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Jonathan asks how budget policy could be changed to get investment and consumption spending sorted out. The most important reform would be a separate federal capital budget. With a unified budget, completely different kinds of expenditure, some with immediate payoff, like welfare payments and hiring park rangers, and others whose benefits keep flowing in for [...]
Archive for the ‘Infrastructure’ Category
October 13th, 2008
Steve, Mark, Jonathan, and I have now weighed in on the importance of (i) deficit spending on an economic stimulus (ii) focused on investment rather than consumption (iii) that can get up and running quickly. Mark points at all the great research that didn’t make it into the outrageously stingy budgets of the last decade, [...]
March 17th, 2008
We’re all neocons now.
August 8th, 2007
Now that the wreckage of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis is no longer all over our screens, it’s worth considering what the episode should teach us about infrastructure, public policy, politics, and engineering. Part of the answer is, not much: it’s very tricky to interpret rare and exciting events. This one, recognizing that any accidental [...]
August 4th, 2007
Category: Infrastructure
The engineers trying to puzzle out the collapse of the I-35W bridge are at this moment pouring out libations of latte to the gods for the video from one security camera that happened to pick up part of the bridge as it went in the river. Seeing something like this happen, even on such a [...]
August 2nd, 2007
The I-35W bridge was two arch-cantilever trusses, with smaller trusses parallel to the river supporting the roadway. Each of the main trusses rested on two concrete columns, one on each side of the river. The design highlights a characteristic design tradeoff: a truss like this is statically determinate, which means that the all the forces [...]