means taking 10's of millions of people and forcing productivity on them to the point where most of them are unnecessary. We could probably double the unemployment rate with the right reforms. That's why it won't happen.
This is a symptom of David Graeber's phrase of "bullshit jobs". Capitalism and the government work together to create unnecessary work (often through regulation and oversight and middle management stuffing) to maintain "safe" employment levels to keep the economic system working. If we were only hiring people to do productive things, and considering we saw a 75% productivity increase between 1975 and 2005 with all the bullshit jobs, while domain-specific productivity figures hit the 300% or higher ranges, you could maintain the same GDP at 40%+ unemployment. The only problem being the country would collapse with that much unemployment, so the private and public sectors respond by fabricating things to do that don't actually create goods or services.
I mean, the federal government is supposed to create jobs by spending money. Doesn't matter what they spend the money on.
The only acceptable way to measure economic output is in terms of the dollar value of all the goods and services bought and sold. It could consist of marijuana farming, muscle car paint jobs, bass fishing lures, watery beer, custom gun barrels, cow-brain sandwiches and East European strippers. Doesn't matter. We can't go around imposing our value-based notions of "bullshit jobs" on top of that measurable dollar amount.
This reflects in health care as well. American health care costs about twice as much as it does in every other first-world nation. Those systems run the gamut from fully socialist to mostly privatized, but they all share a common feature - they provide universal coverage at half the cost of the American system. That says there's something uniquely broken in our model.
Infrastructure? Same thing. There's something distinctly American in how slow and expensive it is. These are systemic issues, not some single-cause thing that [liberals|conservatives] can finger-point to a partisan villain.
Japan's system is over 60% privately funded, using employer-based private insurance not radically different from the US system. Providers are also more private than public, and the system does not distinguish between private and public providers.
Where Japan differs is strict price controls - all medical procedures and products cost a fixed price, set by a government panel. This helps guarantee that the various private health care providers can make a profit and stay in business, but are not profiteering or abusing customers.
Healthcare in Switzerland is universal and is regulated by the Swiss Federal Law on Health Insurance. There are no free state-provided health services, but private health insurance is compulsory for all persons residing in Switzerland (within three months of taking up residence or being born in the country).
Everywhere outside the "developed world". By the numbers, the global norm is free-market healthcare, where the patient directly pays the doctor.
And yet, even that delivers a cost structure that is infinitely preferable to our circus over here.
I personally favour socialised medicine. The point is that whichever extreme you go to, it's going to be better than the morbidly obese, hyperinflated, worst-of-all-worlds catastrophe in the US.
But bear in mind what you just said IS NOT a valid argument for socialized medicine--it is an argument for market reform, or for looking at what is really going on in healthcare (hint: Wall Street).
Why do you feel the need to point this out, when he mentions mostly privatized and socialized in the same sentence? You may as well have said that it IS NOT a valid argument for mostly privatized medicine.
I have been wondering lately if we have become so dependent on certain sectors of the US economy (housing, infrastructure, healthcare, education) that risk aversion is suffocating innovation.
No one wants to send their kid to an unproven, experimental university. No city wants to beta test a new style of road building. No patient wants to be the first to try a new treatment. We are so dependent on these things that the cost of failure is astronomical. Because no one is willing to try new methods of doing things, costs never go down. There are marginal improvements, for sure, but no disruptive changes.
It feels like a weird manifestation of NIMBYism. We all want innovation, but we want to test it on someone else first.
People are so incredibly willing to try unproven experimental universities and medical treatments that people getting scammed over fake ones is actually a fairly large problem. I'm not sure where you got the idea that no one is going to Trump University or University of Phoenix and that no one is trying alternative medicine or pushing right to try bills across the country.
> No patient wants to be the first to try a new treatment.
Plenty of patients are willing to try new treatments. New treatments are incredibly expensive, but unlike in other countries and industries, old treatments/technologies continue to get more and more expensive. The problem there is that pricing is totally obfuscated, and providers are able to get monopolistic profits as a result. The government could step in and hold down prices, as they do elsewhere (or at least require transparency), but their pockets are too stuffed by the monopolists to do anything. "Free markets!" they declare, destroying capitalism.
Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen have a lot to say about this subject. The argument boils down to regulatory and cultural pressures have caused innovation to slow down drastically since the 1970s in all areas but ICT.
