How the US can stop wasting billions of dollars on each transit project
I believe Ray Dallio&#x27;s most recent book talks about this a bit. Essentially the idea that more developed countries have slow downs in productivity related to waste.<p>A year or two ago I read the book The Power Broker about a guy who was responsible for a lot of the construction in new york city in fairly corrupt ways. You get the idea in the book that they were just figuring out the earliest versions of ballooning costs and slowing projects down in those days.<p>In the same way private contractors benefit from the military industrial complex and are incentivized to keep it alive and even promote conflict, We have a sort of bullshit industrial complex too of consultants and other nonsense jobs that come in and make projects take longer.<p>It seems like there must be a way to go back to building stuff as fast as we could 100 years ago in the US.<p>In China they can still build that way today[0][1] in a way I find embarrassing and annoying.<p>Patrick Collison explores this idea some on this page[2]. I consider it to be one of the most important problems of the modern age.<p>How different would the world be if in 3 months SF build 19 giant skyscrapers full of apartments you would want to live in?<p>Some of these problems are exacerbated by the fact that even if you could do it now, capital isn&#x27;t as cheap as it used to be. Which makes it even more frustrating that we went through that period without massive infrastructure updates and improvements.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=OWp6vSHFG4M" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=OWp6vSHFG4M</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=N6f_sayw0mM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=N6f_sayw0mM</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;patrickcollison.com&#x2F;fast" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;patrickcollison.com&#x2F;fast</a>