Does anyone believe that contemporary Americans could build another transcontinental railroad in six years?Oh I'm sure someone, somewhere believes that it could be done again, but it seems beyond implausible to me. You'd think that with all of the technology we've developed, we could just snap our fingers and voila!, new railroads and regular roads and bridges and ... would appear in no time. But no, not even close.
VDH notes other typical nearly absurdly slow projects:
Californians tried to build a high-speed rail line. But after more than a decade of government incompetence, lawsuits, cost overruns and constant bureaucratic squabbling, they have all but given up. The result is a half-built overpass over the skyline of Fresno — and not yet a foot of track laid.VDH wonders if a new mythology will be born based on our forebearers being able to construct wonders far beyond our modern day capabilities:
California’s roads now are mostly the same as we inherited them, although the state population has tripled. We have added little to our freeway network, either because we forgot how to build good roads or would prefer to spend the money on redistributive entitlements.
When California had to replace a quarter section of the earthquake-damaged San Francisco Bay Bridge, it turned into a near-disaster, with 11 years of acrimony, fighting, cost overruns — and a commentary on our decline into Dark Ages primitivism. Yet 82 years ago, our ancestors built four times the length of our singe replacement span in less than four years. It took them just two years to design the entire Bay Bridge and award the contracts.
Our generation required five years just to plan to replace a single section. In inflation-adjusted dollars, we spent six times the money on one-quarter of the length of the bridge and required 13 agencies to grant approval. In 1936, just one agency oversaw the entire bridge project.
California has not built a major dam in 40 years. Instead, officials squabble over the water stored and distributed by our ancestors, who designed the California State Water Project and Central Valley Project.
Contemporary Californians would have little food or water without these massive transfers, and yet they often ignore or damn the generation that built the very system that saves us.
America went to the moon in 1969 with supposedly primitive computers and backward engineering. Does anyone believe we could launch a similar moonshot today? No American has set foot on the moon in the last 47 years, and it may not happen in the next 50 years.
Many of the stories about the gods and heroes of Greek mythology were compiled during Greek Dark Ages. Impoverished tribes passed down oral traditions that originated after the fall of the lost palatial civilizations of the Mycenaean Greeks.
Dark Age Greeks tried to make sense of the massive ruins of their forgotten forbearers’ monumental palaces that were still standing around. As illiterates, they were curious about occasional clay tablets they plowed up in their fields with incomprehensible ancient Linear B inscriptions.
We of the 21st century are beginning to look back at our own lost epic times and wonder about these now-nameless giants who left behind monuments [such as the transcontinental railroad] that we cannot replicate, but instead merely use or even mock.I do see his point. Who isn't frustrated with traffic being badly slowed for years while crews patch a few holes at a snail's pace?
However, VDH did leave out a few details that I think are important. First, the working conditions were really, really bad for most of those epic projects. Around 1,200 people died building the Transcontinental Railroad. The construction of the Golden Gate Bridge was noted for how "safe" it was - only 11 people died. Things are much, much more comfortable now. Almost nobody would be willing to work in those conditions and take those risks (especially for what they were paid) and even fewer in power are willing to let them take those risks.
Yet before we blame those running the projects for the death toll, we need to keep in mind that those horrible working conditions were often a step up from what the workers were previously experiencing. For example,
Many more workers were imported from the Guangdong Province of China, which at the time, beside great poverty, suffered from the violence of the Taiping Rebellion. Most Chinese workers were planning on returning with their new found "wealth" when the work was completed. Most of the men received between one and three dollars per day, the same as unskilled white workers ... A diligent worker could save over $20 per month after paying for food and lodging—a "fortune" by Chinese standards.Second, though he does grudgingly admit it, VDH glosses over the fact that working with modern technology very often creates more value than building yet another road. Instead of concrete, we build most of our roads with glass fiber and electrons and both the market and the taxpayer think that's more valuable.
So to me, it's not so much that we were once competent at building immense material things and now we're not. Instead, it's that once upon a time we were very poor and the best we could do was work high-risk construction jobs for the "fortune" of net $20 per month whereas now we can do oh-so-much better doing other things. And those that still work construction jobs (reasonably) demand orders-of-magnitude higher pay, far better working conditions, and far better safety.
VDH ends his article with:
Our ancestors were builders and pioneers and mostly fearless. We are regulators, auditors, bureaucrats, adjudicators, censors, critics, plaintiffs, defendants, social media junkies and thin-skinned scolds. A distant generation created; we mostly delay, idle and gripe.Perhaps we do "mostly delay, idle and gripe." But we can afford to, our ancestors could not. To me, our ancestors seem far less like gods and far more like people desperately impoverished compared to us trying to do the best they could. I thank them for taking the risks and building our comfort, I really do, but gods? Not so much.
As we walk amid the refuse, needles and excrement of the sidewalks of our fetid cities; as we sit motionless on our jammed ancient freeways; and as we pout on Twitter and electronically whine in the porticos of our Ivy League campuses, will we ask: “Who were these people who left these strange monuments that we use but can neither emulate nor understand?”
In comparison to us, they now seem like gods.
7 comments:
Bret,
Good post, thank you.
The narrative of decadence is too often an easy temptation. Every generation thinks the next one will blunder it all, since immemorial times. So I guess your final lines make justice here.
That said, I would add that our tendence to "delay, idle and gripe", even if done because we can, may very well lead to consequences integrated over time. Mainly, the next generations inherit the material wealth but lose bit per bit of the "immaterial wealth". That's one of the reasons many civilizations eventutally descend to its dark ages.
Yes I agree our tendency to delay, idle and gripe may become a big problem over time. Thinking of that reminded me of a quote that I've put in a separate post.
