29 votes

The costs of not investing in American public infrastructure, research, and education

Posted by patience_limited
Tags: usa, innovation, infrastructure, education, market failures, history, transport, industry, policy, health.public, investment.public, research.basic, author.david leonhardt, source.the new york times, long read, paywall
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/magazine/us-public-investment.html

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Title
Longer Commutes, Shorter Lives: The Costs of Not Investing in America
Published
Oct 17 2023
Word count
5332 words

4 comments

  1. patience_limited
    Link
    I'm posting this in part as a direct critique of the Marc Andreeson "Techno-Optimist Manifesto". The 60-year period of faltering public investment and national decline was a direct result of the...

    I'm posting this in part as a direct critique of the Marc Andreeson "Techno-Optimist Manifesto".

    The 60-year period of faltering public investment and national decline was a direct result of the policies Andreeson advocates for, a classic example of failures of the private marketplace.

    From the article:

    Federal spending on research and development, which had already come down from its post-Eisenhower high, declined in the 1980s and 1990s. In recent years, it has accounted for less than half as large a share of G.D.P. as it did 60 years ago. The country’s roads, bridges, rail networks and air-traffic system have all atrophied — hence the lengthening of travel times. The share of national income devoted to government spending on education stopped rising in the 1970s and has remained stagnant since. Less selective colleges, which tend to educate working-class students, tend to be especially lacking in resources. Other countries, meanwhile, have passed by the United States. Every American generation born between the late 1800s and mid-1900s was the most educated in the world. Americans under age 50 no longer hold this distinction. The lack of progress among American men has been especially stark. Men’s wages, not coincidentally, have risen extremely slowly in recent decades.

    The stagnation of investment does not stem only from the size of government. It also reflects the priorities of modern government, as set by both Republicans and Democrats. The federal government has grown — but not the parts oriented toward the future and economic growth. Spending has surged on health care, Social Security, antipoverty programs, police and prisons. (Military spending has declined as a share of G.D.P. in recent decades.) All these programs are important. A decent society needs to care for its vulnerable and prevent disorder. But the United States has effectively starved programs focused on the future at the expense of those focused on the present. The country spent about twice as much per capita on the elderly as on children in recent years, according to the Urban Institute. Even the affluent elderly can receive more government help than impoverished children.

    These choices help explain why the United States has fallen behind other countries in educational attainment, why our child-poverty rate is so high, why it takes longer to cross the country than it once did. As Eugene Steuerle, an economist with a long career in Washington, has said, “We have a budget for a declining nation.”

    Americans have come to believe that the country is, in fact, declining. Less than 25 percent of Americans say that the economy is in good or excellent condition today. Whether the economy has been growing or shrinking during the 21st century, whether a Democrat or Republican has been in the White House, most Americans have usually rated the economy as weak.

    Pundits and politicians — who tend to be affluent — sometimes express befuddlement about this pessimism, but it accurately reflects reality for most Americans. For decades, incomes and wealth have grown more slowly than the economy for every group other than the very rich. Net worth for the typical family shrank during the first two decades of the 21st century, after adjusting for inflation. The trends in many noneconomic measures of well-being are even worse: In 1980, life expectancy in the United States was typical for an industrialized country. American life expectancy now is lower than in any other high-income country — including Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and even less-wealthy European countries like Slovenia and Greece.

    This great American stagnation has many causes, but the withering of investment is a major one. The economists and other experts who advise politicians have increasingly come to this conclusion, which explains why President Biden has made investment the centerpiece of his economic strategy — even if that isn’t always obvious to outsiders. He has signed legislation authorizing hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild the transportation system, subsidize semiconductor manufacturing and expand clean energy. These are precisely the kinds of programs the private sector tends not to do on its own. All told, Biden has overseen the largest increase in federal investment since the Eisenhower era. Notably, the infrastructure and semiconductor bill both passed with bipartisan support, a sign that parts of the Republican Party are coming to question the neoliberal consensus. As was the case during the 1950s, the threat from a foreign rival — China, this time — is focusing some policymakers on the value of government investment.

    There is plenty of reason to doubt that the country has reached a true turning point. Biden’s investment program remains much smaller in scale than Eisenhower’s, relative to the size of the economy. Many Republicans continue to oppose government investment, as the recent chaos in the House of Representatives indicates. It is possible that we are now living through a short exception to the country’s long investment slump.

    Whatever happens, the stakes should be clear by now. A government that does not devote sufficient resources to the future will produce a society that is ultimately less prosperous, less innovative, less healthy and less mobile than it could be. The citizens of such a society will grow frustrated, and with good reason.

    9 votes
  2. scroll_lock
    (edited )
    Link
    Archive link if paywalled. I think the article’s full title of “Longer commutes, shorter lives…” is pretty essential here. The author of this article is taking a highly simplistic approach to...

    Archive link if paywalled. I think the article’s full title of “Longer commutes, shorter lives…” is pretty essential here.

