Wednesday, February 18, 2004

Infrastructure costs escalate faster than productivity Posted here Wednesday, February 18, 2004 at 9:27:16 AM     I've been in a series of discussions lately about the extreme need in certain areas, such as water protection, plague control, next generation tech investment. Each of these requires cash. At the same time security, war, and deflation (American assets in comparison to the Euro) cost. the problem is, each group looks at their own costs as incremental to the current national (government plus private) budget, without noticing the coming demands from other sectors. The whole ensemble is not affordable, but necessary. What to do? As the fascinating book The Collapse of Complex Societies, by Joseph Taintor, makes clear, societies collapse because of overspending on infrastructure costs, and elites usually own the infrastructure organizations.   Our failure to manage as a design process is rooted in the conflict between planned and freemarket values. At the moment free market wins out, but the need for design exists if we are not to go bankrupt *as a society* and destroy the whole. The trouble is, no one knows how to do this. It is in its totality not an engineering problem, but a cultural one. ********