Environmentalists have raised the alarm about global warming. The U.S. government responds with massive subsidies to a biofuels program. Unfortunately, corn-based ethanol turns out to be even worse than gasoline in its emissions of greenhouse gases. Plus, the conversion of so much corn to ethanol instead of food has led to dramatically rising food prices and food riots all over the world.
Some call the ethanol program “the stupidist federal subsidy” that “makes gasoline costlier and dirtier.” The Antiplanner calls it government planning on a normal day.
Which raises some interesting questions: Have any major government projects ever been successful? If so, what is the ratio of unsuccessful to successful projects? And finally, what were the characteristics that made some of the projects successful while the rest failed?
To begin to answer these questions, I invite you, dear commenters, to nominate projects that you think were successful. By “project” I mean a discrete activity, such as an effort to build something or eradicate something. The Big Dig is a project; an agency such as the Forest Service or Federal Highway Administration is not a project.
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By “government” project, I mean a project that is heavily funded by, though not necessarily led by, a government agency. The government might contract it out, or it might simply have responded to some outside entity that conceived and carried out the project but sought and received government funding to do it.
By “successful,” I mean a project whose benefits, in retrospect, are clearly greater than its costs. It would be helpful if it did not have huge cost overruns or other serious execution problems, but that is not essential.
I will start the ball rolling by proposing that the Interstate Highway System was a successful government project. There were some problems in execution, mainly related to funding (the gas tax did not keep up with inflation). But the benefits of the highways for our national and local economies, culture, personal incomes, and lifestyles have been enormous.
Commenters are welcome to debate this if they want, but I would like to know what government projects you think have been successful. The moon landings? Polio eradication? World War II? The floor is yours.
AP: “By “successful,†I mean a project whose benefits, in retrospect, are clearly greater than its costs.”
You may be setting the bar too low. A better, but perhaps more difficult to substantiate, measure would be “better than if some non government entity did it”.
By “successful,†I mean a project whose benefits, in retrospect, are clearly greater than its costs
I actually think this might be setting the bar too HIGH, not only for “government” projects, but for any project. I strongly suspect it’s impossible to calculate all of the costs and benefits that result from any project, regardless of size or “private/public” distinction. Not only can we not identify all the costs and benefits, but many of them cannot be converted into a quantifiable metric.
The notion that benefits should “clearly” be greater than costs would seem to require objective, measurable, non-controversial methods of identifying and quantifying costs and benefits, which is simply not realistic.
The other problem is that we don’t know the opportunity costs of pursuing any project, i.e. what would have happened if the project had not been pursued. All we can do is estimate all these costs and benefits, a process that is inherently “political” because people disagree over what counts as a cost and what counts as a benefit, the magnitude of costs and benefits, etc.
I would classify the Interstate Highway System as a textbook example of a government project that failed to deliver on it’s promise. Sure, you got the quantity promised but what about the quality. Congress’s only measure of acceptable progress on this project was miles completed. To get those miles within the available budget engineers were forced to compromise on safety, aesthetics and operational aesthetics.
The biggest failure occurred before a single dollar had even been spent. At that time most CBDs were encircled by substandard tenements. The earliest Interstate planning replaced these slums with parkways and park/ride streetcar stations to take full advantage of the grid layout of CBDs. The tenements would be replaced with highrise apartments on the parkway boundaries. Freeways would then radiate outwards to ports, airports and to industrial areas not on the parkway. Once the parkways were built a second parkway would encircle each city within a greenbelt.
Eisenhower nuked these plans. He wanted urban interstates to facilitate evacuation of CBDs in the event of nuclear attack. That’s what engineers were told to build so that’s what they built. By the time they had built them the pesky russky’s had switched from bombers to ICBMs. So instead of the CBDs being evacuated they were inundated by cars for which no parking had been provided, at least not from the Interstate budget. A good idea from technocrats (or possibly planners) went down the gurgler in favour of a short-sighted idea from a politician.
I nominate the Hoover Dam as the most (only?) successful government project. Electrification was the greatest innovation of the 20th century. Without the innovation, industry and wealth unleashed by electrification America would not have had the money to buy autos or build the Interstate Highway System.
This is a tough subject, but I would nominate WWII and the containment strategy of the Cold War from 1947-1990. The cost in human lives and on the American federal treasury were massive, but I have had the dubious pleasure of having spent 17 months of my life living in the life draining, deadening world of a Communist society. Had the West fallen to either Fascism or Communism, the world would have become stuck for ages in an early 20th century totalitarianism. Amongst other things, Planners and Antiplanners alike might not have seen the creation of an Internet nor blogs with which to enjoy our daily arguments.
I would think the dam building projects and water projects of the 1930’s era would be classified as successes.
The interesting question for us today is why the government could do things better back then versus now. What changes have corrupted the system? How can we get back to getting value for our tax funded projects?
Land-grants for public colleges, universities, and higher education centers under the Morrill Act of 1862 and other federal programs. These programs have made higher and specialized education available financially and geographically to millions of people. The return on this investment has been tremendous. Technological, agricultural, and engineering innovations; educated populace; economic impacts that are derived from the above, etc.
How succesful should it be? Setting aside pissing away more than have it’s budget on a light rail line, I’d call T-Rex successful.
#’s 4,5 and 6 all provide good examples, but #5 is on
the mark with the question he poses. My answer is the dumbing-down of the educational system for reasons of political correctness. SAT scores peaked in–depending
on whom one speaks to at the College boards and who is massaging the data–in 1962,63,64(variously) and has been in a free-fall ever since–despite dumbing down the exams and “re-centering” the averages (i.e., adding 100 points) approx. a decade ago.
Living in New Orleans and, due to Katrina, having more
than a nodding acquaintance with FEMA types, the Corps of
Eng., various and sundry State, City and other FED types
I am of opinion that if we had fought WWII with the people alive today in today’s bureaucracies we would have
lost hands down. P.S. I graduated H.S. in ’62, so my critique is somewhat self-serving, but nonetheless valid for that.
There is an excellent PDF download by a think-tank whose name escapes me(I’m sorry–really bad form to reference a study w.o.identifying source) in which main thrust was that, rather than rearranging the deck chairs at the Federal level, pvt. institutions such as WAL-MART, Home Depot, Loews, etc., should be folded into disaster planning as their response was far quicker and more flexible(to which I can personally attest) than
govt. agencies at all levels. Coast-Guard also came in for high marks as being a uniquely decentralized operation divided into districts leading to personnel stability leading to lots of familiarity with local players and assets,e.g., knowing which State agencies, had lots of flat-bottomed boats(Wild-Life and Fisheries,
NOT Police and Fire).
With this biofuel stuff the problem here isn’t so much directly bad farm or energy policy, so much as a mostly road based transport policy that artificily increases the demand more then where it ought to be.(Biofuels can be made with bio-watse products too, maybe the anti-planner could power his home from a septic system since we know he’s full of crap.)
Also in a strange way in the past farm land was set aside for transport reasons(horses), now there seems to be some what of a return, though the difference between automobiles & horses, is that horses have brains.