Report Card for America’s Infrastructure

pages: 300 words: 78,475

Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream by Arianna Huffington

Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 13, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, call centre, carried interest, citizen journalism, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, do what you love, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, invisible hand, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, post-work, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, smart grid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Works Progress Administration

PART 3: AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL DILAPIDATED 1 George Washington knew that: Robert Fishman, “Beyond Motor City, 1808–1908–2008: National Planning for America,” 23 Jan. 2010, www.america2050.org. 2 The nation’s overall infrastructure grade: American Society of Civil Engineers, 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, www.infrastructurereportcard.org. 3 downward trend since 2005: American Society of Civil Engineers, 2005 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, www.asce.org. 4 “It’s the kind of report card you …”: Katherine Harmon, “U.S. Infrastructure Crumbling,” 28 Jan. 2009, www.scientificamerican.com. 5 According to the ASCE: American Society of Civil Engineers, 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, www.infrastructurereportcard.org. 6 But we’ve only budgeted $975 billion: Ibid. 7 America’s population is expected to reach: Jeffrey Passel and D’Vera Cohn, “Immigration to Play Lead Role in Future U.S.

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2 Aug. 2007, http://minnesota.publicradio.org. 73 On March 16, 2006, the Ka Loko Dam in Kilauea, Hawaii: Craig Gima, “Ka Loko Settlement Is Reached,” 30 Oct. 2009, www.starbulletin.com. 74 The breach created an ecological disaster: Diane Leone, “State Keeps Eye on Dams,” 16 Mar. 2006, www.starbulletin.com. 75 According to Hawaii congresswoman Mazie Hirono, it was not: Joint Hearing on National Levee and Dam Safety Programs, House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, 8 May 2007. 76 There are more than 85,000 dams in America: American Society of Civil Engineers, 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, www.infrastructurereportcard.org. 77 It would take $12.5 billion over the next five years: Ibid. 78 Plus, of our 85,000 dams, the federal government regulates: Ibid. 79 In 2007, during congressional testimony: Joint Hearing on National Levee and Dam Safety Programs, House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, 8 May 2007. 80 Like any number of agencies charged with protecting: Harry Shearer, “Fixing the Responder, Ignoring the Cause,” 25 Nov. 2008, www.huffingtonpost.com. 81 Instead of fulfilling its responsibility to build: Harry Shearer, “New Orleans: Where Accountability Failed, Liability Follows,” 19 Nov. 2009, www.huffingtonpost.com. 82 The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates: American Society of Civil Engineers, 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, infrastructurereportcard.org. 83 Over the next ten years, there will be a five-hundredfold: “Fixing America’s Crumbling Infrastructure,” Free Enterprise: News and Views from the U.S.

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pages: 219 words: 61,720

American Made: Why Making Things Will Return Us to Greatness by Dan Dimicco

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, California high-speed rail, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, digital divide, driverless car, fear of failure, full employment, Google Glasses, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, manufacturing employment, Neil Armstrong, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

Gerry Smith, “Internet Speed in United States Lags behind Many Countries, Highlighting Global Digital Divide,” Huffington Post, September 10, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/05/internet-speed-united-states-digital-divide_n_1855054.html. 14. “2013 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure,” American Society of Civil Engineers, March 19, 2013, http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/. 15. “Failure to Act: The Impact of Current Infrastructure Investment on America’s Economic Future,” American Society of Civil Engineers, January 15, 2013, http://www.asce.org/uploadedFiles/Infrastructure/Failure_to_Act/Failure_to_Act_Report.pdf. 16. “2013 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure,” American Society of Civil Engineers, March 19, 2013, http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/. 17.

pages: 104 words: 30,990

The Centrist Manifesto by Charles Wheelan

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demand response, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Solyndra, stem cell, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Walter Mischel

