Really? I thought the reason was corruption! Perhaps if we all think positively it goes away!
If we figured out how we can make combating climate change rife with corruption 30 years ago, we'd be in much better place right now.
Elections kinda do that up to a point, called elections. Corruption is longer term mechanism.
How is complaining and pessimism working out for you?
This misunderstands the relationship between corruption and state capacity.
The key insight is that corruption does not require a project to actually deliver the promised benefits, or even to be completed at all.
> If we figured out how we can make combating climate change rife with corruption 30 years ago, we'd be in much better place right now.
Fortunately there’s a great test case for this theory: California High Speed Rail. It was justified in climate terms but actually got underway so that numerous local/regional special interests and parasitic consultants and contractors could extract profit from it. And the result is a fatally flawed project that is decades late, has swallowed money that could’ve paid for numerous other rail projects, may not be completed at all, and will never deliver the originally promised benefits in any case (too slow because of sweetheart deals for numerous Very Special cities).
Meanwhile, lower-corruption countries that haven’t gutted their state capacity can and do build immense amounts of beneficial infrastructure.
No, but another key insight is that it helps corruption very much if it's completed and delivers the promised benefits, since it means less chances for people to complain, and for later investigations (e.g. by political opponents) to deduce wrongdoing...
As for the California example, this is in a place with supposedly less or no corruption (and no "mafia ties" level corruption).
So, "Local/regional special interests and parasitic consultants and contractors" messing up the project is more about a huge bureaucracy and a too disjointed process, with baroque procurement laws, and decision makers who have to satisfy and yield to all kinds of interested parties along the way.
Plus of course the totally hand-tieing legal framework, and ligitation heavy environment leading to paralysis. Sure there would also be some corruption, but in the California case I'd venture to guess that you don't need much of it, and it's all both systemic and legal. It's just regular interested parties and middlemen getting their say and their legal share (but too many of them, and with high multipliers), and costly elaborate and unneeded procedures having to be followed.
Again, a nice theory, but one that does not match reality. High-corruption projects rarely get done, or have serious flaws if they do. You can see this all over the world: from Russia’s Vostochny Cosmodrome (still not fully complete, money all embezzled) to Mexico City’s Metro Line 12 (inferior concrete saved Carlos Slim some money but killed 26 passengers). There is no accountability for the perpetrators of these failures precisely because of the corruption that enabled them in the first place, so they do not need to concern themselves with the benefits of the project. That’s why corruption fundamentally breaks the incentives for good governance. Meanwhile low-corruption countries build lots of great infrastructure.
> As for the California example, this is in a place with supposedly less or no corruption
Surely you can’t be serious
> So, "Local/regional special interests and parasitic consultants and contractors" messing up the project is more about a huge bureaucracy and a too disjointed process, with baroque procurement laws, and decision makers who have to satisfy and yield to all kinds of interested parties along the way.
What huge bureaucracy? The problem is that there is none, that all decision-making has either been passed up to politicians or down to consultants. CA HSR authority barely exists—all there is is a self-serving political board and a bunch of self-serving private consultants with virtually no one in the actual civil service technically competent to check their work. The politicians like Rod Diridon of San Jose use their positions to improperly benefit their cities (corruption) and the design-build consultants use their lack of oversight to improperly enrich themselves by making intentionally expensive design choices (also corruption).
The rest of what you said about the process is correct, and is another way to say “institutionalized and legalized corruption”.
Survivor bias. You only hear about corruption in failed projects. You don't hear all that much about corruption in successful projects because it couldn't have been that bad if the project went well and was a good idea. I can assure you that with every successful project many people got rich on the side too.
Getting rid of corruption is impossible. But it can be done in a better or worse way.
It is trivially true that someone makes money from every project; the land, labor, and materials have to come from somewhere. But it’s only corruption if someone is extracting surplus beyond the actual necessary cost.
Fortunately the Transit Costs Project has a great database of global costs for rail transit projects, making it possible to discern when something is fishy. I highly recommend reading at least their executive summary.
Stating that every large project involves some degree of corruption is less like claiming that there's a teapot in the orbit of Jupiter we can't hope to observe. It's more like claiming that every sufficiently large economy has some gray area even if we didn't directly observed it.
Yes. Corruption only requires for the project to get started. Which is what very few useful projects experience at all. Most never get off the ground. And project getting started raises the probability that the project will be eventually finished at some point.
> And the result is a fatally flawed project that is decades late
But the alternative is not a project done right. It's a project than never got started because no one saw opportunity for personal gain in it. Think of all the places that don't have high speed rail projects, let alone high speed rail.
I know it's easy to lament inefficiencies of corruption and compare effects with other, more successful projects that possibly required less corruption to get going. But the fact is that inefficiencies are not a problem as long as there is money in the pockets. Every corporation operates with huge inefficiencies at every level except for perhaps core revenue centers. And it's fine. The problem is with starting things as an organization with money.
The alternative is absolutely a project done right—that’s why working high speed rail exists all over the world! The US is not the only place that exists.
I can assure you that they weren't built corruption free. The US might have worst corruption because it has the most money to bleed off on the side.
I could have added a few words to my comment to make it clearer:
“This meek fetal-position defeatism in the face of corruption is why infrastructure costs spiral up and up and up forever.”
Corruption can be defeated, or at least minimized, but only if we fight it head-on rather than submissively accepting it and factoring it into our future expectations.
This meek fetal-position defeatism is why infrastructure costs spiral up and up and up forever.
Raise costs on project A
Baseline the expected costs for project B based on project A
Raise costs further on project B
Repeat endlessly
It doesn’t have to be this way. Italy itself halved its rail construction costs by cracking down on corruption in the 90s. We always have a choice.