Specifically bad union rules. European countries also rely on union labor and don't have this problem. Another factor mentioned in the article is poor management which seems to be a common theme in America.
I wonder if it's that European unions have long had legitimate political clout, while it sounds like in the USA, unions have been under more suppression, and have developed tactics to match?
This is entirely based on my thoroughly unresearched preconception of the matter, BTW.
When I look at Germany it looks to me that both sides are more reasonable and try to find compromise.
In the US either employers want to squeeze all they can out of the work force and get rid of unions or the unions get greedy (see police unions who happily bankrupt municipalities for their pensions). Maybe it's a reflection of the "winner takes it all" political system.
I'm reading these articles and wondering: why do these unions have rules for e.g. the number of workers that must be posted to a specific task? Safety? It seems like a tremendously inflexible way to go about it.
I'm genuinely curious btw. I wouldn't be surprised to hear it's a counterreaction to historically irresponsible employers, for example, but I do wonder about the rationale behind U.S. union rules as reported.
It is because they are so corrupt. It has nothing to do with safety 99% of the time, but ensuring they need more workers on the job site. The mob got heavily involved with unions in the USA fairly early on, and influenced their tactics to what we have today. Europe didn't have that same issue.
I can't find it ATM, but recently there was a good article that linked this phenomenon to the disappearance of unions. As unions disappear in the private sector they become increasingly dependent on the public sector to employ their laborers.
Because union members vote and because unions so visiblly represent the working-class, in many cities the best way to be pro labor is to support union labor.
In areas were unions are strong but increasingly relegated to public sector work, that translates to pressure to bloat public sector projects with union labor.
One way to think of it is as a form of work program.
On a related note, some conservative commentators have pointed out recently that if you combine U.S. healthcare spending with U.S. welfare spending, it roughly equates to what European countries spend on healthcare + welfare. IOW, we don't overspend on healthcare so much as we trade-off social welfare spending for healthcare spending.
Similarly, I wouldn't be surprised if you combine the overspending on public works projects with similar jobs programs, it would likewise roughly equate to what European countries spend on public works + jobs. IOW, public works projects are expensive because we refuse to adequately fund training, long-term unemployment benefits, etc.
I think this is all comes down to Americans' inability to embrace the necessity and role of social welfare programs. But because we can't admit of the need doesn't mean our society doesn't ultimately respond to the need; our response is just obscure and indirect in a way that preserves the fantasy of the free-market. For example, we can blame these excessive public works projects on "corruption" and "bloat" rather than admitting that they're pressure-relief valves for legitimate political, economic, and social demands. Something similar could be said regarding the Trump phenomenon.
A professor once pointed me to the writings of George Plunkitt, the notorious Tammany Hall politician who openly defended so-called "honest graft". I don't know what his takeaway from Plunkitt's arguments were, but mine were
1) The institution of civil service was the solution for solving the problem of graft. Plunkitt even says that if politicians didn't fight the wave of civil service rules spreading across the country, it would put all politicians out of business. The red tape of the bureaucracy is the price we pay for getting rid of traditional graft.
2) But the civil service didn't magically erase the needs that were met by Tammany Hall-style politics. Back in the day "corrupt" politicians like Plunkitt were open about their graft, and voters voted them in regardless. Why? Because they provided the promise of job security; that if you do X you'll get Y--something the free market never guarantees at the individual level. The need and desire for job security never went away when the civil service came about, it just made it more difficult for voters and politicians to make an open, conscious exchange.
One easy way for politicians (intentionally or naturally, in response to dynamic political feedback) to provide a simple quid pro quo is to bloat public works projects. It can't be a coincidence that as relative wages for blue-collar construction work have declined, public works projects have gotten more expensive. That is, we've _tolerated_ more expensive public works projects to relieve/because it relieves the employment and wage pressures put on laborers in the private sector. That's easier to do than to affirmatively institute employment and wage supplementation programs.
We spend alot of time explaining the phenomenon in terms of loss of talent, experience, regulatory capture, etc. But perhaps the best and simplest explanation is precisely what Plunkitt was trying to drill into people's heads--nobody is going to vote themselves out of a job, no matter their claimed political preferences. I bet most Second Avenue Subway workers were as "disgusted" with the bloat as every other New Yorker, but their _real_ political preferences (and those of their families and friends) were better measured by who and what they voted for than by what they said. People's ire is easily blunted when receiving a nice, steady paycheck.
None of which is to defend honest graft. Plunkitt thought the only way to meet the needs of the small guy was through honest graft. There are better ways, I think, which are more efficient and therefore permitting greater overall social benefit. But those ways aren't achievable if we don't recognize and attend to the underlying economic and political forces, which will tend to steer things in certain directions whether we like it or not. The reasons things haven't changed despite the obviousness of the problem is because of these very real, counterveiling political forces. Those forces are far greater than just a few rich special interests.
I don’t know enough about the topic to discuss the last two, but unions don’t intrinsically slow down metro development:
France, for example, has one of the largest transport/trade unions (CFTD and CFT) and much stronger union laws than the US. And yet Paris has the second busiest and comprehensive metro in Europe, second only to Moscow. Not to mention how clean it is compared to anything in the US, a beautiful feat of design, architecture and engineering on its own, even!