I strongly suggest you read "The Complacent Class" if this is a subject that interests you
Think of the economy as having a temperature-- 100 years ago, the US was hotter, more dynamic, more dangerous. And it's gradually settled into a more stable structure. Safer, but harder to make changes.
I was surprised the article didn't address regulation much nor the fear of litigation (when I googled for canada pex legal, I found class action suits...)
The distinction that I see is that the US is perhaps not individually risk averse, but is systemically accountability averse. There is no end to the inefficiencies that can be introduced by constant ass-covering and compulsive subdivision of responsibility to the point that no one human is accountable for anything of note.
I don't think this is the problem. I think that PENSIONS are the problem. The risk aversion comes from municipalities that are flat broke because they over-promised.
Readit News
If you look at old blueprints for projects in the past, they are a LOT less detailed. They had to be, because it was physically more difficult to produce them since they had to be drawn by hand. A lot was left to the contractor to figure out in the field.
Now, drawings are more detailed and contractors are incredibly reluctant to make even the smallest decisions on their own. They don't want to assume the liability and risk getting sued if they do something wrong, so they push that off on the engineers and architects.
This means every time there's a question, it has to be submitted through a formal process, tracked, answered, documented. And if the change has any cost impacts, the contractor tacks on a hefty premium because they know they can get away with it (and they probably underbid in the first place to win the job). Delays pile up, every clarification becomes an expensive change order, construction workers twiddle their thumbs while designers get around to addressing questions and this all costs money and time.
If I walk down the street and there is a group of workers excavating a road, there's a lot more of a relaxed attitude about fencing, walking underneath construction equipment, etc.
After all - use your common sense - don't fall into the hole. If you do, isn't it kind of your own fault? Nobody's going to sue anybody.
Additionally, it's not a big deal to close or severely impact a road due to construction - just shift around the fantastic public transit infrastructure, and everyone carries along. A bus only needs one lane in both directions. Another thing that would never fly in North America.
Both of these problems are deeply cultural. Lawsuits have become a form of welfare. Sure, you might not have government healthcare if you get hurt or sick, but maybe you can sue somebody and get paid for your suffering?
And America's love affair with the automobile is a well-known abusive relationship that America will never have the courage to leave.
Just like a an abusive relationship, the car love affair still produces some good things. It's not all dark and dreary.
"I hate that he comes home drunk and hits me, but he's so loving and apologetic the next morning."
"I hate that I get so stressed from my daily commute, but being able to drive to the countryside on the weekend is so nice."
You can be in a relationship without dealing with abuse, and you can get to work less stressfully and still have the freedom to explore the world.
That's what makes the relationship so sinister; it's Stockholm syndrome.
"How could I ever live without him, even though he hits me sometimes?"
"How could I ever live without driving everywhere, even though the country on the whole is getting more unhealthy, we continue to use up our limited resources, and the ability to walk around and individuals' quality of life is reduced?"
Of course you can live without those negatives. There are ways out. There is a better life possible.
It's pretty much impossible to leave this relationship unless you live in one of the larger US cities. If you live in a suburb, rural area, or city that's not in the top 10-15 in terms of size there's literally no other option that exists or that could easily exist.
From what I have read, Millenials are putting noteworthy pressure on this aspect of American culture.
Also, I gave up my car years ago. With the magic of the internet, I work online. I mostly walk everywhere and occasionally take public transit.
I think we can change this substantially.
What you describe could also be understood as an inefficient way of organization that is peculiar to the United States, and a by-product of American business and economic logic. Firms (i.e. vertical integration) exist to reduce the comparative inefficiencies of having separate, independent entities. Most other countries still have huge conglomerates (e.g. Japan, Korea), or contractors enjoy closer and longer-term business relationships.
With rare exception (Berkshire Hathaway, Elon Musk, etc) Americans have systematically shifted toward looser organization of smaller, independent business entities. One of the downsides is the exploding cost of orchestrating these entities for big projects, and the loss of knowledge about how to manage such projects.
How do you know that? It seems like a really difficult number to account for like the cost of medical lawsuits. Sure, you can look at malpractice insurance, legal fees, and damages awarded to plaintiffs - but how do you properly count the extra tests, procedures, pharmaceuticals, man-hours, etc. that result from the increased defensive posture of doctors and hospitals?
