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The content on this blog is my personal opinion and does not reflect the views of the Department of Defense or the US Navy in any way.


Sunday, July 7, 2019

Infrastructure Predicament

Explaining how I found the article which inspired this blog post may take a little more time than usual, but since I now have two posts that came about this way, I'll take a moment for it.

Over the past few months, one of the blogs I follow has been doing a series on Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead. (I found this blog during its previous series on Atlas Shrugged, and honestly the book review posts are the only ones I regularly read on it.) The whole thing is an excellent catalog of the major flaws in Rand's philosophy, but there's also been a few side points on architecture and urban development, since a lot of the book is supposed to be about the genius of the architect main character. That has spun off into points about construction, building design, and urban design on more than one occasion.

In this particular case, one of the posts starts off by talking about the impending collapse which the heroes are worried about, then asks where that collapse actually might come from in real life. It links to an interesting article whose main point is quite simple: Our suburbs simply don't make enough money to pay for themselves, and the cost of trying to maintain them is causing financial problems that we don't have any good way to fix.

Interestingly, it doesn't try to argue that the government should just abandon those costs and privatize (the typical conservative or libertarian response) nor does it argue that the solution lies in taxing people more (the typical liberal response). It's a bit closer to the former than the latter, since what they do argue is that the whole system benefits more from a large number of smaller local projects than from huge federal projects. Even then, though, they still clearly believe that government has a role in encouraging the right projects and setting rules and regulations that will help.

Unfortunately, they also seem to believe there may be nothing that can save all of our suburbs, and that a lot of them are doomed to slowly waste away. They're well aware of the pain that will cause for a lot of the people currently living in those places, but don't believe there's much that can be done without making the long term problem worse than it already is.

The whole site is interesting, although I haven't had time to go over it in that much detail. There are some points I think I disagree with, but overall I think there are some very good points in there about how we should be designing our cities and what we should be spending our infrastructure budget on.

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