Our small Maine city recently replaced an entire bridge in a couple days, https://verandaplan.org/
It worked great. They shut down the road for a couple hours, literally moved the newly built bridge from beside the road into place, and then were ready for rush hour in a couple days. I had a friend who worked the project.
America can build great things if we were willing, but the past 70 years has seen strong anti-government rhetoric (weirdly after the most successful big government projects seen probably in our history) has helped hollow out local governments and remove any chance they had to cultivate internal talent that could get more efficient at doing things.
Imagine having the pay of a local grocer, the turnover of Amazon warehousing, and the public animosity of Google and Facebook combined, with an entire TV channel watched by 60 million daily screaming that your very existence hurts the country, and plenty of grandmas taking that to heart. Government is overtly attacked every single day. Is it any wonder it often struggles?
It’s bizarre to point to criticism of the government to justify the failures of the government. What exactly are people supposed to do in response to public services that are over budget and don’t serve their needs?
Surely the solution to criticism of government inefficiency is for government to operate well. If visiting San Francisco was like going to Tokyo or Copenhagen—clean, efficient, convenient—Fox News would lose credibility. At some point, people in Missouri would point to San Francisco and be like “that’s great, why don’t we do that here?”
Sure, but to operate well you need to be able to hire top talent (and therefore pay top dollar) and you need to give them the freedom to do what they think best without being micromanaged, both things that require a level of public trust. This seems to be one of those "multiple stable equilibria" problems - a government that is trusted can be effective and justify that trust, a government that is mistrusted will be ineffective and justify that mistrust.
>It’s bizarre to point to criticism of the government to justify the failures of the government.
I think that would be a fair statement to make in the global context, but Americans' distrust and paranoia around anything the Government does really is exceptional.
> I think that would be a fair statement to make in the global context, but Americans' distrust and paranoia around anything the Government does really is exceptional.
I'm not sure how accurate that generalisation is. The US has a lot of government – in some ways, a lot more than many other countries do, because local government in the US has a lot of responsibilities which in other countries are centralised at the state/province or even national levels - such as law enforcement, courts and prosecutors, public education, correctional facilities. Much of the US has two layers of local government (county and municipal), some parts even have three layers (e.g. the state of New York has village governments underneath town governments underneath county governments), when many other countries only have a single layer. The US has lots of special-purpose local governments (school districts, drainage districts, emergency services districts, etc), where in many other countries those kind of functions would be performed by state/provincial/national agencies instead.
Most of the anti-government rhetoric in the US is primarily directed at the federal government, not state or local governments. Even when state or local governments are targeted, it tends to be only directed at some of them. Some American conservatives will be very critical of the state governments of California or New York, but I doubt they'd be anywhere near as negative about the state governments of Florida or Texas or Utah or South Dakota. Or very critical of the county/city governments of big liberal-leaning urban areas like Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, but far less likely to criticise the local government of some rural "Red State" county or town.
Despite its reputation for hyper-capitalism, the US is arguably "behind" much of the rest of the English-speaking world when it comes to asset privatisation, public-private partnerships, public funding of private schools (US % of K-12 students in private schools is significantly below the OECD average, and severely limited public funding for private schools is likely a big factor in that), etc – and those issues are far from being the top priority for contemporary American conservatism. Which suggest that the US is actually far less "anti-government" than its popular image suggests.
War on drugs, 20yr of military involvement in the middle east, meddling in Latin America, three letter agencies manufacturing domestic terrorism of all types and the list goes on...
I would always choose San Francisco over Missouri. Every day of the week. St Louis' crime rate dwarfs san francisco, and the economy is much weaker. You can cherry pick stats that support your cause all day.
The fact is people in other states have infrastructure that some of my taxes went to. I will never use those roads. Perhaps we should all be selfish and just take more and more for ourselves?
Principled, fiscal responsibility is a great thing and what I would champion - but these bad faith arguments are not fiscal responsibility. We need some level of service and infrastructure. Even if costs overrun, we still need highways.
>> It’s bizarre to point to criticism of the government to justify the failures of the government.
This is precisely the conservative game plan though: starve the government of funds, force it to outsource as much as possible to the private sector, then when projects end up delayed and overbudget (or failing), point to lack of government efficiency and competence to justify further funding cuts.
This has been happening since basically the Reagan era.
>> Surely the solution to criticism of government inefficiency is for government to operate well.
