The $6.5 Trillion Dollar Problem Nobody Notices
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- Опубликовано: 23 сен 2023
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There's a massive cost that every developed economy has to deal with that nobody talks about... Infrastructure maintenance. It sounds boring but all of those developments that governments love to talk up can end up costing a fortune to maintain. So what can we do about this and why is this such a problem?
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georgism vid?
Build back better made it worse!
Toward the end of the video you mentioned previously operating under the assumption of not needing maintenance, but that wasn't the only assumption you were making. The problem for Sri Lanka and similar countries, is that it engaged in ridiculous contracts with China that involved importing the LABOR to build the projects. So an additional assumption you were making, was that the labor used was domestic and not foreign. These infrastructure projects only benefit the country not just in having to be actually needed, but hiring those who will spend the money they make in that country.
Would you ever consider making a video that speculated how the US would look like if it were not the world currency reserve holder?
Would you consider uploading your videos to Nebula?
I am a CTO of multiple IT startups. It always bugs founders to know that just maintaining their software at exactly the same state (no new features, only some bugfixes) takes 30-50% of the team that was needed in the phase of active development. That's because the third party vendors often change something, hardware fails, some stuff becomes outdated. Maintenance is a big deal and nobody sees it, because the end result of maintenance is "nothing has changed"
This was said so well. Even outside of startups, maintenance gets the shaft due to being a cost center in leadership's eyes.
When I joined Microsoft back in 1999 it was impressed upon me the importance in making decisions based on maintainability as long term support was around 50% of the cost of developing software. In the modern world of software as a service, that support cost is never ending since the software is no longer static with a bug fixing period and then end of life.
Those founders sound like children.
Indeed - I have started a few web / app companies, and getting clients to pay for necessary maintenance was always a struggle. They think that ‘the internet’ just works without any ongoing upgrades.
@@lookoutforchrisThe last four years have taught me that most people think like children.
In some European countries, when a contract is granted to build/repair a road they winner has to post a bond to cover the relevant maintenance for the next 10 years. This incentivizes the builder to do it right the first time. They are paid for the maintenance out of this bond. Why don’t we at least try this in the US?
Too many crooks in politics!
1)Start company
2)do work with cheap materials(it will crumble in one year)
3)Give guarantee for 10 years
4)close the company
5)??????
6)PROFIT
Note that they have to post a bond to cover maintenance. They get a percentage back each year and at the end of 10 years they get any remaining amount back. This creates incentives to do it right the first time.
Because the builders would cry “socialism” or “anti-capitalism.”
@@kenyonbissett3512 Ridiculous statement. Builders are bonded for work preformed on building construction in the US. Banks won't approve loan disbursements without proof. I wonder why this doesn't apply to roads, which tax payer fund and not private banks. Back to corruption?
Amazon is notorious for finding towns to build in that will NOT charge them taxes. The local road infrastructure then gets destroyed by Amazon vans and trucks and the town cannot afford to fix them. Very short-term thinking on both Amazon and the town's parts. This is happening in the town where I work.
Yup, Scamazon warehouses also = blackouts in the summer. And the worst kicker is their turnover rate is so high the warehouse workers are from two counties over, sometimes even commuting in from out of state so money is leaving the area at the basest level.
This is the same effect of the Border Patrol all across southern Arizona.
Nonsense. Without Amazon they would have trucks, vans and 18-wheelers delivering stuff on their roads anyway. The problem is not Amazon the problem is the local people who will not fund road repair properly.
@@christopherkidwell9817 if there were smaller companies with smaller trucks (like in Japan & Europe) there would be more competition, less stress to the grid per unit, less damage to the roads per unit, less turnover with people coming from two counties over and more potential for unions to form.
Scamazon's mega monopoly drains small and medium cities like a vampire. Don't be braindead bootlicker, bigger is not better especially when their fair dues aren't being paid.
@@christopherkidwell9817nonsense you're not correct. Statistics show you're incorrect.
They renovated the bathrooms in my high school and removed the original marble and bronze fittings.
The stuff was old, but it still worked well.
They replaced it with tile and contractor grade plumbing materials.
The original stuff lasted for 70 years. The new stuff is already failing after two years.
I guess someone's cousin got the contract so the deal got approved.
It's always cheaper to use the best materials and do the maintenance.
We are about to learn this very expensive lesson... again.
No, it is not always cheaper to use the best materials.
There is a point where the material becomes too expensive, and the maintenance is rather cheap or easy.
It is always cheaper to spend more than the minimum...
Goes for shoes as well.
Buy a cheap pair, might only last for half a year. Buy an expensive pair, likely last 2-5 years
Ah, yes, the problem that no politician wants to talk about: Corruption.
@@neilreynolds3858
I guess it hits too close to home.
It was probably some one who thought the school facilities looked old fashioned : probably had no idea how valuable, and effective, everything was. Bronze is superior to steel because the copper in bronze kills germs by shredding DNA and RNA. Likely all that was needed was resurfacing and polishing.
@SioxerNikita thats why i rock it with thorogoods
I work for a state DOT. We are actually one of the better rated state DOTs, but still less than 40% of our roads are considered "good". ~25% of our roads are "past due" for maintenance, ~20% are in need of "urgent repair" and about 15% are needing "critical repair".
Each year twice as many "urgent repairs" turn "critical repair" than "critical repair" that actually gets repaired. E.g. 1500 lane miles turn from urgent to critical while 750 critical miles get repaired.
We are getting further and further behind.
Sadly repairs are invisible and maintenance activities often disruptive to traffic, when politicians want something new and flashy to tout for their reelection campaign.
Probably one of the reasons why people buy more and more SUV, which are heavier and more damaging for the roads, creating negative feedback loop.
@@cancermcaids7688 Much of that merchandise would be more efficiently transported by train, but so much money gets expanded at roads that we can't build train lines. Here is another feedback loop.
Yikkkes!
@@cancermcaids7688 There's a chart I've seen that shows like a typical SUV is like 3-5x more damaging than a typical sedan, something like a hummer H1 is 20x more damaging, and a fully loaded semi is like 400x more damaging.
1:06 As a Swede, the cost of the Skagerrak railway line really caught my eye. $110B is roughly 15% (!) of our entire GDP, which seems a bit excessive, especially for a project that is barely on the public radar over here. Turns out there must have been a translation error: the real cost is estimated at about 100B SEK, or $10B. So about a tenth of what's shown in the image.
Yes, it's 18 Billion.
That’s a pretty glaring mistake given that it’s #2
Wow that’s huge error
@@LucasdeBlock-- Get used to it. That "railway station to nowhere" is in the heart of an entire city now.
EE is capitalism apologia. The team behind it isn't ready to come to grips with the fact that China's population is so big that a population increase of 0.1% is 1.4 million people and effectively requires the construction of a new Washington D.C. every 4-5 years.
EE is basically throwing shade at China's version of the U.S. housing boom of the 1950's and 1960s.
Statista has some really bad stats sometimes I’ve noticed
I have spent a large portion of my career trying to get state departments of transportation to build bridges that last longer and corrode more slowly (we're talking pennies on the dollar upfront to return whole dollars later). You cannot begin to imagine that stagnation and unwillingness to try new things. No one gets fired for doing that same stupid thing the organization always does. This sort of casual lazy wastefulness is all over governmental projects.
EDIT: I don't want to single out state DOTs. The US Army Corp of Engineers is also shockingly terrible at corrosion control.
It's all over private companies too.
@@bobbyc1120 I have certainly seen it, but often you can find a young engineer or manager that wants to make a mark and get something done. I'd rather deal with ExxonMobil or Marathon than any state DOT or the USACE.
Up until SpaceX, the whole space industry was the same way, sticking with basically the same engine designs for 50 years in some cases, and not trying anything innovative or risky.