    The speed at which people can get from one place to another is one of the most basic measures of a society’s sophistication. It affects economic productivity and human happiness; academic research has found that commuting makes people more unhappy than almost any other daily activity. Yet in one area of U.S. travel after another, progress has largely stopped over the past half-century.

    In 1969, Metroliner trains made two-and-a-half-hour nonstop trips between Washington and New York. Today, there are no nonstop trains on that route, and the fastest trip, on Acela trains, takes about 20 minutes longer than the Metroliner once did. Commuter railroads and subway lines in many places have also failed to become faster. When I ride the New York City subway, I don’t go from Point A to Point B much faster than my grandparents did in the 1940s.

    The lack of recent progress is not a result of any physical or technological limits. In other parts of the world, travel has continued to accelerate. Japan, China, South Korea and countries in Europe have built high-speed train lines that have tangibly improved daily life. Because the United States is less densely populated, high-speed trains would not work in much of this country. But they could transform travel in California, the Northeast and a few other regions — and it is not as if this country has been improving its highways and airline network instead of its rail system. All have languished.

    The author of this article is taking a highly simplistic approach to evaluating high-speed rail suitability. They are not a transportation expert. Contrary to what they say, there are more than “a few” places where a HSR network would be extremely successful. See: Where High-Speed Rail Works Best. The vast majority of US population centers are feasible places for HSR, and all would benefit greatly from it. This includes, but is not limited to: literally everything within 600 miles of Chicago (Detroit, St Louis, Indianapolis, Columbus, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Madison, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, etc.), the Piedmont–Atlantic region in the South (Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, Birmingham, etc.), the Texas Triangle (Austin, Houston, Dallas, Forth Worth, San Antonio), the Front Range (Cheyenne, Denver, Albuquerque), the entirety of Florida and the Gulf Coast, the Southwest (Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Diego), Northern California (San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento, and the Central Valley cities of Madera, Merced, Fresno, and Bakersfield), the Pacific Northwest (Seattle, Portland, Eugene, Vancouver), and, yes, also the Northeast Corridor. And per recent discussions on Tildes, inter-regional HSR trips (including cross-country ones) are also feasible and would have great utility.

    The article also makes the false statement that the US has not been investing in highways and airports for the last 50 years. This is wrong—hundreds of billions (actually, trillions; it was $230 billion on highways in 2022 alone) have been spent on these modes, often counterproductively in the case of most highway expansions. Almost all investment that should be going toward high-speed rail has gone to these other modes, even in situations they’re not suited for. While travel times may not have decreased dramatically by highway as a result, this is because cars just aren’t fast or efficient on a per capita or per vehicle miles traveled (VMT) basis—and never can be. It’s physically impossible at large volumes, which is exactly why high-speed trains are effective. And there are physical—or at least economic—reasons that air travel has not hugely improved in speed; see: Concorde. The article’s remarks about security theater at airports have nothing to do with technology.

    Some of the steepest declines in government spending on research and development — a crucial form of investment — occurred after Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 with a message that less government was the solution to the country’s economic troubles. Government investment has never recovered.

    Biden’s 2021 Infrastructure and Jobs Act (“Bipartisan Infrastructure Law”) does change things. It represents $1.2 trillion on government investment in various kinds of infrastructure, anything from high-speed rail to advanced computer chips to sustainability initiatives. Honestly, after 50 years of neglect, we need a second infrastructure package like this. But the fact that this actually passed and is currently having a positive impact on many sectors of the economy and our society is promising.

    3 votes
  3. UP8
    Link
    Public radio station WGBH is making a podcast series that is up to Episode 5 right now about the “Big Dig” project in Boston https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ9wEUKs4U4 I love how it covers the...

    Public radio station WGBH is making a podcast series that is up to Episode 5 right now about the “Big Dig” project in Boston

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ9wEUKs4U4

    I love how it covers the politics and personality of the people involved, everyone from Mike Dukakis to Tip O’ Neil, Ronald Reagan and Bill Weld. (I grew up in New Hampshire so I was very aware of Massachusetts politics in that era.)

    That documentary is working towards a very detailed explanation of “why we can’t have nice things” and exactly why infrastructure is so difficult to build in the US.

    2 votes
  4. tealblue
    (edited )
    Link
    We should probably try to get a better bang for our buck out of what we already spend first before we ratchet up spending. The US spends more on K-12 and vastly more on post-secondary education...

    We should probably try to get a better bang for our buck out of what we already spend first before we ratchet up spending. The US spends more on K-12 and vastly more on post-secondary education than most other OECD countries and we obviously aren't getting the same results (see: here or here). And practically anyone in academia can tell you that opportunities for research in the US can not compare to our peers. Investing in public infrastructure is reasonable, but should be centered around the actual utility of improved infrastructure than just putting people to work (otherwise we'll likely have bloated costs and drawn-out development timelines).

    1 vote