Jeff Roorda suggested this provocation. I wrote it, so don’t blame him! If you would like to submit a provocation for posting – keep it under 400 words and no more than 2 arguments. (i.e. leave something for someone else to say!) To set up a new provocation, email your suggestions to me at penny@talkinginfrastructure.com
Or leave a comment on this one!
For years we have acted as if we could tax our way out of an infrastructure deficit if only they (the Government of your choice) would have the wisdom and courage to do it. That is why so much effort has been put into calculating ‘backlogs’. But is it true that we can fix the problem with more money?
The pro side: Yes, if we are prepared to pay for it by forgoing personal consumption (ie pay more tax or more rates) or by reducing other government expenditures. However, without some reduction in the total renewal bill what we have to go without might be rather painful. But would this clear the backlog?
The con side: No, for just as work expands to fill the time available (Parkinson’s Law), the infrastructure deficit or backlog expands to meet the money being spent on it! The clue is in the definition “The term Infrastructure Backlog refers to the total amount or value of renewal works that need to be undertaken to bring a Council’s (or other entity’s) asset stock up to an acceptable standard” source LGMA Knowledge Base. Consider the key word ‘acceptable’. Think back to when you were young, your funds were low and an ‘old bomb’ was quite acceptable (and certainly better than the bus!). But what did you do when you started to earn a decent income? Now it wasn’t ‘acceptable’ any more, so you upgraded. And that is what we all do. ‘Acceptable’ is a relative term. The more we spend on infrastructure, the higher our expectations and the higher the minimum ‘acceptable’ level. Whenever I hear that our roads or other assets are in poor condition, I think ‘relative to what?’ Spending more money to reduce the deficit is thus like a dog chasing its tail. And will be equally unsuccessful.
Your views?
With monetary policy now so ineffective (bank rates are as low as they have ever been, in some countries negative, and yet they are not stimulating investment and spending) countries are increasingly looking to fiscal policy – that is direct spending by Governments. The expenditure of choice is infrastructure, and government infrastructure proposals are usually well received by the electorate because they are seen as creating jobs.
But proposals are normally vague on exactly what type of infrastructure spending is in mind, and the employment benefits of spending are often hyped up, so here are a few facts to bear in mind.
FACT: Out of every dollar spent in Australia, some proportion will go overseas in the form of imports. Some years ago, a government industrial economics report estimated that:
Maintenance generates 25% more employment than house construction and from 50% to 100% more employment than engineering construction. This is because:
- Maintenance is highly labour intensive, therefore there is little leakage of funds overseas to pay for imported elements
- House construction spending has a higher proportion of imports
- Engineering construction (i.e. infrastructure), with its specialised equipment and materials has an even higher proportion of imports.
FACT: It is not infrastructure spending specifically that creates jobs but ANY government spending. Some types of spending, as indicated above, will create more jobs than others (and engineering construction such as infrastructure is on the low end of job creation).
FACT: Just as putting money into the economy will stimulate job growth, it is also true that taking money out of the economy, e.g. by taxing us to pay for the infrastructure, or reducing other government spending for the same purpose, will reduce job growth.
FACT: Low income earners spend more of any dollars they earn than high income earners. So if we find the money for infrastructure by increasing taxes or reducing other spending on low income earners (which is what is happening at the moment) and we then spend that money on high income earners in infrastructure industries, this will itself reduce jobs rather than creating them.
So is infrastructure spending the jobs panacea so many believe it to be?
I have been told that, today, asset managers and other middle to senior management decision-makers, are becoming a victim of the drive for ‘efficiency’: resources are being reduced, workloads increased. So much so, that they have ‘no time to think’. If this is true there are some very serious consequences.
I recall a client of mine who wanted my help in developing strategic policy and planning for her more than two billion dollars of education assets: schools and colleges. Her day was back-to-back meetings, so much so that we had to get together for policy discussions over coffee at 7 am or else after her day eased off at 7 pm. I asked her, with such a hectic schedule, when did she ever get time to think. She smiled wryly, shrugged and said “When I get home!” I was concerned for this bright young woman but also for her staff who really needed the strategic direction that she should have had the time to give them. Then my concern moved to the students, who were being shortchanged by not having infrastructure decisions thoughtfully coping with changing needs, and to their parents and their future employers. The whole community misses out when infrastructure decision-makers do not have time to think.
And the individual misses out too. With increasing automation, jobs that do not require thinking are going to be taken over by robots. Do we really want infrastructure decisions made by computer algorithms, by robots?
Questions today
Is it true that many decision-makers believe they have ‘no time to think’?