My dad tried to get a carbon composite system of building pools to take off in Australia. Modular, longer life span... The engineers were all flustered over it. Despite this, no one would buy it. Except engineers. People don't like different.
@@Br3ttMthe few times nasa engineers did try to come up with innovations they were effectively shut down because of political/bureaucratic reasons.
I dont think anyone i know hasnt realized how jacked up our infrastructure is. A couple years ago i had to do a rating project where i looked through the most prominent 30ish forms of infrastructure in the United States. Only rail was considered "acceptable" and met the standard it was supposed to have
The USA in particular has been on a crash-course with infrastructure for most of the last 80 years. Since suburbanizing US cities, the attitude has always been 'well land is cheaper on the edge of town, so leave the built stuff to rot--and build more farther out', which results in massive infrastructure obligations for blighted areas no one has the money to maintain--because it was built with debt in the first place. And that brand new stuff they just built? In 40 years it too is going to be blighted and not worth the costs to owners of fixing up and keeping nice...combined with cut taxes at all costs budget decision making, the results are predictable.
Shocker, I know...when your places are built with public debt and private mortgages...no one should be shocked when things are left to rot and fall apart.
Yup, all else aside, the sheer levels of disrepair seen in our infrastructure neccesitates spending on repairs, improved maintenance, and new construction. The money saved that would otherwise be lost to economic inefficiencies caused by poor infrastructure alone would pay for within a few decades. Not even including the added economic capacity and durability that expanding electrical and communications/internet infrastructure would create. Not even getting into how it could improve the lives of millions.
Proper investment in infrastructure at this point could single-handedly keep the U.S. at the top of the economic leaderboard for maybe the next century.
🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡
I must admit I have never personally encountered an infrastructure problem in the US. Maybe I’m blissfully ignorant, but yeah, never seen even one traffic light fail, pothole in a highway or had a power outage that lasted more than a day due to a fallen tree. I had bad internet for a couple of days once I guess, and had to resort to using my iPhone.
@@peters972 Don’t let your facts get in the way of a socialist/communist’s rant about economics. 😂
Excellent video. I work in infrastructure and you missed a bigger issue. Capex vs Opex. Otherwise known as whole life costs. The people problem is that Clients, designers and contractors obsess about the initial capital cost of a project. Mention the cost to operate and maintain it over its lifetime and their eyes glaze over.
As the poem says, there are few things that cannot be made a little cheaper and a little worse. So, the cheaper product is brought and the increased cost of maintenance and the need to replace it faster than the alternatives, is ignored.
There is an army of cost cutters, Value Engineering, always available but it is damm hard to find anyone interested in the actual whole life cost of products. And people wonder why things are falling to bits around them.
And its funny how once the project is up and running they all disappear to the next project. Meanwhile the O&M team are left trying to hold it all together for the next 40 years.
The main cause raising OPEX and lowering CAPEX is the accountant and/or budgeting world 'control of money' - very inefficient in the bigger, longer term picture, but accountants and budget control guys work on yearly basis - the short term view being compensated upon...it is embedded in american industry as a normal operating procedure. We used to make the operating guys forecast opex with the capex, but somehow that got disconnected.
why no one mentions the "generalized fourth power law"?
10 times heavier vehicle=10 000more road damage
remove overweight trucks from the roads or tell them to have more wheels, same goes for the buses
A lot of Chief Engineers of "not my problem".
@@mikeflair6800I think the disconnect is systematic in all countries, everyone wants the big new shiny and the overall long term costs are ignored, love them or hate them we are being pushed into ev ownership without discussing the huge cost to upgrade grid and power generation, but it looks good for the politicians as they talk about green issues, and once again it will be Joe public that picks up the tab, we need to make our politicians and decision makers more accountable in the long term, ten or twenty years on they should still be accountable and subject to censure, and "it seemed like a good idea" wouldn't be an adequate defence,
Well, as a engineer with a minor in economics, there are such materials available. They can drastically reduce the amount of maintenance (although not to literally zero). For example, alloy steel that are corrosion resistant embedded within high strength concrete (the type of formula they prefer for military bunkers) and built to extreme designs (for example, 400% safety buffers and layers upon layers of additional barriers against wear and tear or corrosion). It would be stupidly expensive though
Stupidly expensive up front, but over the long term there'd be some gains by saving on maintenance costs.
The question really becomes: what infrastructure gets to be built from "forever" material? I could put a roof on my home that lasts 500 years but if I'm only going to use for a tenth of that time, why bother going broke over it?
A lot of cities fall into the cheap shoe theory of poverty. That problem being that when you don't have much money, you buy cheap shoes that don't last very long, instead of nice shoes that will last for a very long time. The irony being that, in the long run, you end up paying more for all the replacement cheap shoes than you would have over the lifetime of the expensive high quality shoe.
Same thing with infrastructure. The Kansas City Public Works Department recently did an analysis that showed that brick paved streets can easily last over a century with little maintenance, but at a high upfront cost. Meanwhile, your typical asphalt street is comparatively a lot cheaper up front, but you have to replace it every 30 years or so for largely the same cost, so that after about 70 years, the brick pavers come out ahead. Add in other aspects, like brick pavers having fewer stormwater requirements due to permeability, less icing problems in winter requiring less salt treatment, excellent traffic calming effects in neighborhoods, and also just a higher aesthetic quality, and they really shine. Just look at the Netherlands, where pretty much every neighborhood (even knew ones) is brick paved.
But at the end of the day, that high upfront costs just scares folks off, so we end up with a crappier solution that just costs more long term.
The aphorism of "Penny-wise, Pound-foolish" comes to mind.
@@Descriptor413 I really wish our government would stop shopping at the dollar store... Nothing gets done in the US because of this mindset and when it does it is often the worst & ugliest possible solution because of anti-government spending dogma.
Yea, I studied engineering and got frustrated in the end, we do have most of the resources and knowledge to fix those big problems but in the end the money will go to some useless AI project or to help some politician with the public
I would like to see another video analyzing the complex infrastructure dedicated to maintaining infrastructure. It’s a part of society that most people don’t think of until infrastructure fails so I believe it would be important to learn what goes on behind the scenes.
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And you want to know why it's crumbling?
Because before the advent of car-centric infrastructure, if you wanted to have infrastructure like paved roads, town water etc. you had to prove your area was not only worth the investment but was also economically viable/valuable enough over a long term to either afford it or deserve it. Its why cities and towns developed the way they did - because they were the places that had the most economic activity and were the most valuable, so not only could they afford the improvements but the improvements actually added value and economic activity to them, thereby making them more valuable.
But with the advent of the personal automobile and the Post-WW2 development strategy that centered completely around the personal vehicle, all that logic and gained knowledge was completely thrown out the window and instead we started paving everything, giving high-end infrastructure to everything, and developed everything around the car with extremely low density as the goal.
Thus we ended up with thousands of low-economic activity, high maintenance cost housing developments and thousands of miles low economic value, high-maintenance cost roads to support all of that development and now we're on the hook for it.
And who do we try to make pay for it?
The original successful cities and towns that followed the logical development pattern...but only after we destroyed large sections of them to make room for personal vehicles, which significantly kneecapped the ability of cities to continue to grow and make more money.
Cars are SO expensive to society
Well said. Not to mention in the USA context that low interest loans and red lining enabled impoverishing the most wealthy parts of the USA, their urban cores and funnelled good money into bad with (financially unviable) suburban sprawl. That money is never coming back, the USA and other nations have to build that wealth up again from first principles. Focusing on what's financially viable, what's a black hole for maintenance and focusing on enriching areas that are already viable. All said much better via Strong Towns
Bike infrastructure costs are fraction of a road per km. A road will get less pressure simply if people are biking. Electric cars will only make this problem worse because the are simply heavier.
