Why Does the U.S. Suck at Building Things?

Politix

Politics, News Commentary, News

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 18 August 2023

⏱️ 66 minutes

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Summary

At the start of the pandemic, China built a 1,500 room hospital in 5 days. In the United States, things don’t tend to go that way. We’re notorious for our boondoggles, cost overruns, and the slug-like pace it takes us to complete relatively small projects. It’s given rise to a debate over why we so often suck at building stuff, and what we should do to get better at it. Is the problem red tape that ultimately cripples projects or falls victim to abuse? Is it that powerful interests have a monopoly over what gets built? Is the key to creating state capacity for progressive ends building comparable progressive power? A bunch of the scholarly legwork that gave rise to this debate about the future of liberalism was undertaken by a University of Michigan law professor named Nicholas Bagley. He’s the author of the influential law review article “The Procedure Fetish,” and he joins host Brian Beutler for a discussion about how systems that were designed to either sabotage government or keep government honest have combined to make government incapable of building new projects that would make life better.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Rico indicted and it feels so good on Tuesday's episode of Pots of America.
0:05.9	Host John John and Tommy reacted to the latest list of Trump indictments out of Georgia
0:10.3	and be where it's long. And if you want to stay up to date on the latest indictment news,
0:14.9	make sure to check out our daily podcast, What a Day. Strict scrutiny will also be doing a
0:20.0	legal deep dive, so be sure to tune in wherever you get your podcasts.
0:42.8	Hello and welcome to Positively Dreadful with me, your host Brian Boiler.
0:46.5	For my entire adult life, I've heard politicians appeal for votes by saying something like we
0:52.4	should end wars abroad and rebuild here at home. So the war half of that formulation is primarily
0:59.8	the legacy of the George W Bush administration and its forever wars, which is why you tend to hear
1:04.6	Democrats making that pitch more than Republicans. But the other half, the part about rebuilding here
1:10.5	at home has a much more complicated legacy. And because of that, I think it even lacks a shared
1:17.1	meaning among Americans. Rebuild America means something very different to a city dweller than to
1:23.1	a person from the hinterlands. But both citizens, I think, would have a sense that it means the
1:28.0	government should invest in civic infrastructure so the places we all live in can have better jobs,
1:34.4	better public goods, better amenities, the whole deal. Still, and in part because rebuild America
1:40.5	is such a challenge even to define, you can see why politicians like the pitch. It speaks to
1:46.9	everyone. It makes everyone think you're talking about their little slice of America.
1:51.7	A leader who ended our global misadventures and instead built a bunch of cool stuff that made life
1:56.4	better in both red and blue parts of the country would join the pantheon of great presidents.
2:02.8	Or at least that's what we'd like to think. Joe Biden has tried much harder than anyone before
2:08.5	him to implement this vision. He ended the war in Afghanistan and then he signed a bunch of bills
2:12.8	that have allocated trillions of government dollars and even more private sector dollars to building
	...

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