I guess also, ever do a home renovation on a house > 40 years old? You usually walk into a disaster of things not up to code. These days, it would just be done correctly, just as cheap as possible, and not built to last. Most recent housing developments near here are just ways for developers to make money and run, as the infrastructure (housing, not utilities, etc) is not going to last all that long. The developers don't care - they'll be enjoying their profits States away, as the city that is home to their developments are quickly crumbling.
Not that I'm bitter on the changing landscape of my city, or anything. But a housing boom has dark sides.
I don't know why you think proper change control is a bad thing. In both software and systems engineering you submit change requests that are tracked, reviewed, assessed for risk, approved and documented. You do this to create an audit trail to identify "how we got here". Any concerns? It's documented in the ticket.
Now when it comes to civil engineering projects, where bridges can collapse, you should WANT that kind of rigorous change control of tracking, approving, and documenting.
Yes, documenting change control requires more work, but it also saves lives and creates an audit trail in case of a grave error.
As it stands now, some unforeseen circumstance in the field will necessitate a minor modification to the design. The contractor knows perfectly well what needs to be done, but instead of simply doing it, they will ask the designers to tell them to do it, so they aren't the ones responsible for it. The designer of course can't simply rubber stamp whatever the contractor says, so they have to spend time figuring out what the issue is and whether the contractor's solution is adequate. All that adds up.
It's not bad, it's just more expensive than not doing it. Thus, infrastructure built today costs more.
Both true. But the interesting question is if and when the costs outweigh the benefits.
There was an article shared to HN some time ago arguing that the kinds of cost overruns that we see so often on infrastructure projects in the US are almost endemic to common-law countries, and radically less prevalent in civil-law countries.
I haven't been able to find that article again, but its conclusion has come up in many similar discussions since.
From time to time, each of the siblings has built a new home, and they just do it themselves in their spare time. My friend was telling me about helping his sister with her home. His sister has moved into a very rural community in the western U.S. When the family showed up to pour the footings, they asked for a copy of the footing plans. Their sister handed them an 8.5x11 sheet of paper with a hand-drawn floor plan.
"Where's your official plans? The plans you submitted for your permit? The ones with the footing details?"
"That is the paper we submitted for our permit. See the stamp that says 'Approved'?"
All the other siblings live in Clark County, Nevada. The permitting process there is excruciating. They looked at the paper, looked at each other, shrugged, then built the house. They know how to build a footing. They know how to frame. They know how to build a house. The sister's house was built with the same quality as the other siblings' in a fraction of the time.
But if one of the big builders tries to put in a subdivision in that little town, I hope the municipality watches them like a hawk. Big builders don't build homes. They cheat and connive and do everything to push product at the lowest possible cost.
In a world without trust, you cannot afford to let people self-manage.
I always say there are not too many lawsuits, but too many laws. Legislatures think they are making something better by passing more rules, regulations, and laws. But, for every rule, regulation, or law, you have an opportunity for a lawsuit. Use more common sense? Sure, but then don't pass a multitude of laws regulating the subject.
Why are infrastructure projects' costs higher here? I don't know really. My guess would be that compared to say Germany and Japan, everything here is the U.S. is huge. I mean probably 10-30% larger in size than those other countries with the resulting higher costs. But, this is just my personal observation.
Actual construction is performed by contractors, corporations that are contracted by the government. In the US, it is rare for a construction project to be built, or even be designed, by government workers. These corporations and their workers can be sued, and take on additional liabilities due to the contracts and laws that apply specifically to them.
What? Two women suing McDonalds because they got fat from eating too many cheeseburgers is not a regulatory issue. A canoe company being sued for not having lifeguards posted every mile of the river they serve is not a regulatory issue. Parents suing a city because their idiot kid fell off a slide is not a regulatory issue.
America is lawsuit-crazy. Anybody can sue anybody for anything, regardless of whether regulation surrounds the issue or not. If anything, regulation acts as a legal protection against lawsuits, and many regulations are enacted in response to frivolous lawsuits from assholes who think the world owes them something because they can't take personal responsibility.
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The litigousness argument seems to be interesting from that perspective, but I'd be hard-pressed to believe that France or Germany are less detail-oriented in their planning, given that the same tools that allow better blueprinting are available everywhere.
Europe is less litigious, mainly because they have massive government oversight and regulations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_%28attorney%27s_f...