I wish there could be just 25% less narrative in this type of discussion. Extremely low density was never a political goal. Somewhat low density was a very common personal goal, for people who didn't want the overcrowding of city cores that by WW2 had already expanded essentially as far as demand would take them. Very few homebuyers didn't want more space. That could have been accomplished in a sustainable way (by zoning in a checkerboard pattern along existing main routes)... but cities went with the immediately cheaper option, which was wholesale infill, lots of which transit had no chance to effectively serve.
Perfectly put, couldn’t have said it better myself. The city planning in the 1950s ruined America
Locally in Missouri, our government took the money from Build Back Better and put most of it into improving and modernizing and repairing all existing bridges and many roads. Made me feel pretty happy to see them thinking that forward instead of building a useless vanity project. The bridges are cool, they are using some new materials. Instead of covering the metal in paint it looks like it also now has a layer of concrete over the steel. Anyways, to give you an idea of how thorough they are being in bridge repair, our local town of 90k replaced or modernized every bridge, including the tiny ones that just go 10 ft over a rain run off ditch.
BBB never made it out of Congress.
@@sauceman5498 yeah? i don't really pay attention to the news lol. Then it looks like my State is managing to do it on its own then. That is even better. Might be the legalization of weed here. I heard that we have had higher then expected sales at $5 mill a day here. So the tax money from that might be fueling it.
They mean the infrastructure bill that got passed in 21
Money printing press is working overtime!
Wheres this at.. St louis is one of the more populated places in missouri and the roads here are god awful.
I think the maintenance problem got totally out of control with the death of expertise - IE plans made without maintenance in mind or the best engineers left alone to do what they do best, remember, it's a race to the bottom with the lowest bidders winning the construction contracts and maintenance is totally an afterthought, not baked into the long term plan. We see this too much in the US where general infrastructure is basically a disposable commodity
Competency crisis brought on by corruption, affirmative action, and foreign labor. Not to mention corporate/bank consolidation of power and endless money printing. As whites become a minority it will only get worse and worse.
it gt out of hand with overweight trucks and buses
the "generalized fourth power law"=10 times heavier vehicle=10 000more road damage
remove overweight trucks from the roads or tell them to have more wheels, same goes for the buses=problem solved
@@faustinpippin9208 I know.. it's like the weight limit laws are now merely suggestions and enforcement is based solely off how much a city/county/state needs the income generation from fines, and whether or not they feel like manning and maintaining weigh stations
Mmmmm
The other problem is that we simply are too sprawled out. America has one of the lowest population densities in the developed world, with the only other countries lower than us (Russia and Australia) mostly being empty wasteland. As a result, we have way more infrastructure per person than most other countries, which is why we keep falling further and further behind.
Combine that with the fact that infrastructure expansion encourages more sprawl (along with fiscal and regulatory policies basically enforcing low density) and it becomes a vicious circle. We're living on borrowed time.
While I am a conservative and vote republican, this is exactly what Obama meant when he said "you didn't build that". He was talking about the infrastructure that made many businesses possible. My party who I called out on this, tried to paint Obama's statement to mean he was trying to say the business owners didn't build their businesses. While I didn't like Obama as a president, I HATE it when they act as disingenuously as we claim the dems do.
One aspect he didn't touch on just how massive infrastructure projects have a serious corruption problem because that is a lot of money being thrown around. Add in the political incentive for projects to be done in areas for political support, not economics, and it is no wonder debt driven infrastructure has such a bad reputation.
Yep, costs to the taxpayer are probably 10x the cost of materials and labour. Insane corruption and middle manning.
Yes. The main reason infrastructure is crumbling and cities are going bankrupt is because of corruption. Affirmative action and other anti-white discrimination occasionally plays a role in cities like jackson mississippi and detroit michigan. Cheap but incompetent foreign labor is also a big problem. It's a competency crisis and it will only get worse as the USA slips further into decay.
@@sneediumminerlol always blaming immigration for all your problems 😭😂
True, It seems to happen every time. Politicians spend billions on an infrastructure project nothing happens keep dumping billions into it then years later quietly cancel or decrease the scope of the project. It's a running gag at this point
@@sld3577
Nope, that was just another item on the list. And not immigration in general but illegal.
The problem is that infrastructure projects tend to be allocated based on who will benefit from the spending instead of which projects confer the most benefit. And because projects are done for political reasons and not societal benefit, we typically fund things that were a good idea 30 years ago, instead of things that will be freat investments 20 years from now.
Chinese generally don’t have that problem.
@@newagain9964 Tell me you know nothing about China without telling me. I guess you COULD reach that conclusion if you only watch official Chinese state media.
And if you ignore all of the infrastructure that isn't being used, and the massive flooding that happens because dams were not put in the places they were needed.
Entropy always wins in the end. The more you build, the more you have to fight entropy. Choose your battles wisely. Building "disposable" stuff is one approach - IE cheap and easy to replace as needed. Building "lasts (practically) forever" stuff is another. Infrastructure is typically designed with neither in mind. So, we're left with a bunch of crumbling stuff that's neither cheap nor easy to replace. "Patching the patches" is the typical approach used.
The Not Just Bikes channel has a good case study of this about the infrastructure supporting suburban development not being worth the cost long-term because of maintenance. Title is "Why American Cities Are Broke - The Growth Ponzi Scheme"
If you think American cities are broke, you should see everywhere else.
@@faustinpippin9208how is "heavier vehicles destroy roads faster" against his agenda? To me that sounds like a GREAT argument for building cities for: bicycles, pedestrians, tram tanks, trains, busses, etc, instead of those thousands and thousands of cars.
Unless you think one bus it's worse than hundreds of cars? In that case you should know that your role applies to pressure, not weight.
@@faustinpippin9208 can you give examples of great walkable cities that are also great for cars? I'd be genuinely interested- I like to question my own biases especially given the algorithms around us that seek to confirm them.
@@sangle120 when i was saying that i meant designs on paper~just concepts that will never be build because that would go against the "we have to get rid of cars to make a nice city" agenda
If a city like this would be build then the wef will lose all of their great excuses to remove cars
but in real life it also exists but not what i meant in my original comment, and that is:
almost every village/small town/small city in most eu countries with good zoning
most places in EU are car centric but you just dont see it like in the US because we have good zoning
thats why most normal people laugh at the extreme urbanist who think that "car=incarnation of evil that generates a traffic jam in every corner of the world"
because thats simply not the case and its not a problem for most people
and even when someone sits in a traffic jam then most of them prefer to sit in their own car then to be crammed in a bus whille sitting in traffic jam and on top of that wait in cold/heatwave/bad weather on the bus station
and i know that i sound like im just making assumptions but i asked many people about this and all of them say this....
@@faustinpippin9208 Those arguments are quite valid, as long as one condition is met: those people never actually saw GOOD public transport. If you get to your destination faster, cheaper and with more space than in your car, people start taking public transport over the car. However, if your only public transport is a bus that shows up once an hour, usually with delays, it's always completely packed and gets stuck in traffic, then nobody will take the bus unless you're desperate and/or too poor to afford a car. Which of the two futures would you want?
And cultural infrastructure, such as a legal system that allows people and business to engage in commerce on a level playing field. Also erodes over time, with rent seeking and political entrepreneurship entrenching advantages for a minority. Very hard to measure, but surely every expensive.
Very true.
I wouldn't call the legislative and courts infrastructure. They are institutions and it's more useful to think them like this.
@@cancermcaids7688 At a distant enough zoom everything is institutions. Culture are first institutions and then parts of it can be infrastructure but not everything is infrastructure. Then it would loose any meaning.
