And public officials did not pocket the money they were supposed to send to the pension funds, like some greedy corporate executive. They spent it running the city, often based on the recommendations of the staff they were shortchanging. Despite the frequent caricature, these are not bad or incompetent people. While we can all be self-serving at times, I’ve yet to meet an elected official that wasn’t sincerely doing what they thought best. Sure, they might strategically reduce a pension payment, but if they were investing in growing the city, there was a broad cultural consensus that it would work out better for everyone.
Local elected officials, and the professional staffs that serve them, all pretty much bought into the prosperity narrative around our growth-based development pattern. In that, they are simply human, all too human.
The Illusion of Wealth
We should all recognize our own behavior in that last chart. It’s the reason why people smoke. It’s why many of us struggle with dieting. Why we’ll sit in front of the television instead of going for a walk. In our minds we understand lung cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, but those are very distant threats. And the pleasure from smoking, sugar, and inactivity are very real and very now.
Humans have a propensity to highly value pleasurable feedback today and to deeply discount potential negative consequences in the distant future. Psychologists call this effect temporal discounting. While it is not difficult to imagine why wiring humans for such opportunistic behavior would provide an evolutionary advantage, it’s also clear why, in a world lacking the constraints that humans evolved with, this could now prove problematic.
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, it would have been folly for a human to pass on a meal. Being opportunistic was a survival strategy. Most modern humans, especially in the United States, have continuous and predictable access to food. Restraint has become an imperative. Yet, is it simply a matter of applying modern willpower to overcoming evolutionary shortcomings?
In his book The World Until Yesterday: What We Can Learn from Traditional Societies, Jared Diamond describes the perfect physiology for a hunter-gatherer living in a traditional society. Due to food insecurity, they would have been able to gorge themselves whenever food was available. Their bodies would have converted as many of those calories as possible to body fat. They would then burn that stored energy as slowly as possible, giving themselves that maximum chance for survival between meals.
Under these traditional conditions of starve-and-gorge existence, those individuals with a thrifty genotype would be at an advantage, because they could store more fat in surplus times, burn fewer calories in spartan times, and hence better survive starvation. To most humans until recently, our modern Western fear of obesity and our diet clinics would have seemed ludicrous, as the exact reverse of traditional good sense.
The genes that today predispose us to diabetes may formerly have helped us to survive famine. Similarly, our “taste” for sweet or fatty foods, like our taste for salt, predisposes us to diabetes and hypertension now that those tastes can be satisfied so easily, but formerly guided us to seek valuable rare nutrients.
Note . . . the evolutionary irony. Those of us whose ancestors best survived starvation on Africa’s savannahs tens of thousands of years ago are now the ones at highest risk of dying from diabetes linked to food abundance.2
Today, Pacific Islanders, whose forced adjustment to the modern diet occurred over years instead of generations, suffer from incredible rates of obesity and diabetes. The World Health Organization has reported that within many Pacific Island countries, more than 50%, and sometimes up to 90%, of the population is overweight. Obesity rates range from 30% in Figi to 80% among females in American Samoa.3 This is not a matter of willpower but rather our shared genetic dispositions.
Diamond speculates that, before modern medicine, European populations “may have undergone an epidemic of diabetes” from suddenly having access to abundant food. Those poorly adapted to abundance would have died early, not reproducing or, where they did, leaving their children and descendants at a serious disadvantage for survival. The replacement of the starvation-hardened by those more well-adapted to a modern diet is a good explanation for why European rates of diabetes are comparatively low (10.3% for men and 9.6% for women).4
Complex, adaptive systems learn through destruction. It’s not survival of the fittest – a phrase often misattributed to Charles Darwin – but rather, survival of the most adaptable. The fittest in one time and place may be at a fatal disadvantage in another. It’s those who can survive in both that have the opportunity to flourish.
Author of The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb, in a 2013 speech at Loyola College titled “How to Live in a World We Don’t Understand,” explained how humans have reacted to abundance – to a lack of constraints – by exercising more control over their environment, repeatedly solving the immediate problem at the expense of our overall stability.
With the enlightenment, the industrial revolution, came a greater control over our environment. So what did we get? The smoothness. We remove everything. We smooth out the economic cycles. No more up and down. It’s okay until it blows up.
You want to smooth out the forest fires? It’s okay, but without fires, the forest blows up. You want to make people comfortable? Okay, but their bone density goes down.5
This is a central theme for both Taleb and Diamond, the two modern authors who have most influenced my thinking on these subjects. With constraints removed, surrounded by abundance, we humans are hardwired to address the immediate problem in front of us, and to overlook, or dramatically discount, the long-term consequences of that action.
