Ezra Klein has a long interview today about governance with Steve Teles and Jennifer Pahlka. The gist is that our government bureaucracies really are terrible and liberals are in denial about the need for massive reform. It left me with many thoughts because I think, overall, it hit the wrong targets.
It's hard to adopt just the right tone for this because, God knows, big bureaucracies have lots of problems and liberals aren't always willing to face up to them. I'm really not trying to be a big defender of the bureaucracy here. But maybe a little one? This turned out to be very long, so let's take it in small pieces.
KLEIN [on defending institutions]: The core conflict right now, the irresolvable one, the ones that two parties will not compromise on, is over institutions: Democrats staff and defend them. Republicans loathe and seek to raze them to the ground.
This is nothing new. Remember when William F. Buckley said he'd rather be governed by 2,000 random names from the Boston telephone book than the faculty of Harvard? That was 1963. As a possible explanation for the recent travails of the Democratic Party it really doesn't work.
PAHLKA [On the disconnect between policy and delivery]: Probably the biggest example of it would be the Biden administration’s insistence on the success of the big bills that were passed — the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, infrastructure, where they are incredible accomplishments legislatively. And if you look at it from that perspective, he is absolutely a hero. But if you look at from the perspective of people in states in the U.S. whose economies have been hollowed out: It took so long to get that money out the door.
This just isn't true. First, here's construction spending after the CHIPS Act:
That's fast! And despite lots of early warnings, new fabs have been opening on time and on budget. Second, here's estimated IRA spending on green energy projects:
This represents about two-thirds of the total authorized. It's going out the door and being used about as fast as you could hope for with such enormous sums.
Third, the infrastructure bill. The headline number is that it was a $1.2 trillion bill. But that's grossly misleading. It allocated only $550 billion in new funding, and as always, that's over a decade. It's really a $55 billion bill, and that money is being spent just fine.
KLEIN [on nothing ever getting done]: The first contract to build the New York subways was awarded in 1900. Four years later — four years — the first 28 stations opened.
Compare that to now. In 2009, Democrats passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, pumping billions into high-speed rail. Fifteen years later, you cannot board a high-speed train funded by that bill anywhere in the country.
So, yeah: I’m worried about our institutions. I’m angry at our institutions. I don’t want to defend them. I want them to work.
Well, yes, but I don't think this is due to dysfunctional liberal bureaucracies. It's due to a different liberal delusion: the unshakable belief that America desperately needs lots of high-speed rail. This has been going on for 60 years, not just 15, and we still have no high-speed rail.
The bureaucracy isn't at fault for this. It would happily dole out the money for HSR if it was truly a priority for anyone. But it's not. California is ground zero for HSR boondoggles, and only a part of that can be blamed on inefficient bureaucratic rules—though there are plenty of those. Mostly it can be blamed on voters and politicians who have succumbed to hazy liberal dreams of gleaming trains that have no basis in reality.
TELES [on why bureaucracies deteriorate]: Things go wrong. There’s a scandal. We add a new process, we add a new procedure — without really thinking about how it interacts with all the rest of it. And so we shouldn’t necessarily think that the problems that Jen is describing are a result of the fact that anybody designed this thing to operate this way. It’s really the result of just additional layers of accretion without corresponding layers of destruction.
This is true. When we set out to build things these days there are lots of hoops to jump through. The project has to be let out to competitive bidding. You have to write an environmental impact report. Maybe you have to ensure some of the work is done by small businesses. There are minority set asides. Buy American provisions. Zoning variances. Environmental justice requirements. Public comment periods for new rulemaking. Grievance procedures for anyone who's unhappy. Etc.
But with few exceptions these hurdles have nothing to do with the bureaucracy per se. They're put in place by legislators at all levels. Liberals want to ensure social fairness. Conservatives want to make sure liberal interest groups can't cheat. Local politicos want to retain power. And everyone wants to make sure nothing objectionable happens near their own house.
This is where the blame lies. Bureaucracies themselves are just the unlucky bastards who are forced to make it all work.
PAHLKA [on outside forces]: We’re skipping over a really important point here that Steve touched on when he mentioned scandal, which is the adversarial nature of all this.... Steve was referring to that earlier, sort of the ’60s and ’70s that’s still very much in our DNA as Democrats — that is to sue, sue, sue. Well, if we sue, sue, sue all the time for all sorts of reasons —
Suing government, here, you mean?
PAHLKA: Exactly. Suing the government. Then every time we sue, we make the government more risk averse. There’s a lot of adversarialism out there, and the natural result of that is going to be a system in which you defend your judgments by using no judgment.