In summary, end contracting and subcontracting.
You might claim that there are no state-run construction companies because of free-market ideology or some such bogeyman. But that doesn't explain why the private contractors don't integrate vertically.
My own guess is that even a vertically integrated entity would be risk averse and have to create expensive, slow, internal sign-off procedures.
I also wonder about the effect of building codes, etc.. It might be interesting to plot construction costs and number pages of building code vs. time for the U.S., Japan, France, etc., and see if there are any correlations. That type of plot seems like it might almost be doable.
So basically in digital terms it went the opposite way from HTML where everything is more relative to each other to print where everything is exact.
I wonder if there is some underlying principles hiding in this. Have to think about it some more but thank you so much for your insightful comment.
Now it could be that litigation pays for medical costs, whereas other countries pay medical costs separately from project costs.
Design/build raises the level of dumb even higher by giving all parties powerful incentives to build the cheapest, minimally viable slop possible.
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For example, if a big irrigation project will force taxpayers to subsidise corporate farms, the corporations have a big incentive to spend on ads and campaign contributions. Or if you have to give $60 to a private company for tax filing software, they have a big incentive to lobby and make campaign contributions to keep the tax system complicated.
I'm sure construction projects are subject to the same pro-waste incentives.
I'm not sure what the solution to this is - campaign finance reform, perhaps?
Abso-fucking-lutely. I think in order to run at any levels of office, you should be using public money. For simplification, let's say if one wants to run for president, they can only use whatever is in the FEC public coffers. In return, we levy a federal FEC tax to boost it way higher than its current rates. We replicate a similar tax at state and local levels. Completely remove private donations and PACs and all that shit from the lawbooks. A fuckload of people want to run for president? Well, you better get creative with your tiny slice of the pie. Show us how fiscally responsible you really are.
People would scream and holler about it not being American, but it's one of the only ways, I think, to really take a large stab at our chronic corruption.
The idea is a sort of non-partisan "un-PAC" -- a fundraising organization explicitly dedicated to combating corporate political donations. If a presidential candidate or his affiliated PACs recieved eg. $5MM in fundraising from oil executives, the un-PAC would spend $5MM on negative advertising linking him in the public's mind with that industry. If the un-PAC raised enough money, eventually a large multiple of corporate donations could be spent counteracting them, and at some point it would become uneconomical for politicians to accept those donations at all.
We spent about $6B on the 2016 federal elections (https://www.opensecrets.org/overview/cost.php). That comes out to about $20 for every American. That's a big number to beat, but not impossible, and every bit along the way helps.
This should be more obvious in US (and Canadian) politics than it is. But politicians are rarely willing to admit their malleability when it comes to both businesses and non-profit organizations (or special interest groups) influencing them. So the problem persists.
This is a big thing many small-government conservatives seem to miss. They think that capping financing of political parties is anti-business. But in reality it's only incumbent businesses who fleece the government for contracts or exploit government policy to create barriers of entry for their competitors who back ending these policies.
Even though small/medium business represents 60%+ of employment they are largely ignored policy-wise. Then when big-corps exploit market dynamics then ever more regulation are put in place that only hurts the small businesses rather than the big corps (see: minimum wage).
So those of us who support small-government, we're often left with only choosing between big government liberals who are indifferent to the ROI of ever-expanding government power/tax base or small government conservatives who let corporate influence in politics run free. It's difficult to tell which one results in the most abuse these days.
Even if this stops being a problem it has existed for decades and these 'gray' connections between politics and business is everywhere in North America. It would take decades to reverse their influence which is a shame because it's very existence is self-reinforcing (much like those organizations whose very existence depends on the continuation of government financing as opposed to depending on their utility to the public).
What in particular would they not be allowed to use private money to do?
Would individuals that aren't running be allowed to use private money to do those things?
Nobody in their right mind would elect me, but I have yet to see a fair way to exclude me.
But that requires to unfuck the entire american political system and weird fascination for corporations being people, so this might take a while.