When it comes to the traditional city, there was no lack of problems to address. Harmonizing all those competing interests created habitats that may have been optimized for humans, but optimized is different than optimal. I’m not criticizing the people who believed they could do better, or the people who empowered them to do so. I believe we would all have acted in the same way in that situation.
Yet, like the human evolved on a starvation-diet finding themselves in a modern society with abundant food, our habitats are now radically different than they were. They are bloated, poorly adapted, and fragile. This experiment – conducted on a continental scale – is proving to be financially ruinous. Acquiring the cash that comes with immediate growth in exchange for enormous long-term obligations is a great way to solve today’s problems, but a terrible survival strategy.
For many cities, even those that are still growing, the illusion of wealth is fading. We are now 70 years into this experiment and we find ourselves with large amounts of debt while facing unpayable levels of obligations. This isn’t a matter of raising taxes or cutting services to make things balance out. It is coming down to a decision more akin to triage.
Which road do we fix and which do we let fall apart? Which pipe do we repair and which one do we walk away from? Which neighborhood do we save and which do we write off?
For cities who have arrived at this point, there are no good answers. The conversation, once broached, always seems to circle around to the American case study: Detroit.
Understanding Detroit
I’ve traveled to hundreds of cities to speak with people about Strong Towns and, when the subject of Detroit comes up, the conversation nearly always goes the same. If the person I am speaking with is on the left of the political spectrum, they have a narrative of what has happened in Detroit that is internally coherent with their worldview. It was greedy corporations or Wall Street swindlers or a lack of social empathy for the underprivileged.
If the person I am speaking with is on the right of the political spectrum, they have a narrative on Detroit that is also internally coherent with their worldview. It was inept government or the destruction of the family or crony corruption.
While internally coherent, these narratives have no overlap, except for one point: We are not Detroit. Nearly everyone I have spoken with sees Detroit as a kind of anomaly, some
strange place unlike any other in America, and certainly unlike the place they live. We are not Detroit and what happened there could never happen here.
My narrative of Detroit is different. It starts with acknowledging that, prior to the Great Depression, Detroit was one of the greatest cities in the world. It was certainly one of the richest. Even today, it is breathtaking to visit places like the Detroit Opera House, opened in 1922, and realize that it would be stunning even in the wealthiest of European capitals. The amazing buildings still there today speak to Detroit’s once tremendous wealth and prestige.
In the early 1900s, as Detroit was on its way to becoming the Motor City, it became the first major city in the world to start experimenting with what would become the American development pattern. They were the first to create automobile suburbs. The first to experience people commuting into the city by day, returning home by car at night. They were the first to run major roadways through their neighborhoods. They were the first to tear down buildings and turn over large portions of the public realm for parking.
They were the first to transform the human habitat into what we recognize today as the modern North American city. And when society reached the Great Depression and cities around the country started to experience major distress, losing jobs and dislocating populations, there was a cluster of places centered on Detroit that fared comparatively well. So much so that, by the end of World War II, it was very clear to a victorious nation what needed to happen if we wanted to keep from sliding back into economic depression: We all needed to copy the success of Detroit. That is what we did.
When you take a prosperous and stable city, spread it out at tremendous cost over an enormous area, denuding and bisecting the original fabric as part of the transition, then saddle it with decades of liabilities, you end up with Detroit. Like all bankruptcies, it happened slowly and then all at once.
Detroit is not some strange anomaly. It’s just early. It’s just a couple of decades ahead of everyplace else.
Notes
1 Disclosure: Jon and I would become good friends after this project. It was his idea to form a nonprofit named Strong Towns to explore the startling ideas we started to uncover in Pequot Lakes.
2 Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What We Can Learn from Traditional Societies (New York: Penguin Books, 2012).
3 http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/88/7/10-010710/en/.
4 http://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/noncommunicable-diseases/diabetes/data-and-statistics.
5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=948&v=iEnmjMgP_Jo.
4
The Infrastructure Cult
The point is that perfectly standard, mainstream economics makes a powerful case for much more infrastructure spending. And this needs to be said often.1
—Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize–winning economist
The case for a substantially increased programme of public infrastructure is undeniable.2
—Lawrence Summers, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury
This is America. We’ve always had the best infrastructure.3
—Barack Obama, 44th president of the United States
We need once and for all to have a very big infrastructure program.4
—Hillary Clinton, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate
Infrastructure – we’re going to start spending on infrastructure big. Not like we have a choice.5
—Donald Trump, President of the United States
The last thing that our cities need is more infrastructure. Yet, at a time noted for political polarization and bitter divisiveness, the only thing our politicians, professionals, and the working class all seem to agree on is spending for infrastructure. Support for infrastructure investments continually poll higher than any other policy item under consideration.6 Voters have even demonstrated a willingness to accept modest tax increases if the money is dedicated to infrastructure.
