We have in The American Interest an ongoing project called “Nation-Building in America” and infrastructure renewal is a subject I have been trying to get covered now for some time, so far to no avail. The reason for my difficulties is my standard of adequacy: I don’t want an essay just telling my readers how bad things are and extolling all the nifty gadgets we have to make them better. I want an essay that acknowledges Galston’s Law, the ur-observation of the entire project: You can’t get new policies and new outcomes from the same old bureaucratic/organizational setup. If you want to do something genuinely new, you have to consider organizational design factors, whether the organizations in question are governmental, private or, in this case, some public-private partnership structures.
I define a worthy 21st century infrastructure for America as an integrated structure that encompasses energy, transportation, communication, airports, water/sanitation and all the rest, bound together by an IT-driven central nervous system. We all know about the “smart grid”, but that’s just about electrical utilities. I am talking about something an order of magnitude above that. I am taking about maximizing the synergies among developing technologies, and I am talking about skipping a technology generation to acquire a truly advanced infrastructure that can serve as real productivity value-added for the economy. It’s not exactly like the opportunity Japan and Germany had after WWII, where the Allies had destroyed their legacy systems, but we’re in such bad shape that it’s almost analogous.
Yet the government seems clueless. The stimulus program was about shovel-ready infrastructure—old technology that it’s often foolish and wasteful to fix. Of course, that was mainly a jobs programs for favored constituencies, and little more. The Obama Administration’s new investment in railroads is nice, but it’s a one-off. It is not integrated into anything, as best I can tell. The President is just jealous that French and Japanese and Chinese trains can go faster than ours. That’s what he actually said, in the State of Union address no less. I waited that night to hear a vision for infrastructure that was economically sensible and sound in terms of engineering principles. Nothing doing. If this guy is really so smart, why is he consistently so disappointing?
Now, I am not a centralization freak; on the contrary, I am more impressed by the efficiencies of subsidiarity. But there are some public-goods functions that can benefit from technical and engineering synergies if built up to scale, and I think national infrastructure in an age of rapid IT advances is one of them.
Even more than that is at stake. We want an infrastructure that’s efficient in thermodynamic terms, of course, but also one that is desirable in broader social terms. We know that the choices we make about technology affect social patterns, attitudes and behaviors (think internal combustion engines, highways, suburbs and drive-ins… or think the Pill, for that matter—not all the shaping is spatial in nature). We don’t get integrative efficiencies and social benefits from dumb luck. They require some planning, some forethought. They also require a capacity to trade short-term for longer-term benefits. Why, for example, do we still keep so many of our power and telecommunications lines up in the air, where they’re vulnerable to every passing windstorm, instead of burying them? Partly because we’ve become incapable, much of the time, of front-loading a long-term investment. It’s not because we’re incapable of calculating the investment; it’s because we’re institutionally deficient when it comes to the politics of the matter. Business models do not align with the long-term public good, and government seems incapable of doing anything about it.
Seems to me, too, that if we now need some aspects of this system to be national in scope for the sake of efficiency and rational management (say, the telecommunications piece), then we cannot keep doing on the state level some of the things we’ve always done before. Just as it makes no sense to pay for digging up the street four times if you only have to do it once, how much sense does it make to have 50 separate licensing schemes when the technology is of national (and international) scale? (Though perhaps there are some functions that would be better de-federalized and given to the states.)
And it seems to me that the principle of modularity needs to be built into a new infrastructure, so that just as newer avionics packages can be put into old airframes (to a point), technological advances can be instituted in infrastructure systems without having to start over every time some key component ages. We now face a mountain of costs because we have let systems age so badly. If they had employed modular designs, we would be able to upgrade without that mountain being so high, and that should be our aim in the future: to use modular design, insofar as possible, to space out our investments, so that planned maintenance cycles double as forms of upgrading, again, insofar as possible.
Moreover, as already suggested, I want this essay to consider what the role of government ought to be to promote (not to own and manage) a new infrastructure. Now, I know people who argue that government should have zero role in infrastructure, that it all should be privatized. I regard this as an insane remark, but actually, so do most of the people who assert it—because the moment after they got their libertarian rocks off, so to speak, they acknowledge all the “exceptions” in which some government role has been and remains necessary. If you add up all the exceptions, there’s not much ideology left. Any reasonable and historically literate person knows enough of the history of the canals and roads and railroads and telegraph and so on in our country to realize that we need government for a variety of purposes: licensing to ensure health and safety and rational use of scarce public goods, providing an understory market for new technologies, basic science and R&D investments, and so on. There is a logic to some kinds of public monopolies, after all, just as there is to certain zoning practices.
The design problem in this regard is that we need a permanent place where the partners and participants involved in building a new infrastructure can convene to decide what to do and how to do it. I have a hard time seeing how people who build electricity grids, people who build road systems, people who build trains and light rail, people who do energy infrastructure, people who do fiber optics, people who plan airports, people who think about financing such things, people who consider safety and environmental issues (one of several necessary governmental functions) and so on, will all somehow get together on their own accord within a private-market framework to plan an integrated system. Without such a place to convene and plan, we will continue to get incremental developments at best, and possibly developments not up to efficient scale. We will get a system that is less than the sum of its parts rather than more. As things stand now, there is no such place in the Federal government, nor is there any interagency arrangement substituting for such a place.
Now, I am mindful that even if a concept for such a place were developed (say, merging the Department of Transportation, the non-military side of DOE, the FCC and maybe the NTSB) there is a good chance that the U.S. political system, as presently constituted, could not do this right. (Look how the Feds messed up the original light-Washington-footprint DHS proposal to create the dysfunctional monstrosity we have now.) The opportunities for distortion, corruption and God-knows-what are almost too large to imagine. But is that a reason not even to think about it?
Moreover, seems to me that the promise of a really major leap forward could attract significant private sector support. Oddly enough, in this economic climate, it may be easier to think and build big than to persuade people to go further into debt to fix already obsolete bridges, rails, roads, water/sanitation systems and so on.
I think I have finally found an author who understands what I want and can do it. We’ll see. In the meantime, I went with some optimism to the newly opened offices of Building America’s Future (BAF) here in Washington. This is, supposedly, an infrastructure renewal project co-sponsored by Governors Schwarzeneggar, Rendell and Mayor Bloomberg. I told the head of this office that I wanted to help them get out their message. Come to find out, they have no message. They appear not to have any version of their program or vision even 2,000, let alone 4,000 or 5,000 words long, that they can give me for TAI. So far, it seems, they have only a PR stunt, a minor upper-middle-class jobs project and some expensive rental space. If they have done any actual thinking, I can find no evidence of it. Unkind? Too cynical? Maybe; let’s test the statement: Arnold, Eddie and Michael, prove me wrong if you can. Make my day.