Which leads to the other possible amendment, up ending the monopoly the political parties have on the primary voting system. One way that sounds nice, but is specious, is destroying the political parties - simply disallow their existence. Probably better is to change the voting system:
a. Range or preferential voting in a single election rather than the current tribal primary system which is not controlled by law but by each political party. Primaries encourage members of the tribe to vote in a reactionary way, the extremes of each party tend to win.Range or preferential voting is better than runoffs, it's basically an instant runoff system.
b. Get rid of the Electoral College. The idea it will keep us from getting incompetent presidents is pretty much proven wrong, plus it's been broken again by the two political parties who have gotten states to enact laws that require electors explicitly to not vote their conscience, under penalty. So it doesn't at all do what it was designed to do; and it comes from our racist slave history, the southern slave states wouldn't ratify the constitution without this provision. So get rid of it. The only thing worse than tyranny of the majority is tyranny of the minority.
Anyway, it's not going to fix itself. People will have to want to fix it.
Imagine that you are the Sierra Club and you want to block construction of a new highway. You can lobby:
* The President, who signs the appropriations bill * EPA, Department of Transportation, and any other three-letter federal agency that gets to weigh in on the project * Congressmen and Senators of affected regions/states, and remember that Senators can filibuster legislation to make it require a super-majority * State governors * State legislators * Local governments whose land the road will pass through * Indian tribes, if their land is affected
And if above doesn't work, you can sue in federal/state court.
All that adds to the time and cost of a construction project, assuming that it will be even approved. And once its approved? You still have a million ways to delay/obstruct the project through lawsuits and lobbying the bureaucratic process.
That's why there are no 'shovel ready' projects. We'll never be able to build another Hoover Dam or the Interstate Highway system.
Obviously other countries have division of power too. But the effect is much less pronounced.
EDIT: As for why the U.S. of a century ago wasn't as paralyzed, well, that's partly because of the growth of the administrative state (bureaucracy), growing importance of interest groups as sources of campaign funds, more regulations in general (which makes lawsuits possible), and fragmentation of party discipline.
Democracy is, after all, a system in which a determined voting majority can use the hammer of the state to extract wealth from the rest of the population. Many people vote in self-defense.
I know that arguing for smaller government and less democracy is an unpopular position, but it is the only way to achieve long-term success. The areas of the economy with the most government involvement and regulation are where we find costs ballooning out of control: healthcare, prisons, infrastructure, student loans, military. Continuing on the present course is not sustainable.
Come on. Really? Healthcare is heavily regulated, yes, but a lot of that comes from regulating a fucked up mix between public and private institutions along with insurance companies thrown in the mix. Single-payer would absolutely lower these costs substantially. That's the opposite of less regulation.
And prisons? We have private prisons...as in, corporations that have a financial incentive to put more people in prison. Not just that, they lobby the government to create more laws or have stricter penalties to keep more people in prison. You can't seriously tell me that's too much regulation.
Infrastructure? Absolutely needs to be government run. Private companies have no incentive here, unless heavily subsidized by the government, in which case they would just balloon costs as much as possible in order to squeeze as much blood from the stone as they could.
Student loans...if a dog put on a pair of glasses it could get a student loan. That's a lack of regulation. The only real regulation making it balloon out of control is that bankruptcy doesn't absolve your loan debt (whether it should or shouldn't, that's another issue).
Military, I agree with you on! Less military spending! We can use the money for (public) schools and make sure our country isn't made up of complete imbeciles in 20 years.
The US has the most money in politics per capita in the western world, and yet, given how much a company can get per dollar spent, lobbying and donations are an absolute bargain. Handing money to a politician directly is very effective, but in practice, even a lobbying group that didn't spend a dime in elections would still be worthwhile for industry groups.
The dynamics of collective action don't even need government to be true: You see the same behaviors in large corporations, where departments can cause a lot of overall damage to a company by causing small inefficiencies to everyone else: Not enough to organize against. Having worked in government and in big enterprise, if anything government is better, as the lobbying and the cajoling is far more visible.
The solution to the general inefficiency problem in infrastructure in other countries is, against what you would think, is to align goals empowering government vs contractors. The places where we have more inefficiencies is where we are trading not money fork work, but knowledge for expertise: The more layers of expertise we borrow, the harder a contractor is to replace, and thus the higher the final markup.