No argument here. This is absolutely a problem—though it's pretty ecumenical these days. Block a rich person's view and they sue over some alleged deficiency in the EIR. Build something near a poor neighborhood and liberal interest groups will sue. Build near a residential area and owners will sue over increased traffic. Violate someone's notion of government overreach and conservative interest groups will sue. Award a contract and the losers will sue.
But—this is obviously a broad problem that bureaucracies themselves do nothing to cause. All they can do is react, and it's true that sometimes the reaction can be a sort of fetal crouch where dotting i's becomes far too important.
If you want to solve this, the answer lies mostly in legislation that rolls back protections a bit and provides safe harbors if the truly important rules are followed.
KLEIN [on the problems with big cities governed by Democrats]: I was looking at some election results. And it was weighting the shift in the vote by the density of the place. And what it shows is that in the most dense places, which is to say the big cities, the vote turned against Democrats the most... These are places where people were very exposed to blue state governance, exposed to the cost of living, exposed to housing crises, exposed to disorder on the streets, homeless encampments.
I doubt very much that this is responsible for a sudden shift over the past four years. More likely it's due to the fact that Kamala Harris didn't campaign in these places and lots of Democrats in deep blue cities stayed home because they knew their votes didn't matter. The obsessive coverage this year of the seven swing states as the only ones that mattered may have had something to do with it.
But I want to make a larger point. It's true that big cities have deteriorated over the decades, but it's a couple of big trends that are largely responsible for this. The first one is also the most obvious: Both the rich and the upper middle class have increasingly disengaged from cities, partly by moving to the suburbs and partly by segregating themselves into gated enclaves where they can shut out the problems of urban life. This has left central cities increasingly subject to the pathologies of the poor, the poorly educated, and the homeless.
Second, the poor communities themselves have deteriorated. In the past, the smartest and most capable of the poor stayed put their entire lives because no other options were open to them. They ended up as the natural leaders of these communities. But no longer. We've gotten too good and too aggressive at identifying these people and sending them to college—where they become part of the middle class and move away. As a result, central cities are left rudderless and even poorer.
These problems obviously have nothing to do with governance, either red or blue. It's just the way things are.
TELES [on the high cost of building stuff]: A piece by Leah Brooks and Zach Liscow...shows in exhaustive detail just how much the costs of building infrastructure in the U.S. have gone up, which Jen was talking about earlier. And they demonstrate that the explanation for that increase, which I think is behind a lot of Americans’ sense that nothing works, is citizen voice. That there’s so many opportunities for often quite minoritarian intervention in building things, that everything takes very long. It takes a lot more. And the other thing is government doesn’t get big wins that translate into trust and a willingness to invest it with new resources.
"Citizen voice." Not bureaucracy. Beyond that, though, I'm a big fan of this chart:
New York City has astronomical infrastructure costs. But more broadly, the US is fairly middling. There's a popular myth that America has fantastically higher building costs than other countries, but it's largely based on (a) New York City, which gets a ton of media coverage; (b) comparison of a few high-profile HSR projects; and (c) massive building throughout China, where the government doesn't have to care about public approval. Overall, though, it really is mostly a myth. There's probably a kernel of truth to it because America really is a litigious nation, but no more than that.
Here's a story: FEMA has long handed out money to disaster victims, but in the past they required people to spend it only on approved things. If you ran out and needed more you had to show receipts that demonstrated you had followed the rules.
Then they decided this was dumb and rescinded the rule. That's an example of a bureaucracy killing a regulation on its own. It can be done.
But it also opens up FEMA to blowback. Someday an activist group is going to collect evidence of fraud and hand it to a friendly politician, who is then going to demand hearings that generate blaring headlines about millions of wasted taxpayer dollars. You can practically see it in your mind's eye already.
And it's not as if the criticism will be wrong. You'd like to think that people could be relied on to use common sense, but they can't be and we all know it. It would be nice, for example, if all we had to tell restaurant managers was, For God's sake, just make sure the place is clean and the refrigerator works and employees wash their hands. But as we become richer we also become more risk averse. That means lots of detailed rules—the refrigerator must close automatically and contain separate areas for meat and vegetables and run at 34-36°F and shelving must be stainless steel. This is not the bureaucracy at work. This is the result of the public reading The Jungle and Silent Spring and Food Politics and demanding action. But that's not all. At the same time we also demand that cheating can't be allowed. And the environment be kept clean. And the workplace be safe. And residents have some say in what gets built next door. So we demand politicians pass some rules about this and naturally they do what they're told.
This doesn't always turn out the way we'd like. But it's not really the fault of the bureaucracy. For that, we just need to look in the mirror.
