Thread by @asymmetricinfo

This is a problem that has deep roots. Consider the history of the subway system.

https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1468717212844191744

In 1891, New York State passes a bill to allow the thing to be built. As the price of getting it passed, Albany Republicans, fearful that Tammany will get their greedy, corrupt little fingers on the funding, sets up a rapid transit commission stuffed with good government types

The commission is very, very concerned that everything will only be done in the Best Possible Way, and as a result, they chase their own tails for the better part of a decade, in part because the streetcar companies use procedural tricks to jam them up.

Around 1898, the Tammany machine reclaims NYC's mayoralty, points out that it would be good if the commission could, you know, hand out a contract to maybe build some subways. Tammany of course has an ulterior motive: the machine wants to award the contract to their pet operator

Governor Roosevelt manages to keep them from just giving the subways away to their friends. But two years later, there is actually a contracting process. Which is ... won by a contractor with deep connections to Tammany Hall.

McDonald, the contractor, has no money, but is backed by August Belmont, who has too much of it, having recently been turfed out of a couple of choice Wall Street deals.

The first line is built in 4 years, half as long as the commission took to get around to awarding a contract

The great building phase of the NYC subway occurred under the reign of Tammany boss Charles Murphy. After his death in 1924, Tammany's power begins to wane, and in the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt (who had battled Tammany as governor) finally breaks its back.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the subway largely goes into maintenance mode. The big builder of the succeeding decades was Robert Moses, who was a master at accumulating centralized power to himself, not to make a buck, but because he was kind of a megalomaniac.

Progressives figure out how to stymie that, too. Government is now larded with so many anti-corruption measures and community review points to make sure nothing goes wrong that it is almost impossible to make anything go at all.

The reformers weren't wrong about the abuses they were trying to curb. They just massively underestimated how costly it would be to prevent them. The best way to prevent anyone from abusing the building process is just not to build anything.

That's not literally where we are, but it does sometime seem like that's where places like NYC and SF are headed.

Anyway, longtime readers may be familiar with my old twitter thread: the optimal amount of fraud is never zero.

https://twitter.com/asymmetricinfo/status/1326576292779728896

The optimal amount of ill-considered megaprojects that disrupt settled communities to ego-stroke overweening bureaucrats is also not zero.

The way to fix this is to worry less about corruption, and much less about community review. But Dems, who control the govs with the biggest problems, would have to blow up the veto points that local activists use to stymie building or jack up its costs to untenable levels

And those activists are also extremely influential in the party. The old neighborhood clubs that used to provide the footsoldiers of the party--and connect the party firmly to its roots--have now been replaced by professionals, and activists. The activists LOOOOOOVE their vetos.

And of course, the vetos, when described to ordinary voters, sound very reasonable and good. Who could be against communities having a voice in whether a highway or a water tunnel is run through their neighborhood?

What sort of monster would want to curtail the environmental review process? What if your stupid new railyard destroys the only remaining habitat of an endangered fish? WHAT IF YOUR PORT EXPANSION POISONS THE WATER AND CHILDREN DIE?????

If you leave the veto points and the onerous procedures in place, everything else you can do seems pretty marginal.

That's not to say you have to say "Let politicians and planners do whatever they want, with no accountability".

But accountability should be to voters, afterward.

If voters don't like the crap infrastructure you built, or think they didn't get value for money, they can fire the politicians who oversaw it.

If you try to ensure, ex ante, that nothing bad will ever happen, you may end up ensuring that nothing ever happens, good or bad.