There's a great study on this regarding the Madrid subway. The subway authority has a budget, and in practice it will go up if they have more ridership. It's in their very best interest to have a large, high quality network, so to keep costs down, they do most of the planning themselves, have a lot of the engineering in house, and most of what they farm out is basic construction and drilling: They'll go as far as to give different contractors different sections to drill, because different sections of tunnel are easier to handle with different techniques and machinery. It's not as if Spain doesn't have insane infrastructure inefficiencies overall, but in this case there's enough goal alignment, and enough decision making outside of the political arena, that they save an order of magnitude per kilometer and per station than the US equivalent, while typical highway construction, decided at the political level and handed to big contractors, aren't really any cheaper.
In software terms, it's the difference between handing the work to a small startup that lives and dies by its runway, or handing a project to big software contractors, healthcare.gov style: The big project handed to the big contractor will very rarely work right, and it will be incredibly expensive.
But these are things we as a society have deemed important. Its not acceptable for lives to be lost. It's not acceptable for construction workers to accept low wages. It's not acceptable to recklessly degrade our environmental resources, and it's important to have diversity in this industry.
I don't know if it's true in other countries, but it seems the USA vascilates between priorities depending on the public administration. I am young so my experience is short. Bush saw a real estate bubble, Obama saw an insurance bubble, Trump et al aim for a construction boom. I would add that in New York my home state, a Democrat state, there is a large infrastructure program starting, so it's not just Republicans.
I will give you some (sparse, 1 every 10 years) datapoints:
1983 - 2 or 3 copies of any drawing or letter/calculation
1993 - 6 to 8 copies of any drawing or letter/calculation
2003 - 12 to 20 copies of any drawing or letter/calculation
2013 - 16 to 24 copies of any drawing or letter/calculation
And of course this increase of copies is due to the increase in permissions/authorizations/approvals/checks needed and due to "stricter" (actually only more complex) construction codes and changed calculation methods I would say that the number of documents (before making the copies) has increased by 1.5x every ten years, i.e. something that was built on 1,000 drawings/documents in 1983 was built in 2013 on the basis of more than 3,000.
The number of people involved (not labour, but management, engineers, surveyors, technicians, etc.) need also to be multiplied by a factor of 3 2013 vs. 1983.
The actual production (thanks to a few computer-related innovations and the availability of better, bigger machines) has increased, but all in all you do the same amount of work with less people (labour) and lots of people looking at what the workers are doing.
This is a classic meme, but is not that much far from reality: https://web.archive.org/web/20131005125257/http://ajotube.it...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btOE0rcKDC0
Google Translate: >This tunnel under the A12 is one year old, and closely sealed EDE - Just a year and a day, it's already waiting under the A12 at Ede: a large tunnel, intended for the Park Avenue, the route that must open in Ede East from the A12 to the N224. As it turns out, it will take another year for road construction.
The audacity of the thing and sheer impossibility of doing anything remotely like it in today's America makes it seem like a relic from an ancient civilization.
It felt like visiting the pyramids in Egypt.
They aren't gifts bestowed by the gods upon the completion of sufficient human sacrifice. Deaths and injuries are minimal with construction equipment and safety techniques.
It's also hard to imagine building the interstate highway system today but, in general, a greater concern about the environmental impact of infrastructure projects isn't really a bad thing.
Yes, but Japan and Western Europe surely care as much about the environment as the US does, don't they?
Plus a lot of the times you have a incredibly amount of money spent on environmental review for things like, a housing complex in the middle of SF being torn down to make way for a taller housing complex. That's not going to impact "the environment" as the term is usually used. It's not dropping new development in a forest or building a dam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7CmcsOubZ8
No hard-hats
No shirts
Free climbing tower with no safety lines
Cigarette hanging from mouth
No way they could ever pull this off today. No way the Apollo program could be pulled off either.
It is no wonder "farmer" is one of the most dangerous occupations in the US. They're the last to be impacted by health and safety regulations.
One of my favorite photos looks down on him running a small horizontal drill rig into a cliff while suspended on a rope several hundred feet above the river. Just a rope knotted around his waist, no harness.
Definitely would not pass today's construction safety regulations.
I agree about the relic-feeling. I guess there were giants in those days.
For the curious, here are some photos of that place:
https://pemco.com/blog/Lists/Photos/denny_creek_viaduct_capt...
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/36708233.jpg
https://scottsk.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/img_1674.jpg
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millau_Viaduct
0 - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-a-nicotine-p...
And people were happy to be working because they were in many cases about half starved. So they put up with it.
Contrast that with now. Medium articles about toxic passive aggressive workplaces from people making $120K/year and who spend a lot of that screwing around and in meetings. In air conditioned offices. And that's just the start!
