By Jim Geraghty
Monday,
February 19, 2024
If we’re so rich and brilliant, it should be
easy as pie for us to make things like the Moscow subway or the Burj Khalifa.
So where are they? Why is our whole country ugly and decayed? Are people
seriously saying that’s the price of freedom, of riches and
democracy!?
You’ve
no doubt heard the data and anecdotes comparing the average salary in Russia ($787 per month) to the average salary in the U.S. ($4,713 per month). Or you may have heard that 22 percent of Russians do not have indoor plumbing, while
thankfully just three-tenths of 1 percent of American households lack indoor
plumbing. Or that Russia ranks 141st out of 180 countries in perceptions of
public-sector corruption last year, while we rank 24th. (Ukraine ranked
104th, for those wondering.)
Or
that the life expectancy for Russian males is 64 years old, and for
Russian females it’s 75 years old. For American men, life expectancy is 73.5
years, and for women it’s 79.3 years. (This number has dropped a bit in recent years, an issue for
genuine concern, likely reflecting a combination of Covid-19,
pandemic-related deaths such as delayed medical treatment, an increasing rate
of drug overdoses, etc.)
But
let’s turn the camera back upon ourselves. No one would dispute that America
has problems — big, serious, severe problems, worsening in some areas. But when
I hear someone declaring, “Our whole country is ugly and decayed,” I would urge
them to get out more.
“It
should be easy for us to make things like the Moscow subway.” First, remember
it was the British
who designed the Moscow subway, and then Stalin had the architects
arrested, detained, and deported:
It was 1931 when the plans to build the first
stations were approved. Lazar Kaganovich was the man responsible for the design
of the first line. The first order of business was to consult with his British
counterparts, architect Charles Holden and administrator Frank Pick who had
been working on the Piccadilly Line. Both men became advisors for the Soviet
project. British engineers were charged with sorting out the functional
importance, while the Soviets provided the labor and the artistic designs. . .
.
British business in Russia would not last
long, however. The NKVD [secret police] arrested several engineers on
charges of espionage. After a show trial, the accused were sent back to Britain
along with their colleagues.
And our Andrew Stuttaford reminds us that if the Moscow
subway system enjoys little crime, it is probably partially because of the
installation of an extensive facial-recognition system, which has also been
used to identify and arrest dozens of journalists and activists.
“If
we’re so rich and brilliant it should be easy as pie for us to make things like
the Moscow subway. . . .”
For
this, I can turn to a bunch of centrist and left-of-center publications and
think tanks, who, sotto voce, recognize that red tape,
environmental-impact statements and regulations of every kind, lawsuits,
increased costs for union labor and materials, and a lack of consequences for
going over budget or falling behind schedule have left most mass-transit projects
a bloated, slow-moving mess.
Let’s
begin with getting all the permits in line. From the Niskanen Center:
Today the average [Environmental Impact
Statement] runs more than 600 pages, plus appendices that typically exceed
1,000 pages. The average EIS now takes 4.5 years to complete; between 2010 and
2017, four such statements were completed after delays of 17 years or more. And
remember, no ground can be broken on a project until the EIS has made it
through the legal gauntlet — and this includes both federal projects and
private projects that require a federal permit. Meanwhile, the far more
numerous environmental assessments (the federal government performs more than
12,000 of them a year, compared to 20-something Environmental Impact
Statements) have likewise become much lengthier and more time-consuming to
complete.
Read
that again: “The average EIS now takes 4.5 years to complete.” Why
do mass-transit and other transportation projects cost so much? Because you get
it designed, you get access to the land (perhaps through eminent domain), and
then you spend a half-decade fighting in court to make sure that building the
new subway station won’t endanger a snail darter. Keep in mind, most
large-scale infrastructure projects in blue states and cities now face
opposition from environmental groups that oppose any project that involves
fossil fuels. (Apparently, they prefer solar-powered underground subway
cars.)
The Medici Project illuminates the problems that come once the
construction finally begins:
In the United States, the prevailing
contracting system is based on time and materials. In this setup, contractors
are compensated based on the hours worked and the materials used. This
arrangement can lead to budget overruns, as it incentivizes contractors to take
longer, employ more laborers for tasks, or use excessive materials. . . .
Moreover, a substantial portion of government
contracts stipulate or mandate the employment of unionized labor. According to
the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, union labor in the U.S. typically costs 18
percent more than its non-union counterpart. As one can deduce, this does not
help the cost problem. . . .