Um, the article in no way supports the first two as the primary problem.
And, I would also like to point out that the cost per mile drops dramatically as the NUMBER OF MILES goes up.
Note that most of the foreign projects mentioned are 3+ miles. And note that even the US projects which are longer magically cost less.
So, perhaps the issues are:
1) a mayfly has an attention span longer than the average US voter and so getting projects approved and committed to for long durations borders on impossible
2) most contractors understand that their funding could be pulled at any time due to the vicissitudes of said mayflys, so they book as much revenue as possible and do as little work as they can until the pressure becomes overwhelming and the voting public is actually COMMITTED to funding and completing the project
The US seems to get less of everything for its money than its peers. Geographic spread is a major macro factor, but you'd still think that a supposedly efficient capitalistic market would at least handle local services better.
For market based goods, the US does deliver pretty phenomenal, innovative and minimally priced outputs. Groceries, energy, technology, etc.
"Local services" are almost always driven by non-market based considerations. Politics, not economics, determines contract awards for public works. It's as far from the market as you can get. And our society receives commensurate "value."
Later on, the city built its own third competitor to the two private operators, and eventually ended up purchasing them both. These days the entire system is owned by the state of New York (which took over when the city was out of money during the decline of the 1960/70s).
(There is a lot more nuance here... but the highlight is that the city/state often directly or indirectly financed capital construction regardless of whether they were the operator of the system at the time)
The BRT was formed from the remains of the privately-financed Long Island Traction Company [1][2]. It went bankrupt and was merged into the more public-private bits. The lines it laid as a private enterprise remain today.
The IRT looked more like the British rail system, with the public lending to the company, which was under public-private management.
By mileage, the BRT built the most. By transit volume, the public-private Dual Contractors outperformed the IND, though that was in part due to the latter's late start. It remains that the bulk of the New York City subway system was, by any metric, built under private management and, by mileage, financed with private capital.
All that said, I have no illusions about whether private ownership would be possible today. (It is debatable whether it was possible then, given they went bankrupt.)
I don't think GP is correct in saying that the NYC subway was privately funded and built - the funding was largely public, with the resulting infrastructure leased to private companies to operate.
The initial IRT subway was funded by the city with bond issuance, which then contracted the construction and operation of the railway to private bodies.
Later expansions were funded by a mix of public and private funds - but again, with the city retaining ownership of the property and leasing to private hands for operation.
The NYC subway was never a private enterprise in the usual understanding of the word. It's frustrating when achievements like the NYC subway are attributed to free-market triumphalism when there's nothing in its history that justifies this conclusion.
Thanks a lot for that clarification. I have heard the claim that the NYC subway was built privately many times but this explanation makes a lot more sense. Do you have any preferred sources on the history of the subway?
Heh. True in some ways, not in some others. Groceries for example - yes, I can buy chicken at Walmart for much cheaper than I would in the EU, for instance. But the chicken I’d buy in the EU would be of much higher quality. If I want a comparable chicken (not cage raised, not full of hormones, etc), I’ll end up going to Whole Foods or similar upscale store and end up paying roughly the same as I would in the EU.
Yes, there are different regulations, famously chicken in the EU can't be washed in chlorine as it can in the US. But your average EU supermarket selection is a flavourless, watered up battery chicken. It's not "much higher quality" by any stretch of the imagination.
Sorry, fair point, it’s not battery chicken then. Not sure what the correct term is, but it’s certainly nor free range organic animals we’re dealing with here.
You can avoid the steroids et al. at most any Walmart at this point. Tyson is completely removing such from their chicken products. You're primarily going to struggle to find free range inexpensively in the US.
... I have seen countless posts shocked by our price of eggs and beef. Eggs 50c a dozen, ground beef about $2.30-$3 depending on location.
It is one of those things that are hard to research effectively, but when I stayed in France for a few months groceries were definitely more expensive.
According to NationMaster[1], we're the 43rd most expensive. Notables that are more expensive than the U.S. include Switzerland, Norway, New Zealand, Denmark, France, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, Japan, Belgium, the UK, Canada, Austria, Italy.
Notables with cheaper groceries are Germany, Netherlands, Greece, Spain, Poland, Ukraine.
And Germany is about to work some of its grocery magic on the US, likely pushing prices down even further, as Lidl invades. Amazon will also likely have a positive effect.
What? I've shopped in the U.K., Spain, Greece, Switzerland and Sweden. The U.K. Was pretty much on par with the US for basic staples. The others were the same or more.
Unless your comparing to some boutique grocery in the US.
I often read frugal tips and tricks on reddit, and it's phenomenal what you can get in the states for little money. That's not possible in a lot of places in Europe.
Unfortunately that's not what we have when dealing with regulations, red tape, unions, and somewhat unaccountable government agencies running the show.
