Abundant America: Part 1: A Path Between Autocracy and Bureaucracy
In 2011 I led a group from the UNC System’s Board of Governors on a trip to China. Like about 210 million people do every year, we decided to make one leg of the trip via high-speed train between Beijing and Shanghai. Over a 720-mile route, the train made almost no turns (this is important when speeds top out at 217 miles per hour). We completed the trip in a little over 4 hours.
In 2014 I took a different work trip through southern India. It included the single most terrifying drive I have ever taken, as our driver sought to deliver us from Thiruvananthupuram (metro population 1.7 million) to Kottayam (population 800,000). The problem: there was no high-speed train; no interstate; just a single pothole-marked 1.5 lane road that snaked through and around the center of probably 25 different tiny villages. We weaved around the middle of the road past cars and bikes and trucks and livestock going in our direction and toward other cars and bikes and trucks and livestock trying to go in the opposite direction. It was only because our driver was the winner of 187 consecutive games of chicken against people coming toward us that we made the 85-mile drive in a little over three hours.
This photo does not do justice to the terror of my trip. Shrink the road, add scooters, livestock, and small children and it’s more accurate.
China and India aren’t that different in population – both have about 1.4 billion people. But they are a world apart on their approaches to building infrastructure.
China demonstrates what you can do when you have an autocracy. I asked our Chinese hosts how they could possibly build a 720-mile high-speed train line in just three years. They said it was because they were able to remove any obstacle in the way of the straight line path without hesitation: they destroyed homes, diverted streams, cut down forests, displaced animals – whatever it took to accomplish the goal.
When I asked my Indian colleagues about efforts to improve the road between Trivanthum (their nickname for the city) and Kottayam, they shrugged: “We are trying, but there are so many rules.”
Imagine a country where all these things happen:
· We build more efficient transportation – using planes, trains or automobiles -- to get us from Point A to Point B;
· We find ways to construct more housing, more quickly and more affordably;
· Everyone who wants broadband has access to it, no matter where they live;
· The energy we use is affordable and sustainable;
· Our scientists get the funding they need to invent and reinvent, spend less time writing compliance reports and more time discovering new things.
That’s an agenda that Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson lay out in their new book, Abundance. And they make clear that neither of our two major parties, in their current form, is likely to accomplish any of those goals.
Democrats, they argue, believe in that agenda, but are so focused on the process of achieving goals that they find it almost impossible to accomplish them. They may get the money appropriated for the projects, but then they load up so many policies and procedures and rules that they never actually get built.
Too often, Democrats spend so much time building their “everything bagel” that nobody actually gets to eat breakfast.
Sometimes a plain bagel is enough.
Republicans, meanwhile, aren’t focused on that agenda; they’re focused on dramatically shrinking the size of government. As Klein puts it, “We’re caught between a party that doesn’t make government work and one that wants government to fail.”
There is a third way, the authors argue. And they illustrate what it looks like by showing contrasting examples.
In 2008, California voters approved a $35 billion referendum to build a 494-mile high speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco, to be completed by 2020. Seventeen years later, the project is still snarled and costs have spiked. It must get approval from voters in 58 different counties. There are environmental concerns, worries about displaced homeowners, arguments over which route it will take. Currently, less than one quarter of the project is under construction; the estimated cost has increased by $100 billion.
Contrast that with what happens when a leader prioritizes outcome over process.
In 2023, a tanker truck crashed into the base of an overpass of I-95 near Philadelphia, killing the driver and taking out a bridge that moves 160,000 cars a day. Initial estimates were that it would take 12-24 months to replace the bridge. Instead, Gov. Josh Shapiro dropped all other work, waived environmental studies and bidding regulations and selected contractors who could start immediately. In 12 days, the 6-lane bridge was back up and running.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro called his approach to rebuilding this bridge a “getting stuff done” strategy.
Or think about the development of the COVID vaccine in 2020. Nowadays neither party likes to talk about the 2020 initiative called “Operation Warp Speed”: Republicans don’t talk about it because it seems to suggest that vaccines are a good thing; Democrats don’t talk about it because it was an initiative of the Trump administration. But the project showed the amazing things that can happen when we put outcomes first. To develop a COVID vaccine, the government invested simultaneously into three different potential solutions. Then the government had to waive regulations for both the approval and production of the vaccines, set up 27 different manufacturing facilities and used the expertise of the US Army to distribute the doses. It cost a total of about $40 billion. Was it worth it? Well, it prevented an estimated 20 million deaths worldwide.
I went to a talk that Derek Thompson gave this week in Chapel Hill and he made it clear: he is not suggesting we take a “China” approach and throw out all our rules and regulations for building big infrastructure projects. He understands the importance of care in getting life-saving drugs approved. We can’t completely ignore neighbors’ concerns when it comes to building affordable housing, getting broadband out to the unserved or getting clean energy initiatives approved.
But we don’t want to get stuck in an “India” approach either. According to Thompson, by the time the Biden administration’s $42 billion broadband expansion program was approved, anyone interested in participating had to follow a 14-step process. Of 56 entities that sought funding through the program, only 3 were ultimately approved. And almost no new broadband was built.
There’s plenty of polling to suggest that Americans want more broadband, better transportation, new discoveries, more affordable housing and enough energy to get us around. Klein and Thompson don’t offer all the answers on how to get there (they’re not politicians, and, as Thompson put it, “nobody ever voted for a book”), but they do make it clear: we can’t get there until we find a way to prioritize outcomes over process.
Notes:
Beijing-Shanghai high speed rail line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing–Shanghai_high-speed_railway
LA to San Francisco high speed rail challenges: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-03-21/high-speed-rail
Philadelphia bridge rebuilding: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/pennsylvania-governor-josh-shapiro-approval-polls-i-95-bridge-collapse/
The power of coordinated government response: https://www.governing.com/next/government-cant-be-agile-dont-tell-pennsylvanias-bridge-fixers