Decaying infrastructure and “cost disease”

If you read a lot of news articles, then surely you’ve read about the problem of decaying infrastructure. For example, there’s this article at the New Yorker.

From the crumbling bridges of California to the overflowing sewage drains of Houston and the rusting railroad tracks in the Northeast Corridor, decaying infrastructure is all around us, and the consequences are so familiar that we barely notice them—like urban traffic congestion, slow-moving trains, and flights that are often disrupted, thanks to an outdated air-traffic-control system. The costs are significant, once you reckon wasted time, lost productivity, poor public-health outcomes, and increased carbon emissions.

While the author of that article blames “politics” and “complacency,” he completely ignores the real culprit, which is cost disease (as I blogged about yesterday).

It seems to me that what’s really going on is that civil engineering projects are ten times as expensive (in real inflation-adjusted dollars) compared to the 1930s. Therefore, infrastructure that was built a long time ago, and is now nearing its end of life, is ten times as expensive to replace than what it originally cost to build, because of cost disease. This means that either we can’t afford to repair/replace our infrastructure, or we can only afford it by making sacrifices in the form of significantly higher taxes and/or significantly reduced government spending on other desirable things.

Decaying infrastructure is the natural result of severe cost disease.

If cost disease continues, and the cost of civil engineering projects double again, then we can expect a very dystopian future.