I don't think it's fair to call out unions/government without calling out large capital investors as well. We wouldn't have suburbs or massive shopping malls without huge real estate investors pumping money into major developments that exist to drain money out of a market. Large developments are a net drain on local economies and produce far less efficient markets than small incremental developments based on organic demand. There's a point where regulation and large capital investments are interlinked to prevent these markets from correcting, but the capital does plenty of damage on its own.
Since there is broad societal consensus* that capital should not be permitted to intensify urban environments, it had better build suburbs, or we’ll all be homeless.
*with a little bit of scrappy opposition emerging in the last few years.
The whole point of the limited article was a comparison to other developed nations. You can't be surprised when you jump in to "explain" the reason behind the difference to have people point out that it's disproven by the very article we are discussing!
Ironically, when things were MORE political, they cost less.
Adding all the oversight in order to "prevent" political cronyism just made things worse by increasing the barrier to the small guy being able to compete.
(Normally, I'm a big believer in oversight to avoid corruption and graft. However, I have a friend who tried to bring broadband to his little town. Between the open meeting laws, requirements for bid, big telecoms swinging in at the last minute when they couldn't care less until it looked like something might go through, etc.--he'd have received less grief if he just murdered everybody involved and went to prison ...)
We're stuck because "invisible hand" zealots keep doubling down on deregulation when faced with the phenomenon of market failure, as if they stay willfully ignorant of "market failure" the market will magically start behaving.
This is a very important and valid point you are making. "Invisible hands" zealots are at the heart of the problem. Unregulated markets can and do screw up. This fact has been demonstrated and accepted by most economists now [1]. Yet, US policy makers (and apparently tax payers) seem stuck on a deregulation rampage [2]. The consequences of this have been predicted by Adam Smith. Some necessary maintenance tasks will not get done, because without regulations, they will have no immediate return on individual wealth
I'm not buying or selling here, but you need to draw the distinction between a system designed to optimize extremes, and one that optimizes the median. If you don't, then you're basically comparing minimum wage to average housing prices, i.e. incomparables. It's up to you to argue which is the better one to optimize, but if you just assume that everyone is on board with median maximization, you're going to be talking past a lot of people.
There is clearly something out of whack on public infrastructure projects, which have very little to do with "efficient capitalistic markets".
I'm not sure how you get from there to your statement about "local services" not being addressed by the market. It isn't clear what other things you think are broken. Mainly just suggesting that more specificity would clarify your point.
There's already an amazing nationwide public-private transit network: they're called airplanes. But on the local level it's politicians kowtowing to the people who scream bloody murder when anything but heavily subsidized private transportation is incentivized.
"The US seems to get less of everything for its money than its peers."
Exactly my sentiment. However, my take away is there are too many middlemen dealing with middlemen dealing with ... Everyone's gotta get greased with before each blow by the the worker carrying out the physical labor.
NYT has a great writeup on the East Side Access tunnel. In short, the costs work out to 3.5bn/mile (!), there's ~200 "ghost" workers, and the usual spot of corruption and favoritism. It's a mess, and the MTA is deferring regular maintenance to pay for it.
Agenda much? Is anybody in this thread doing basic math?
200 ghost workers at $100K per year (probably a bit high, thanks) is $20 million per year.
Um, so much for that causing the cost overrun.
Project management is generally the failure. And, generally, it starts with the asinine "low bid" rules.
Everyone successful at dealing with the government knows that you bid as low as possible to get the contract and then you charge them a fortune on the back end.
Edit: Okay, even if I BELIEVE the $1,000 per day (and I don't) that's $300K per year and is still only $60 million.
Edit2: I have read and searched the original article several times and cannot find that $1,000 number anywhere.
Edit3: Oh, it's in an article linked in the comment. And the linked article says that they laid off those contractors once they found them. Project management and oversight failure--again.
You're doing that math wrong. Take $73mil a year. Make it $100mil a year, to cover other employment expenses (employees cost more than their salaries). The extension took 10 years, so call that $1billion. That sounds like about 1/7 of the cost of the 2 miles of track, not an "extremely small fraction"
That's the tip of the iceberg - the linked article goes into much more detail.
Procurement practice and staffing practice are huge contributors to the excessive cost. The projects are massively overstaffed contrasted with comparable projects elsewhere - the article:
> "The staffing of tunnel-boring machines came up repeatedly in interviews with contractors. The so-called T.B.M.s are massive contraptions, weighing over 1,000 tons and stretching up to 500 feet from cutting wheel to thrust system, but they largely run automatically. Other cities typically man the machine with fewer than 10 people."
> "It is not just tunneling machines that are overstaffed, though. A dozen New York unions work on tunnel creation, station erection and system setup. Each negotiates with the construction companies over labor conditions, without the M.T.A.’s involvement. And each has secured rules that contractors say require more workers than necessary."
> "In New York, “underground construction employs approximately four times the number of personnel as in similar jobs in Asia, Australia, or Europe,” according to an internal report by Arup, a consulting firm that worked on the Second Avenue subway and many similar projects around the world."
The fictional no-show jobs that are pure corruption make up only a small amount of the cost of projects - a much larger portion are jobs are real, but largely unnecessary.