Notes 1 New York Times exit polls for 2012 elections, http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/results/president/exit-polls (accessed January 2, 2013). 2 Thomas Friedman, “The Tea Kettle Movement,” New York Times, September 29, 2010. 3 Organisation for Economic Co-operation, “OECD Health Data 2012—Frequently Requested Data,” http://www.oecd.org/els/healthpoliciesanddata/oecdhealthdata2012-frequentlyrequesteddata.htm (accessed January 2, 2013). 4 American Society of Civil Engineers, “Report Card for America’s Infrastructure: 2009 Grades,” http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/ (accessed January 2, 2013). 5 “Life in the Slow Lane,” Economist, April 30, 2011. 6 Tamar Lewin, “Once a Leader, U.S. Now Lags in College Degrees,” New York Times, July 23, 2010. 7 Charles M. Blow, “The G.O.P.’s Abandoned Babies,” New York Times, February 26, 2011. 8 Peter G.

pages: 128 words: 35,958

Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People by Dean Baker, Jared Bernstein

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, collective bargaining, declining real wages, full employment, George Akerlof, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, low interest rates, mass immigration, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Phillips curve, price stability, publication bias, quantitative easing, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rising living standards, selection bias, War on Poverty

References Akerlof, George, William Dickens, and William Perry. 1996. “The Macroeconomics of Low Inflation.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Vol. 1996, No. 1, pp. 1-76. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2534646?uid=3739584&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101919624531 American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). 2013. “2013 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure.” http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/a/#p/home Anderson, Palle and David Gruen. 1995. “Macroeconomic Policies and Growth.” Research Discussion Paper 9507. Sydney: Reserve Bank of Australia. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.200.1174&rep=rep1&type=pdf Appelbaum, Eileen, Thomas Bailey, Peter Berg, and Arne Kalleberg. 2000.

Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin, Ph.D.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, air gap, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apple II, ASML, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, defense in depth, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, GPT-3, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, hallucination problem, helicopter parent, income inequality, industrial robot, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, ransomware, replication crisis, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert X Cringely, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, TaskRabbit, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, US Airways Flight 1549, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, web application, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

There’s that phrase again. Earlier in this book, we looked at what happened when outages in California left people without power and sparked fires. I would prefer to call “deferred maintenance” what it is: infrequent maintenance, or sometimes no maintenance. According to the 2021 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, of the 617,000 bridges across the country, 7.5 percent are considered structurally deficient and 42 percent are as old as the Fern Hollow Bridge, which, almost fifty years old, was not built for that longevity. There is hopeful news: bridge engineers have been developing all kinds of cool materials, such as high-performance concrete and steel, corrosion-resistant reinforcements, and improved coatings.

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A Review of General Anesthesia in Different Animal Models.” Consciousness and Cognition (2016). doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.06.017. Zentall, T. “Jealousy, Competition, or a Contextual Cue for Reward?” Animal Sentience 22, no. 4 (2018). AFTERWORD American Society of Civil Engineers. Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, 2021. https://infrastructurereportcard.org/catitem/bridges. Associated Press. “Review Slated for 5 Bridges Sharing Design of Collapsed Span.” February 2, 2022. Robertson, C., and S. Kasakove. “Pittsburgh Bridge Collapses Hours before Biden Infrastructure Visit.” New York Times, January 28, 2022.

pages: 190 words: 53,409

Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by Robert H. Frank

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, attribution theory, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, experimental subject, framing effect, full employment, Gary Kildall, high-speed rail, hindsight bias, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, invisible hand, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, low interest rates, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Thaler, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, selection bias, side project, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, ultimatum game, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, winner-take-all economy

Gromet, Kimberly A. Hartson, and David K. Sherman, “The Politics of Luck: Political Ideology and the Perceived Relationship between Luck and Success,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 59 (2015): 40–46. CHAPTER 6: THE BURDEN OF FALSE BELIEFS 1. American Society of Civil Engineers, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, 2013, http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org. 2. Donna M. Desrochers and Steven Hurlburt, “Trends in College Spending: 2001–2011; A Delta Data Update,” Delta Cost Project: American Institutes for Research, 2014, www.deltacostproject.org/sites/default/files/products/Delta%20Cost_Trends%20College%20Spending%202001–2011_071414_rev.pdf. 3.

