Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org or you can subscribe,

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Today is October 3rd, 2013, and my guest is Cliff Winston of the Brookings Institution. Cliff,

welcome back to Econ Talk. Good to be here. Thanks for having me. We're going to talk today about

an article you've written for the Journal of Economic Literature on the Transportation System

of the United States. It's a pretty, and we're going to put a link up to the paper itself in a video

that Brookings has put together, summarizing some of the points. Transportation's a pretty

big part of our economy, right? Yeah, a lot bigger than people realize. If you think about it,

it should be a lot, but no one typically sort of thinks of the annual expenditures on transportation.

But when you sum these things up in terms of what consumers spend,

in terms of getting to work, various pleasure trips, and non-work trips,

and then you look at what shippers spend on shipping freight, so on and so forth,

and then the government spends building infrastructure. We're talking shares of GDP

that approach the amount that we're spending on healthcare. But people obviously don't seem to

pay as much attention to transportation as they do about health, and that's just out of pocket

expenditures. It doesn't include the time expenditures, which it turns out, or about as large as

the monetary expenditures. So you look at a whole range of policy issues related to

transportation, including some of the history. I want to start with the history.

How has the role of government in the transportation sector evolved over the history of the

...