Cannot be overstated enough. Unchecked rentseeking slowly but surely is dragging us back to feudalism.
I always wondered: the more we build, the more we need to maintain, Is there a point when we can ONLY afford maintenance?
It's basically a pyramid scheme. It'll only happen when there's either no room to build or no buyers
Not to mention, cars are heavily subsidized. Look at all the free parking and roads in the US. If the true value of car ownership was levied on the public, people wouldn't be driving as much. Gas taxes don't even cover road maintenance.
Reality is much worse! City sprawl has been proven to cause financial bankruptcy when done wrong...
@@maxpowr90 we would vote out the current admin in a heartbeat "if the true value of car ownership were levied".
Technically possible but you would have to literally build roads to nowhere. Infrastructure is normally built when the value gained by it is greater than the cost, otherwise why bother?
Used to work for the port authority in a mid sized American port city.
Our domain included everything that touched water, even the airport and most bridges.
I was on the IT staff, so I ended up talking with everyone from the lawyers to the engineers over the course of a week.
Especially when talking with the old engineers a grim picture was painted.
Most of our infrastructure was built when the costs relative to GDP were much lower. Part of that was the much lower cost of labor 50-100 years ago. But that isn't all of it.
Just the way we go about things now compared to the early 20th century is much different. Everything is financed out. All of it is subcontracted. Very few large cities have a DPW that takes on large projects.
So they farm out that work. The huge difference is that a government department only has to pay their staff and get the job done. Subcontractors need to do all that and turn a profit.
The benefit for the city comptroller is that we don't have to worry about the pension plan or health benefits of a subcontractor.
But this puts us in the position that we can barely afford to replace our aging infrastructure. Much less widen, extend or otherwise improve. So you see cities opting for bond issues, which is just borrowing from a future budget, with interest.
I stayed there long enough to see them downsize the staff by 1/3rd and after I had all of their data secured I was gone too.
In typical government fashion, while we were retrieving desktops and laptops and shuttering satellite offices we never stopped deploying the latest round of new desktops.
They were paid for in last years budget. If we sent them back our budget would get reduced!
So many departments ended up with twice the computers they needed.
We struggled to get some at least gifted to the local school district but that never happened.
Why so long
There's a broad disparity in how even economically literate people use terms like "public good." I often catch the same person talking about a "public good" being a physical thing, an object, as in a good, as opposed to a service. Yet then a minute later they just the term "public good" to mean something good for the public, as in, the opposite of a "public bad." This is intellectual dishonesty and we keep letting people get away with it
Well it is after all "public" and "good". Hard to argue with that! 😂
It’s amazing how much this type of mistake is used on purpose nowadays. It’s also amazing that it’s harder to do this in English than most other languages because its a more precise language, yet I think that precision puts us off guard to this sort of chicanery.
@@nunyabidness3075 Is English an exceptionally precise language? A lot of scientific language defaults to English (greek and latin roots primarily), but English as a whole is more known for its flexibility than its precision. I suppose you could say they functionally amount to roughly the same thing, as having many slightly varied ways of saying approximately the same thing does allow for greater precision, I just hadn't really thought of it that way before.
@@grant5642 I think it’s a modern phenomena brought about by well intentioned education changes. Journalists, government officials, the military, and marketing people have all been pushed to use simpler language which is more effective. Decades later the differences in nuance are often lost or even worse (literally meaning metaphorically as an accepted usage, lol). If you studied Latin or Greek you often can pick just the right word, but then no one knows what you are saying. To preach, speak, rant, and pontificate all have different flavorful meanings, but the last one most people do not even know. Not even Catholics who are led by a pontiff!
The Japanese cleverly just use English for a lot of terms now, much like English borrowed from so many other languages in the past.
I think it’s kind of like a roof. If you cover a roof with large sheets it will be inflexible and simple. If you use a material with smaller components, you can be more precise, and it’s more flexible.
@@nunyabidness3075just a note on the use of English by other languages. This is very common, particularly in ones that were mainly pastoral when introduced to English. I do see it as an easy fix for the speakers, but I also see it as a way that languages are being made "English". English stole words from all languages, the word "avatar" is East Indian, the word "boss" is Afrikaans, "shaman" is from Mongalian. This makes English a World language, and ones that start using words, just branches. The cleverest thing done with English was making new words from Latin and Greek, this has set it apart. Then there are the weird acronyms that are now taking over, my favourite being LED.
British voters are against infrastructure building itself, not just the cost of it. That way they get to oppose economic growth without appearing to be against it. No politician dares defy Nimbys, who are mostly old, but not all of them are.
100% no one dares build a new road or port HS2 is seen as evil there is loads of land before and after the Scottish border and is very low farm value and as for hospitals we deserve everything we get when Ukrainian wins the war I'm emigrating
Seems like the right solution is to train construction workers into maintenance workers once the business of construction is dying down. Fixing a building wall often requires the same type of work than building it does. When theres a lot of infastructure built, maintenance workers basically never run out of work when by the time they're finished fixing everything, the first maintenance projects need maintenance again.
The difficulty is the financial incentives. Promising and delivering on building the road in the first place wins politicians elections. But keeping the road in good condition doesn't get noticed at all.
@@EconomicsExplained Everyone hates pot holes, but not quite as much as they hate roads that are closed for maintenance.
Another thing is that compared to many other form of government procurement (i.e. military equipment); they usually (at least in my country) do not really take into account the full life cycle cost of said infrastructure in the project proposals. They use baseline, low estimate cost for maintenance planning figure. Otherwise, the cost for the project would be so high that it would never go through; thus, project go forward, something is built, not enough funds are allocated for it's base maintenance and you get huge deferred maintenance cost 15-20 years down the line and a structure in bad shape.
Then politicans look at the bill and prefer to pass the puck to the next guy to take the hard calls needed to sustain it all. Fast forward to today, all these time bombs are starting to go off; add buildings that were kept for way to long past the economic viability of it's condition and they now all need to be replaced at the same time. The costs are easily 6-7x more then if the money came throughout and politicians can't really pass the puck to the next guy anymore...it's going to be really expensive.
If you think corrosion is that important, study coatings, alloys, and concrete additives. We already have a lot of technology in these areas, but builders frequently don't want to pay for it, choose poorly, or need help understanding all of the alternatives.
Also, paying more to build a 100-year infrastructure is questionable since construction automation, materials extraction, transport, and construction-related office work may cheapen rapidly within 10-20 years. Should we wait?
100% agree. I've spent a career trying to get DOTs and municipalities to use things like CorTec even though that was not the company I worked for. So many cheap solutions abound that pay out massively later and they just sit on the shelf.
Lack of maintenance is what made the Fern Hollow bridge collapse. You can still street view it and see the four drains are clogged and sinking by the cracks in the new pavement. Along both curbs of the bridge you can see the destruction from the inundation of the trapped water going through the freeze thaw cycles. You can even street view from the path under it and see all four drains are at the important structural support connections. I'd even argue the expansion joints weren't properly cleaned out as well. Lack of maintenance is what took that bridge down. Peace/JT
Many buildings/infrastructure are built cheap in beginning and then cost a lot to repair. (cheapest contract bidding) Many short lasting Materials are still used, because they are cheaper when new for the builders. (Roofing shingles 10-20 years instead of metal 100+ years)
This video is a decent demonstration of various ways the "broken window fallacy" works.
Canada and the U.S. have come up with an interesting solution to this problem.
They ignore it completely, then act surprised when something collapses, the power's off for days, etc.
eh that's more like south africa
The U.S. is trillions of dollars in debt due to uncontrolled federal spending. They have no money
Using GDP rather than NDP is a big mistake. Unfortunately in many cases infrastructure isn't so much an asset as a future liability.
All of economic growth is a future liability.
