Tag Archives: infrastructure

What Is Government For?

Right now, the United States is being “governed” by a dangerous fool–a madman entirely ignorant of governance, cause and effect, or anything other than his own self-importance. Perilous as the current situation is–and it is–he will be gone, and given his obvious and accelerating decline, probably sooner than later, making it imperative that Americans engage in an important–an essential–debate: what is government for? What are the core responsibilities that markets and individuals and voluntary organizations cannot provide?

In my last few posts, I’ve emphasized that there are two questions pertinent to the operation of governing institutions: what and how–and I’ve explained the importance of the “how.” Today, I want to talk about the “what.”

I think most reasonable people look to government to provide essential infrastructure. There’s broad agreement about its responsibility to build and maintain physical infrastructure. There is far less understanding or agreement about social infrastructure–what is sometimes called the “social safety net.” Ideologues of the Right dismiss efforts to strengthen that social infrastructure by labeling it “socialism” (a label that is supposed to justify a hysterical repudiation of whatever the proposal may be). That response ignores the reality that all first world countries have mixed economies. The issue isn’t whether we should “socialize” certain activities, it is the much harder questions of which ones and why.

Resistance to expansion of America’s social infrastructure– our inadequate social safety net– keeps millions from accessing medical care. It keeps working people impoverished and mothers out of the workforce. It reduces economic mobility and amplifies historic inequities.  Ironically, it costs considerably more and delivers much less than is the case in other first-world countries. As researchers have amply documented, the inadequacies of our social infrastructure push numerous problems downstream: Jails and prisons become de facto mental-health providers; emergency rooms substitute for primary care; Police and courts manage crises unrelated to public safety. Our insistence upon limiting “help” via means-testing adds millions in bureaucratic costs.

Despite the claims of “fiscal conservatives,” keeping safety nets inadequate doesn’t save money or eliminate costs—it adds many and reallocates others inefficiently.

And what about the argument that “big” government (i.e. government administering a more capacious safety net) erodes individual liberty?

The new mayor of New York begs to differ. And I agree with him. As Heather Cox Richardson recently reported,

The policies [Mamdani] promised are not simply about lowering costs, he said, but about “the lives we fill with freedom.” For too long, he said, “freedom has belonged only to those who can afford to buy it.” “Here,” he said, “where the language of the New Deal was born, we will return the vast resources of this city to the workers who call it home.”

Mamdani’s speech was a declaration of a new kind of modern politics that focuses on “freedom to” rather than “freedom from.” For decades, the Republican Party has called for dismantling the government, arguing that regulations and taxes were destroying Americans’ freedom from constraints. But for most Americans, government regulation and investments in social welfare like education and infrastructure guarantee freedom to build a life that is not cramped by preventable obstacles, including those imposed by the wealthy and powerful.

The idea of government regulation and a basic social safety net to permit Americans to live their lives to their fullest potential was a key principle of the New Deal launched by Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933, and Mamdani was right to note that the New Deal was born in New York City.

A number of political philosophers have argued that liberty is, indeed, “freedom to” rather than “freedom from.” When every day is a struggle for survival, the promise of “freedom” to follow one’s dreams rings pretty hollow.

For a long time, proponents of a minimal state have argued that the absence of social supports results in a system where “merit” allows talented individuals to prosper. If our current government demonstrates anything, it is the idiocy of that assumption. The “captains of industry” who have clawed their way to power are anything but the best and brightest–they are beneficiaries of a social system that elevates some at the expense of others, and they are busy dismantling another important part of our social infrastructure: the rule of law.

When we rid ourselves of the current kakistocracy, we need a national discussion about the nature of liberty and the dimensions–and costs–of our social infrastructure, and what we expect government to do (not to mention what we expect a legitimate government to refrain from doing….)

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Cultivating Solidarity

A few years before I retired, I attended an academic conference in Sweden on “Social Citizenship,” a concept commonplace in Europe and utterly foreign to Americans. I came away with a far better understanding of both the concept of “social citizenship” and the importance of a robust social infrastructure.

What do I mean by “social infrastructure”?

The dictionary defines infrastructure as the “basic physical and organizational structures and facilities needed for the operation of a society or enterprise.” Most of us are familiar with this definition in the context of physical infrastructure: roads, bridges, sewers, the electrical grid, public transportation, etc. Within the category of physical infrastructure I’d also include physical amenities like parks and bike lanes. Schools, libraries and museums probably fall somewhere between physical and social infrastructure. Purely social infrastructure includes laws that prevent the strong from preying on the weak, and–importantly– the various programs that make up what we call the social safety net.

