The leadership class in America holds infrastructure investments in such high regard that the overwhelming benefit from new growth is simply assumed. It’s a foundational belief not open to serious examination.

Modern development, where the public sector leads and everything is built to a finished state, is a bad party. When someone buys that new house on the cul-de-sac, they don’t want more development around them. To the contrary; new development merely means more traffic, more people using the park, more taxes.

Complex, adaptive systems learn through destruction. It’s not survival of the fittest – a phrase often misattributed to Charles Darwin – but rather, survival of the most adaptable. The fittest in one time and place may be at a fatal disadvantage in another. It’s those who can survive in both that have the opportunity to flourish.

Earlier in this chapter, I described the value of taking small steps in the dark and the dangers of large leaps. There is an important variation on that story that applies to situations where many people are leaping simultaneously.

What would it mean to break out of the Infrastructure Cult and make capital investments that had a real return on investment? First and foremost, it would require us to spend public money on infrastructure projects that covered their own costs, not only today but indefinitely into the future.

In our new experimental living pattern, feedback and adaptation have become meaningless. We do not perceive any need for our human habitat to harmoniously balance multiple things simultaneously. Why would we when we can just go ahead and use our resources to solve problems as we become aware of them?

something viscerally satisfying in blaming the morally compromised politician who can bring home the pork-barrel project. Yet, this answer also felt incomplete. I worked with a lot of politicians, and a lot of other professionals, and while few would pass up an opportunity for self-congratulation, I never got the sense that was the motivation. Ther

that’s not how infrastructure works. The generally accepted accounting practices for municipalities counts infrastructure as an asset, not a liability. There is no accounting of the tax base or the revenue from the community’s wealth; it’s simply ignored. With this approach, the more roads a city has, the more pipes in the ground, the more public b

If that seems a little too authoritarian, understand that this is how most of the United States was originally built. Only, it wasn’t government; it was trading monopolies and railroad companies. For the latter, the railroad would acquire land for a town where they intended to put a train stop. As they developed the rail line, they would sell the l