pages: 227 words: 62,177

Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probability and Statistics on Everything You Do by Kaiser Fung

Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andrew Wiles, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, business cycle, call centre, correlation does not imply causation, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, edge city, Emanuel Derman, facts on the ground, financial engineering, fixed income, Gary Taubes, John Snow's cholera map, low interest rates, moral hazard, p-value, pattern recognition, profit motive, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, statistical model, the scientific method, traveling salesman

Downs put forth the provocative thesis that congestion itself is the market’s solution to a problem of mismatched supply and demand. National statistics on commuting were taken from Elisabeth Eaves’s article “America’s Worst Commutes,” published in Forbes. The American Society of Civil Engineers issues an annual Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, which measures road congestion in all fifty states. The engineering community has only recently recognized the importance of managing the reliability (variability) of trip time; see Richard Margiotta’s presentation to the National Transportation Operations Coalition, available online, for the state of the art.

pages: 222 words: 50,318

The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream by Christopher B. Leinberger

addicted to oil, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, big-box store, centre right, commoditize, credit crunch, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, Ford Model T, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Savings and loan crisis, Seaside, Florida, the built environment, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, walkable city, white flight

Go to http://www.cabq.gov/council/impactfees.html for information about the City of Albuquerque impact fee system, which passed in 2003. The author served on the impact fee advisory panel, and the studies backing up the impact fee legislation justified fees that were twice as high as those implemented. 53. American Society of Civil Engineers, “Report Card for America’s Infrastructure,” http://www.asce.org/reportcard/2005/. 54. Congressional Research Service, Report for Congress, “Energy: Selected Facts and Numbers,” November 29, 2006, http://ncseonline.org/NLE/ CRSreports/06Dec/RL31849.pdf. 55. Testimony of Congressman Roscoe Bartlett before Congress on February 8, 2006, http://www.peakoil.net/Publications/PeakOilSpclOrder%2 315TextCharts020806Low.pdf.

pages: 362 words: 83,464

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Bret Swanson, “Zero GDP Reading Exposes the Real Deficit—Economic Growth,” Maximum Entropy, February 1, 2013, http://www.bretswanson.com/index.php/2013/02/zero-gdp-reading-exposes-the-real-deficit-%E2%80%93-economic-growth. 59. Walter Russell Mead et al., “The Blue Model Needs Wall Street to Survive,” American Interest, October 25, 2013, http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2013/10/25/the-blue-model-needs-wall-street-to-survive. 60. American Society of Civil Engineers, “2013 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure,” http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org. 61. Carl DeMaio, “Revoking the Federal Free Pass on Pensions,” Wall Street Journal, February 6, 2013; U.S. Department of the Treasury, “A New Economic Analysis of Infrastructure Investment,” report, March 23, 2012, http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/economic-policy/Documents/20120323InfrastructureReport.pdf. 62.

pages: 254 words: 82,981

A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies by Matt Simon

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, biofilm, carbon footprint, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, Easter island, epigenetics, food desert, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, precautionary principle, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, South China Sea, the built environment

“Occurrence, Identification and Removal of Microplastic Particles and Fibers in Conventional Activated Sludge Process and Advanced MBR Technology.” Water Research 133:236–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2018 .01.049. Simon, Matt. 2021. “People Should Drink Way More Recycled Wastewater.” Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/people-should-drink-way -more-recycled-wastewater/. American Society of Civil Engineers. 2021. “Report Card for America’s Infrastructure: Wastewater.” https://infrastructurereportcard.org/cat -item/wastewater/. Packard, Vance. 2011. The Waste Makers. New York: Ig Publishing. REI. 2022. “What Is Organically Grown Cotton?” https://www.rei .com/learn/expert-advice/organically-grown-cotton.html. Al Jazeera. 2021. “Chile’s Desert Dumping Ground for Fast Fashion Leftovers.” https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/11/8/chiles-desert -dumping-ground-for-fast-fashion-leftovers.