The cultural narrative for infrastructure spending is a pretty easy sell: Building infrastructure creates jobs as well as other development opportunities. It will shorten commutes and keep the environment cleaner. And just look around at all the crumbling infrastructure in the United States; infrastructure investment is seen as a bipartisan no-brainer.
We can somewhat let the broader American public off the hook. It’s not their job to manage our infrastructure; they don’t have the spreadsheets of the cash flow, a tally of the cost of maintenance, the present condition of these systems, and all the other blinking red lights on the dashboard of America’s cities. Polls have shown that Americans want infrastructure maintained more than they want these systems expanded.7
What should baffle us, however, is how professionals and decision-makers are so possessed by faith in infrastructure spending. Cities with a mind-boggling backlog of unfunded road maintenance routinely go out and build new roads. Places with pipes crumbling and pumps failing from lack of maintenance give incentives to developers to build more pipes and pumps for the public to maintain. How could they be so myopic, so lacking in introspection, to intentionally add more water to their already capsizing ship?
It’s easy to assume that those involved in these decisions are acting in their own self-interest, but this is more than just ribbon cuttings or kickbacks. And it’s more than job security for the engineer, planners, and the other city-building professionals who do this work. I will not deny that personal benefit is a seductive reinforcement to their thinking, but the intellectual capture of the belief in building infrastructure goes much deeper.
This also can’t solely be attributed to the pyramid-scheme nature of our development pattern, the cognitive discounting that prompts us to highly value the cash benefits today while ignoring the long-term financial consequences of our decisions. Even when the negative financial math on a project is easily discernible, even when the cash payout isn’t there, public officials often vote – with the recommendation of their professional staff – to move ahead with infrastructure spending.
The ultimate victory of any ideology is to no longer be considered an ideology, merely truth. Our collective belief in the power of infrastructure spending is now so deeply embedded within our society that we struggle to identify it as belief, let alone systematically question it. We take it as truth, unequivocally.
A cult is a collection of people having a misplaced or excessive admiration for a person or thing. Since the end of World War II, America’s leadership class has grown to be an infrastructure cult.
The American Society of Civil Engineers
The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) is the most authoritative, prestigious, and oft-quoted organization on North American infrastructure spending. Their periodic report cards routinely score U.S. infrastructure at just above failing. With the enthusiastic support of contractors, developers, trade unions, and others involved in the business of construction, the ASCE regularly calls for large increases in all levels of infrastructure spending. They boldly cite the obvious benefits of more infrastructure, claims that are parroted nearly unquestioned by politicians and media outlets.
For example, in 2011, as governments everywhere were having their budgets hammered by the lingering effects of the housing crisis that began three years earlier, the ASCE published a report called Failure to Act,8 an analysis of the economic impacts of infrastructure investment trends. In this report, the ASCE detailed the hundreds of billions our failing infrastructure is costing American families and businesses.
At that point, ASCE estimated that families and businesses had lost $130 billion due just from deficiencies in transportation systems. Over the next decade, an additional $430 billion would be lost by businesses and $482 billion by families, all due to our failure to make the proper investments in transportation infrastructure. Taken cumulatively, this is a loss just over $1 trillion in a decade.
To avoid this loss, and to reach what the ASCE has called “minimum tolerable conditions” on the nation’s highway, bridge, and transit investment
s, the Failure to Act report indicates that an additional $220 billion must be spent annually going forward. That’s $2.2 trillion in additional infrastructure spending over the coming decade.
Let me summarize what you’ve just read: The American Society of Civil Engineers suggests that the federal government, on behalf of the American people, spend $2.2 trillion over a decade to save those same Americans from the hardship of having distressed infrastructure, a difficulty estimated to cost just $1 trillion.
How can a prestigious organization like the American Society of Civil Engineers write something that seems so nonsensical? Spend $2.2 trillion to save $1 trillion? That’s preposterous!
The answer is simple: They don’t consider it nonsense. They have such a deep, cult-like belief in what they are saying – as do the organizations, politicians, and media outlets that continuously repeat these assertions – that they don’t even comprehend the absurdity of their own numbers.
For example, in that same report, the following assertion was made:
By 2040, America’s deteriorating surface transportation infrastructure is expected to cost the nation’s economy more than 400,000 jobs.9
This was reported in numerous news outlets exactly as presented by ASCE: 400,000 fewer jobs by 2040. Yet, the week this report came out, new jobless claims were 400,000.10 That’s 400,000 jobs lost in a single week! The ASCE suggests Americans make $6.6 trillion in additional transportation investments over three decades in the belief that such an investment would save the economy the distress of losing 400,000 jobs, and the same news outlets reporting on jobless claims ran ASCE’s projection without questioning it.
Strong Towns Page 7
