The infrastructure one really stands out to me, and I'm always astounded by it. Adding yet another example - The Golden Gate Bridge was built in 4 years for $1.6 billion (inflation adjusted), under budget and ahead of schedule. 11 workers died during construction, a safety record matching or surpassing most modern projects.
In contrast, a project to install suicide nets around the bridge has been under development for 12 years. It was recently delayed for another 2 years, and is estimated to cost ~$250 million.
I would bet it’s tied to the neglect of work in both real wages and respect for workers.
We no longer take pride in work. We pay people less and make them compete for the mere privilege of holding a job. Then, we tell them what to do, disrespecting their intelligence and autonomy and ability to make something they can be proud of. For the brilliance of this strategy, we pay leaders ten times more than we did before, and even more when they fail and need to be replaced—surely installing a new CEO is the answer.
It is no surprise at all.
Deming tried to lay it out for us, but no one really listened.
It's entirely possible that you are right except for construction and civil project jobs.
I've built several large-scale buildings and developments at urban scale in California and Nevada, both heavy heavy union states.
I can't point to the systemic problem leading to the delays but I can tell you that any job even tangentially related to construction requires high wage labor. This is universally true for civic projects.
Some of those unions (e.g. electrical workers, carpenters) provide exceptional training services for apprentices. Others (e.g. the people holding the stop signs at highway construction sites) are mostly strong-arm groups.
These groups could be causing delays and from personal experience I can tell you they do, sometimes. But overall I can certainly say that the point you made here is not the reason why projects are delayed.
It's entirely possible that you are right except for construction and civil project jobs.
It's all very well to pay someone well and expect good results for the money, but that person is still a member of society and will be affected by the things around them. I'd argue that someone who hears constant negativity in the media about how everyone is underpaid and living in poverty, and sees the person serving their coffee at a diner working their third job, and knows that their wife is working longer hours than they are for much less money, is going to be less productive as a result no matter how they're treated as an individual. Poverty is a structural problem in society. It doesn't just affect poor people.
Oh, I'm not disputing that at all. Just that the bridge's enduring quality (much as with other Deoression-era / WPA works) is at odds with your observation on poverty. Though that does seem to have some validity otherwise.
Maybe focus more on inequality and uneven reward? The Depression seems to have often been, as with the WWII recovery, something of a leveller.
The issue might actually be the opposite. It would probably cost too much to employ the number of bridgeworkers that were employed for the Golden Gate Bridge.
I'm totally nitpicking on your style here, but IMO this line reduces the value of the rest of your comment. Without it, your comment could be interpreted as a call to action, eg to encourage people to take more pride in their work. With it, it's clear that you've already given up, and you're not really adding anything except maybe encouraging others to give up on stuff too. That makes me sad.
> We pay people less and make them compete for the mere privilege of holding a job. Then, we tell them what to do, disrespecting their intelligence and autonomy and ability to make something they can be proud of.
This fully embodies the experience of the modern-day Agile experience in software development. "I know you're a senior but I (a non-technical Product Manager/Scrum Master) am going to have to check in multiple times a day and dictate every single feature and how it's built."
This is something I've ruminated on a lot – but frankly, I'm in no way qualified to understand or make sense of it. The two things that I often come back to are:
1) the pathways that infrastructure would run through have more "things" (a scientific term) in the way, raising the time and cost of a project. My father often mentioned how when I-95 was built, many homes near where he grew up had to be physically moved to accommodate it. That was in the 1950s. That problem only grows more complex over time. It's no surprise that building a new subway in NYC would have been 'easier' and cheaper in 1900 than in 2000, despite advances in technology, per Patrick's question.
2) investment in infrastructure requires foresight and time. It demands a long view. Who wants to be the one responsible for allocating a huge chunk of change for a project that they won't be in office to get credit for?
Please tell me why I'm wrong or what else I'm missing, I'd love to learn more about this.
1) You would have to explain how the problem of existing structures account for the orders of magnitude cost of new construction.
2) Why is this any different now than at the times of the examples? It would seem as though, if you initiate a project, you would have an incentive to complete it within your term in office. This could have been accomplished with many of the historical projects cited - Empire State Building, Golden Gate bridge, man on the moon (mostly).
No-one died during the construction of the Humber Bridge in the 1970s, which was the longest suspension bridge in the world. Construction took nine years and cost £530 million (adjusted to 2016 prices).
No-one died during the construction of the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge (Dartford Crossing) in 1988-1991, which was the longest cable-stayed bridge in Europe. Construction took less than three years and cost £260 million (adjusted to 2016 prices).
So, in other words, your statement "a safety record matching or surpassing most modern projects" is something you made up.
Bringing up the stadium in Qatar only further highlights that point: I remember that building project getting tons of press outlining how shockingly bad the safety record was compared to what should be expected.
Take some time to research safety and deaths in large construction projects happening today at the scale of bridging the Golden Gate back in the 1930s. E.g. Channel tunnel - 10 deaths, Panama Canal Expansion - 7, Three Gorges Dam - 100+, Gotthard Base Tunnel - 8, Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge - 19, Istanbul Airport - 55. I'm not sure what statistics you are looking for, but construction isn't a no-risk profession even in modern times. If you want to just look at America - 3 people died at the Hard Rock Hotel construction site in New Orleans last year. Two people have died in the last two months building the SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. Two more died digging a trench in Phoenix two weeks ago.
