Well that was disappointing. I thought he was on to something regarding projects being difficult to complete because of the common law system. But nope, it's the unions! Please...
As Mary Poppendieck explains, the Empire State Building was built on schedule and under budget in 18 months. When they started work on the bottom floors, they hadn't even finished designing the top floors. But that was fine, because they were working in a flow-oriented approach:
https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of...
(It's also covered in one of her books, and I think it's "Leading Lean Software Development".)
As we know with software, big up-front design approaches can get unnecessarily long, confusing, and expensive. (See, for example, the healthcare.gov fiasco.) But we also know that approaches that optimize for cost- and time-effectiveness can work much better. (See, for example, Lean Startup methods or the healthcare.gov rescue.) We haven't really learned the lesson in software yet, so I can't blame people for not rediscovering it in other spaces yet. But I hope one day they will!
"...Others have argued that labor laws governing infrastructure projects drive up costs. Gordon and Schleicher are dubious of that as an explanation for why the U.S. has higher costs than other countries, though, because “American laws would have to be tougher than those in Europe, where trade unions are much more powerful. (France, anyone?)” ..."
My limited understanding of US unions was that the ones which augured companies into the ground had a toxic, dysfunctional, non-communicative relationship with company management. Even when the company management was sharing and showing them the books and the mathematical certainty of everything shutting down if changes weren't made, the unions thought the company management was pulling the wool over their eyes. So they decided to call what they felt was company management's bluff, and called it wrong.
I've never felt comfortable with the narrative that these particular US unions were so short-sighted they would cut their noses off to spite their face; that doesn't fit the prior narrative of the enormous amount of diligent, persistent work it took to organize in the first place. I'm more inclined to believe the narrative that there was such an antagonistic, distrustful, hostile atmosphere in those meetings that union and company management were together as doomed as a Greek tragedy.
Any US union history buffs out there care to clarify what the current thoughts are here on what really happened?
From that history, American Unions have almost always believed that the government and the business owners were out to get them. Also, because the Southern American states have historically been the most anti-union, American corporations have had a much easier time moving from union friendly areas to anti-union areas then European companies.
So, overall union-business relationships in the USA are much much worse then in Germany. American businesses routinely make decisions solely to hurt unions (a good modern example is Boeing which is moving production from Washington to North Carolina, a large part of which is about weakening the union, even though this has made logistics harder), American unions think of management as the deadly enemy.
I think a model more like Germany's where Unions and Businesses tend to work together would be overall much better for both sides, but we're stuck in the current system. It's also not helped that now there is a strong political anti-union movement no matter what the situation (like when Volkswagen wanted to unionize their plant in Kentucky in order to practice business on a more German model local politicians and businesses were strongly opposed even though the actual managers wanted it).
It would even be beneficial to let small business owners unionize against larger companies.
Imagine how much the economy and small business owners, say gas station owners, could benefit if they all unionized and could collectively bargain against Shell, and could collectively set the wage/prices they sell gas.
One can dream...
because you've basically just described what they call a "trust" when they make antitrust legislation.
(Alternatively, you've described the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, later found unconstitutional - leading to FDR's infamous court-packing attempt - and considered by a little under half of economists to have been a major contributing factor which prolonged the Great Depression.)
Getting more power to ordinary workers is laudable when it comes at the expense of the power of their large-corporation employers... not if it comes at the expense of everyone else in the economy.
Really, though, infrastructure stuff is neat, and we probably should start fixing it up. The main problem is the size of the US infrastructure is outstandingly staggering. There's an article [0] that's an argument for pouring money back into the highway funds (and the like), and the cash involved is worse than astronomical. At the very least, I didn't know there were over 600000 bridges in the US... I honestly don't know where we put them all. (Are overpasses included?)
[0] http://www.budget.senate.gov/democratic/public/index.cfm/rep... I don't go to senate.gov much, so I'm guessing this is pretty partisan, but there's a crapton of followup links that are at least interesting.
It put in perspective for me how expensive bridges really are. They couldn't afford to build one, crucial bridge. It took a major super power to do it.
Your 80s bridge survived the '92 quake, assuming you saw it after '92 of course. That was a biggie.
Earthquake proof bridges are no joke to build.
I don't think it's particularly effective to go about judging costs by a banana-republic Communist dictatorship which went and deliberately destroyed its economy (+) and replaced it with one controlled by Party loyalists. It's just not a particularly effective way to make anything happen at all: it focuses on getting adequate wealth and substantial power to the people on the top, and doesn't care much care about things on the bottom except as necessary to keep the peace.
If you go judging things by that standard, you could equally say that it puts in perspective just how expensive food is, because when the USSR pulled its support, Cuba came perilously close to starvation. Or housing - have you seen central Havana? That's not even a matter of building, just basic maintenance...
(+) Destroyed its economy in part to rid itself of Mafia infiltration from the Batista regime's days, which may have been a reasonable thing... if they'd left things in a free state instead of just replacing it with another little oligarchy.
The difference between that project and the bridge in Cuba is more likely expertise. After the revolution loads of finances, academics, engineers, and doctors left the country. Cuba has plenty of medical expertise, so much so that outside of US and Canada, they are the developing countries' hospital. But I don't think anyone is going to them for civil construction projects. They just don't have that expertise.
FWIW, I do think the US as a whole should be concerned with (subway) infrastructure that's crucial to the basic functioning of cities that are the biggest drivers of its economy. (NYC simply has too many people to move to rely on surface traffic.)
And I think the neglect of the subways is representative of the general neglect of important infrastructure. Though some of the causes of high maintenance/repair/expansion costs differ, others are exactly the same.
Personally, I would have figured a majority would have been rural (since there's just so much rural land area). I hadn't realized it was so sparse.