These videos are made by great content creators with bad or even incorrect information, what worries me is the influence a high quality edited video make the credibility feel greater 😅
Doesn’t most infrastructure provide more economic benefit than they cost to maintain though?
@@dragonpanda1274 Its hard to quantify as there may be indirect benefits and costs for any project but from what I've seen a good portion of US infrastructure is not supported by the local tax base. This is specifically speaking to suburban developments (Urban3 does a bunch of good case studies on this if you're interested). It could be argued that indirect benefits outweigh this deficit but I'd argue any action that benefits a group should be paid for by that group, not by either people from other parts of the city or the future citizens of that area.
Another thing to think about is opportunity cost. Could a piece of infrastructure that provide 100 benefit and 90 cost be profitable? Sure. If we take that project in lieu of another piece of infrastructure with a even greater margin does that mean we made a bad decision? Probably.
Really the main point I was making with this comment though is that depreciation is a real thing that should be taken into account. Building a bunch of trashy buildings that will collapse in a decade supposedly worth $1 trillion should not mean $1 trillion in economic growth, or at least should be thought of as far less than $1 trillion in solid buildings meant to last.
@@dragonpanda1274 Is infrastructure a perpetual motion device?
The solution is to simply run infrastructure like a business, but publicly owned. Put each interstate, railroad, and port in the hands of different commissions, each headed by a random selection of people who pass a civil service test. They won’t receive tax funds but rather pay for all operations with tolls. The most in-demand infrastructure will receive the most profit, allowing them to expand to meet demand. Whereas unnecessary infrastructure will die and not use up resources better allocated elsewhere. That way you get excellent infrastructure that people use while not having any “bridges to nowhere”.
You say that as though we haven't tried that for the past 40 years. As though "run the government like a business" hasn't been the credo of both sides of the aisle since Reagan and Clinton. What more could we do besides interstate privatization at this point?
One technical solution we can look into is to stop putting rebar in our concrete. Steel rebar corrodes within the concrete and causes it to crumble from within after less than a century. Figuring out ways to build with concrete purely in compression like many ancient and medieval architects did makes structures last way longer
There are current solutions to passivate rebar so that it does not corrode. Good luck getting any governmental agency to use it. There is also basalt fiber reinforcement that cannot corrode. Again, it will never ever happen because the system is designed to never change.
Medieval roads didn't have cars and semis driving down them all day.
@@traderjake8449 To be clear I'm not suggesting readopting medieval technology as it was. It's just a shift in our engineering design mindset and how we think about materials. Concrete should not be used in tension like it is in many designs that use reinforced concrete. Or we should design new concrete matrices that don't set with water which is the primary corrosive agent for rebar. A company named Solidia for example is working on a concrete that cures with CO2 instead of water.
Removing rebar from concrete is not feasible in the modern world. Most ancient architecture had to use very short spans, with arches, due to concrete having low tensile strength. Their bridges also had much lower live loads compared to modern bridges.
Another important thing to remember is survivor bias. The vast majority of ancient structures crumbled centuries ago. The ones that remain have usually been restored.
@@user-xn2nu3lm7p Cracks only propagate under tension but brittle materials can perform well under compression. The roman colosseum didn't use any rebar because it didn't require concrete to carry any substantial tensile loads. Rebar makes concrete more versatile in the short term by allowing it to handle some tension but it shortens its lifetime due to its corrosive reactions with the steel.
A 1950's invention, the interstate system, was outdated by 1970. We still refuse to think out of the box and think of new methodologies.
You said it yourself, maintenance is the key to sustainability! The ongoing problem of growth-economy is best illustrated with the sprawl anomaly. New roads are being paid for by new developments, which in turn leads to the crumbling of older roads and the devaluation of older developments. As long as maintenance isn’t structurally factored in, it’s a continuous downward spiral, a pyramid scheme in it’s truest sense. Cheerio
Degrowth/steady state anyone?
"world is crumbling" is one of the most accurate sentences said in history
It's true because everything is crumbling. It's literally a fundamental law of nature called entropy.
Yea and it’s about as helpful as saying cancer kills people.
What do we do about it?
As someone that makes their livelihood maintaining railroad bridge infrastructure, I would appreciate an even deeper dive into this topic. What about the economic contributions of that maintenance activity? Is it just a sink, or does provide a net benefit on its own? What about incremental improvements that are derived from maintenance activities? Are they quantified? If I keep a bridge in service and this allows not just a existing customer to remain, but also I new customer to build on that rail line, is that purely maintenance or does it include development? Just questions from a non-economist.
Can you please talk about non-compete clauses in the US (perhaps world) and their ramifications on labor force mobility as well as the impacts to the greater economy? Thanks!
Interesting topic but very very niche, not sure a lot of people will be interested unless they are currently under a non-compete clause.
@@EconomicsExplained I don't know I think you would be surprised at how many people have to sign n/c papers in various fields even down to general labor.
I thought you gonna mention about the US’s highway networks and suburbs at last.
Seriously! He didn't touch on it at all. Wish he'd done something like Strong Towns or NJB. The cost of road maintenance or depreciation is never factored into municipal budgets bc it's not as good as a flashy stadium
Thanks for reminding me....that's the reason I clicked on the video.
This channel love cars and highway and suburb haven't you see his last video 😅😅😅😅😅
Good. Enough communist propaganda on RUclips as it is
@@JasonL527 "the generalized fourt power law"
10 times heavier load per axle=10 000times more road damage
cars are only a rounding error for road maintenance (buses and semis destroy the roads the most)
and please dont listen to people with a clear bias and agenda that make their own "evidence"
I love your videos but can u make a long video (I don't care how many hours )on how the entire world economy works
i do want thant
Fundementally it's simple. It's all the region specifics laws and beuracracy that make a mess.
@@jonathan2847same here
If you watch his videos you can figure it out on your own
Are you asking for a whole university degree or a Ph.D. thesis in Economics delivered to you as a RUclips video?
Sadly the associated costs of maintaining this infrastructure is another example of costs being publicized (on to the taxpayer) whilst the profits are privatized (to the corporations). Corporations continue to use the infrastructure to assist in their profit generation, yet the taxpayers are funding the maintenance costs. A different strategy could see profits getting taxed differently to accommodate those costs
When people say “how is there a war in 21st century Europe?”, you can mention maintenance. Even if we do somehow achieve a world with no wars and global peace, we’d still have to maintain it, which wouldn’t be easy. Global peace needs constant maintenance once it’s established.
Actually the answer is greed, more specifically the fact that capitalism demands infinite growth which is impossible on a planet with finite resources.
@@logans3365 That’s not really my point. The point is that all good things require maintenance, be it peace, social harmony or physical infrastructure.
The problem with infrastructure in the USA is that we need improvements in infrastructure but have tried several times to address the problem. Every time we pass an "infrastructure" bill the money ends up going to everything but infrastructure. Obama infamously laughed when he admitted there were no shovel-ready jobs, after promising shovel-ready jobs.
I will never again support any "infrastructure" spending. We need an itemized breakdown of where the money is going, and then approve the money for the next project only after successful completion of the previous project. Politicians can't be trusted, nor the companies they choose to aim the money at.
Overall it would be better left to the states to provide infrastructure. There absolutely has to be accountability.
With no accountability you end up like China where they built ghost cities that nobody will ever live in.
Basically the way we do just about everything is the worst way. I don’t understand why more people don’t want change….
A great video. I do CBAs for a living and this definitely weighs on my mind. Huge surges of infrastructure investment will lead to huge capital replacement costs when the useful life of all those roads and ports approaches in 50 years. Like a resource boom, if the proceeds from an infrastructure boom aren't saved when the infrastructure is new and working well, you're going to be up it when that infrastructure is starting to crumble all around you.