What made me think about that conference was a recent essay in the New York Times on the concept of solidarity. It began:

These days, we often hear that democracy is on the ballot. And there’s a truth to that: Winning elections is critical, especially as liberal and progressive forces try to fend off radical right-wing movements. But the democratic crisis that our society faces will not be solved by voting alone. We need to do more than defeat Donald Trump and his allies — we need to make cultivating solidarity a national priority.

For years, solidarity’s strongest associations have been with the left and the labor movement — a term invoked at protests and on picket lines. But its roots are much deeper, and its potential implications far more profound, than we typically assume. Though we rarely speak about it as such, solidarity is a concept as fundamental to democracy as its better-known cousins: equality, freedom and justice. Solidarity is simultaneously a bond that holds society together and a force that propels it forward. After all, when people feel connected, they are more willing to work together, to share resources and to have one another’s backs. Solidarity weaves us into a larger and more resilient “we” through the precious and powerful sense that even though we are different, our lives and our fates are connected.

Social solidarity is the antithesis of the tribalism that is tearing America apart. The essay goes into considerable detail about the efforts of the political Right to undermine connections between groups, and also faults leftists who downplay the important role of policy in shaping public sensibilities. 

Laws and social programs not only shape material outcomes; they also shape us, informing public perceptions and preferences, and generating what scholars call policy feedback loops….. Policies can either foster solidarity and help repair the divides that separate us or deepen the fissures.

I have repeatedly argued that American solidarity depends upon the allegiance of our diverse tribes to what I call the “American Idea”–the governing philosophy underpinning the Constitution and Bill of Rights. E Pluribus Unum envisions that philosophy as an overarching belief system that unifies Americans while respecting our differences.

I have also argued that America’s inadequate and bureaucratic social safety net ignores a fundamental precept of social solidarity: the concept of membership.

Remember that American Express commercial proclaiming that “membership has its privileges”? Several  countries, not just those in Scandinavia, base their social programs on the theory citizens are “members.” 

In today’s America, the Right is intent upon excluding disfavored minorities from “membership,” insisting that only White Christians can be “real Americans”–aka members.

The widespread belief that not everyone is entitled to be considered a “member” is one of the central flaws of America’s social welfare system. You can see it in the dramatic differences in attitudes about means-tested welfare (negative) versus Social Security and Medicare (positive). When a benefit is universal, it unifies rather than exacerbating tribal animosities. I’ve never heard anyone complain “those people are driving on roads paid for with my tax dollars!”

One of the great virtues of a Universal Basic Income is that it would be universal. Not only would it eliminate the costs of America’s enormous welfare bureaucracy and the manifest inequities and humiliations of the present programs, it would avoid the stereotyping of recipients that deprives them of human dignity and excludes them from “membership.”

What if government provided a social infrastructure within which all members would be guaranteed a subsistence livelihood, access to health care, a substantive education and an equal place at the civic table, and in return, would exact “dues:” higher taxes and the discharge of civic duties like voting, jury service and a stint of public service?

A girl can dream….

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Some Reflections

Travel is always educational–a way to challenge the “givens” of our own daily surroundings and routines by engaging with different cultures and environments. As our recent, extended trip has concluded, it seems appropriate to share some reflections.

  • In both Australia and New Zealand, we were struck by–and impressed with–the meticulous maintenance of the infrastructure and especially of the public spaces. In New Zealand, especially, the parks and beaches  weren’t only well maintained, they were numerous–and I found it particularly interesting that they routinely included public toilets–also clean and well maintained. Not “pay for use” facilities, as we’ve seen elsewhere, but conveniences open to the general public.

The emphasis on –and care for–free publicly available amenities really impressed me; it suggests a culture far more focused on community than we in the U.S. are accustomed to.

  • A couple of conversations–one with a passenger on our ship, and one with a New Zealand friend of my youngest son–gave me an insight into the contending reactions to lockdowns that we saw during the Covid pandemic. The first exchange occurred when I was in a line with another passenger; he said he lived in Florida, and (intemperate as it was) I asked him how he viewed Florida’s governor. His response was that DeSantis had “handled” the pandemic exceptionally well.  I restrained myself from remarking that the data showed a rather different result. It may have been less annoying for the Florida citizens who survived; but thanks to DeSantis’ dismissal o medical science, a significantly larger percentage of Florida residents died than died elsewhere.

The conversation with my son’s friend was a bit different. I remarked how much I  admired Jacinda Ardern, the former PM. She laughed and told me that Ardern was far more popular internationally than in New Zealand, and that she would not have been re-elected because of widespread disapproval of the way she’d handled the Covid pandemic–that New Zealanders overwhelmingly thought the lockdowns were too stringent, lasted too long, and were damaging to the economy.