You're getting downvoted because more than half of your examples are from non-Western countries with appalling safety regulations.
We already know authoritarian dictatorships (China, Turkey) can still achieve amazing infrastructure projects, damn the cost to human life or displaced poor people.
Fromt eh Western examples, Gotthard Base Tunnel work began in 1999 and it opened almost 17 years later, so that's less than 0.5 deaths/year. The Channel tunnel is then probably the only remaining example.
The other examples prove the point - safety standards have gone up and very few people die during major construction projects
" but looking around the world the numbers aren't much better"
? Qataris use indentured servitude, paying subsistence wages, forcibly holding passports and people in work conditions, not letting them leave, no access to healthcare, making workers 'pay for their debt' of the 'flight from India to Qatar'.
So this is not remotely any kind of basis of comparison for 'why we have a hard time making bridges'.
Japan has a different attitude, they're able to 'make stuff safely' but it's a different culture.
> Where/when did we go wrong, and how do we fix it?
Speaking logically; there can't be anything is making it physically harder to build infrastructure over time. And nothing physical is making the economics of railroads worse.
Therefore the changes have to be entirely legal, political and social. The specifics are probably things like increased environmental scrutiny, greater political impediments to forcing people out of their homes, requiring higher standards for construction, increased safety. Reduced political will to build infrastructure due to competing models of public/private ownership.
My personal theory; I suspect big chunks of modern infrastructure are now illegal to build. I don't know if it is still acceptable to sign off on a project where it is expected that 11 people to die. I know that would be wholly unacceptable in a mining context; for example. Probably construction too.
> Speaking logically; there can't be anything is making it physically harder to build infrastructure over time. And nothing physical is making the economics of railroads worse.
Building could be harder over time when lands to build is used for other purpose. Railloads economics could be worse relatively over time when competitor(car, airplane) getting cheaper and improves quality.
I sometimes wonder about this too. When you walk through European cities and look at the decoration of those old houses, they were all handcrafted. I think it would be too expensive now to build those same houses with handcrafted details. Same with all those old chairs, where some woodworker sculpted everything by hand. You can't imagine that right now anymore.
Is it because we throw away stuff after 5 years? Or because we just have way more stuff to produce? Because we don't work as hard? I have no idea.
> I think it would be too expensive now to build those same houses with handcrafted details.
On a tangential question - I sometimes wonder why modern buildings are so boring. Postwar buildings in many European cities are drab and devoid of interesting detail and yet with CAD designs, 3D printing and so on it should be possible to create all kinds of intricate detail (perhaps let a computer conjure up a wild pattern to dress up a facade with, like something from a Tool album cover) to create visually interesting features - cheaply. I think it's much more to do with postmodernism rather than cost. There was a great discussion on HN some time ago about it which I cannot find unfortunately.
> Today your design has to be approved by many different people with veto power.
I don't think that's it, at least for public buildings like churches, theaters, town halls, museums, and so on. After all, veto power doesn't prevent awful buildings like the Walkie Talkie building[1] from being built, as long as they conform to the bland, in vogue architectural tastes. It's the cult of postmodernism, stripping away visually interesting features, even though humans gravitate to older buildings despite the "form over function" blind cult thinking. This has dominated architecture for the past few decades. Many older buildings are simply built with many intricate visual details that are architectural heresy nowadays. As mentioned, there was a briliant article and HN discussion on this recent-ish, I just cannot dig it up.
EDIT: This is the article, "Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture":
I have not looked up the numbers, but would guess wealth inequality is a big part of it. Those houses were built for people who were richer, and they had people working for them who were poorer, than is common nowadays in the west.
There isn't really a concept of civic pride any more. The Victorians - for all their many faults - did have a kind of local-scale pseudo-patriotism which motivated some very impressive buildings.
When modernism decided that decoration was superfluous and forbidden, it also did a lot of damage to the tradition of civic building.
Buildings were no longer designed to be aesthetic. If private, they were supposed to be utilitarian money factories put up by capital as cheaply as possible for the generation of more capital. Or they were supposed to fill a social need - again, as cheaply as possible.
A few architects, like Calatrava, produce public statement buildings, but they're often poorly regarded and not necessarily designed to wear well. (Calatrava has a very striking visual style but is notorious for poor build quality.)
Modern corporate HQs - like Amazon's and Apple's - half buck the trend, but only half. They're modernist statement buildings, but they're still motivated by a kind of minimalist corporate narcissism rather than pride.
The only buildings that don't fit the trend are some of the religious mega-projects. They're designed to be awe-inspiring and spectacular, and they often are.
So the real culprit is penny-pinching modernist utilitarianism - mostly capitalist, but not exclusively. If you removed that you could recreate a 21st century aesthetic of imaginative but robust civic architecture at all scales, with high quality materials and handcrafted detailing and decoration.
In a very literal sense the entire culture is run on an ethic of ever-narrowing acquisitive miserliness. This started to become a serious problem in the 80s, and it's been hugely dispiriting - not just for the arts but for civics in every respect.
In contrast, a project to install suicide nets around the bridge has been under development for 12 years. It was recently delayed for another 2 years, and is estimated to cost ~$250 million.
Where/when did we go wrong, and how do we fix it?