Luckily, we're already bankrupt so there will be no way to pay for maintenance. Problem solved. Put your time and energy into figuring out how you're going stay alive and well instead.
I'm surprised you didn't spend any time talking about the serious problem of countries deferring maintenance on infrastructure in order to make their budgets look better. The whole point about "crumbling infrastructure" is largely down to the failure to pay for conducting proper, regular maintenance. Many governments have tried to "kick the can down the road" and let someone else pay for it later. This has led to the real risk of important infrastructure experiencing sudden catastrophic failures. The most talked about example of this is bridges, but another one less mentioned is dams, whose failures are far more likely to be disastrous. An interesting and useful comparison could've been "is it more expensive to pay ongoing maintenance for the life of the item, or to just replace it and pay for the clean-up after it fails?", because the latter seems to be an option many governments are taking.
Something you forgot about here is the real costs associated with NOT maintaining these projects. When a dam fails, hundred if not thousands can die along with massive infrastructure destruction that creates a massive negative feedback loop. Nuclear power plants, if not properly maintained, can semi-permanently remove an entire area or region from all future economic development. I’m sure there are more examples but those are two big ones that I can think of without researching it further.
It might be a bit niche but it's very topical (again!) for us in the UK and ties in with this topic quite nicely. I'd love to see a proper economic breakdown of the HS2 line in the UK. Is it worth the ever increasing cost? Would it actually boost the economy to any meaningful extent if fully completed?
As said, it might be a bit niche and certainly speculative but I'm not sure I've ever seen a good breakdown of it from a purely economics perspective.
The money would have been better spent on improving the current rail system.
To add to this with the speculation they are cancelling the line north of Birmingham how would that affect the this.
HS2 is a huge waste of money.
@@CornishCreamtea07 HS2 is way too expensive for sure, but there's only so much upgrading you can do to infrastructure built over 200 years ago. East Coast or West Coast main lines simply can't be turned into modern high speed lines like TGV or Shinkansen systems. Every modern high capacity high speed line had to be built from scratch.
@@arturturkevych3816 I was thinking of new trains. The last time I went on a train it was pretty old and shabby looking.
This video is great and i wish many people from developing countries would see it. Leaders and people from developing countries often complain and expect the developed countries should give them more money so they could build their own infrastructure, the problem is developed countries spent a lot of money to maintain all their infrastructure. Also because people in developed countries are paid more, the projects cost a lot more money. If you build new infrastructure you also have more benefits like boost in productivity, investment, but if you are just repairing it you only get taxes from construction. If you don't maintain the infrastructure properly it can cause a catastrophic, like for instance the Genoa bridge collapse in Italy. But maintaining it can have terrible effects on the countries budgets
I learned this on a tank farm. When I visited, the operations manager took us around. Upon seeing gravel roads, I asked why they weren't paved. The Ops Manager answered with one word: "CAPEX." I raised my eyebrows and he told me that for inspection duties in light vehicles would not justify the higher build cost and cost of maintenance. A paved road ages and deteriorates over time, even if nobody drives on it. A gravel road deteriorates primarily through active use. So the less a road is used, there comes a point at which gravel roads are overall more efficient.
Living in rural eastern Germany, I can attest to the importance of good infrastructure, because we don´t have much of that here. I´m faster riding my Sacco Cart through the woods to the local main city, than taking the car or bus because both are routed via what feels like Baghdad. Not to mention the roads you do have often are abysmal, if you even have actual roads and not just cobble stone.
Cities are notoriously broke here, so there´s rarely any repairs/improvements and if there are any, the traffic has to be rerouted over other parts of the countryside, putting a massive toll on the roads and infrastructure there.
Great to see a video made on maintenance. As you rightly noted, it is the hidden cost of infrastructure. It is impossible not to be impressed when you read that China poured more concrete in three years than the U.S. did in a hundred, or that it produces more concrete than the rest of the world combined on an annual basis! However, China, in the next 10-50 years, is going to have to maintain all that concrete, steel, high speed rail lines, etc. as it wears down. It will make our infrastructure problems, which are huge, seem insignificant in comparison.
Infrastructure is a fascinating topic to discuss, especially transport infrastructure, which is the most visible. However there's a quite an easy fix to reduce infrastructure cost - just have less of it. Imagine having 50 families living in individual houses, 50 families living in terraced houses and 50 people living in an apartment block. For individual houses you'd need to lay out asphalt to each of them, bring wires, water and sewers. In case of terraced houses, due to two shared walls the length of all the utilities is much smaller. That's even smaller for a single block, which needs just a single power line, road, etc going into it (albeit bigger then in case of single family houses), which then is shared between 50 families. Sure, many people might prefer to live in single family houses, in which case taxes just need to be increased to equalize the difference - you want to live in a place that requires much more infrastructure, then pay more.
Indeed, a good video but should be at least worth a mention of the environmental impact of all these “necessary” projects. If planned/ designed and built well there would be less embodied carbon/ negative impact on the environment.
Rust problem is actually solved a long time ago. There are basically rustless steels like Myodo H1, some fancy knives are made of it. Sure it is orders of magnitude more expensive then common construction mild steel, requires different welding methods and so on BUT it is capable not to rust for centuries. Economy of scale is probably able to make it much much cheaper. But no one is interested, I dont know why.
Politics. Companies no longer have a product to sell if they supply longer lasting material, and in return the governments gets less tax money. Planned obsolescence is a positive for both cultures. Ultimately the workers pay for it by having to do unnecessary work and unnecessary pollution harms people and the environment. The businesses and governments have teamed up to take advantage of workers (i.e. the general population) out of greed.
This video didn't go into the effects of lacking of proper maintenance.
Degraded roads and bridges means that companies and people spend more to repair vehicles, cargo transport travels slower or longer routes, and companies have smaller areas to attract workers from.
Thanks for creating these videos and explaining complicated concepts in a way we can understand.
You're welcome mate
I apologize if you already have as I couldn’t find one, but could you maybe do a video on the housing crisis in Canada? It’s insane here right now and seems to just be getting worse. Thank you for being so educational! 😊
Basically you got what you voted for. At least twice as many people want houses as before, single women etc
Some blame is on large companies that got a lot of property, after government destroyed family unit and made property super profitable, while at the same time destrying construction industry where only luxury apartments are profitable.
@@mikiandfriends1820 It also might have something to do with China looking at Canada and saying "It's free real estate."? Even outside the CCP influence, people have been fleeing China's collapsing economy in droves.
The housing problem in the US and Canada is mostly due to zoning. Most residential land in cities is zoned for low density residential, which literally cannot fit the population. It's not foreign or corporate investors buying up a few houses, it's the fact that apartments are illegal in most of the residential area, while population has been moving from rural to urban areas ever since the industrial and agriculture revolutions. It's regular homeowners petitioning local governments to block apartments because of "property values", which literally means driving up price on purpose.
As Chinese investors have been offshoring their money for years now by buying real estate in certain areas around the Pacific rim (like Vancouver, Canada), what is the impact on the GDP of countries and their perceived comparative wealth? I believe that it is getting harder to define the economic value of certain types of public infrastructure. The problem with money ‘stored’ in expensive real estate abroad is that it impoverishes one country (by removing money from the national circulation) without enriching the other (private real estate produces no economic output other than providing municipal taxes).
Yes. This needs more upvote. Had to scroll a bit to find this comment but seriously its concerning.
Thanks for covering a topic I didn’t think any RUclipsr would. This is actually my area of expertise and for the most part you nailed it from the economic point of view.
any other channels or resources you'd recommend to dig deeper into this topic?
@@kenwarner any specific area you are looking for more details on? The subject matter really splits into planning (what new infrastructure is needed?) and engineering (what is the best way to maintain what we have?)
