Fred Block: Infrastructure, Deficits, and Global Recovery
[Fred Block is a research professor of sociology at the University of California at Davis. His book, edited with Matthew Keller, State of Innovation: The U.S. Government’s Role in Technology Development has just been published by Paradigm.]
A TALE of two episodes in the life of a bridge tells us a lot about the dilemmas facing governments around the world. The Bay Bridge linking San Francisco and Oakland was originally built between 1933 and 1936 at a cost of $77 million. After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the eastern span had to be rebuilt. The project began in 2002 and is supposed to be completed in 2013, with cost estimates now running at $6.3 billion. Despite our technological progress, replacing just half of the old bridge will take four times longer and cost five times more, after adjusting for inflation, than the initial construction. Rush hour tolls were recently increased to $6 roundtrip to help cover these mounting costs.
Even if we allow for some waste and inefficiency in the rebuilding project, the historical cost differences are still enormous. Some of this is because safety practices were casual in the 1930s, and because they didn’t have to work around hundreds of thousands of commuters already using the bridge. But the key problem is that bridges and other infrastructure projects don’t benefit from the astonishing productivity gains that we have made with mass-produced goods. Bridge-building is much more capital intensive than it was seventy-five years ago, but you can’t simply pop out another bridge segment the way that cars, computers, or toasters now jump off heavily automated assembly lines. Almost all infrastructure projects resist standardization; they have to be adapted to particular physical sites, and this drives up costs. Nor do we let employers pay workers the prevailing wage in China; earnings for the skilled workers and managers on such projects have risen much faster than inflation.
When we generalize from the story of this bridge to all infrastructure projects, it becomes clear that the cost of maintaining and rebuilding our infrastructure will inevitably rise as a percentage of GDP, even if our infrastructure needs remain constant. And they won’t: we need more infrastructure now than ever before....
Read entire article at Dissent
A TALE of two episodes in the life of a bridge tells us a lot about the dilemmas facing governments around the world. The Bay Bridge linking San Francisco and Oakland was originally built between 1933 and 1936 at a cost of $77 million. After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the eastern span had to be rebuilt. The project began in 2002 and is supposed to be completed in 2013, with cost estimates now running at $6.3 billion. Despite our technological progress, replacing just half of the old bridge will take four times longer and cost five times more, after adjusting for inflation, than the initial construction. Rush hour tolls were recently increased to $6 roundtrip to help cover these mounting costs.
Even if we allow for some waste and inefficiency in the rebuilding project, the historical cost differences are still enormous. Some of this is because safety practices were casual in the 1930s, and because they didn’t have to work around hundreds of thousands of commuters already using the bridge. But the key problem is that bridges and other infrastructure projects don’t benefit from the astonishing productivity gains that we have made with mass-produced goods. Bridge-building is much more capital intensive than it was seventy-five years ago, but you can’t simply pop out another bridge segment the way that cars, computers, or toasters now jump off heavily automated assembly lines. Almost all infrastructure projects resist standardization; they have to be adapted to particular physical sites, and this drives up costs. Nor do we let employers pay workers the prevailing wage in China; earnings for the skilled workers and managers on such projects have risen much faster than inflation.
When we generalize from the story of this bridge to all infrastructure projects, it becomes clear that the cost of maintaining and rebuilding our infrastructure will inevitably rise as a percentage of GDP, even if our infrastructure needs remain constant. And they won’t: we need more infrastructure now than ever before....