Not suggesting we return to the bad old days, but that is one of the major differences. Nicotine is an extremely minor one.
Things like CAHSR instead of agreeing on a goal and deciding we should have a CA-wide rail system, so then establish a division of Caltrans which we fund to incrementally build/acquire/run a network through ROW acquisition, running DMUs on the routes in the mean time, making it compatible with existing systems, etc. instead becomes one giant $60b acquisition that is master planned for a multi decade time frame to be built almost entirely as a stand alone system the benefits of which can't really be enjoyed until decades in the future.
1. http://blakemasters.com/post/23435743973/peter-thiels-cs183-... (Section I. The End of Big Projects)
A certain portmanteau describes it perfectly:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=clusterfuck
Admittedly anecdotal, but after having lived near two major DOE national laboratories (where >40% of my neighbors worked at the lab), I wouldn't be surprised if 60-80% of the workers at these labs could be eliminated under a combination of audit-based reform, regulatory reform, and management changes. Without any change in output or results. I've listened to descriptions of what people do at these labs, and it blows me away how low productivity they are compared to the private sector. I've known people who work entire workweeks that could be consolidated into 3-5 hours of work, and they're willing to admit it. In fact, those that would try to change from within have told me they would feel vulnerable to retaliation if they went through with it.
And that's before we get into the shitshow that is federal contract work. We've turned federal contract work into a goldmine for whoever has enough lawyers to win a bid. And we don't even know how many people are employed doing that contract work [0]!
At this point, meaningful reform means taking 10's of millions of people and forcing productivity on them to the point where most of them are unnecessary. We could probably double the unemployment rate with the right reforms. That's why it won't happen.
[0] http://www.govexec.com/contracting/2015/03/even-cbo-stumped-...
I mean, the federal government is supposed to create jobs by spending money. Doesn't matter what they spend the money on.
The only acceptable way to measure economic output is in terms of the dollar value of all the goods and services bought and sold. It could consist of marijuana farming, muscle car paint jobs, bass fishing lures, watery beer, custom gun barrels, cow-brain sandwiches and East European strippers. Doesn't matter. We can't go around imposing our value-based notions of "bullshit jobs" on top of that measurable dollar amount.
That wouldn't be economics.
Infrastructure? Same thing. There's something distinctly American in how slow and expensive it is. These are systemic issues, not some single-cause thing that [liberals|conservatives] can finger-point to a partisan villain.
Where's that?
Where Japan differs is strict price controls - all medical procedures and products cost a fixed price, set by a government panel. This helps guarantee that the various private health care providers can make a profit and stay in business, but are not profiteering or abusing customers.
Healthcare in Switzerland is universal and is regulated by the Swiss Federal Law on Health Insurance. There are no free state-provided health services, but private health insurance is compulsory for all persons residing in Switzerland (within three months of taking up residence or being born in the country).
And yet, even that delivers a cost structure that is infinitely preferable to our circus over here.
I personally favour socialised medicine. The point is that whichever extreme you go to, it's going to be better than the morbidly obese, hyperinflated, worst-of-all-worlds catastrophe in the US.
Just more regulated.
No one wants to send their kid to an unproven, experimental university. No city wants to beta test a new style of road building. No patient wants to be the first to try a new treatment. We are so dependent on these things that the cost of failure is astronomical. Because no one is willing to try new methods of doing things, costs never go down. There are marginal improvements, for sure, but no disruptive changes.
It feels like a weird manifestation of NIMBYism. We all want innovation, but we want to test it on someone else first.
Plenty of patients are willing to try new treatments. New treatments are incredibly expensive, but unlike in other countries and industries, old treatments/technologies continue to get more and more expensive. The problem there is that pricing is totally obfuscated, and providers are able to get monopolistic profits as a result. The government could step in and hold down prices, as they do elsewhere (or at least require transparency), but their pockets are too stuffed by the monopolists to do anything. "Free markets!" they declare, destroying capitalism.
I strongly suggest you read "The Complacent Class" if this is a subject that interests you
http://www.remodeling.hw.net/products/house-systems/californ...
I was surprised the article didn't address regulation much nor the fear of litigation (when I googled for canada pex legal, I found class action suits...)
https://www.wired.com/2010/06/ff_waterless_urinal/
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