On a per capita basis, the US government is the most efficient in the industrial world. When the government doles our money for infrastructure, agricultural subsidy, welfare, disasters, or retirement, someone has to dole out the money. When it comes to welfare management, case workers (one of the most under paid jobs that exist) can only do so much. Sorry, there is just not that much fat to cut. As mentioned in many places, you can rid of ALL government except defense, medical expenses, retirement and interest payments and you still have a deficit. When it comes to medical services, it is Dems, through ACA, who have bent the curve downwards. DOD is untouchable in these perilous times. The average SSA check is less than 2k per month and 40% of the elderly rely on it 100%. The bottom line is simple, the wealthy need to pay more, yet we are discussing cutting taxes, just nuts. Let’s put it this way, the GOP and Trump talk a lot, but like mass deportations, they will soon find out, that they cannot accomplish what they want, it is factually possible (though they will cause a lot of misery in the process). I wonder what group of people they will demonize next, since that seems to be the slogan in every election, apparently women are the next target, then the elderly, then the lazy working class, eventually, it will be all Americans.
"On a per capita basis, the US government is the most efficient in the industrial world."
It's also much more efficient than most companies. The US government employs ~5 million people (civilian plus military), and spends ~$6 trillion a year, which means that the ratio of employees to spending is north of a million to one.
Compare that to, say, Tesla, which employs ~120,000 people, and has revenue of ~$25 billion a year, which is a ratio of about 210,000 to one.
Obviously, the two entities have different missions, structures, etc. But at a very, very coarse level, the amount of money-per-person being handled by the US government is nearly an order of magnitude greater than at Elon Musk's own business.
> It's also much more efficient than most companies.
I wish this were pointed-out more often, and these guys like Teles forced to address this. I worked in enterprise I/T, and the joke we used to tell was: if we could only double the productivity of R&D, we'd be rolling in money, just -rolling- in it. Double it, from 2% to 4%. B/c that much of R&D was completely wasted, and I mean WASTED. There was a guy who went from line programmer all the way to VP and Fellow, and not one of the projects he championed and later led was successful: every one of them was a gigantic failure, and I mean -gigantic-. And before him there were two gigantic failures that involved billions of dollars spent across sites all over the damn world, that were also colossal failures.
This stuff happens in every big I/T company, including the ones we all think of as great successes. And nobody talks about it, b/c hey, it's not the Federal government. When the Feds invest in medical research and it produces something wildly profitable, does that profit go to the Feds' bottom line? No! It goes to some pharma's bottom line, and the Feds only get the failures.
There's an old, old joke a friend of mine told me in 1994(ish): The Economist (magazine) never met a bloated, sclerotic public bureaucracy it liked, and it never met a bloated, sclerotic private bureaucracy it didn't like.
aldous..
In some respects the DoD is both a government entity and it's own bureaucracy. Not only that but its a bureaucracy that is controlled by the Congressional purse strings which for DoD are almost open ended.
Then you have those congress critters who benefit from the financial largesse of spending those dollars in their states. If I am not mistaken todays aircraft carriers are built mostly in Newport News but the components are sourced from all 50 states because each state wanted a piece of the pie. Its no wonder that no one in either party wants defense spending cut
We toss around words like bureaucracy like it was an epithet, when in fact the people that fund those bureaucracies look at them as "success stories" for their states
"In some respects the DoD is both a government entity and it's own bureaucracy."
Not to snark, but I'd be hard-pressed to think of any respects in which the Department of Defense (or nearly any other agency) isn't a government entity and its own bureacracy. What exactly are you saying here?
On a per capita basis, the US government is the most efficient in the industrial world.
What are you basing this on?
See worldpopulationreview.com.
so, nothing, got it.
Type public sector size by country in 2024 and see the results in worldpopulationreview.com.
Fucking radical centrists.
My experience with federal bureaucracy is that if they just had more people to do all the work, it would be a much better experience for everyone.
HUD has way too much administrative work to do and is short-handed. We frequently have to use our own reserve cash when a grant period starts while we wait for the grant to get through HUD's gears. Prior to 2018ish, we *never* had to wait. This most recent year took EIGHT months after the start of the grant. Nothing was wrong - they just had so many vacancies that people are doing 2 and 3 jobs. And every year, the annual grant renewal competition got later and later. It used to be in May-June, then it was July, then August, now it's September and October. For grants that can start as early as January.
It's not that bureaucracy doesn't work, it's that there aren't enough people staffing it so things don't go smoothly. It's not like there are layers and layers of red tape (I'm sure there are some, but they're not the primary issue). It's that the staff that exists has to do several jobs because there have been vacancies and then hiring freezes.
Republicans do this shit on purpose, and Ezra Klein gives them cover while he masquerades as a policy wonk. Fucking enablers are just as bad as saboteurs.
Concur. Thank you for that.
