Bridges, Economics, and New Deal Planning

The Oregon Coast Highway is graced by numerous arched bridges, most of which were built in the 1920s and ’30s. Designed by state highway engineer Conde McCullough, the bridges were both innovative and beautiful.

Five of the largest of these bridges were built with funds from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the New Deal program that aimed to put unemployed Americans back to work. Though made entirely of concrete and steel, the bridges required 10 million board feet of wood as forms for the concrete.

Since the goal of the WPA was to create jobs, agency planners required that all wood be cut by hand — no power tools allowed. This policy betrayed a serious misunderstanding of basic economics.

The bridges’ benefits came not from the jobs created by their construction. Jobs are a cost, not a benefit — no one wants to work 24 hours a day. The benefits come from the savings in time, fuel, and other costs when people could simply drive across a river or bay instead of taking a slow ferry or driving the long way around a bay.

Allowing workers to use power tools not only would have saved many blisters, but would have saved money — money that could have been used to put other people to work, possibly building another bridge that would produce many other long-term benefits.

Of course, buying the power saws would also have created jobs in the factories that built them. But those jobs weren’t as visible as the bridge jobs: the factories would not advertise “Your tax dollars at work.” Politicians aren’t interested in invisible jobs or long-term benefits: they only care about highly visible projects, preferably ones in their districts. Planners enable this attitude by focusing on the jobs, rather than the benefits, produced by big-ticket government projects.

This is typical of the errors made by planners, few of whom understand much about economics. Other mistakes I’ve heard from planners’ mouths include:

• “Only manufacturing jobs can drive a local economy.”
• “Federal dollars are free.”
• “We should be allowed to regulate people’s land but we can’t afford to compensate landowners” (but the landowners can afford to be regulated?)
• “High housing prices are solely due to demand and have nothing to do with urban-growth boundaries.”
• “You can’t build your way out of congestion; the only solution is to get people to drive less.”
• “The government is not in business to make a profit, so it’s okay if (insert crazy scheme here) loses money.”

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