Sometimes I despair of my countrymen. I’ve been making my rounds of the blogosphere and looking at various people’s posts and comments about the economic situation. There are a variety of different reactions.
Some rather obviously believe that the right thing to do is to react hysterically and emotionally and do something whether that something will produce any practical results or not. Some are more concerned with looking for somebody to blame than taking any sort of action. The government. Big Business. Unions. Politicians. Conservatives. Liberals. The Illuminati.
Some see the country’s economic difficulties as a splendid opportunity to hawk their pet projects which they were hawking long before any sort of economic turndown was apparent. It must be nice to have an all-purpose solution so near to hand.
Some are looking for advantage whether it’s partisan advantage or hoping to grab some of the billions that are being thrown around. Some don’t give a damn as long as it doesn’t touch them directly.
The number of people who are interested in identifying the facts, considering the problems rationally, and taking a prudent course of action are vanishingly small.
Between just Calculated Risk and The Big Picture readers can find plenty of facts.
But at some point, IMO, it all descends into “he said, he said.”
Economists say that if we don’t follow their plan, the outcome will be worse. Their arguments are unprovable of course, making the choices by citizens and voters a bit difficult.
Should I infer from above that you are taking the “do less and the outcome will be better” position? I think that also is unprovable, and falls into the “he said, he said.”
Oh, as a collection point for economic prescription, Economist’s View is pretty good. The host leans liberal, but we learn the opposition as he reports/responds to them.
Not quite. I think that doing the minimum politically possible would be better than doing what’s counter-productive. My position is more one of “right-sizing”: we shouldn’t do to much or too little and should select what we do carefully.
For example, I’m very suspicious of road- and bridge-building projects. Not only do I think that in most cases those are best undertaken by local jurisdictions but I think that their value as infrastructure is being overestimated. Building a bridge in 1959 is one thing—it was sure to get decades of productive use. Building a bridge in 2009 is some else again.
In my view, as I noted here, the greatest challenge for policy-makers is that the objectives of intervention are in direct contradiction with one another. They’ve got to change the paradigm they’re thinking in. You’re not going to re-employ 2 million clerks, salesmen, and bankers with a road-building project. You’ll give a raise to current road-builders to build a road that may only have a few years of productive life.
We certainly can’t expect to get a 1:1 bang for buck ratio on this new spending. After all, this is Congress we’re talking about here. I’ll consider it amazing if half the dollars spent yield anything of real value.
I think the danger is to over-build on new highways, and thus to build in recurring maintenance costs. Of course, US population in 1959 was 177,829,628 compared to 305,829,550 today. Even if I want to “lag” on highway building I have to accept some growth.
To the extent that roads produce exurbs and sprawl they might be counterproductive. Downtown loft projects probably produce recurring infrastructure (and energy) savings.
I’d rather have a walkable city with free wifi than a new superhighway … and maybe that’s the future.
It’s not just maintenance costs that are the problem. Building new roads constitutes an indirect subsidy of oil consumption and, consequently, carbon production. It takes twenty years for the total fleet to turn over. More roads, more sprawl, more oil consumption.
The infrastructure we really need to build is an energy infrastructure and an information infrastructure. Those aren’t as glamorous as roads or bridges and won’t employ 2 million people.
Repeat three times every day: The Blogosphere Is Not America.
More and more I suspect America is defined, even in our citizen-minds, by the worldview of politicians. The need to “do something” is what a politician thinks. He remembers Hoover in 1932, and Roosevelt in 1936, the one who did little and the other who did everything; the one lost, the other won. The situation at the end of each year was about the same (except a bunch of old realities — many of them harmless or beneficial in the long run — had been demolished).
Don’t build new roads. But do fix old ones.
Don’t listen to Callimachus: do build new roads. But tell me in advance where you’re going to build them so I can buy land near the likely off-ramps.
“The number of people who are interested in identifying the facts, considering the problems rationally, and taking a prudent course of action are vanishingly small.”
Wouldn’t it be so great to have those identifiable facts, I’m beginning to believe that there are in reality very few facts that would fit so nicely into that category. Most of our reality is pure fantasy, and we all have our own story that we try to live out, …the issue is who’s fantasies have we allowed to rule over our own. Generally we have trusted, entrusted our fantasies with those few who we thought were smart enough to control the production, now we’ve got a problem..and I don’t think we know how to fix it without causing a lot harm.
I’ll keep checking back…I hope someone will actually find some truth that we all can agree on…mean while, as we play more musical chairs, a few more people will lose out..the question is how many chairs will there be left before the music stops..
I was surprised to see Alex Tabarrok over at Marginal Revolution come out for the smart grid: Infrastructure: Roads and The Smart Grid
I’ve liked the idea for years but thought it was too fringe envio-energy to make it mainstream.