them: Taber why are you trying to make good farming happen in the South, that sounds like an amazing way to piss away your life & get your house burned down

me: *looks at California water issues, raises a cigarette with a hand too jittery to connect to mouth* https://twitter.com/tressiemcphd/status/1328475420510064640

Should we talk about WHY we keep building infrastructure & not maintaining it?

The obvious answer is "because maintenance is boring & costs money." But it's also a little more complicated than that.

time for the Game Theory of Power, kids

You get power by collecting resources & distributing them to your supporters. Full stop.

In a fully-functioning democracy, where you need a LOT of supporters to be in power, this means public goods like education, healthcare, libraries, etc ... and infrastructure.

Autocracies, though, are characterized by having a lot of inequality & a small number of very powerful people you need to keep happy.

This could be as little as a few generals & oligarchs.

Of course, democracy & autocracy aren't an either/or. It's more like a spectrum.

So you could wind up with, for example, a core support base that's disproportionately rural landowners

who have disproportionately high power thanks to gerrymandering & the electoral college.

In such a case, you can get a lot of political mileage from rewarding a comparably small # of people compared to US population as a whole: 2-3M farmers.

That's why they've gotten $60B in "aid" payments in the last 3 years.

Collect resources, redistribute them to supporters.

Anyway, back to infrastructure.

One of the most important things about distributing money/other resources to supporters is it has to be TIME-LIMITED.

You can't just give people a steady long-term budget. Then they wouldn't need you anymore!

You gotta send cronies money, but you gotta do it in a way that keeps them coming back to you. Big, sporadic payouts. Not steady, predictable, long-term ones.

This means *building* infrastructure is ideal for patronage. Lots of opportunities to give out big, limited contracts.

It also means *maintaining* infrastructure is patronage kryptonite. A small, steady cadre of people who have to be paid regularly?? for just doing work???

It's pretty common knowledge that infrastructure projects are closely connected with pork barrel politics.

See every "bridge to nowhere" project.

But I don't know that we fully process how graft IS the purpose of a lot of infrastructure. Once it's built, its real job is done.

There's literally no political upside to budgeting for maintenance in most US jurisdictions.

That's why we don't maintain infrastructure.

As far as what to do about it, you got me there. Sorry I don't have a 280-character to a solution that the United States has failed to solve for over a century.

Even in a fully-functioning democracy I'm not totally optimistic about the general public wanting to budget for maintenance

until there's multiple, grisly failures in short succession.

IME risk just isn't real for most people until they see carnage in front of them. : /

But knowing the underlying source of failure to maintain infrastructure ("maintenance has no place in our political system")

helps us do better at exploring ways to fix it, I think.

Just saying "we need to do maintenance!" is not effective.

Publicizing the problem does nothing about the fact that under our current political system, budgeting for maintenance is career suicide.

Whereas reinforcing democratic norms & institutions make budgeting for maintenance less risky.

If we have multiple horrific infrastructure failures under an autocratic political system, guess what? It won't lead to maintenance & repair. Autocracies straight-up don't value their own subjects' lives.

Witness the current pandemic.

Whereas in a high-functioning democracy, even if people don't see the need for maintenance BEFORE failures occur

at least afterwards, they get it. There's actual political will with teeth behind it and a likelihood of action being taken.

Reinforcing democracy can be especially challenging at the county/municipal level, where turnout for local elections is so low that a nominally democratic system is effectively an oligarchy of a few hundred or few thousand voters.

Anyway, that's a thread about the game theory behind shitty infrastructure maintenance.

If you loved/hated it, check out The Dictator's Handbook. Yes the title is scary. And yes it makes the current moment, and what to do about it, a lot more legible.

this is why @tressiemcphd said "never talk to infrastructure people" innit