No organization can operate well if it doesn't have necessary levels of funding, and the government is no exception. Said lack of funding is the primary cause of the inefficiencies, which often times manifest as lack of inhouse expertise that can provide strict analysis of and oversight for projects outsourced to the private sector.
> Said lack of funding is the primary cause of the inefficiencies
San Francisco? Lack of funding? $14 billion isn't enough?
The budget of San Francisco has roughly doubled in about the last ten years: is the government now twice as good at whatever it's supposed to do than it was ten years ago?
If anything the problem with San Francisco is that there is so much money that an entire ecosystem of nonprofits and contractors has evolved to feed off those funds.
> Said lack of funding is the primary cause of the inefficiencies
No, the primary cause is politicians promising things that sound good so that they'll get reelected, because that's the number one thing they care about, not efficiency. On the other hand a private company will only build something that makes economical sense.
Yes, if lack of funding is the primary cause, then the federal government should be quite effective indeed, considering how much money it receives and spends.
"makes economic sense" is not a useful metric to build society on. There are so many things in our day to day life that should be considered well beyond "does this make a profit"
How does that explain the situation in deep blue states with respect to services such as transit and education that are primarily state funded? Is the ghost of Reagan haunting California and keeping San Francisco from having well funded, efficient services like Copenhagen?
>If visiting San Francisco was like going to Tokyo or Copenhagen—clean, efficient, convenient
A lot of the positive traits of these cities come from the citizens themselves. It's them as much as the government of these places that want that - therefore they create a system that achieves what they want - 'the government', and are willing to cooperate with it to get what they want.
If all San Franciscans wanted a clean, efficient and convenient city, I'm more than convinced that all citizens working towards that goal could readily achieve it, and would make a government tasked with those goals.
Governments I would argue, since they're usually made up of the local people, reflect the goals of these people. And if 'good enough' is OK for them, then that's what they get.
> A lot of the positive traits of these cities come from the citizens themselves. It's them as much as the government of these places that want that - therefore they create a system that achieves what they want - 'the government', and are willing to cooperate with it to get what they want.
I would agree with that.
> If all San Franciscans wanted a clean, efficient and convenient city, I'm more than convinced that all citizens working towards that goal could readily achieve it, and would make a government tasked with those goals.
I think you have to carry through your reasoning from the first point. People in San Francisco have different goals than those in Copenhagen or Tokyo. I strongly suspect that they also have differing (and lesser) ability to put aside their individual concerns to work together on a mass compromise like public transit inevitably must be.
Which is a good reason for the rest of the country to not want to throw a bunch of money on transit projects. American infrastructure reflects the American psyche. We drive around in individual steel tanks on roads that can take us anywhere we want to go because that’s who we are as a culture.
Fox news can openly tell a court that it knowingly lied to its audience and lose only ten percent or so of its audience. They faced bigger backlash being critical of Trump. Meanwhile there are 49 other states, some of which that do things well, but fox news doesn't talk about that because they don't run positive stories about government because of their ideology.
The time it took to place the bridge has almost no indication of whether this project was on time or on budget.
This bridge project started December 2017! So 5+ years of work for a weekend of final execution. On top of this, while the bridge may be in a small city in Maine, the initiative is run by the Maine DOT, which is likely substantially larger as an organization.
The best construction hustle I've ever seen is Georgia's relatively recent repair of a bridge over I-85.
I-85 is an interstate highway serving a central economic corridor through Atlanta. A portion of the bridge collapsed when a homeless person lit a fire next to highly flammable plastics stored under the bridge, which later grew into a bridge-melting inferno.
The state of Georgia provided incentives for contractors to finish the project early due to the incredible economic damage it was causing. The loss of the bridge took out all travel on I-85 - it was a devastating and crippling loss that gave many Atlanta area knowledge workers their first taste of "work from home" (or five hour commutes).
The incentives provided absolutely made the contractors hustle. There was work ongoing 24/7 for the entire period, and they completed ahead of time and budget. I don't think I've ever witnessed something happen so fast.
It was a marvelous feat, and it's too bad we don't see more like it. It's what happens when the correct incentives and pressures are put in place.
1000%. It's all about creating and aligning incentives.
Government gets this sometimes - subsidy for the things it cares about. Food, energy, defense. Those are all pretty solid, even if some of the vendors aren't the greatest. The sheer scale of the investment means we'll be okay. Too big to fail.