The data confirms that Ardern’s management–a management consistent with medical advice– saved many lives. But those measures did depress the economy.

Both discussions illuminated something I’ve had great difficulty understanding: why did so many people resent the rules and restrictions meant to protect them from illness and death? I guess if you owned a small business or restaurant and the rules caused it to tank, recognizing that your pain had saved the lives of people you don’t know is asking a lot. Still…

  • Humans on planet Earth occupy vastly different natural, economic and cultural environments. The contrast between the native populations with whom we interacted in French Polynesia and Tonga, for example, and those who live in Australia and New Zealand was striking, and confirmed to me how much of individual well-being is  shaped by the institutions of a given culture and society.

I think particularly of the young man who drove us around in Uturoa. He spoke at least two languages–his own and English (and perhaps others), and shared that in addition to providing tours to visitors, he had established a small business exporting fruit and vegetables. He was clearly ambitious, hard-working and entrepreneurial, but it was also clear that what he will be able to accomplish will be limited by the extent of local dependence on tourism, by  the widespread, obvious poverty, and by the lack of a supportive economic infrastructure.

  • On a cruise and far from home, the news takes on a more detached quality. As we have heard heart-rending stories about the hostages, about Gaza and the continued travesty in Ukraine, and been treated to daily reports chronicling the chaos, stupidity and mean-spirited activity that passes for politics in the U.S. these days, it’s hard not to be depressed about the world our grandchildren will have to negotiate. I alternate between hoping that we can emerge from all the craziness and despairing that humanity is headed for another Dark Ages…

Most of all, a trip of this sort reminds me how very fortunate my husband and I have been. We may have missed Thanksgiving with our extended family, but my husband and I absolutely haven’t forgotten to be grateful for having been born in a time and at a place that allowed us to fashion a good life. I just want that same good life for my grandchildren– and for everyone else’s children and grandchildren.

A ship took us to an incredibly beautiful part of the world. Next year, I hope Americans will vote to keep another ship– the ship of state– in the hands of an equally sane, competent captain who can steer us into calmer waters.

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The ReThink Project

I used to defend Indiana’s slow progress by pointing out that allowing other states to innovate and then seeing what worked and what didn’t was prudent. What happened in State X after it did thus-and-so, and what can we learn about the best way to handle thus-and-so?

Unfortunately, that justification too often mistakes stubborn resistance to change for prudence.

That bureaucratic refusal to consider past error was especially annoying in the initial effort to get the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) to rethink its automatic approach to repairing the Interstate highways that divide the city’s downtown.

As I have previously written, it was inarguable that at the 50-year mark (which we hit a few years back),those interstates required  extensive repairs. A group of downtown residents, businesses, architects and landscape architects formed a group they called “ReThink I69/70” and urged INDOT to “rethink” the design of those highways and to mitigate, where possible, the problems they’d created when they were first rammed through the city’s Black and historic neighborhoods.

The racism reflected in the siting of the nation’s Interstate system has been widely documented, and the Biden Administration is confronting the damage.

The interstate system — largely built between the 1950s and 1970s — helped move Americans in large numbers and at high speeds, but its creation required a lot of destruction. History.com reports that “more than 475,000 households and more than a million people were displaced nationwide” due to federal highway construction. “Hulking highways cut through neighborhoods, darkened and disrupted the pedestrian landscape, worsened air quality, and torpedoed property values.”

That damage was largely inflicted in Black and Latino neighborhoods. That wasn’t an accident. At Yale Law Journal, Sarah Schindler writes that the “placement of highways so as to intentionally displace poor black neighborhoods” was commonplace in places like New York, Miami, Omaha, Oakland, and many other American cities. “Although this work was undertaken in order to make places more accessible to cars,” she adds, “it was also done with an eye towards eliminating alleged slums and blight in city centers.”

Knocking down poor neighborhoods to make room for commuter highways was inherently racist, the Los Angeles Times adds: “Highway builders often defended taking property in Black neighborhoods by arguing the land was cheapest there — a fact that relied on government-backed mortgage redlining policies that discouraged investment in Black areas.” Sometimes the harmful intent was more overt, Reuters reports. In Montgomery, Alabama, the state routed Interstate 85 “through a neighborhood where many Black civil rights leaders lived, rather than choosing an alternate route on vacant land.”