The other big practice cited in the article is that the unions do not negotiate with the MTA, but rather with contractors. Contractors, receiving a percentage of the total cost of the contract, have no incentive to reign in labor costs and staffing - and in fact have every incentive to do exactly the opposite.
A cheaper, smaller contract employing fewer people is worth less to the contractor. Realistically the city or the MTA should be negotiating with labor unions directly.
Realize that these projects often take up to a decade. $730 million is a lot of wasted money and probably how much an entire line costs in some countries.
The east side access project started in 2007 and is scheduled to go into service in 2023. At $73 million per year, that’s $1.16 billion, or almost 10% of the total 10 billion budget. Just for that one batch of ghost workers.
When there's such blatant fraud, like ghost workers, why do you assume that's the only fraud?
That sounds s bit like the guy that carries a bomb onto the plane because the chances of a terrorist carrying a second bomb and having 2 bombs on the plane must be astronomical.
But his reasoning is as equally faulty as yours -- if he finds it so easy to get a bomb on the plane, so will others.... likewise, if there's blatant fraud going on, it's likely that there's even more, hard to find fraud too.
It seems like European infrastructure construction is more centralized than its American counterpart. In the Bay Area, there are two competing transit providers, each funded by the same taxpayers. Every city seems to run its own show, and CAHSR infamously rejected offers from European companies to do construction. It's just my view from 10000 feet, but the average city council has few civil engineers on board, so maybe a more top-down system could be better. The Boring Company might be a meme but at least there's not a different one in every city.
In Paris, you have the national train company (SNCF) who competes with the Parisian subway system (RATP). To make matters even more complicated, some suburban rail lines are operated by one over the tracks of the other. This is seamless until one of them goes on strike...
For the geek part: when trains shift from one network to the other (RER B between Châtelet and Gare du Nord), they free-wheel while they transition power from one network to the power of the other one. On the rare occasion that a train has to stop in the middle of that dead zone, it can't move anymore...
This is half true: European infrastructure construction is almost perfectly decentralized to the point that it's (for the most part) fully centralized at the level of each member state.
The US half tries to fund and administer infrastructure at the federal level, state level, as well as local level, depending on the state.
As an American, I find the EU to have phenomenally good infrastructure, but I think that's because decisions aren't being made in Brussels, they're being made concurrently in Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, London, etc.
I feel that the US would do well to emulate the EU, and centralize the funding, regulation, and administration of its respective systems in each member state.
This is why I'm not entirely opposed to the Trump infrastructure philosophy of encouraging states and local governments to pay their own way. It also encourages more private investment in infrastructure which is something that has contributed to the success of the subways in Seoul, Hong Kong and Tokyo as well as the original builders of the NYC subway.
I'm not opposed to that idea, but for it to work, we would have to invert our funding structures, with the majority of our taxes going to states and cities, and not the federal government. And while he seems to be happy to cut taxes, he doesn't seem to be too keen on cutting actual spending, so we're all gonna have to pay for it sooner or later.
I thought they were dumped by SNCF because they were making a pork barrel project instead of an actual rail system, and SNCF did not want to deal with the headache and reputation hit.
Please don't compare activities in the private market to public infrastructure. They serve different purposes and the latter is there for the good of humanity, not to make a profit, be innovative or be disruptive.
I’m pretty sure that’s not the case. My understanding is that the Scandinavian countries generally like their government and its level of efficiency as well.
The US spends 80%-90% of what Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland spend per capita PPP, yet the public services and social welfare in the US are abysmally bad.
Dunno about the rest of the metrics, but the relative rankings in "infrastructure outcomes" seem deeply off-kilter, based on my own experience (I work in infrastructure planning and have spent time in most of those countries). Would really like to see that measurement explained.
The US spends 80%-90% of what Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland spend per capita PPP, yet the public services and social welfare in the US are abysmally bad.
Here's one issue with your source:
> The United States is one of the most efficient countries because no other country achieves its level of public sector performance with less government spending.
This is an unfair comparison, since public spending in other countries include national health systems, national pension systems, etc. A fair comparison would be the US vs. other countries including only the same expenditures as the US.
The indicators also seem weird, the US has a higher Education indicator than Germany and Switzerland, a higher infrastructure indicator than Belgium.
Also, the study is from 2007, using data up to 2005. Things changed dramatically in the past 10 years. Take a look at all the government shut-downs, etc.
It isn't about "enfficiency innovations". You always have to make tradeoffs between the collective and the individual, the private and the public.
Allowing private companies to extract economic rents from the public is good for the private sector, bad for the public. And vice-versa.
Take social expenditures, for example. The US spends 80%-90% of what Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland spend per capita PPP, yet the public services and social welfare in the US are abysmally bad.
Economic rents benefit owners of entrenched corporations, but they don't make them more efficient. They also don't explain why US corporate practices make foreign companies more efficient when they are exported. And you haven't addressed the difference in public service efficiency since 10% in scale is not nearly large enough to explain order-unity inefficiencies in the US public sector. (And in absolute terms the US is larger, anyways.)
> Economic rents benefit owners of entrenched corporations, but they don't make them more efficient.
Efficient at extracting rents and higher profits, yes.