[OP:] However, VDH did leave out a few details that I think are important. First, the working conditions were really, really bad for most of those epic projects. Around 1,200 people died building the Transcontinental Railroad. The construction of the Golden Gate Bridge was noted for how "safe" it was - only 11 people died. Things are much, much more comfortable now. Almost nobody would be willing to work in those conditions and take those risks (especially for what they were paid) and even fewer in power are willing to let them take those risks.
You pose a false dichotomy.
Yes, it is true that both working conditions and hazards were bad for those projects. And it is almost certainly true that the conditions and hazards were about as good as they could be at the time.
But that past doesn't confine us now. There is no reason to believe that to get those things done in the same time now as then would require trading time for working conditions or risks. The issues that Hanson talks about have nothing to do with either of those things. There is no reason to believe that, absent nearly malevolent bureaucratic incompetence, we couldn't build another Golden Gate bridge or transcontinental railroad faster, safer, and in comparative luxury for the workers.
Second, though he does grudgingly admit it, VDH glosses over the fact that working with modern technology very often creates more value than building yet another road. Instead of concrete, we build most of our roads with glass fiber and electrons and both the market and the taxpayer think that's more valuable.
So we can do without the Golden Gate bridge, on account of fiber optics?
As I noted above, the issue isn't relative value, but rather institutional barriers to achievement.
Skipper, but those "institutional barriers" of which you speak don't exist in splendid isolation from the political zeitgeist underneath them. This is not just a political-legal issue to be resolved by putting the right party into office. There is something about general prosperity that brings with it the seeds of its own, if not decline, at least a kind of fatigue and a questioning of what "it's all about". I agree with Clovis that the word decadence is of limited use and can be overly-inflammatory (although I still treasure David Cohen's quip from years ago during a debate about whether the West was decadent: "If we're not, who is?"). Nonetheless the old idea that we are collectively building something materially grand to bequeath to our children is being widely replaced with a worry that we need to protect them from excess and destruction.
Probably the biggest force behind this emerging ethos is the environmental movement. I have noticed how it waxes and wanes in inverse proportion to economic stress. We went through a period of fevered concern over climate change in the mid-oughts (remember Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth?), but it went down everybody's list of priorities after the financial crisis. Now it's back as the good times roll, with a rhetorical emphasis on consumption excesses--second SUV's, monster homes, private jets, etc. The faithful don't seem to be worried about driving anybody into penury. Plus as we are of course all fellow passengers on Spaceship Earth, it turns every proposed mega-infrastructure or resource extraction project into a national, if not global, concern. Hey, Clovis, if you are listening, you keep your hands off my Amazon forest, do you hear?! Maybe Californians will have to wait for the next market crash to get that high-speed rail line completed.
Bringing common sense and rationalism to what has become an almost metaphysical force (viz. Ste. Greta) is tough because there are lots of past infrastructure projects that were indeed wasteful and destructive. The climate change religion angers and frustrates me, but it can't be denied man has shown himself quite capable of causing severe environmental damage, wrecking communities, imperiling forests and farmlands, etc. The fact that so much of the scientific community has sold its soul to political activism doesn't make it any easier.
Hey Skipper wrote: "As I noted above, the issue isn't relative value, but rather institutional barriers to achievement."
So what construction mega-project do you think people generally think ought to be undertaken that isn't?
[Bret:] So what construction mega-project do you think people generally think ought to be undertaken that isn't.
I was responding to this: ... VDH glosses over the fact that working with modern technology very often creates more value than building yet another road.
First, that is a debatable proposition. Spending money to maintain the Oro Valley Dam (my memory is vague on the name) spillway properly, or PG&E confining itself to its core mission, rather than being sent after every political whim, are both examples of institutional barriers to achievement. Whether modern technology creates more value is beside the point, and creates a false dichotomy.
As for a mega-project that was undertaken, and was from the outset an epic money fire, look no further than California's high speed rail project, the epitome of the inability to complete a project that should never have been started in the first place.
[Peter:] Probably the biggest force behind this emerging ethos is the environmental movement.
I am completely baffled that anyone ever gave communism any credence whatsoever, yet they did. And adding to the bafflement, there are plenty who continue to do so. Okay, maybe at one time, its utopian claims must have been compelling. But now?
Same with the Church of the Ever Warming Globe. Dr. Hansen made apocalyptic claims in 1985. The UN IPCC followed up with more of the same. Those who decided those claims were baseless were held up to ridicule.
In assessing those claims in the here and now, skepticism was completely warranted. Despite that, those claims have been recycled unchanged, except for sending the sell-by date forward yet another forty years. Left unanswered, because it is never asked, is what climate scientists have learned over the last forty years to make these latest predictions believable?
One would think abject failure an excellent reason to reassess one's religion. I keep hoping that St. Greta represents peak credulity.
... it can't be denied man has shown himself quite capable of causing severe environmental damage, wrecking communities, imperiling forests and farmlands, etc.
I recently read Pinker's Enlightenment Now. Aside from sullying the book a bit with contemporary politics, it is quite good. One point he successfully makes, not that you will ever hear the Gretins admit it, is that computational power has allowed the rapid de-materialization of our economies.
Back in the day, say 20 years ago, my music weighed several hundred pounds (stereo with large speakers, cassette and reel-reel tape decks, tapes and CDs.) Now, much more music (in fact, all I could ever hope to listen to) weighs maybe 80 pounds. Aluminum cans used to weigh three ounces, now a third of an ounce.
I could go on, but an undeniable consequence of capitalism is lessening the impact on the environment.
Whoda thunk.
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