Is this something we need to address, and if so, how could we do it?
Most writers who set out to define ‘public infrastructure’ give up! I can understand why.
Is ownership the key? Does public infrastructure need to be publicly owned? This would make definition simpler. But the very same infrastructure can pass from private to public and back to private again without changing the service provided as, for example, when the Adelaide Electric Company, which started as a private company was taken over by the Government as a war time measure, became part of the public company, the Electricity Trust of South Australia. The generation, distribution and retailing arms were then disaggregated, with some sold and some let under long term leases to the private sector.
If not ownership, is ‘control’ the key? Does government regulation substitute for ownership, and if so, what level of regulation is necessary – price control, worker safety, environmental protection? (A subsidiary, but important, question here is to what extent do the regulators work in the ‘public interest’ and to what extent as protectors of the incumbent agencies.
Then are we looking at ‘access’? For example, rail track, roads, and depots within, say, Dupont Chemicals would be private infrastructure since its purpose would be to provide service only to Dupont and access to these facilities would be limited to Dupont. Now we may be getting somewhere. Public infrastructure would then be infrastructure that the public has access to. They may have to pay for it, but the right to access would be open to all.
This places the focus on service, and access to service. This, in turn, may overcome a problem that all asset managers and infrastructure planners have observed, when infrastructure is defined in terms of assets rather than service, we can have a wide differentiation. For example, some would limit infrastructure to transport systems (pipes, wires, roads, rail). Others would include public buildings (government offices and schools and hospitals) but not private buildings (private offices, private schools and private hospitals). Some would differentiate between passive civil structures (infrastructure) and electrical and mechanical assets (plant and machinery). Others might make a differentiation between these elements but consider them all as subsets of infrastructure, along with fleet. It all gets rather confusing.
Questions today are:
Is defining public infrastructure in terms of service and access to service useful?
Such a definition may open up new questions for exploration, what might these be?
My friend did not care for the streetscaping decision made by our local council and was angrily denouncing it to
us all at coffee, concluding “This is a useless council, they simply do not care for the individual”.
Which raises the question – should they? Council decisions may be made well or poorly, but they need to be judged by their effect on the community as a whole not on any one individual. In fact, when decisions are made in favour of an individual, we call that corruption!
So why do we get so aggrieved when councils make decisions not to our liking? For there is no doubt that we do. I suspect we fail to make the switch from being a customer to being a citizen. We carry on thinking ‘me’ when we should be thinking ‘we’.
My question for you today is a personal one:
Not how we can get others to make the switch, but rather how can we, ourselves, do it? What experiences have you had when you just naturally switched to ‘we’ thinking? What was it about those situations that caused the switch?
As a young economics student I was all for efficiency. So much so that if it could be proved that it was ‘efficient’ to send women and children down the mines – down they would have gone! But is economic efficiency to be our only criterion for evaluating government and infrastructure policy?
I thought of this when reading Leith van Oselin’s comment on the Federal Government’s submarine project. Writing in Macrobusiness as the ‘Unconventional Economist’, he nevertheless puts forward a very conventional economic argument. Using the release of the Productivity Councils’ 2014-15 Trade and Assistance Review as his starting off point, he argues: “Paying more for local builds, without sufficient strategic defence and spillover benefits to offset the additional cost, diverts productive resources (labour, capital and land) away from relatively more efficient (less assisted) uses. It can also create a permanent expectation of more such high cost work”. The article is titled “PC hits out at submarine pork”.
Our question today: Seems straightforward enough, doesn’t it? But is it?
!['Rust taking over…' Courtesy lamdogjunkie](http://talkinginfrastructure.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/8717898768_621570de6f_m.jpg)
‘Rust taking over…’ Courtesy lamdogjunkie
When you look at infrastructure what do you see?
My boss had just returned from a visit to Rome and was telling me about his trip. What particularly inspired him was the Trevi Fountain. As he spoke of its magic, its beauty, its romance, its glory, his eyes lit up, his voice was reverent. Not surprising you might say since tourists always rave about the Trevi Fountain. Except that he was a Hydraulics Engineer and what he was describing to me was the fountain’s hydraulics! Engineers see things differently! I have seen my brother, another engineer, stare at the luggage carousel at the airport, fascinated by the design of the metal plates that enable it to turn the corners so smoothly. As an economist, it is unlikely that I would, but for them, have ever thought of the ingenious design of the Trevi’s hydraulics or the luggage carousel, but now I cannot help but see it too. That’s the thing, once you see things through someone else’s eyes, you can never ‘un-see’ it. You are forever changed, and the richer for it.