pages: 389 words: 87,758

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

Since the 1970s, global investment as a share of GDP fell from 26.1 percent to a recent low of 20.8 percent in 2002. Total global investment from 1980 through 2008 averaged $700 billion per year less than it would have been had the investment rate of the 1970s persisted—a cumulative sum of $20 trillion. 24. 2013 report card for America’s infrastructure, American Society of Civil Engineers, www.infrastructurereportcard.org. 25. Dobbs et al., Infrastructure productivity. 26. Ibid. 27. Dobbs et al., Farewell to cheap capital? 28. Benedict Clements, Victoria Perry, and Juan Toro, From stimulus to consolidation: Revenue and expenditure policies in advanced and emerging economies, IMF, departmental paper no. 10/3, October 6, 2010, www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/dp/2010/dp1003.pdf. 29.

pages: 324 words: 92,805

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, insecure affluence, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the long tail, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, value engineering, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

Chris Myers, “Conservatism and Campaign Finance Reform: The Two Aren’t Mutually Exclusive,” RedState, April 24, 2012, http://www.redstate.com/clmyers/2013/04/24/conservatism-and-campaign-finance-reform/. 24. David Brooks, “The Opportunity Coalition,” The New York Times, Jan 30, 2014. 25. “2013 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure,” American Society of Civil Engineers, http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/. 26. In Robert Frank, The Darmn Economy: Liberty, Competition, and Common Good. 27. Brooks, “The Opportunity Coalition.” Footnotes Chapter 1 * Traffic fatalities in the 1920s were about seventeen times higher, per mile traveled, than today

pages: 305 words: 89,103

Scarcity: The True Cost of Not Having Enough by Sendhil Mullainathan

American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cognitive load, computer vision, delayed gratification, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fault tolerance, happiness index / gross national happiness, impulse control, indoor plumbing, inventory management, knowledge worker, late fees, linear programming, mental accounting, microcredit, p-value, payday loans, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra

Jaikumar, Firefighting by Knowledge Workers (Information Storage Industry Center, Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California, 2000), retrieved from http://isic.ucsd.edu/pdf/firefighting.pdf. Steven Covey finds it helpful to classify tasks: S. R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (New York: Free Press, 2004). approximately one in four rural bridges: Bridges—Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, retrieved from http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/fact-sheet/bridges. scarcity makes this problem a whole lot worse: There are many studies of the planning fallacy. Good reviews are: Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin, and Michael Ross, “Inside the Planning Fallacy: The Causes and Consequences of Optimistic Time Predictions,” in Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment, ed.

pages: 339 words: 88,732

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

Office of Science and Technology Policy, March 2012, available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/competes_report_on_prizes_final.pdf (accessed September 18, 2013). 22. For a detailed list, see the appendix of McKinsey and Company, “And the Winner Is . . . ” Research Report, 2009, http://mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Social-Innovation/And_the_winner_is.pdf (accessed September 18, 2013). 23. “2013 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure,” ASCE, 2013, http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/a/#p/home (accessed August 12, 2013). 24. See Matthew Yglesias, “The Collapse of Public Investment,” Moneybox blog, Slate, May 7, 2013, http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/07/public_sector_investment_collapse.html (accessed August 12, 2013); and the underlying data at “Real State & Local Consumption Expenditures & Gross Investment, 3 Decimal,” Economic Research—Federal Reserve Bank of St.

pages: 346 words: 101,255

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters by Rose George

American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anton Chekhov, Bob Geldof, Celtic Tiger, clean water, glass ceiling, indoor plumbing, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, land reform, low cost airline, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pepto Bismol, Potemkin village, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Steven Pinker, urban planning

Sewerage undertakers House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, Out of Sight—Not Out of Mind, Ev. 2. Bonuses totaling £1.26 million Martin Horwood MP, Parliamentary Debates, Westminster Hall, June 27, 2006. One of the most unpleasant events House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, “Out of Sight—Not Out of Mind,” Ev. 2. D minus American Society for Civil Engineers, “Report Card for America’s Infrastructure 2005,” http://www.asce.org/reportcard. Crumbling, dangerous sewer pipes NRDC, “Swimming in Sewage,” p. 23. 2,175 Olympic-sized swimming pools David Hsu, “Sustainable New York City” (New York: Design Trust for Public Space and New York City Office for Environmental Coordination, 2006), p. 21. 1.46 trillion gallons U.S.