Government workforce at the federal level today is smaller than during the Reagan years, despite US population adding 110 million people (45-50%). For 40 years the neoliberal "government is the problem" mindset has ruled our politics. When was the last time the GOP tried to get government to do anything (except go to war)? Trump talked big on infrastructure and did zippo. The post-2010 GOP in Congress forced austerity on Obama and the rest of the nation, forcing a glacially slow recovery from the worst economic crisis since the Depression.
Joe Biden rightly should have been regarded as the president who delivered the long overdue end to the neoliberal era. Now, instead, we have turned to authoritarianism by idiots.
Klein has nerve implicating Democrats as the reason government can't get anything done. Dems may not be perfect, but on the whole the country would have had so much more done if not for Republican obstruction and austerity over the years.
The subtext to this campaign he has been on is to provide cover for the destruction of vital government functions the new regime will bring.
Elsewhere, Klein has been lauding Trump for Operation Warp Speed. "You gotta hand it to him." He talks about it like Trump masterminded the whole project himself, rather than signing a bill than any president with a heartbeat would have. There's a group at the NYT that essentially offers a shiny, polite version of what Fox offers. Klein is part of that group. Maybe the most prominent member. His conservative stripes have been showing since his support for the Iraq War back in his college days.
Start of the Reagan years: 2,961,00 Jan 1981
Minimum during Reagan years: 2,855,00 May 1982
End of the Reagan years: 3,158,000 Jan 1989
Today (October 2024): 3,002,000
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001
Depending on where you want to pick fruit, it either is smaller by 4.9% or larger by 5.1%. All the while, computers are supposed to have been increasing productivity, if I'm recalling some past Drum posts correctly.
Per chart here, total government employment since late '50s has grown by about 16 million workers (inc. 6 million in education). Federal employment is flat as a pancake.
https://bsky.app/profile/pkrugman.bsky.social/post/3lbmo2fsgo22o
I dunno, but it would be odd if computers are having a big effect at the federal level but not elsewhere.
Anyway, it's remarkable that DOGE is going after the one place where government seems to have been scaled for productivity. Methinks they may not be thinking about efficiency after all.
The face to face and human labor work of government in the US mostly gets done at the state and local level. Computers aren’t replacing teachers, police or garbage collectors yet so not surprised that these areas have grown as the population has.
Federal government departments outside of some notable areas is much more focused on areas that can be digitised or shut off without the mass public noticing. The IRS doesn’t need hordes of people processing tax returns anymore and the areas where it does need human input such as audits aren’t missed by anyone except a few leftists so they just don’t get done.
Even removing education workers (8 mil) and police (1.3 mil), you still see substantial increases in the number of non-federal government workers.
So how can the federal workforce be so "efficient" and stable? It's probably not. That is, if we're only looking at workers on the government payroll.
Per the article at the link below, about 40% of total federal work is done by contract employees (almost 4 mil workers, as of 2015). So as population grows, government grows, and government work gets outsourced.
https://www.pogo.org/analysis/contractors-and-true-size-of-government
The outsourcing of government work is not done because it's cheaper that way (sometimes it might be), but often for other reasons.
Anecdotal note: my most Trumpist relative works from home as a government contractor for pay that exceeds your typical senator's. He also has time to hold two other WFH jobs. I don't think the taxpayers are getting a great deal on outsourcing the kind of work he does.
I expect that federal contractors will be outside the scope of any efforts that the DOGE bros do to make government more efficient. I do expect more privatizing of government work will be the result.
Outsourcing was a big boondoggle. It left the government without expertise and necessary manpower. It doesn't work in the public or private sector. (Boeing is the most visible example, but most of US industry is having similar problems except they are less visible.)
Agreed. I just meant that compared to local governments where people will notice and get angry if garbage isn’t collected, kids aren’t taught, parks aren’t cleaned etc that when it comes to the federal government no one will notice if HUD takes an extra 9 months to issue a grant or the IRS does less audits. So there is far less public pressure to increase staff to do work that requires humans.
Also as a former federal government employee I can tell you that a lot of federal government work lends itself to automation (tax processing) that has helped in part to keep employment down. From what I know of federal government compared to now there are far less people employed to process forms. Not has the national park system seen substantial growth even as local government parks have grown exponentially.
And yes outsourcing jobs to contractors hides this but most of these contractors are doing highly skilled work that they struggle to attract at government wages or is for workforces they can quickly upsizes and downsize depending on requirements compared to direct government employees who are hard to fire.
Also slow growth of federal government workers is a pattern across federal governments across the world. The Australian government public service has 40,000 less employees of 2024 than it did in 1968. So I doubt it is a specific product of the US political system.
The federal government has a mishmash of systems and a huge backlog of things that need to be digitized. Obama started to tackle that and even set up usable websites. It will still take a while before we can cut down on employees, and we still need people to answer questions, digitize paper tax returns, sign off on projects, etc. Of course with the population ca. 50% larger, serving them with the same number of people, +/- 5%, is a pretty good productivity gain.