> And you haven't addressed the difference in public service efficiency since 10% in scale is not nearly large enough to explain order-unity inefficiencies in the US public sector. (And in absolute terms the US is larger, anyways.)
Wait, you do know how good social services are in Germany and Switzerland, and how bad they are in the US, right?
If I had to rate social services in DE and CH, I'd give, let's say, an 8 and a 9.
> in particular note that we are discussing public sectors, not just social services
Sure, let's discuss government-owned companies. And let's discuss infrastructure investment. And research spending. Oh, education too.
Pick one. The US is far less efficient than most of its peers in healthcare spending, government-owned companies, infrastructure investment, military spending, education, taxing, etc.
Please, tell me, where is the US government so efficient?
The US probably has the best, most efficient private sector of any developed country.
All you have to do is look at healthcare to realize this is (at least a) questionable assertion. I mean, it's dogmatic to believe so as an American but it's at least worth a proper look at.
I would argue that because healthcare is so regulated its more of a public sector thing. Also, an enormous amount of money going into the healthcare sector comes from public sources (medicare, medicaid, obamacare, etc.)
Note: I'm not saying regulation is bad. Just making the point that healthcare is really not a free-market in this country and never has been.
No True Scotsman is about moving goalposts within a conversation. Bringing up, say, a lack of transparent pricing for commodity services (x-rays or pregnancy tests, for example) isn't a No True Scotsman fallacy.
Ok, it my be pushing it a little bit - but the point is that the US economy is chock full of things like the healthcare system. You can’t easily argue that these are just outliers and the “real” economy is extremely free market. They are, in fact, completely normal parts of how the economy works.
Arguing the converse would be precisely the no true Scotsman fallacy.
Who's arguing that the American economy is exceptionally free market? It's certainly not centrally controlled as much as in other places, but I'm not sure "free market" is any more accurate. Large sectors (probably even a majority) of the economy is heavily regulated, monopolistic, monopsonistic, oligopolistic, etc.
The original point, that it's not fair to blame the free market for the dysfunction in the American healthcare system, is still a valid one. A main point is that "shopping around", even for commodity procedures, isn't really possible. Also, there aren't many remedies for consumers caught in undesirable contracts with health insurers. Quitting a job or moving states to fire an insurer is wholly unreasonable.
Actually the original point was that “best, most efficient” is not a feature of many significant parts of the US economy. Of which healthcare is only one example. Not sure why that caused confusion.
Except that's nowhere close to a no true Scotman context.
The US healthcare system is extremely far away from being a free market style system. Healthcare hardly even crosses state lines. It's absurdly regulated. It's about as regressive in terms of markets as it gets these days. Over half the US system is government healthcare now, either directly or indirectly; eg heavy subsidies, SSD, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, VA, numerous other programs.
Part of the reason for the vast cost inflation, is that the system has gradually spread out to cover a lot more people over the last 30 years. 5% of people are half of the cost in the US system. In a market system, if you focus on covering the other far healthier 95%, the system is dramatically cheaper - that's how it worked in the 1970s-1990s, and US healthcare was radically less expensive. 50% of people in the system (in terms of cost) are only 3% of the total cost of all healthcare in the US, you can cover those people for extremely inexpensively in a free market system.
By changing the system as they have, such that you commingle government and quasi-private systems, you risk dramatically screwing up a private market system and the government system simultaneously. Ultimately you can do one or the other, you can't do both at the same time and in the same phone booth where they constantly collide. You get the worst aspects of both worlds, which is what the US now has.
I think you missed the point I was attempting to make. So I’ll try again. Yes, the healthcare system is very distorted - but that is entirely common for the US.
The Scotsman here in particular is a truly free market.
You're mixing free market and laissez faire. Any market without monopolistic forces and where prices are set freely by the balance of supply and demand and competitive forces is essentially a free market.
No, I’m not. Your description here is fine, but it does not fit a huge chunk of the real economy, which was the point. Healthcare is just one example of many (agriculture, energy, telecom, etc.)
> Healthcare is just one example of many (agriculture, energy, telecom, etc.)
That depends on the country. Energy and telecom are quite free markets in many countries, especially with local loop unbundling and separation of generation, transmission and distribution.
And compare that to "Almost nothing is a free market" which you claimed. Now it's the opposite: most markets are free, but some, which depend on restricted physical infrastructure, are not.
No - My claim was narrower than that. In essence, that while we tend to think of the USA as very free market, in fact a huge fraction of the US economy is very much not free market. Enough so that any claim about free markets leading to strength in US economy is at least worth a second look.
At any rate I’m obviously not big articulate in the time I have for here, so I’ll leqve it at that.
You literally said: "Almost nothing is a free market".
Yes I did, in a broader context, which it is commonly assumed the reader is following.
The things distorting these markets in the US are typically nothing as simple as land, natural resources, etc... more they are policy decisions and politics. Suggesting otherwise is facile.
I'm not talking about efficiency as in providing the best bang for the buck to consumers, companies and investors don't care about that. I'm talking about returns. Cold, hard cash.