This is important for us as infrastructure decision-makers, and it is the rationale for the collaborative structure of ‘Talking Infrastructure’. We need to be able to see through the eyes of the engineer, the economist, the scientist, the environmentalist, the planner, and… even the artist. (Our picture today is from the free photo sharing site, Flickr. To see other pictures of rust or infrastructure decay through the eyes of the artist photographer, just type in infrastructure decay.)
So our task today is to consider how many different minds we can engage.
Let us multiply our perspectives.
How true is this today?
For a long time, I agreed with my friends in the water and wastewater business, that their assets were largely immune from technological change and that, in fact, such change as we were likely to see, eg, improvements in trenchless technology, would be to their management benefit. However, recent developments throw this easy, and comforting, assumption into question. Prolonged drought in Australia over a number of years has led to many changes to reduce our consumption of water (from the simple brick in the cistern to changing garden design to policies restricting the use of hoses for hosing down driveways and washing cars) and, in Canada, councils are struggling with pricing models that are not able to adjust to demand reduction brought about by environmental conservation. And now, consider the nanotechnological toilet. This is a toilet that does not need water, a sewage system or external power but instead uses nanotechnology to treat human waste, produce clean water and keep smells at bay, which is being developed by a British university.
Todays question:
What other changes (technological, cultural, environmental) are impacting our demand for what is shaping up to be the 21st century’s scarcest resource, and how is our infrastructure changing (or how does it need to change) to meet the challenge?
Again, links are welcome so that we can expand our media awareness, but please provide a brief summary so that following the link is optional, and limit links to two or the system may think that you are spam and throw you out!
What is involved in putting new technology to work?
She waited patiently for the train, a small girl, slight of build with an enormous stack of books almost as heavy as she, the books she needed that day at University. I felt sorry for her. That was 20 years ago. Today technology makes it possible for that heavy load to be reduced to one tablet. However to apply the technology requires changes in business models (University lecturers supplement their incomes by writing books that become requisite texts), in intellectual property rights, in methods to deal with plagiarism (which is so much easier with digital texts), etc. These problems are being overcome and Universities today are a far cry from those of 20 years ago. But when we consider the impact of technology change we must also take these cultural and organisational adjustments into account and tracking trends in cultural change is as important as tracking changes in technology change. For example, a friend who runs a large accountancy firm declared, over ten years ago, that when computers were able to respond to voice commands, he would immediately change all the computers in his office. He didn’t type himself and so voice command control would, he believed, be a benefit. However, his most efficient and dedicated staff that were responsible for data input were a group of women, around 35 – 50 years of age, all of whom were experienced keyboard operators. I queried how willing – and able – they would be to change their method of operating. His company has yet to use voice activation. (And given the problems raised by Geoff Hudson, referenced in the last post, other issues will need resolution before it does.)
So our question today concerns trends in cultural change.
What trends have you observed? How are they affecting technology and our demand for infrastructure?
Media links welcome.
Infrastructure is a means to an end – but it is not the only means.
As ends change, traditional infrastructure may not even be the best means. In ‘Talking Infrastructure’ we consider technological, demographic, environmental and other change and its impact on criteria for infrastructure decision-making.
Do we really want a road – or do we want to get from A to B? And what is so attractive about B anyway? Is it where we want to work, or shop, or play? Technology today is changing how we do all three. The key to understanding what technology can do, and how fast it can do it, is to recognise that it must be accompanied by cultural or organisational change. For example, Geoff Hudson, speaking on the ABC radio show, Okham’s Razor, argued that technology has made it possible for effective working from home for many years now and yet few businesses use it. He puts forward a detailed and fascinating plan for overcoming disadvantages currently experienced – lack of connection, suspicion, lack of control amongst others. ‘OK, so it is possible’ you might say, ‘but why bother?’ The answer lies in the interconnection of the new digital technology and physical infrastructure. We build more roads every year, yet congestion gets worse, commute times get longer, house prices in the cities rise and become unaffordable for many. Now ask yourselves, as we adopt voice instruction for our computers over keyboards, can our open space offices cope? Working from home can aleviate many problems – if we can solve the cultural and organisational problems.
So our first question, designed to expand awareness, is this:
Which technologies – e.g. iPhones, driverless cars, 3D printing, nanotechnology, bio-technology, you name it, are likely to increase the demand for roads and which are likely to reduce it – and why?
Links welcome but provide a brief summary for each so that following the link is optional and limit them to two links or the system may think you are spam and throw you out!
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