@@JakeYT7 I remember some time back I watched a video on the cost of maintaining roads in my state (North Carolina) and there's SO many roads built in rural areas that arguably aren't needed, that it's been a drain on state budget. stuff like that.
there is a very serious academic arguments that the new deal did not end the depression, that it actually prolonged it. ik, heresy.. just look into it
Doesn't matter if the New Deal prolonged it or not. It was necessary and made America better for decades and centuries to come. Unfortunately, the New Deal just didn't go far enough.
I always call it "the bad deal".
@@2hotflavored666 i beleve the opposite to be true, except the first thing, it does matter that it prolonged the suffering of millions even if it helped a fraction
The New Deal didn’t just end the depression, it kept people alive during it. A lot of “capitalists” forget that their system would’ve led to massive amounts of death if FDR didn’t step in.
I’m impressed by John Desmond Heppolette, professionalism and expertise in financial planning. He took the time to understand my financial goals and provided personalized recommendations that have proven to be successful, with his guide I make monthly returns from investing in assets and mutual funds.. Look up to John Desmond Heppolette, he has an online presence….
Thank you very much for that. I'm retired after 30+ years in utilities and transportation. Everyone gushes about vehicles that run on this or that or the other thing. My retort: what good is it if you have nothing to operate it on?
6.5 trillion seems a low number for the usa the WEF pdf regarding their lighthouse project stated it to be closer to 15 trillion and 50 trillion world wide regarding infrastructuer
If we were talking about the US. The US needs to stop expanding the interstate system in terms of new miles and lanes added. The sheer volume of traffic created by suburban sprawl commute (low value freight) that degrades that infrastructure is insane. Interstates need to be more strictly enforced as use for actual interstate use, aka state to state, city to city, not local commute.
Nice job! There is a distinction between the category/genre of infrastructure discussed in that it's a publicly provided good, not a public good. A public good doesn't have barriers to access and in non-congestible, e.g. a nation's military would be an example of a public good -paid for by the public, everyone gets the benefit.
I live in New Jersey. It takes a generation to get major infrastructure projects done. Probably why the population is stagnating or growing very slowly at best
There definitely are technologies that can help lower maintenance costs. Paint is the main one that comes to mind. The main reason we paint things is to prevent this degradation. Better paints therefore is a clear way to extend the life of our infrastructure. Powdercoat painting is a much better than traditional painting and is being used especially in areas exposed to the elements like naval vessels. If that could be extended to other products then we could get much longer lasting metals.
Another one that comes to mind is Roman Concrete. I have heard that we are either really close or have finally discovered what makes roman concrete more durable than portland cement. If that is true then this would be a major boon to reducing costs and concrete is the most widely used construction material globally.
Roman concrete is a meme. We can make concrete as good as they did, but it's cheaper to use other methods. Just like we can make better clothes but still pump out fast fashion that falls apart in weeks.
@@CarrotConsumer well it is a meme in how it has been portrayed as a miracle material but it is better in some areas as far as resiliency. A good example of this is that roman concrete does noticably better when exposed to salt and salt water than most modern mixtures. This could be important for road use in the north where we are literally dumping saltwater on roadways during the winter to melt snow. It would also improve the resiliency of port infrastructure that is exposed to saltwater from the ocean. Again it isn't like it is a miracle mix and we ask an awful lot from our infrastructure, but if we could increase the longevity of concrete in certain areas then that would have a measurable impact on maintenance costs.
I have hear about the need for bridge maintenance and yet it still isn't done in the US.
in China the quality of construction is so low that maintenance is unpractical, unaffordable, pointless and the ground underneath is sometimes not properly evaluated if at all.
all buildings should be evaluated and maintained but so often the resources are not available due to lack of revenue and basic economics.
Question; how much more or less damage will the heavier EV automobiles do to our roads over time and how much more will it cost us in the long run…
Is it possible to do a video on the economics of tipping? I haven't seen much literature on the subject. The tipping economy is worth about $44 billion dollars annually and I would love to see if you think tipping causes inefficiency due to the mis-allocation of wealth through the means of each tip being a discretionary amount that is used to justify lower wages.
Workers who receive tips generally make pretty good money
Bro is violating the 2nd law of thermodynamics.he should be in a physics prison😂😂
This makes sense, even in games at one point, maintenance becomes so huge, you cannot run your empire. Second, would be losses due to corruption and negligence.
It is obvious why in the 19th century there was a race to build privately funded railroads and not roads for horses/autos. Despite railroads being far more capital intensive, since they can only operate on flat grades and slight curves. Because, unless the volume of traffic justifies building a huge expressway, a private road is much more difficult to enforce tolls and keep "freeloaders" off of it. Illeagal rail "Velocipedes" existed, but very risky. If you rounded a bend and encountered an unexpected train head on, you might not be able to move away fast enough to avoid death.
But isn't the spending on maintenance contributing to gdp and the r&d done in this field also help general growth?
@3:23 Thank you for the Canada shoutout!! Love from 🇨🇦
This video gives a higher level overview of many of "Strong Towns" core concepts; great job!
(highly recommend Strong Towns book and blog for those in the USA who are interested in infrastructure cost issues)
When I think of the Build Back Better program, I picture the city engineer hearing that the city will receive $1.2 billion, rushing up to the mayor's office with a tattered manilla folder of urgent infrastructure repair projects. When he gets there, he is crestfallen to see the mayor polishing his chromed ceremonial groundbreaking shovel.
Just wait until you find out how much time, effort and money is spent simply patching vulnerabilities in software. Even with the good people at the Linux foundation working tirelessly and thanklessly to patch vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel. Each little fix needs to be tested and deployed by billions of companies and individuals on billions of systems and devices every week.
I've heard the maintenance cost of America's highways is ludicrously expensive.
As a maintenance technician, I appreciate the focus on maintenance. So often it is overlooked. Kurt Vonnegut said: “another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”
Maintaining and repairing infrastructure, especially individually owned infrastructure, is the backbone of the US economy. As a maintenance engineer, rust, heat, and moisture are my three very best friends.
Exactly, there are large groups that actively sway politics so they can keep maintaining and replacing things.
@@lucidbasil9869 I think enterpi pretty much make sure that we've always got work.
I watched another video recently by a creator name 1Dime where he explained MMT. According to that video big countries like the US, UK and Australia basically have infinite money because they have sovereign currencies and issue debt in their own currency. As such they can always pay back said debt by simply printing more money. He also explained that taxes are not actually used to fund anything and are simply used to remove money from the economy as a means of reducing the money supply and to a lesser extent controlling inflation.
I'm curious about your thoughts on this, since in most of your videos you talk about how countries need to "pay for" things like infrastructure using taxes or borrowing.
MMT is what the governments use, and it's gonna fall apart big time.
MMT is in disagreement with mainstream economics
@@supernukey419 that’s why I'd like to hear EEs take on it
MMT is basically just inflating currency. It only works if there is other deflationary pressures like technology to prop it up.
@@stdesy How do you explain Japan? They’ve been running a massive deficit for years and are experiencing deflation.
That was a good dive into something no one talks on sustainability forums
Everyone talks about this. Also, everyone wants to drive to the mall and take a trip to some waterfall they saw on instagram.
This was an absolutely excellent documentary. Sure, it was well presented. Sure, it had good up-to-date statistics but more importantly, I learned some very, very, very important inforamtion put in good context, that I have never seen before. And I have watched a handful of good documentaries every day for well over a decade.
Even among good content creators, these gems are rare. It makes me think so much.