We enter public sector with the expectations of the private one. Every public sector worker 'deserves' to be high middle class, which today is defined as 300k+ income easily, and we strive to have as many public sector workers as possible.
Few weeks back, while commuting to work the E and M lines weren't running. There were 3-5 MTAs finest per platform exit, hallways instructing riders "The E and the M lines are not running!" I took another route only to find same amount of MTA agents at the other station. You count the number of stations. The overtime paid that day would have gone a long way paying for a decent electronic information boards that rest of the world seems to have. As a taxpayer, this abuse of tax funds infuriates me.
This ultimately has to come back to voter standards.
Other first-world countries in Europe and Asia manage to create comprehensive public transit systems cheaper and faster than the US does -- yet they also have environmental reviews, safety standards, unions, contractors, etc.
They are able to do it simply because the people running the city fear that they won't be reelected if they fail to provide comprehensive, properly functioning public transit. Voters there believe that providing public transit is one of the basic duties of government. It's amazing how streamlined a public project can become if the politicians fear for their jobs.
In the US, voters don't punish politicians for problems with public transit, even in places like New York where most people use it. So it's no surprise that it sucks.
Why does it cost 1 billion dollars a mile to build a subway in San Francisco? Where are all the costs coming from? It's the same with healthcare. Nobody knows why it's so ridiculously expensive. I wish they could hire some smart forensic accountants to figure out what is behind the ridiculous cost and then actually fix the problems by replacing the guys who are price gouging or work with the government to change regulations to make it cheaper.
Agreed, but the article does explain why it costs absurd amount cost per mile. Unnecessary roles that don't reflect modern construction techniques, high union labor costs, regulations, and concession to people to minimize quality of life disruptions, etc. I'm all for fair wages, but $110+/hour or $225,000/year? Give me a break. You'd have lines going out to NJ if they open up the job to everyone at $85,000/year.
I work in healthcare and we all know WHY it costs outrageous amount here in the states, but nobody wants to fix it because EVERYBODY has his or her finger in the pie.
Yes, price gouging is a problem, but it's only side effect of a bad system. Healthcare is expensive because there are too many damn fingers in the pie, and nobody wants to pull his or hers out first.
Doctors, hospitals, private insurance, drug distributors, medical device makers, lawyers, pharma, pharmacists, physical therapy center. Guess what all these entities have? IT, HR, Sales & marketing, etc.
I wish people could start with that premise in healthcare, that there isn't 1-2 big things causing the US healthcare system to be so expensive.
So many people seem to always have a point about "Oh if we just moved everything to medicare" or "if we just repealed obamacare" as if there is a silver bullet.
The only thing i think we can know for sure about why the US healthcare system is expensive, it's because of what you said, so many special interests groups that all work within the system and gouge each other every day to keep their heads above water.
I almost wish we could forget for a moment that health care in USA is expensive, and pay attention instead to how quickly it is getting so much more expensive. Let's just stop the worst of the bleeding, and worry about solving all the problems later.
Well it can't happen without price transparency. Transparency is good on it's own.
Why does Google not want to make all salary and compensation information public? Why do insurance companies want to keep their contracts and payouts with hospitals secret? There is zero reason for these things to be secret. These things should be required to be public.
What about if it's just government waste/corruption mostly? Who is going to be able to hire someone to say that with such authority that things change?
EG: We find out that 30% of road costs are being wasted by nepotism/contracts given to mates. I just can't imagine how it would work that someone could point it out and anyone would even care.
If the county hired him, he wouldn't get any coverage.
If the state government did, they would probably just bury it to cover their own ass.
The federal government maybe, but then you have issue of jurisdiction and dealing with 50+ audits at once and trying to explain to every state voter about what is happening in their state.
Only other option is independent watchdogs or companies but it still like it would be almost impossible to be even get a proper view of the real corruption from that angle as the government would never let you close enough to the deal making process.
In the end, I really don't know how you can overcome the losses due to government corruption unless voters make significant changes in their behaviour. That or just wait for a whistleblower to blow the lid off it all in some spectacular way.
When you say Asia, are you including China? It's likely that the situation is different in each country, and grouping "Europe and Asia" versus the "US" leads to a pretty sweeping generalization.
Here in the US voters don't punish any elected officials for anything because half don't vote and the other half that do are more concerned about their side "winning" and less concerned about practical day to day considerations like corruption.
People would gladly accept a corrupt Democrat over a Republican and vice versa purely based on political lines.
NYC voted in a Republican for mayor in 1993, 1997, 2001, 2005 and sort-of in 2009 (he ran on the Republican line, but wasn't a party member).
To contrast that with partisan affiliation when it comes to national politics, the last time NYC went for a Republican presidential candidate was 1924 for Calvin Coolidge.
> Even that was close, and the Republican candidate was _accused of molesting children_.
There, fixed that for you.
Look, I'm very progressive, but we need to firmly stand behind "innocent until proven guilty" especially when it is so easy to create a slander campaign against a political opponent. And, yes, even the democrats are capable of that.
It's difficult to get people out of that mentality even after making changes. Here in NZ we changed to MMP many years ago but many people still vote along party lines. It is slowly changing, but there's still a long way to go.