pages: 441 words: 136,954

That Used to Be Us by Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum

addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andy Kessler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, drop ship, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, full employment, Google Earth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Lean Startup, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, oil shock, PalmPilot, pension reform, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

(China, by contrast, is the People’s Republic of Deferred Gratification.) In the Terrible Twos, our roads got more crowded, our bridges got creakier, our water systems got leakier, and the lines in our airports got longer. In 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) issued a Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, and gave America an overall grade of D. The report also gave individual grades to fifteen infrastructure categories. None got higher than C+. “Decades of underfunding and inattention have endangered the nation’s infrastructure,” the engineers said, adding that since the ASCE’s last report card in 2005, there has been little change in the condition of America’s roads, bridges, drinking-water systems, and other public works, but the cost of repairing them (when they do get repaired) has risen.

pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel, “Hail the Maintainers: Capitalism Excels at Innovation but Is Failing at Maintenance, and for Most Lives It Is Maintenance That Matters More” (April 7, 2016), https://aeon.co/essays/innovation-is-overvalued-maintenance-often-matters-more. 7. Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out. 8. American Society of Civil Engineers, “2013 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure” (2014), accessed February 1, 2019, http://2013.infrastructurereportcard.org/. 9. Ingo Braun, “Geflügelte Saurier: Zur Intersystemische Vernetzung Grosser Technische Netze,” in Technik Ohne Grenzen, ed. Ingo Braun and Bernward Joerges (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994). 10.

pages: 692 words: 167,950

The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century by Alex Prud'Homme

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, commoditize, company town, corporate raider, Deep Water Horizon, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, megacity, oil shale / tar sands, oil-for-food scandal, peak oil, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, William Langewiesche

CHAPTER 11: WATER SCARCITY 107 Tunnel No. 3: New York City Department of Environmental Protection: http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/pdf/factsheet.pdf and http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/ dep_projects/cp_city_water_tunnel3.shtml. 107 Ted Dowey: Author’s tour of Tunnel No. 3 with Ted Dowey, March 5, 2007. 119 The American Society of Civil Engineers: “Report Card for America’s Infrastructure,” American Society of Civil Engineers: http://apps.asce.org/reportcard/2009/grades.cfm. 120 In 2007, 159 leaks: Anthony DePalma, “Mysterious Leak Provides Hint of Lost Manhattan,” New York Times, February 5, 2008. 120 The EPA estimates that 1 trillion gallons: US Environmental Protection Agency, Water Sense, “The Facts on Leaks,” http://www.epa.gov/WaterSense/pubs/fixleak.html. 120 the water pressure inside: From David Grann’s indispensable article on Tunnel No. 3, “City of Water,” New Yorker, September 1, 2003. 122 Standard pay is $35 to $38 an hour: Ibid. 122 Hogs have their own language: Ibid., and Dowey interview.

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon tax, circular economy, colonial rule, complexity theory, coronavirus, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, endogenous growth, energy transition, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, Gregor Mendel, happiness index / gross national happiness, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, knowledge economy, Kondratiev cycle, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, optical character recognition, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, South China Sea, synthetic biology, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, three-masted sailing ship, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, yield curve

In: The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity: Economic and Social Factors, Princeton University Press, pp. 609–626. Asao, S., et al. 2015. Variation in foliar respiration and wood CO2 efflux rates among species and canopy layers in a wet tropical forest. Tree Physiology 35:148–159. ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers). 2017. 2017 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure. https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/2017-Infrastructure-Report-Card.pdf. Ashby, T. 1935. The Aqueducts of Ancient Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers). 1980. The Pioneer Zephyr. https://www.asme.org/wwwasmeorg/media/ResourceFiles/AboutASME/Who%20We%20Are/Engineering%20History/Landmarks/58-Pioneer-Zephyr-1934.pdf.