Those systems can only do so much. They can handle the routine problems, but a lot of problems require people who know the system and how to get things done. It makes sense to get rid of tier one, but that means tier two has to have the money to maintain staffing and hire and train good people.
Neighborhood meetings and design review are all layers of bureaucracy. Variances inevitably get opposed and major modifications may require more hearings/reviews. Even repainting a building can trigger design review. Often, to appeal you have to take it up to the city council which involves public notice, a comment period, presentation, and in-person comments.
Rather than a response to a lack of common sense, these layers of regulation exist because people exploit systems that lack rules. See: Trump.
Neighborhood meetings and design reviews are layers of red tape. "Red tape" and "bureaucracy" are NOT synonymous, although it definitely requires bureaucrats to administer the red tape.
Red tape is the rigamarole that you can do without because it exists for no other reason than to document shit; bureaucracy is the involvement of bureaus or groups of people who have the ability to stop your project. Design review and neighborhood meetings are not red tape, they're bureaucratic layers.
Klein is Trump-like in that he tends to adopt the opinions of the last people he talks to, and recently he's been bringing on more and more conservative or MAGA commentators. Part of this is likely due to the heavy "both sides" orientation of his paymaster. Part is due to his natural contrarianism, as one can see from his earliest days at Pandagon blog. Unlike our host here (who is also a bit of a contrarian) he's lazy and doesn't do his research.
That said, I still follow him because he occasionally brings on people with fresh perspectives, and he's not without his own insights. But there has definitely been a decline in that insightfulness of late.
+1
Klein had a whole series in 2020 or 2021 featuring younger conservative thinkers.
It's not a new thing for him at all.
I don't find speculating on motives useful at all.
As I implied, I've been following him since he and Jesse Taylor blogged as Pandagon. He's changed, especially since he had kids. (Or maybe it was when he moved from California to NYC.)
Of late, he seems less willing to make his interviewee uncomfortable. He's developed more of a tendency to recapitulate what they've already said -- often talking more than his guest -- rather than agree or disagree.
i’m pretty sure he lives in California.
He moved to NYC last year.
Journalists can make a very long, stable, and lucrative career out of restating what 'important people' want heard.
He always struck me as rather glib and light weight. I've been unsurprised at his trajectory.
A couple of months ago… “Congress enacts a Continuing Resolution to avert government shutdown through December 20, 2024.”
Y’all are going to want to do a deal to extend this or something and that’s dumb in my opinion. You’ll be funding the construction of migrant camps and trump / musk nonsense. It makes no sense to me that you want to do this, but you do.
Business as usual… it’s bad politics and just bad all around. Shut it down.
A continuing resolution specifically does not pay for new projects.
Yep no new starts under a CR - it has to wait until a budget for FY 2025 is passed. I predict that we will get another CR, there's no incentive for the GOP in this congress to let a budget get passed until the next congress.
Fuck Justin. He’s a troll who should not be fed.
I agree with the overall thrust of Kevin's post. But as he often tends to do, he throws the royal plural around too freely.
New regulations are often created in response to campaigns by the media and/or special interest lobby groups. There's a deadly industrial accident, or a train derails, or a court case makes an unexpected decision adverse to a particular group, and a well-oiled machine revs up insisting the government "do something". That's not "we" demanding action, it's the government tamping down a source of negative publicity.
In similar fashion, Congress often has committee investigations and holds hearings into arcane partisan issues that are of little interest to the general public, but which members of the majority party see as potential sources of headlines justifying new legislation. The committees work to create an artificial sense that "something needs to be done", when in fact "we the people" couldn't care less. Election finance laws are a typical example, where enormous time and effort has been invested in making laws and regulations at the behest of political interest groups, which have ended up having the opposite effect of the vague public demand to "get money out of politics".
"It's true that big cities have deteriorated over the decades,"
I guess. If the decades in question are 1950-1980, and not 1990-2024.
Otherwise, I generally agree. People grousing about government bureaucracy generally either (a) have no idea what they are talking about, or (b) do know what they are talking about, but could make more money if they didn't have to follow a rule that mostly protects the public.
Yeah I didn’t really understand this either. I have lived in cities all my life, and cities have definitely improved since the 1980s and before, even given that they’ve gotten a bit worse in the recent decade. I’ve not been afraid to be in a city since sometime in the early 1990s.
We lived in St. Louis for 40 years beginning in 1982. The city core and mid-town underwent a renaissance during that time. It left North St. Louis behind, however.
I saw in the Boston Globe an article about a 175 square foot condo in Boston advertised at $400K. Two similar condos in the same building sold in that price range. Providence RI real estate is also expensive. Both cities also have issues with homelessness.