The need to address structural problems in our aging roadways gave Indianapolis a rare opportunity to address the problems created by those initial decisions. The ReThink group argued that  thoughtful revamping could improve traffic flow and restore community connectivity and walkability. It could also spur economic development that would significantly add to the city’s tax base–nothing to sneeze at, given our fiscal constraints. It is rare that a city gets such an opportunity.

The initial response of INDOT was to ignore and dismiss the alternatives promoted by the ReThink coalition. It took considerable time and effort to get the agency just to back off its initial plans to add lanes to the current configurations,  consuming more real estate and increasing the divisions between neighborhoods. By the time the coalition had generated enough attention and support for redesign, the northeast section of Indiana’s Inner Loop was already being reconstructed–in place, but thankfully, without the additional lanes and concrete walls.

The remaining work, however, may benefit from the persistence of the ReThink coalition and  the Biden Administration’s emphasis on the need to address the mistakes (and animus) of the past

Today Mayor Joe Hogsett, Congressman André Carson, Rethink Coalition, and the Indy Chamber announced a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT). The award will fund a planning study around the southeast leg of the I-65/I-70 Downtown Inner Loop near the Fletcher Place and Fountain Square neighborhoods, examining how to create more livable, reconnected communities around the interstate while maintaining interstate commerce and regional travel.

“This federally funded study will help guide our community as it looks at ways we can reunite neighborhoods divided by the original interstate program,” said Mayor Joe Hogsett. “Thanks to USDOT, INDOT, and our community partners, this announcement begins a process that could have lasting benefit for generations of Indianapolis residents.”

There’s a broader lesson here. Citizens who are sufficiently aroused can move lawmakers and bureaucrats.

Chinese citizens forced changes to their government’s  COVID rules. Iranians are protesting their government’s “morality police.” Israeli citizens are opposing Netanyahu.

Margaret Mead said it best : Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
 

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Defining Infrastructure

A few days ago, Talking Points Memo ran a story about Republicans’ assault on Biden’s infrastructure bill. That bill is extremely popular, even with the GOP base, so the party’s determination to oppose it had to be something other than “hell no, don’t fill those chuckholes or reinforce the electrical grid…”

According to the story, they’ve chosen to defend their opposition by arguing that the bill improperly defines the term “infrastructure.”

“You look at this bill, the $2 trillion in the bill that, only about 5 to 7 percent of it is actual roads and bridges and ports and things that you and I would say is real infrastructure and that we tried to get passed under the last administration with President Trump,” former Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought said recently on Fox News radio. 

That statistic is particularly misleading, as it doesn’t count even things like rail and water systems — improvements that fall into the traditional infrastructure bucket. 

Republicans charge that expenditures for broadband and green energy, among other provisions of the bill, aren’t infrastructure.

That argument prompted me to look at some of the academic literature. It turns out that there aren’t many publications dealing with the definition of infrastructure, although there’s more than I ever imagined on the economics involved–the returns on investment, the pros and cons of “public-private partnerships,” and various aspects of construction. But there was some, and it was enlightening.

For example, a number of scholars use the term “social overhead capital.” It evidently grew out of  Samuelson’s theory of public goods; Samuelson understood infrastructure to be  investments by the state that are a precondition for the successful development of the private sector– the basic services without which primary, secondary and tertiary types of production activities cannot function.

In other words, infrastructure is a support system, a floor built by government, that allows businesses and individuals to be productive. That certainly includes roads, bridges, and other elements of our transportation requirements. It also includes technology we need in order to communicate–hence broadband–and the need to keep the lights on–hence the electrical grid. It rather obviously includes water and sewers.

But these days, what constitutes that supportive floor has also come to include social infrastructure–services as well as brick and mortar assets. Social infrastructure includes educational institutions, libraries, parks…It definitely includes police and fire protection, courts of law, garbage collection and other municipal services.  In saner countries, it includes healthcare and a menu of social services.

Effective government is a mechanism through which we provide a network of support that allows individual citizens to prosper. That network of support is Infrastructure and it isn’t  something the market can supply. Using government to provide foundational systems and services is simply the process of doing collectively what we cannot do individually. 

In that literature I consulted, there was ample evidence that physical infrastructure is required if business and the economy are to thrive, and a substantial amount of emerging evidence that social infrastructure is equally necessary to support and empower individuals and families.

Biden’s American Jobs Plan would invest $400 billion in the caregiving economy; $137 billion in schools, early learning centers, and community colleges; $111 billion in clean drinking water; and $621 billion in various transportation projects. All of those investments are part of a supportive network that will pay dividends by enabling more Americans to live productive lives.

That supportive network is certainly infrastructure.

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