I would like to suggest that what our country needs is a 50 year plan to create a new double scale transportation grid of rail and freeways. This would be for heavy industrial and commercial shipping. Then the old existing grid can be used for passenger, recreational and light commercial travel. The current system is not built to a code sufficient for the weight being driven on it. Reducing the load would greatly reduce maintenance and increase longevity. Ending the mixing of light and heavy vehicles on freeways would also vastly improve safety. The new grid needs to be properly designed for vehicles and trains that are 4+ times heavier. According to simple first principle physics, 2X width and length in vehicle and conveyance components yields a 4X increase in load capacity, but only a 2X increase in frontal area, so efficiency of aerodynamics is improved). It also must be sustainable at a 1/2 reduction in required periodic maintenance cycles.
Replace steel with graphene or carbon nanotubes. Bam, no rust.
Graphene is atacked by lots of sustances that desintegrate it as rust desintegrates steel.
Sir you are a genius
Big Brain Brielman
Forget asteroid mining. The first trillionaire will be the shareholders of whichever group figures out how to mass-produce graphene at a decent cost. The technology has so many revolutionary applications in so many industries that whoever does it first will see such a bloat in profit that it would make companies like Amazon blush.
@@peterpanini96 Which substances are those?
“The least bad tax.” -Milton Friedman on LVT
Henry George’s Land Value Tax aka the Single Tax would tax land greater which enjoys more public investments like road and utilities.
This produces a market-driven approach to preventing wasteful uses of land.
Great video as always. I can't help but wonder about the similarities between people signing up for military campaigns throughout history and the kids joining the cartel. The acceptance of how uncertain life is, and how it may end at any time. Most communities in modern time don't have this mentality and haven't had it for about a century. Yet, within communities in Mexico there is that view that life is so uncertain that lethal risks in employment (by the cartels) are seen as equivalent to lethal risks in life.
Thank you sir for sharing a presentation summarized addressing all issues truly humbled. 🙇
Didnt the Sri Lankan government ban fertillizers and cause food prices to rise sharpley creating that "political unrest"? At a guess maybe that was one of the conditions of those loans u mention.....
Building infrastructure is sexy and easy. Maintaining it is hard. A lesson China is about to learn hard.
Unlike the rest they used bidding to give to private contractor were thing got expensive the china govt control these infrastructure
Considering the cladding is literally falling off the side of their buildings, crashing to the ground below, I'd say they're already being taught it. Whether they actually learn from the mistakes, is another matter entirely.
Coming from someone who is all about small government. Its very clear that tolls and/or usage charges are needed if you want to maintain the transportation infrastructure sustainably. I go through three tolls each way to work and the road is beyond perfect with an enormous future proofed bridge with budgets prepared for repair out 20 years. Yes it cost me $6/day or $120/month, but the infrastructure without the tolls is garbage
I did read earlier this year that researchers finally figured out how to make proper Roman concrete. The way the Romans made concrete is far better than the concrete we make today. It requires no reinforcement, but is still stronger. It can last for thousands of years. And most importantly, it can repair itself with just water. It's made in such a way that if cracks form, when water is added, a chemical reaction takes place where new material is formed, filling the cracks. Several companies have made patents and are planning on bringing their products to market later this year. Their concrete will be made of synthetic materials, though. Pure Roman concrete is made from materials that are not suitable for mass production, bit synthetic materials can be used to make Roman style concrete that is just as long lasting, requires no reinforcement, and repairs itself with water. Best of all, the materials are super cheap, so the concrete will also be super cheap, though the massive demand when everyone learns about it will probably drive up the price. But who wouldn't pay anything to have such amazing concrete? Now if only something similar could happen with steel.
I'm not sure the Romans had 62 tonne 18-wheelers on those roads though...
@@EconomicsExplained True.
Curious thing that might be warranted to look into: did the new deal really end the depression, or did it just prolong the ordeal and postpone it until after the war ?
I think Germany for example did start to recover even before Hitler enacted the German equivalent.
The new deal prepared the way for America's recovery, but I think it was lend lease and eventually joining the war that truly pulled the US ahead of where they were before the great depression. Germany was hit quite hard by the great depression, which is partly why so many flocked to the Nazis, they were the only major party predicting that Germany's debt situation could not last for very long. Of course, the German recovery was launched off the back of simply not paying the reparations from the Treaty of Versailles.
It has long been debated that the New Deal actually made the underlying problems worse rather than helping - but it is a complex thing to analyse the impacts of a policy on an economy and very easy to argue one way or the other depending on what assumptions you make.
@@dallassukerkin6878 Absolutely !
That's why I would personally hesitate to make it sound like a fact that the new deal DID end the great depression.
I think the video did exactly that "mistake".
I think it did both. The newfound money the government had was used as the basis for government loans which caused worse spending problems but it also gave us good social infrastructure.
I spent 45 years doing industrial maintenance & repair. It was a constant struggle fighting the bean counters (accountants) who always see maintenance as a waste of money and it's the first thing that gets cut when the economy slows down. Then the equipment fails / breaks because of lack of maintenance and it costs MUCH, MUCH more to repair than the routine maintenance they cut out cost. And the big problem is THEY NEVER LEARN because by the time the next business cycle comes around, the bean counters who learned are gone and it's new idiots out of the universities in charge so the think they are geniuses and here we go again, cutting maintenance.
Note that the Kalifornia power companies were forced by the state to divert high tension transmission power line maintenance (which INCLUDES clearing trees and brush that could catch fire if a power line fails and falls down, sparking) into 'green energy' so the destructive fires that burned people's homes and businesses, the state is trying to sue the power companies for "negligence" when the companies were just following state requirements (so this is a classic example of Democrats hypocrisy, make it fail then blame someone else)
The problem there is institutional wisdom. The experienced people who see the problems aren't passing on that wisdom, and young people just coming into the field aren't hungry for that wisdom, so it gets lost over time.
Yep I feel your pain, working with University budgets, if things didn't add up, we would just add more to the 'deferred maintenance' allocation
One huge issue regarding maintenance that you forgot to mention is that infrastructure decay COMPOUNDS the more time passes.
Let's take rust as an example: the longer a piece of metal deteriorates due to untreated rust, the faster the corrosion will spread. This could happen for a number of reasons but, corruption and neglect are the worst offenders as they often come hand in hand. Those two alone, corruption and neglect, can speed up the decay of infrastructure greatly, but if we also include human complacency, i.e. humans giving said infrastructure for granted, the problems just keep pilling. All of these without counting the continuous use that the infrastructure has that also makes giving it maintenance harder, not to mention mayor remodeling projects infrastructure needs to remain functional after a certain amount of time has passed.
One such example is Mexico City's subway system. An interesting case study for this channel.
You should investigate what's happening with HS2 in the UK. Going to spend 100 billion pounds on a link between London and Birmingham that'll save 15 minutes... but take an extra 30 because it terminates at some oak tree way outside of london instead of actually going to london.
"You know life sure would be easier if it weren't for all this entropy." - Every living thing ever
Relatedly, "The Innovation Myth" is a great book. Hail the maintainers.
It's being played out in our country, South Africa. Maintenance went out the window 24 years ago, and grand state capture corruption, fraud and theft has taken care of the rest. We are sitting in a major city (Johannesburg), where a main road gets blown up due to a gas leak, infrastructure is crumbling wherever you look, the railways are being looted for steel, the entire country experiences rolling blackouts, which then lead to water shortages because pumps aren't working for many hours, schools get vandalized over school holidays and weekends, some still have pit latrines, people are planting trees in the potholes, traffic and street lights are being cut down with grinders for their steel, electrical transformers and substations are being stripped for copper (easy when the power is off so often). Streets and buildings are collapsing because of the Zama Zamas (illegal gold mining).
Municipalities admit they don't have funds for new infrastructure, barely enough to fix the frequent breakdowns in plumbing and power. As our infrastructure slowly crumbles, it will be interesting to see where we are in 10 years time!