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Comment by awillen | Hacker News Reader

If only there were some precedent we could look to where huge numbers of people were out of work and the government killed two birds with one stone by employing a lot of them on major infrastructure projects. And what if those infrastructure projects, like improvements to roads, bridges and national parks, were largely outside and thus relatively safe even in today's climate of Covid-19.

It seems like we might go into a depression... if only that had happened before and we could draw on those experiences instead of dithering and arguing while people can't pay their bills.

Dare to dream, am I right?

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Yeah, great precedent of big government intervention in the economy: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/526655831

> The Public Works Administration program and housing was primarily designed to provide housing to white middle-class/lower-middle class families. The progressive aspect of it was that some projects were built for African-Americans as well. But it was explicitly segregated. And in many cases, it segregated neighborhoods that had never known segregation before. So this went on throughout the country. Of the...

> ROTHSTEIN: The second major one was the Federal Housing Administration, which was established in 1934, the year after the Public Works Administration. And the Federal Housing Administration is well known today by many people as an agency that would not insure mortgages for African-Americans. It redlined communities. That was a minor part of what the federal government - what the FHA did in order to segregate metropolitan areas.

That was nearly 90 years ago.

Redlining was made illegal under federal law - i.e. by the government - in the 70s, not least because the private sector had absolutely no interest in doing anything to stop it.

> That was nearly 90 years ago.

Did government bureaucrats micro-managing the economy stop being racist in that time?

> Redlining was made illegal under federal law - i.e. by the government - in the 70s, not least because the private sector had absolutely no interest in doing anything to stop it.

Redlining was invented by the government! The term refers to markings on FHA maps. The FHA massively distorted the mortgage market by insuring mortgages, but refusing to insure mortgages in Black neighborhoods. That made such mortgages vastly riskier for private sector lenders.

Okay, call me naive but would we rather the government have done nothing? I understand racism still exists but you can't act like we haven't made any progress. Could you imagine the protests if segregation or something akin to it started now? I understand horrific actions have been made in the past, I understand there are still bad people in the government. Should we let that prevent us from doing anything to help people? What about people who die of hunger or homelessness? Millions and millions of Americans are in extremely difficult positions right now, my parents included. Should we tell those people we don't even want to try because we're scared of something that happened 90 years ago? Can't we progress? Can't we be better? We certainly can't if we never even give ourselves the chance.

> Okay, call me naive but would we rather the government have done nothing? I understand racism still exists but you can't act like we haven't made any progress.

The Black-white income and wealth gaps are as large today as they were in the 1960s: https://images.app.goo.gl/s1YD3sxKeuG289GfA. While the reasons for that are complex, New Deal programs that redlined African Americans, strengthened unions that excluded them, introduced segregation through the WPA into northern cities that hasn’t been segregated before, etc., played a significant role.

I’m not objecting to the government doing things. My objection is to OP’s invocation of the New Deal as the template for action. Last time we tried empowering white central planners to construct housing and infrastructure, they played out their prejudices in their decisionmaking to the detriment of non-white people.

There’s lots of things you can do that aren’t in the New Deal model. For example, if you’re worried about homelessness, instead of having the government build public housing (the New Deal approach) you can give people money to buy housing (the Nixon-Ford Section 8 voucher model). That’s what the government is doing now. It’s just giving people money and stabilizing the economy. (That’s also what every OECD country is doing.) It’s a better approach.

Sure, there were absolutely problems (though bear in mind you're addressing one program - there was also the TVA, CCC, and a bunch of others I could've told you off the top of my head when I was in US history in high school), but the point is it put unemployed people to work and helped stem the damage to the economy.

It's the best precedent we have for the situation we're in today, and it's silly to act as though it's not useful to draw on it now because it had problems. They're problems that are easily fixable, after all - it's very possible for us to create programs today that have similar positive effects on employment and the economy and just do them without the racism.

It's very easy to find fault with anything in history, but if that's all you try to do, you're going to miss out on a lot of really useful information.

> They're problems that are easily fixable, after all - it's very possible for us to create programs today that have similar positive effects on employment and the economy and just do them without the racism.

I disagree. The racism was a manifestation of the problems critics of the New Deal have with it: when you put government bureaucrats in charge of building things and running the economy, they inject their own biases and shortsightedness into the projects. We wouldn’t be building overtly racially segregated public housing today, but our bureaucrats still have plenty of biases to inject into their projects. (Listen to the podcast “Nice White Parents” for a good primer on how things like special language programs in schools become a way for wealthy, liberal, white parents to secure special resources in public schools for their kids specifically. Those are the same people that would be in charge of these New Deal 2.0 programs. E.g. you spend money for transit, and you have college educated white people spend billions building heavy rail through neighborhoods low income people can’t afford to live in, instead of shoring up the bus systems the overwhelming number of needy people actually use.)

The New Deal isn’t the only precedent we have. Look around at the world: everyone is doing basically the same thing we are. Bailing out airlines, providing increased unemployment benefits or payroll protection funds, etc. Instead of big, centrally planned projects, you inject money into the economy in a broad-based way with minimal bureaucratic discretion.

We've been injecting money into the economy in a broad-based way through PPP. It didn't turn out especially well, a lot of it went to large companies that didn't need it, and small businesses (largely restaurants) are going bankrupt in enormous numbers because it didn't help them sufficiently.

You're arguing that a New Deal-esque program is going to be problematic because it's inherently going to have issues in execution, but you're suggesting a solution that there's absolutely no reason to believe won't have issues in execution.

Problem is most unemployed people don't have the specialized skill set to contribute to these projects and those that do aren't unemployed. The unskilled labor these projects require has mostly been automated over the last 100 years by robotic tools like excavators.

Basically every problem we used to be able to throw manpower at now has similar automation and the same sorts of projects would now be done by far fewer people. Any modern new deal would have to look very different to the old one.

I won't even pretend to know enough about construction/infrastructure to know what's required to work on it, but there have got to be jobs that can be created that don't require technical skills. I've been reading that lots of people are now going to national parks because other stuff is closed, and they're leaving lots of trash - hire people to pick it up. Roads have potholes, and I can't believe that fixing those requires that specialized of a skill set.

And even for some of the things that are most efficiently solved with specialized skills and equipment, if there's a way to do them less efficiently by unskilled people, that's fine, since overspending on labor is totally fine if not desirable in this context.

> I can't believe that fixing those requires that specialized of a skill set.

No but it does require manual labor and a lot of people consider it beneath them these days to do that. Couple it with many people getting paid more to be on unemployment than they made while working and its a recipe for laziness.

So where are all the automatic bridge-building machines? Isn’t our bridge infrastructure famously poor?

Right. The automation nuts are wildly disconnected with reality.

Of course there's no single bridge building machine, but most of the work in bridge building is done by a collection of machines, usually with human specialists operating them. It's not the 1920's and most digging is done by an excavator instead of a human with a shovel, most cement is delivered by a truck humans mixing it onsite. As much as possible will also be prefab.

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