We don't actually need to spend $1 trillion to fix our infrastructure.

The moral hazard of how we spend money, and who spends it.

Our brains, whizzing computers, can’t really comprehend how big a trillion is, so we have a set of heuristics to helps us compare it to numbers we can count.

Consider:

1 million seconds: about 11.5 days

1 billion seconds: 31.5 years

1 trillion seconds: 31 thousand years—think birth of Christ til right now, times fifteen.

Okay, but who cares, right? No one’s going to be around for a trillion seconds. The number, instead, is political. A trillion dollars seems like just the medicine the diseased state of infrastructure in the United States is looking for; it’s too big to count, but it seems right, right? If the diagnosis is “if we only had more money, we’d…” then $1 trillion is a good enough place to start. But a blank check (since that’s what this is) is the very definition of a moral hazard, colloquially throwing good money after bad:

Moral hazard happens when you have an incentive to take risks that somebody else will pay for. You get to do whatever brings you the greatest potential benefit, and you don’t suffer the consequences. 

—Justin Pritchard, The Balance (here)

Couple $1 trillion in federal funding (likely closer to $2 trillion with local/state “match”) with rules—but more importantly procedure—that either disallow or discourage projects that are tied to specific, meaningful, contextual goals, and you get thousands of miles of new asphalt poured, a handful of new train tracks, two blocks of sidewalks, and almost no way to concurrently pay for operations, safety, or maintenance.

Rinse and repeat. One trillion dollars does not necessarily solve the crumbling infrastructure problem, but it certainly sets precedent for authorizing another $1 trillion in a decade when our infrastructure is rated a D+ again, because we haven’t figured out how to build sustainably, and no one is responsible for the liability that roads truly are. It’s a second moral hazard.

Where did this number come from, anyway, and why do politicians and pundits keep talking about infrastructure week?

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In the coming weeks, I’m going to be writing a lot about the Federal Aid Highway program that’s so ingrained in the American transportation and infrastructure mindset. In particular I’m going to tackle:

• How transportation and infrastructure (t&i) projects are funded, with examples.

• How t&i projects are planned, and how federalism and a deep-seeded culture prevents the best projects from rising to the top.

• How we can do both better.

I expect this series to run over the next 6-8 weeks. First up:

The current state of affairs, including a look at the FAST act, and a look under the hood of a few current projects.

If this is something you’re interested in please subscribe & share! And definitely stay tuned.