Adumbration

Science Friday exposes another example of capital consumption on a recent episode concerning the health of bridges around the United States.  Similar to water distribution and management infrastructure, most roadways and their bridges are owned and operated by government agencies, typically state governments.

It's a similar story - politics first drives government to spend huge amounts of money on transportation infrastructure.  In other words, the process extracts resources from the community at large, taking those resources from what purposes the people had currently applied or planned for them, and dedicates them instead to goods and services that benefit a fraction of that population. 

The political cover story is that these things benefit "all of us", but it is more accurate to say that the benefit is entirely unbalanced - that there are some people who are very much advantaged by the arrangement.  For road and bridge construction the main beneficiaries include owners and workers of construction companies, while others who are actively harmed include the owners and workers for railroads who now face subsidized competition with trucking companies (themselves among the other primary beneficiaries).  Inter-regionally, there are not many people in Seattle who actively benefit by Boston's "Big Dig", while people in Huntsville Alabama are paying for a tunnel under Seattle to replace the earthquake-damaged viaduct.

To be clear, I love roads and bridges.  I love driving.  Some of my earliest memories are about high bridges spanning great rivers.  I have some small appreciation of the details that go in to their design and construction, and while I am not deeply on the inside of the profession I understand that design is based on expected loads under all sorts of environmental conditions, and that keeping the system operational requires periodic inspection and maintenance.

The same is true in all other industries.  The person who cuts my hair keeps her shears sharpened; we replace the oil in our cars; the local brewery keeps their filters clean; people who run factories are constantly monitoring the assembly line; manufacturers require regular measurement calibration.  People don't need to be told to do this; the effect of not doing so is obvious enough when things break and production stops.  If you don't learn these lessons your customers go elsewhere, and history is replete with companies that go out of business for failing to take such matters into consideration.

Which brings me back to capital consumption.  For roads and bridges, the insiders see how serious the problem is, but political forces hold the purse strings.  The political forces think there is a savings by not maintaining these systems, and the especially perverse outcome is that even more must be spent to effect repairs when there eventually is a failure.  Which re-starts the cycle of the community at large being forced to pay for goods that primarily benefit a relative few.

I must credit one of the guests in this program making the observation that limited budgets and already high taxes are leading in some measure to such projects being funded with tolls, which tends to bring at least some of the costs more directly into the responsibility of users.