In big cities, "city" covers a lot of real estate and a lot of variety.
I will take liberal bureaucracy over conservative crony capitalism every time.
I have found at universities that the demand for more bureaucracy, more inefficient processes that cost more, comes from the top. Spending money wisely is not a priority, avoiding scandals is. Except in sports of course. There it is part trying hard to win.
You overestimate the importance of winning in sports. Increasingly, team owners are focused on profitability first, and sometimes tack on a desire to win as well. The recent trend here is private equity firms and hedge fund managers buying stakes in teams. They are overwhelmingly focused on making money.
But it's not really a new phenomenon. There is a long history of family owned teams losing the desire to compete. The original purchaser is extremely interested in winning. When they die, their heirs are more focused on the money.
The athletes are obsessed with winning. Their employers, not so much.
There's a reason college sports coaches (especially the football variety) can get paid better than even the university president: alumni contributions often reflect the interest generated by a school's teams. And winners mean $$.
"I have found at universities that the demand for more bureaucracy, more inefficient processes that cost more, comes from the top. Spending money wisely is not a priority, avoiding scandals is."
At universities, the "top" is the board of trustees, which is overwhelmingly rich businessmen.
Alon Levy has convincingly refuted Klein's claim about the speed at which the NYC subway was built:
...the First Subway took 41 years to build from proposal (1863-1904). Physical construction took four years, but it took 37 years to agree on anything to get it built. https://bsky.app/profile/alonlevy.bsky.social/post/3lbkoclf3qc2v
What do you think you're doing injecting facts into the conversation?
High speed rail is a net good.
The idea we don't need it is nonsense. Where are the people demanding the freeway system make a profit before a foot of it is made?
Kevin has a be in his bonnet about HSR that has never made sense. There are all sorts of places with European or even Japan-like population density and geography that can clearly support HSR.
Most of America doesn’t have European or Japan like density, but lots of states and regions (New England, the west coast) do and should have HSR. California’s inability to build HSR is unique to California: lots of NIMBYism and too much environmental impact lawfare. Any other state having that level of funding for HSR dumped into it would’ve already built a line or more by now.
Population density alone isn't really a significant indicator for the viability of HSR. The most important determinant is the existence of major population centers that could be connected up to a travel time between nodes of around 4 hours. Much of the eastern half of the US and the Pacific states meets this basic condition.
This. We've traveled on HSR in France and Spain, covering large thinly populated distances between cities. It's working there. Americans just prefer to drive alone in their SUVs.
Florida didn't do too much better with its Tampa-Orlando HSR line. Passenger rail in the US has been bleeding since the 1920s and the automobile. That was the first great era of federal road building, and it clobbered the railroads. Everyone hated the railroads the way everyone hates Comcast nowadays, so not a lot of tears were shed.
The CHIPS Act was signed into law on August 9, 2022. The upswing was already well under way having started roughly one year before. About 30-40% of the growth had already happened.
There were the tariffs affecting items made in China and the Covid supply chain disruption, not to mention national security concerns. Intel also had plans to become a chip foundry company too, i.e. make other company's chips too. The CHIPS act fed into that momentum and may have motivated some earlier work so companies would be approved for CHIPS act funding as soon as it passed. Not sure how much of the work is truly new vs how much was just pulled forward. Either way, it was structured to prevent (minimize) a Foxconn Wisconsin plant debacle.
A consideration on my mind is the inter-relatedness of everything and how that slows things down. My own specialty is weather prediction, and conventional F=ma models of weather prediction have gotten exceedingly complex. We ask them to model not just the atmosphere, but interactions with the land surface and hydrologic processes; the flux of heat to and from the ocean surface; the movement of ice floes; the interactions of particulates and other anthropogenic emissions. And with everything affecting everything else, testing and making sure one thing here doesn't screw up another thing there slows the process to a crawl. How we do better is an important topic in weather prediction. How do we simplify the process.
And I'd argue that this same complexity relates now to building a new subway line in Manhattan, where now there's 10x-100x the infrastructure to work around; a desire to build to standards of durability and climate resilience that were not a consideration in decades past. Etc..
Our modern world is complex, inter-related, and managing the complexity is just a fact of modern life. Which isn't to say we don't re-evaluate and see if we can simplify; we can and should. But this is a boundary condition.
Before you can rebuild our bureaucracies you have to rebuild our citizens. The USSR and Germany attempted that.
A draftsman who worked for me taught me the old Brit saying: Perfect is the enemy of good enough.
All bureaucracies have those other institutions looking over their shoulders. The office of the president, congress and the subprime court. Even in my tiny bit of NASA I observed what happened when something was requested by the president or congress. FAFO you have been assigned to the FBI office in Nome AK.
