Talking About Infrastructure Improvements

There’s a so much discussion of President-Elect Obama’s plans for a stimulus package and infrastructure improvements that I barely have enough time to read them let alone writing about them.

Amity Shlaes recaps the history of the stimulus packages via infrastructure improvements that Japan funded to pull itself out of its persistent recession. It ain’t necessarily so:

It is wrong to assume that construction will guarantee a two-fer for the economy — shining structures and redemptive growth. The private sector is often better than politicians at guessing what the market needs. And infrastructure projects demand so much political energy that there’s too little energy left over for everything else. Congress might want to remember all this as it debates infrastructure funding in the coming months. An edifice complex seems more likely to petrify a country than to move it forward.

Robert Poole, in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, is skeptical that the infrastructure improvements being pushed by the nation’s mayors are anything more than expensive boondoggles:

And you thought infrastructure investment meant roads, bridges and schools. It is clear that any infrastructure stimulus money given to the country’s mayors will lead to thousands of tennis centers to nowhere. News alert for mayors: We are officially in a recession. American families have to get by with less, and so do American cities.

His catalog of horrors from the mayors’ wish list is enough to curl your hair.

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution posts on a subject near and dear to my heart: smart grids. He’s got a handy primer and bibliography. IMO that’s what we need to investment in. Forget the tennis centers and dog parks.