Often these big budget items get bloated by congressional sway pulling work into disparate districts as job programs. Or locked away in under-performing incumbents (Lockheed / Boeing vs SpaceX), but if we expose the system to more evolutionary pressure and competition, it might thrive.
SpaceX is an example of the RFP process turned on its head. Designing ahead of time for an understood public demand, in a bloated industry, in a way that serves both the public and private sector. A solution where the private sector needs serve to justify the cutting of costs and hone the product into a shape that is undeniably cost attractive and competitive.
The things the government subsidizes that don't compete or aren't forced to stay lean - education, transportation, infrastructure, healthcare - tend to bloat up and soak up all the money they can as well as underperform on all of our expectations.
Maybe the solution is to stop paying the current service providers and hire new ones that service private industry. They'll already be in a shape to optimize for costs and fend with competition.
There's also the MacArthur Maze collapse in the Bay area 2007 [1]
The overpass collapsed on April 29th. They had it reopened to traffic 26 days later. This was American leadership, project management and engineering at it's finest [2].
It has a bearing on the cost associated with road closures, which can't be insignificant.
Anyway, some quick looking found:
> Gov. Janet Mills toured the Veranda Street site of the new bridge being installed along Interstate 295 in Portland on Saturday afternoon and said she was pleased with the rapid progress of the project.
> “I’m thrilled with the technology, thrilled that it’s going on time and on budget,” Mills said. “Three days’ time, and this bridge will be done. It’s amazing. It’s like giant Legos going together.”
You can always say you are on time and on budget as long as extensions come your way. My point was not saying that this project was not on time or on budget, it was mainly to illustrate that the 3 days of work that locals saw was based on 5 years of research and preparation. I recently read 'Built: The Hidden Stories Behind our Structures' by Roma Agrawal and it would be fairly rudimentary for a structural engineer, but for the average passerby it was a very interesting read on some of the structures that we use every day! (and how some of them are miserable failures haha)
Do you think the complaints about government come unfairly out of the blue while it busily provides efficient and timely service with a friendly smile to its constituents?
No. However, consider that since the 40's there has been a concerted effort by a variety of actors, such as Rothbard and other people backed by institutes such as the Volker fund, the AEI, Federalist Society, Murdochs, etc. to sap both the perceived effectiveness of government and the actual effectiveness of government.
"Government doesn't work - elect me and I'll prove it!"
Well hey, he's the only person I know of to have argued professionally that a government shouldn't even be powerful enough to prevent people from selling their children on the open market to the highest bidder. He's kind of the most extreme example one can pluck, and quite an influential one, at that.
Isn't that an argument against Rothbard being successful? You can't meaningfully auction off a child in the US. Although I guess some may argue he's been successful to the extent that in some parts of the US you can electively terminate your unborn offspring, which is a firmly Rothbardian viewpoint.
If my goal is murder, but I only render you completely brain dead, or maybe only paralyzed from the neck down, have I failed? Yeah, in some sense. But in terms of the grievous harm rendered, I've succeeded to a pretty serious degree.
Based on your recommendation of the "pretty serious degree" to the extent Rothbard has managed to decrease government, I have decided to donate a token amount to the Mises Institute in your honor [0]. I gotta say until now I thought he was just a fringe actor with minimal influence and perhaps at most 1 or 2% of representatives even know who he was.
I guess the better question is, are the complaints limited to those that provide a poor service? Or are they fairly evenly distributed regardless of how good or bad the government in question performs?
And sometimes it's intentional: Take the DMV in Texas.
Texas specifically shut down DMV offices in some of the most populated areas. Yeah, that's going to make the DMV suck in those areas. Of course, they left open then ones in the more rural areas, and those DMVs are going to be quite pleasant.
The point isn't the government services are currently high quality. The point is that the current environment foster low quality service. In some cases voting in politicians that drove top-down management changes would help. And that would require the populace to value such changes. We might need to structure the incentives for government employees, contractors, or the regulatory environment to better align with delivering good service. That might mean more pay, which means either higher taxes or strong prioritization of efforts. We can't do that intelligently if nobody cares, or is skilled enough to drive these large institutions. Because it is hard. We almost certainly are using the wrong tradeoffs: some things privatized and outsourced should be done by government agencies. Some functions should be privatized or just regulated on the open market. Some things are better handled at regional levels that today are handled at local or national levels. The mix of tradeoffs is wrong. Incremental work to fix this requires a society-wide agreement to make progress. Not necessarily agreement on any particular (and even when there is agreement, we are going to get it wrong a bunch) but agreement on the project of bettering our society and social collaboration. That seems like it is missing and thus progress is made only in fits in starts, in a hostile environment. A hard-one deregulation here, a new bill to fund a project there, contested on ll sides, and undermined before the initiatives get started.