“Even in my tiny bit of NASA I observed what happened when something was requested by the president or congress. FAFO you have been assigned to the FBI office in Nome AK.”
Wtf does this mean? Like, it’s in English, but why would failing to meet a presidential or congressional request lead a NASA employee to be reassigned to a FBI office anywhere, much less in Nome AK? Aren’t NASA and the FBI two completely different agencies?
It would certainly seem strange if bureaucracy had increased significantly over the last 70 years while the number of civilian employees had changed hardly at all, particularly since the overall population has almost doubled over that time.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1BGh4
Re: Cost of Transit Projects In NYC
Back some 50 years ago at NASA I attended a talk by a couple of guys who attempted to build a STOL port in the East River. They were going to use WW2 Liberty ships as a base. What caught my attention was what they found out about projects in NYC. If the citizens have any say in the project, they say NO!!! It matters not how good the project is. The citizens have been F'd over so many times they don't believe anything the proposers say.
It is a wonder that any subway project gets started.
They managed the Flushing Line extension to the West Side because they built new land, a multi-billion dollar platform over a rail yard. My mother told me the Second Avenue subway was first started in the 1920s but shut down for lack of money. They started again in the 1960s and were doing actual excavation when that got shut down for lack of money. They actually built it as far as 96th Street, not far from my niece's apartment, five or ten years ago. There are two more phases to go farther north and extend south, but, for now, they're out of money. For the stretch that was built, say a full century.
Notre Dame Cathedral took centuries to finish. Maybe they kept running out of money. Some things never change.
>It's true that big cities have deteriorated over the decades<
I don’t think that’s remotely true. With few exceptions, they’re in better shape than they were decades ago. Most of them are richer, safer, more populous, and offer better and more amenities than decades ago, even if a few of them had a rough start to the 2020s.
Kevin is deep in the suburbs and has apparently no idea that cities have been doing well from approx the mid 1990s to 2019, if not later.
Wrong right from the start. Republicans love private enterprise; they only oppose government institutions because those threaten to reduce profitability by forcing businesses to take on responsibilities toward their employees and communities. ‘Smaller government’ is not an end for the Republican Party, it is a means to a state in which government and unions are weakened beyond any ability to oppose business interests.
This is a stellar post.
I have plenty of disagreements with Kevin (including about certain things in this post!) but overall, this is the kind of argument that has brought me back here year after year and will continue to do so.
+1
Is it? Even if comparing say with the slate of (largely) European countries with which you compared the United States during COVID? Looks like we are rather higher than Spain, Sweden, Finland, Italy, Germany, Norway, Austria, Switzerland, Mexico, Denmark, Belgium, UK... Even ignoring New York City.
This has been going on for 60 years, not just 15, and we still have no high-speed rail.
In general I'm on board with Kevin here: this is pretty lazy, pretty imprecise punditry by Klein and his interviewees.
But Kevin raises the above point in response to this by Klein:
The first contract to build the New York subways was awarded in 1900. Four years later — four years — the first 28 stations opened. Compare that to now.
The problems with HSR in the US well known enough, and I agree with Kevin that the bulk of this issue is that the country simply hasn't prioritized this mode of transport enough for lawmakers to get serious.
However, on simple transit (which is how Ezra starts off his point), the US really does appear to be an utterly abysmal performer compared to other high income countries. Matt Yglesias (I know, boo! hiss!) has done a lot of coverage of this phenomenon: it's a long, woeful tale of misplaced priorities (US transit projects often target things like construction job creation rather than, you know, ridership); cost-overruns; abysmal lack of in-house capabilities and ruinously expensive outsourcing; ludicrous work rules; needlessly expensive designs; and so on.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/fancy-stations-make-quality-mass
https://www.slowboring.com/p/whats-not-wrong-with-italy
Anyway, it's lazy and imprecise to blame our public sector problems on "bureaucracy." But it probably is fair to say something like: "The methods, practices and systems used in the United States to build infrastructure projects are cumbersome, inefficient and wasteful by rich country standards, and end up making us poorer and less well-served than we should be."
If you haven’t read the NYT article on what went wrong with California’s HSR project you should:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-rail-politics.html?unlocked_article_code=1.cU4.bS9S.7EJ_96GfvI7Z&smid=url-share
I don’t think it was the “bureaucracy” that killed HSR in California, it was politics.
Is that a response to my comment? I’m referring to non-HSR transit, and I specifically stated it’s lazy to blame that sector’s problems on “bureaucracy.”