The story of the Big Dig has been repeated
time and time again across U.S. cities. Often, American infrastructure projects
fall under the jurisdiction of numerous public entities, with various private
groups participating at different stages. This dispersion of oversight and
decentralization of control lead to significant cost inflation and open the
floodgates for corruption. Politicians, unions, private contractors, and even
organized crime entities exploit this fragmented system to extract maximum value
for personal gain, always at the expense of the taxpayer.
We
are indeed rich and brilliant, compared to any other country on Earth. But we
haven’t figured out how to quickly create consensus around complicated
projects, often underground, that would take years to complete in high-density
cities even in the best of circumstances. It should not surprise you that
Moscow under Stalin had an easier time getting things built than any modern
American city; opposing the regime could get you lined up and executed. This
doesn’t mean that modern America’s endless red tape, delays, lawsuits, and
general paralyzing inertia aren’t real problems. It just means that, “Ah,
Stalinist Russia must have figured out something we haven’t” is not the
lesson we should take away from this.
“If
we’re so rich and brilliant it should be easy as pie for us to make things like
. . . the Burj Khalifa . . . .”
Compared
to elaborate subways, building skyscrapers is easy. The United States has 890 buildings of more than 150 meters or 40 floors.
New ones open their doors to residents and workers every year. The
second-highest skyscraper in New York City, the 98-story Central Park
Tower, just opened its doors a few years ago. The new 70-story J. P. Morgan Chase building is scheduled to open next
year. There are 20 major skyscraper projects under construction in Austin,
with another 30 proposed or in the planning stages.
And
as you may have heard, there’s an audacious proposal to build the second-highest building in the country in Oklahoma
City.
Architecturally,
you might love the designs of these new skyscrapers, or you might hate them.
Maybe the Brooklyn
Tower gives you Eye of Sauron vibes. (I’m not going to lie, the
under-construction Waldorf
Astoria in Miami looks to me like a pile of glittering Christmas
presents that could topple over.) But we still build amazing things in this
country, and you just have to be willing to see them, even if they contradict
your preconceived narrative that “our whole country is ugly and decayed.”
If
you don’t like skyscrapers, there’s the new Gilder Center at the Natural History museum in New York,
the cool-looking One River North in Denver, the soon-to-open Populus hotel in
that city, or the planned “motorcycle amphitheater” outside the Harley-Davidson
headquarters in Milwaukee. Or The Sphere in Las Vegas. The Alamo in San Antonio is working on a sweeping overhaul and
restoration. Been to Gettysburg lately? They’ve got an amazing new “Beyond the Battle Museum.” In my neck of the woods,
the southwest
waterfront in Washington, D.C., and across and down the Potomac, the recently expanded waterfront in Alexandria, are dramatic
improvements upon what was there before.
It’s
so easy to moan and groan, “Ugh, everything sucks. We’re a country in decline.
Americans are fat and lazy. Look at this idiot I saw on social media.” Why do
some Americans think everything in our country sucks? Because the overwhelming
majority of the media they consume, from their social-media feeds to their
prime-time cable-news shout-fests, is designed to make them angry and
frustrated — and those hosts are likely telling them that the only way to save
the country is to tune in every night, hit the subscribe button, buy their
books, and vote for their preferred candidates.
You
probably didn’t hear about two new breakthroughs in slowing down Alzheimer’s from Eli
Lilly and Eisai. Or the new gene therapies to treat sickle-cell disease. Next
up: gene therapy to minimize or eliminate the risk of high cholesterol and to prevent heart disease.
If you heard about the development of an mRNA vaccine for pancreatic cancer, you
probably heard about it from someone telling you mRNA vaccines are bad and
scary and all a sinister plot by pharmaceutical companies.
You
name it, Americans are figuring out how to do it faster. Faster ways to count
microbes and develop antibiotics? It’s happening at University of Colorado Boulder. Faster 3D printing? Happening at Harvard. Faster ways to conduct biopsies of
brain-cancer tumors? Happening at New York University Langone.
Chat
GPT? Made in America. Quantum computing? As far as we know, we’re
leading the pack. Light-based computer chips that don’t use electricity and
are effectively un-hackable? University of Pennsylvania researchers developed them last week. You probably didn’t
hear about that, but you did hear about the sketchy story of the advice
columnist who claims she was conned into handing $50,000 in cash to a stranger.
(Charlie has questions about her story.)
This
country still does great things, you just don’t hear about it much because it
doesn’t draw as many eyeballs as “you won’t believe what this idiot just did.”
Finally,
there’s never a good time to draw the spectacularly erroneous conclusion, “Oh,
Vladimir Putin and Russia have got things figured out, and we don’t.” But it’s
particularly egregious to draw that conclusion the week Alexei Navalny died in
prison because of Putin’s despotic rule.
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