Not helped by the leader of the opposition claiming to have ‘won’ the election, despite being unable to form a government. First among the losers hurts, but claiming some sort of moral right to victory is petty.
The USA is pretty big and has a lot of sparsely populated area compared to Europe. People living outside major metro areas don't care about public transit, because public transit only works and makes sense in dense urban areas.
So people in Upstate New York don't care about mass transit in NYC, and so the representatives they elect to NY state government don't care about it.
Public transit honestly is not even on my radar of issues I care about, because where I live it makes no sense at all.
Pretty tired of "$REGION is too big and sparsely settled for transit" argument. British Columbia is over 2x the size of California, with about 1/10th the population but the city of Vancouver, the only large urban area in the province, has consistently high transit usage and investment. In fact, projections for transit usage have understated the growth in transit usage.
The lack of population density is a benefit in many regards. Texas is likely going to soon deploy high-speed rail at a cost not much higher than Western European standards or equivalent (adjusting for economic variance). There are two good reasons for that: Texas is far more friendly toward development, and there is a lot of sparsley settled, inexpensive land.
The challenge of public transport is to get the timing exactly right. Ideally, you'd build transit where nobody currently lives but will move to immediately after construction ends. Build it too late and it's really hard to make the necessary infrastructure modifications. Build it too early and the line won't generate enough usage, political opposition will grow and other modes of transportation will replace it.
I'm not very familiar with British Columbia, but does the whole province have public transportation on par with Vancouver? If not, that seems to support the comment about regional sparseness...
The city I live in (Los Angeles) covers an area 10x bigger than Vancouver. Even when you compare the metro areas, Vancouver is ~4 times denser
I brought up Vancouver's situation to compare it to New York because they both have large rural areas and comparable rates of urban and rural populations, about 50% of the population of NY and BC live in their largest cities. In addition, both NYC and Vancouver are highly urbanized, dense and developed cities.
If it were truly the case that rural voters down play the importance of intercity public transit, then Vancouver should have the same dismal public transport priorities that plague NYC. In contrast, Vancouver has a long history of progressive public transit initiatives despite being attached to a very large and sparsely populated province which suggests that NYCs problem isn't the upstate voters.
> So people in Upstate New York don't care about mass transit in NYC, and so the representatives they elect to NY state government don't care about it.
That would make sense if there were no political subdivisions below the state level with the power to tax and spend, but there are. NYC has both its own revenue sources, including income, sales, and special excise taxes, and its own (quite vast) governmental apparatus with which to spend that revenue in the service of its residents. They ought to have more than the tools required to get projects done -- it's a government on scale with many smaller countries!
NYC also has structures in place like the Port Authority, set up specifically to solve intra-jurisdictional problems (and IIRC with its own funding from tolls).
None of this seems to have helped stop costs from spiraling out of control.
It comes down to the size of the country, combined with a political voting system that favors incumbents and naturally organizes into a duopoly: First Past the Post.
Approval voting is the future of democracy, if we can manage to get our elected officials to change the law out of their favor. Semi-direct democracy would be a nice addition, too.
Approval voting is good for lots of things, but public elections by secret ballot aren't among them, because outside if open ballots and some kind of defined consequence of a particular vote, “approve” vs. “disspprove” doesn't mean the same thing on different ballots.
For single-winner elections Condorcet-satisfying methods are pretty much the gold standard; but minimizing single-winner elections for ones that can use proportional systems (not necessarily party-list; candidate-centered options like STV are viable) is also an important technique.
Condorcet was assumed to be the gold standard for a long time, but then in the year 2000, Warren Smith's Bayesian Regret figures showed that actually Score Voting (aka Range Voting) was better with any mixture of strategic or honest voters.
Approval Voting is extremely competitive in terms of performance, and _dead simple_.
There is actually a theorem that Approval Voting will always elect the Condorcet winner anyway, given plausible models of voter strategy.
http://scorevoting.net/AppCW
> minimizing single-winner elections for ones that can use proportional systems is also an important technique.
This is really not well supported. Even compared to the horrendously bad Plurality Voting system, PR has had mixed results.
http://scorevoting.net/PropRep.html
No comparison exists between the best PR methods and the best non-PR methods, so it's still very much an open question.
> Condorcet was assumed to be the gold standard for a long time, but then in the year 2000, Warren Smith's Bayesian Regret figures showed that actually Score Voting (aka Range Voting) was better with any mixture of strategic or honest voters.
What such simulations consistently miss is the information problem facing range voting (approval voting has a similar problem; preference systems don't entirely lack information problems but they are much smaller.) And that is that, contrary to simulations where preferences are based on quantified utility and there is a clear and consistent relationship between that and ballot markings on a numerically scored ballots, real world preferences are ordinal preferences which, while they do vary in intensity, are not consistently quantifiable, resulting in radically different score ratings for the same preferences by different voters. (There's quite a lot of research showing that numerical rating systems in all domains have this problem.)
> Approval Voting is extremely competitive in terms of performance, and _dead simple_.
