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Comment by loudmax | Hacker News Reader

The article lays out a lot of the problems with American projects, but doesn't do much to explain why European projects are able to manage a better track record. Are their unions weaker, or are their goals better aligned with the projects?

Also the article suggests eliminating National Environmental Policy Act(NEPA) provisions as a way of cutting red tape. I don't doubt that there's a lot of NEPA that ought to be revised, but we need to remember why these provisions were created in the first place. If we eliminate environmental impact studies rather than come up with a more efficient way to conduct them, we should expect that megaprojects will have unforseen environmental impacts. In some cases, local species will be driven to extinction, and in other cases the long term health of nearby people may be compromised. These risks may be worth the payoff, but we should be upfront about these risks and who could be affected.

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From the article: "A common retort to the claim that union labor drives up costs is that other countries, especially in Europe, have both high union participation and lower project costs. But it is widely recognized in the industry that unions increase project labor costs by 20 to 25 percent on average in the U.S."

The article spends alot of steam making an argument that unions drive up costs, then proffers data that shows it's not a solid argument, then just kind of waives it away by saying their argument is "widely recognized" to be true.

This article is idealogical drivel published by Peter Thiel.

Yes, that section you quoted seemed strangely incoherent.

Looked up the "published by Peter Thiel" to check, and found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835570.

It's not hard evidence that Thiel publishes or funds the project, though.

Yep, I reached that point and went "Okay, so regulation bad, considering environmental impacts bad, unions bad, I can see where this is going".

part of it is probably that some things that US unions have to fight for are protected by law in europe. as far as i know at will employment doesn't exist in europe for example. i hear in france it is almost impossible to fire anyone at all.

in germany every company with more than 50 employees has to form a workers council that gets a say in how certain things are done in the company. they deal with things like work conditions, safety, office benefits (do we want a rec-room or better food in the cantine?) without any union needed to step in. that reduces unions to negotiating collective pay and related questions like reducing work-hours or other topics that are relevant for a whole industry, not just one company.

i also believe a german union would have a hard time to force a company to hire people that are not needed for a project or even influence who the company can hire.

but apart from that, even in europe not all projects go well. politicians that try to profile themselves by attracting large projects, missmanagement, are not uncommon either.

as the article says, for example germany has similar problems. like the Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link between germany and denmark. denmark ratified the plans in 2015. germany took 5 years longer. local communities, a few shipping companies and individuals sued to stop the project. one documentary made the joke that a project that gets done in denmark in a year, takes a decade in germany.

The article specifically points out that Germany has similar regulatory and cost overrun challenges, so in general it can't be used as a counterpoint - the example case where things went well for Germany is attributed to waiving procedural requirements mandated by the EU.

Even when with guaranteed EU protections, the system can be inefficient.

you are right, i have reworded my comment to acknowledge that

> I also believe a german union would have a hard time to force a company to hire people that are not needed for a project or even influence who the company can hire.

A German union has to make sure that it doesn't negotiate anyone into uncompetitiveness. If you negotiate for too high a pay, or absurd things like useless jobs, the company gets outcompeted and all those jobs vanish. In the US some unions seem to get around that by either being big enough to cover enough companies (construction), or the companies themselves are local monopolies (e.g. railway). That doesn't work for most European projects because Unions usually don't span borders, but you can always get a construction company from anywhere else in the EU.

I wonder with NEPA if we could do “existing negative impact” studies, i.e. if this is not built, how will the environment be affected? And if the answer is “on net the status quo is worse environmentally” then permitting can proceed without further in depth reviews required for each sub-component. Like high speed electric trains should be extremely easy to pass: they remove car and plane traffic, so even if they hurt some local environments in the process of being built, the net result is better than the status quo so those micro problems are considered outweighed by the macro, unless someone can prove otherwise.

Expanding on this, private groups should be allowed to fund neutral third parties who act similarly to land surveyors: they can provide impact studies for projects the government has not planned. If the status quo is worse for the environment and more expensive to maintain, these “impact study libraries” could provide off-the-shelf projects that wouldn’t need extra regulatory approval. Advocacy groups, like say Extinction Rebellion, could reasonably fund “status quo” analyses for carbon-intensive infrastructure vs reasonable alternatives (mass transit, HSR, road diets, etc).

I think this is an interesting idea, though I suspect "on net the status quo is worse environmentally" is a hard question to answer w/o the aforementioned in-depth reviews (at least to an extent; obviously the current system has problems).

I tend to agree with your notion of negative impact studies. We tend to favor the status quo, even if the status quo isn't sustainable in the long run.

I do have concerns about private groups bringing in third parties. In practice, these third parties would have incentives to produce whatever results please the organization that hired them. It'ss tricky to arrange conditions such that these third parties are truly neutral.

US unions are uniquely dysfunctional.

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