In the Shack with Robert Caro

That's what I expected going in, but one thing the book really opened my eyes to is how much red tape makes it impossible to build even "popular" projects legally. Until Robert Moses started building highways, many of his early public park projects were not only popular, but projects that people had wanted to do for decades, but it was impossible to get them done.

You basically need three things to build a public works project: 1. The engineering design 2. The money 3. The political will

And 1. is basically the easiest of the three, by far. For 2., Robert Moses was good at finding and selling projects to sponsors, especially when the federal government started funding public works. One of the most exciting chapters of the book is how he goes from zero funding for a particular highway to getting the full amount, purely by pitching the project to enough sponsors.

For 3., the hardest part was that anyone who owned an inch of land where a project would go had a veto, and they often did. Here Robert Moses gleefully embraced a lot of "corrupt" practices: graft in order to convince people to sell him the land, buying corrupt judges to rule in favor of Moses for the people who couldn't be convinced with graft, and aggressively writing and passing sneakily-worded legislation that gave him the freedom to get stuff done.

This book is pretty eye opening because of that third part. Robert Caro certainly goes out of his way to paint Moses as a bad guy, and certainly all the above practices are "bad" because they break the rules, but you kind of come away from the fact that if he didn't commit those crimes, he and his department would have simply collected a paycheck for their whole lives while accomplishing nothing. And the corruption Robert Moses practiced was definitely of a different kind than the Tammany Hall men before him, who really did just create government jobs for political patronage with no intent of accomplishing anything. It was different because he used it to build something.

You look at projects like the California High Speed rail, where the project appears to be an unending money pit and wonder why there isn't a Robert Moses who could ram it through at much lower cost.

Now unfortunately, some of the things that Robert Moses is disliked for were precisely because he became a freight train of getting people out of the way so that things could get built, to the point where no one could stop him even if the idea really was bad. But why do we need such a freight train to do public works?

It's not that black-and-white. Notwithstanding Moses' ruthlessness and whether some changes were for the worse, the book does not paint the past as rosy, pristine and superior. There are also many figures highlighted, each appearing dynamic and full of character with their own interests. It becomes a kind of general history book in a way, with Moses at the center of it.

Can you jerry-rig something to code on it?