Approval Voting again suffers from an information problem like range voting; there's no consistent mapping from actual preferences to ballot markings. This is easily solved if you are doing open-ballot voting for a group activity—eithet treating “approve” as a binding commitment to participate if the approved action is chosen or “disapprove” as a binding opt-out nearly resolved the information problem. In scenarios like that, Approval is a great system.
Likewise, Range Voting is great in a scenario where your score is a commitment to contribute an amount of resources proportional to the rating if the option is chosen.
But when you are voting with secret ballots in public elections, these information-problem mitigations don't apply.
> No comparison exists between the best PR methods and the best non-PR methods, so it's still very much an open question.
Comparisons in actual government satisfaction between countries do exist and show that proportionality of outcomes is key. See, e.g., Lijphart’s Patterns of Democracy. The absence of flawed, limited, abstract mathematical comparisons that ignore key features of the real world is not particularly a problem.
> And you may have to get Score Voting or Approval Voting to get PR in the USA anyway.
The article making that case considers the federal situation ignoring the possibility of bottom-up reform from the states, which is possible because many states permit the citizenry to bypass the politicians to institute reforms from the ballot box directly. And bottom up reform is desirable anyway.
> A significant fraction of the world's major electoral procedures experts support Approval Voting. E.g. www.electology.org/approval-voting
I don't see any support for that claim on that page.
> I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the book "Gaming the Vote" by William Poundstone.
I haven't read it, but unless the book's own promotional copy substantially misrepresents the argument it makes, I can't imagine I'm missing much of value. Arguing that US Presidential elections going to a candidate other than the most preferred is due primarily to spoiler effects on simple majority elections and that a solution to that would satisfy both the left in the right ignores completely the existence, original purpose, and continued structural effect of the Electoral College.
Fascinating discussion by both of you that expanded my depth on the issue. Perhaps the shortcomings can be solved (at least for reasonable numbers of candidates) by "Approval/Disapproval/Neutral" Voting.
In the US, there is no political party where you can go to prioritize competent government. You can only choose between these two options a) more government, or b) less government.
It's too bad the US is still dealing with the simplest of issues - gay marriage, abortion, mandatory vaccination, immigration, prohibition of marijuana - and just doesn't have any room left to discuss things like public transit.
The U.S. also pays a lot for highways that don't have warranties. Last time I read something about it, German highways were procured with warranties. Italian highways didn't. Lots of people also grumbled that Italian highway building was plagued with corruption.
SSC had a great article on cost increases in a general sense. One of the more depressing articles I've read. Makes it sound like we are dying by a thousand papercuts.
America rich 3rd world country. I'm Zimbabwean, but the levels of corruption are comparable. Why would a 'top' tier city have shitty public transportation and centuries old signaling systems ?
Because you aren't dealing with the competent willing who can pull off such projects. Instead, you are dealing with crooks who take their cut and pass the irresponsibility to the next. Taxpayer money is the true lottery.
I read this article, and the NYT one linked herein. But I don't understand why the MTA is involved in the nitty-gritty at all? Why can't there be 1 contract given out to some private entity, and then leave it up to the entity to build it as it sees fit.
Maintenance is the main reason. If you don't get into the nitty-gritty you cannot achieve the amazing feat of keeping a system up and running 30 years passed its design lifetime
"...Rosenthal talked about labor problems: severe overstaffing, with some workers doing jobs that are no longer necessary..."
I learned that in one of the office buildings in NYC, there is one (sometimes two) custodians who press the elevator buttons and call out the next one to arrive. These are modern elevators with indicator lights above them. I learned it was because of a union requirement.
I always liked the idea of unions, having learned about how workers were trampled on "in the old days". After moving to NYC, however, my opinions toward them became a bit more tempered.
I have spent more than a decade working with US colleagues in this sector. Overall, three things come at a disadvantage for US that explains overall this puzzling productivity problem.
First, management. I don’t exactly know where it comes from, in the land of Westinghouse, Edison, Tesla, and the likes, but being an engineering project leader is not seen as the career path of a winner. It’s all about business, storytelling, laws and politics, where the power and the money is. Compare that to Germany where the chancellor is a PhD in physics and there you go.
Second. Individualism. No. Team. Spirit. Everybody wants to be with the best at what he/she does and recognized at such. There is no willingness to fill cross functional gaps, people are absurdly specialized, resulting in very inefficient performance at the collective level and surprisingly high level of bureaucracy.
Third. Protectionism. US established market is protected against foreign competition. The net result is that the US consumer is never benchmarking what he gets against real alternatives. His appliances are crap. His social protection is bad. His car is a good laugh compared to most Japanese or European models. As a consequence he as no notion of how good a deal he is getting on such things (and in most cases, he is being ripped off).
The combination of the three explains quasi all of the shortcomings noted here. I believe these problems were not as acute some decades ago. I think these behaviors have been pushed to the extreme through the various US tax reforms that have allowed very few to capture most of the wealth, thereby promoting the above behavior.
It’s not the first time in US history though. I believe it will be fixed eventually because it’s becoming too absurd. :)
Edit: Was this not an accurate summary of the key issues mentioned?
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