Yes it was a response to your comment, mostly agreeing with it and also pointing out to you the problem that killed HSR in California, which I don’t think is unique to this state. A lot of things that make large projects cumbersome can be overcome. But I’m not sure how you overcome the politics that changed the California HSR project from a train from San Francisco to Los Angeles to a train from Bakersfield to Merced.
got it
Re: the litigation thing, a huge part of this is related to deliberate choices by the legislature to structure major regulatory legislation around a litigation model. The ADA, for example, has virtually no enforcement mechanism outside of individual litigation. In that light, if you agree with the premise of the ADA it’s really more a question of whether that premise is better served by a litigation model or a bureaucracy model, either of which follow from the structure of the statute.
In a lot of cases the litigation isn’t so much a headwind for the bureaucracy as it is a replacement for it, and the fact that other agencies get snarled up in it is a consequence of its design.
Lol, Ezra Klein. Serious centrist!!
His comment on spending $8B one time on national high speed rail and WHEREISTHERAIL!?!? Is comically stupid.
France spends this or more almost every year on their high speed rail network.
Its common to pinch pennies and then complain that your penny pinching has a downside. I want things but dont want to spend any money, I blame government!
Dumb.
Like Truman said about incoming President Eisenhower: "He'll sit here and say, 'Do this, Do that!' and nothing will happen".
It's an Article of Faith with the GOP that they are Hardnosed Businessmen Who Can Make Things Happen. Ain't So..and they've been selling that snake oil since Hoover...It sells, but it takes something like The Great Depression to wake people up.
Kevin is being as he hopes a good technocrat in his politics, Klein as he fully intends a lazy one in defense of his center-right god. Still, it's not even necessary to show that government is efficient. There will always be crooks there and in the private sector, and both can be improved, in no small part by regulation and government.
Rather, the point should be that liberalism is about caring and making government serve the people, as is its purpose. It's become a truism that college professors and those in search of truth are the real powers that be and liberalism the establishment. Yeah, right.
Besides, cuts in government don't necessarily improve efficiency. They merely remove protections and services. meanwhile the so-called populists are looking to place government in their hands where they can make a mint. If that backfires because they've tanked the economy, so be it.
Being grumpy and frustrated about bureaucracy is easy, and justified on some level. But it has to be put into some perspective. There are many people. Not everyone can be left to their own device. Governance is unavoidable when things need to be organized. But is it misguided to believe that this is just about government bureaucracy. Have you tried to fix a problem with a big airline company? Or an internet provider? Health insurance? How many times have you spoken into a phone answering a stupid computer voice, walking you through a series of irrelevant questions that has nothing to do with the issue that needs to be addressed? We need governance, organization, planning, for now and for the future. It's hard to do all that without wasting some time and some resources. Maybe AI can help produce a better dispatch when you try to report a problem.
I'll just add that Trump types, assuming they can read, should just look in any American government text, the kind that many or most college students are assigned. (Oops, that proves they're part of the pro-science pro-academics pro-truth establishment, but leave that aside.) There's always a chapter on the executive branch, sometimes titled with the Bureaucracy , on a par with chapters for the three branches of the federal government. It's taken seriously as a function of government that can't be eliminated.
But anyway the point is that it's not up to us to defend it. It's up to critics to show what's wrong, as indeed liberal reformers have often done historically. And inefficiency , should it be confirmed, is not a reason to eliminate government, no more than less than wonderful companies are a reason to eliminate the private sector.
If you want to speed up construction and cut it's cost, just role back all the worker safety regulations that gum up progress. Back in the 1940's construction death rates were about 150-200 per 100,000 workers, compared with about 12-15 per 100,000 workers today.
Probably a good use of all those detained migrants awaiting deportation. Surprised that Stephen Miller has not already proposed such an idea.
"Democrats staff and defend them. Republicans loathe and seek to raze them to the ground."
When push comes to shove Republicans don't believe in democracy. They believe governing should be done by property owners, employers, and patriarchs, and that democracy is little better than mob rule. The only legitimate role for government is protection of the property rights of owners, employers, and patriarchs. And so they block..
A lot of rules are just scar tissue. At one point, there was a big complaint that the US military had twelves pages of rules defining a cherry pie. It sure sounded ridiculous. Everyone knows what a cherry pie is, but these rules specified that it needed a top crust and bottom crust of a certain thickness, the viscosity of the cherry syrup, the number of cherries as counted using a sieve of particular dimensions and so on. It sounded ridiculous, but it's rather obvious where this came from. One supplier skipped the lower crust. One had no syrup and another provided some kind of watery liquid. Other suppliers skimped on cherries and made a pie with just syrup or perhaps a cherry or two.
It's like SEO. The vendors will take advantage of any loophole they can. As Machiavelli put it, "Whoever takes it upon himself to establish a commonwealth and prescribe laws must presuppose all men naturally bad, and that they will yield to their innate evil passions as often as they can do so with safety." It's not the "ism", it's people.