Anti-government rhetoric? In New York State, construction projects have been notoriously delayed and gone over budget ever since the days of Boss Tweed, which historians have generally linked to corruption and graft.
At least with major projects this is 100% the case. Had a buddy involved in a state legislature said one of the reasons there is so much road work and construction going on all the time is because it is one of the easiest ways to disguise corruption and embezzlement.
As an example in a 5 year project for a new overpass you can have literally 1000s of different contractors involved in the work and it becomes very difficult to notice and prove that Joe's Cement company never showed up to pour the liminal substrate pylons like they were paid $10k to do.
My favorite New York "Joe's Cement" story is that when they were expanding Islip airport, a mob-owned cement company that was giving kickbacks to the local county government poured the ramp pad WAY under the specified thickness using unreinforced concrete, so of course the first Southwest plane to arrive damaged it.
Don't hire a mob-owned cement company, you say? Tough noogies, In NY, at least at that time, they were all mob-owned.
> with an entire TV channel watched by 60 million daily screaming that your very existence hurts the country, and plenty of grandmas taking that to heart
Just say the name next time, I think it's obvious whom you are referring to. It's also obvious replies to your assertions are off topic in part because of this part of your reply.
So here's my list of what the article suggests cause large construction projects to go over budget.
> SUMMARY:
> It’s a tale as old as civil engineering: A megaproject is sold to the public as a grand solution to a serious problem. Planning and design get underway, permits issued, budgets allocated (that took a lot longer than we expect), construction starts, and then there are more problems! Work is delayed, expenses balloon, and when all the dust settles, it’s a lot less clear whether the project’s benefits were really worth the costs.
> REASONS:
> underestimation
> limit in design prevents accurate overall estimation
> subcontracting availability
> subcontracting sufficiency
> subcontracting estimation (bids)
> missed pre-construction costs
> inflation of labor and materials
> course correcting takes longer on big projects
> stakeholder compromises
> not taking exploratory work into account
> opportunistic greed
> ...but that's not nearly as common as: "just too darned optimistic and short-sighted"
The suggested solution from the source, as the author points out, is to spend more time in design and planning.
As far as software, that suggests waterfall like planning could give you a better estimation on total project expenditure. But delivery has won that battle, I think. Maybe as our industry contracts (layoffs and svb) we'll see a push towards that kind of project estimation too?
More time in design and planning? That phase can already often take a decade. I realize most of that is probably political horsetrading around which backyard is going to be torn up and which budget the money will come from, but long planning phases are already a problem.
[This is good natured ribbing] Small? Small Maine City? I clicked this expecting to see Machias or Limestone, but I get your biggest city? Sure, it's small by comparison to other cities, but it is your biggest!
Tone is difficult to convey online, so please understand this is all in jest. :-) I grew up in DownEast Maine (Machias was my local 'small city') - so I actually was expecting some small city I'd never heard of. Jokes aside, that is very cool about the bridge, and you make good points in your last 2 paragraphs.
> Imagine having the pay of a local grocer, the turnover of Amazon warehousing, and the public animosity of Google and Facebook combined, with an entire TV channel watched by 60 million daily screaming that your very existence hurts the country, and plenty of grandmas taking that to heart. Government is overtly attacked every single day. Is it any wonder it often struggles?
Right. Completely nothing to do with underdelivering while bending the knee to whoever corporation brib... I mean lobbied more.
There are MILLIONS of people who work in government that aren't politicians and are just trying to do the best with the purposeful obstruction that is handed to them.
It worked great. They shut down the road for a couple hours, literally moved the newly built bridge from beside the road into place, and then were ready for rush hour in a couple days. I had a friend who worked the project.
America can build great things if we were willing, but the past 70 years has seen strong anti-government rhetoric (weirdly after the most successful big government projects seen probably in our history) has helped hollow out local governments and remove any chance they had to cultivate internal talent that could get more efficient at doing things.
Imagine having the pay of a local grocer, the turnover of Amazon warehousing, and the public animosity of Google and Facebook combined, with an entire TV channel watched by 60 million daily screaming that your very existence hurts the country, and plenty of grandmas taking that to heart. Government is overtly attacked every single day. Is it any wonder it often struggles?