'We know how to get out of this mess'

September 26, 2011 By Fred Clark 209 Comments

We have a lot of work to be done, just waiting for people to do it.

We have a lot of people without work to do.

This really isn’t complicated.

Here’s Dean Baker this morning for the Center for Economic Policy and Research:

We know how to get out of this mess, we have known how for 70 years. We just need the government to generate demand. That means spending money. Ideally it would spend money on useful things like education, health care, and infrastructure, but even if it spent money in wasteful ways it would still create jobs and put people to work.

In the ’30s we got much of the way back to full employment with the Works Progress Administration and other programs. Much of what was done was useful — look around, you won’t have to go far to find infrastructure built by Depression-era programs. However, it took the massive spending associated with World War II to get the economy back to full employment. There is no magic associated with war that makes military spending more effective in creating jobs. The only difference was that the threat to the nation from the Axis powers removed the political obstacles to the necessary spending.

The same situation applies today. We just need to spend money. That applies to both the United States and the euro zone countries. The problem is that we have more people in political leadership positions who want to be morality cops and lecture about balancing budgets rather than focus on policies that will restore economic growth.

Via Atrios, who quoted the very same chunk of text from Baker. In this case, repetition is good. And sadly necessary.

The current situation of low demand/high unemployment is quite literally a text-book problem. It is a problem with a clear, effective technical solution. This is stuff, as Baker says, that we know how to fix.

One thing that has always amazed me about the Dark Ages was how we managed to stop knowing so much of what we had previously known about, for example, sanitation.

One of the nice things about the Roman Empire was the way it didn’t require one to walk around ankle-deep in human excrement. Much of the former Roman Empire later opted to revert to having feces in the streets. I can’t believe that was a matter of preference. I don’t think people in Rome were muttering, “I wish the Empire would just fall already so we can get rid of this wretched sanitation and go back to raw sewage in the gutters.”

And yet that happened.

Europe knew how to solve the problem of sanitation and then, fairly suddenly, it stopped knowing how to solve that problem. And it took more than a thousand years of filth, stench and disease before they would figure it out again.

We seem to be doing the same thing right now. We’re ankle-deep in a mess we know how to fix, but we’ve chosen instead to pretend we don’t know how to fix it. That stinks.

Filed Under: class warfare Tagged With: , 209 Comments
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  • http://twitter.com/FearlessSon FearlessSon

    Venkatesh Rao once had an interesting comment to the effect that people like to build infrastructure, but they don’t like to maintain it.  He describes the differences in innovation that occur between “growing pains” and “dying pains,” and how we wince at the sight of decay, but we feel powerless to stop it. 

    According to my sister who lives in Zurich, they do not do patchwork road maintenance there.  Rather, the government determined that it was more cost-effective to rip up a road once every two years and repave the entire thing.  So the roadwork crews are always busy, tearing up and repaving some street or another, and going through the entire city’s worth on a two year cycle.  

    There is no maintenance there, only continued regeneration.  

  • Anonymous

    Why not build concrete roads or some such thing that wouldn’t need such frequent repair?

  • Anonymous

    Why not build concrete roads or some such thing that wouldn’t need such frequent repair?

  • P J Evans

     It’s probably weather. Freeze/thaw cycles are hard on roads. (That’s why so many cities had streets paved with bricks on sand: the pavement lasted longer. On the other hand, it requires skilled labor to maintain brick paving, which is why so many cities don’t use it any more.)

  • P J Evans

     It’s probably weather. Freeze/thaw cycles are hard on roads. (That’s why so many cities had streets paved with bricks on sand: the pavement lasted longer. On the other hand, it requires skilled labor to maintain brick paving, which is why so many cities don’t use it any more.)

  • http://twitter.com/FearlessSon FearlessSon

    Concrete, sadly, is not necessarily as robust as people tend to think.  It tends to get distorted and broken with alarming frequency.  Something like a tree root growing underneath it can cause it to crack and distort after a few years, necessitating it be smoothed over again, but as long as the tree remains it will just crack more eventually.  Likewise, a heavily traveled road is going to wear very shallow groves into the concrete with the tires of the vehicles which travel it, but those groves will be just deep enough for rainwater to make them worse, producing cracking of a different sort.  Further underground infrastructure development, such as new sewers or cable conduits, require sections of the road to be torn up anyway and repaved over after the work beneath them is done, etc.

    The net result is that concrete roads do in fact require semi-regular maintenance.  The urban transportation engineers in Zurich simply concluded that the the logistics of replacement made it cheaper than more ad-hoc repair, and less susceptible to fickle budget adjustments.  I imagine that most of the concrete they tear up on the roads is broken down in big grinders and used to form the concrete to be poured onto the next road.  

    It actually probably goes a little smoother than we imagine such operations would go over here, considering how good and popular public transportation is in Zurich.  When only 18% of people are driving cars, the impact of this on commutes can be mitigated with effective planning on the part of public mass transit authorities.

  • http://twitter.com/FearlessSon FearlessSon

    Concrete, sadly, is not necessarily as robust as people tend to think.  It tends to get distorted and broken with alarming frequency.  Something like a tree root growing underneath it can cause it to crack and distort after a few years, necessitating it be smoothed over again, but as long as the tree remains it will just crack more eventually.  Likewise, a heavily traveled road is going to wear very shallow groves into the concrete with the tires of the vehicles which travel it, but those groves will be just deep enough for rainwater to make them worse, producing cracking of a different sort.  Further underground infrastructure development, such as new sewers or cable conduits, require sections of the road to be torn up anyway and repaved over after the work beneath them is done, etc.

    The net result is that concrete roads do in fact require semi-regular maintenance.  The urban transportation engineers in Zurich simply concluded that the the logistics of replacement made it cheaper than more ad-hoc repair, and less susceptible to fickle budget adjustments.  I imagine that most of the concrete they tear up on the roads is broken down in big grinders and used to form the concrete to be poured onto the next road.  

    It actually probably goes a little smoother than we imagine such operations would go over here, considering how good and popular public transportation is in Zurich.  When only 18% of people are driving cars, the impact of this on commutes can be mitigated with effective planning on the part of public mass transit authorities.

  • http://apocalypsereview.wordpress.com/ Invisible Neutrino

    I can attest to the serious issues with concrete-paved roads becoming semi-undrivable after some time.

    There are numerous ways to repave roads that don’t involve as much inconvenience to the driver, for example there is an in-place recycling technique where the ground-up asphalt aggregate of a road can be used to replenish the surface, which cuts down on the time the road is out of use.

  • http://apocalypsereview.wordpress.com/ Invisible Neutrino

    I can attest to the serious issues with concrete-paved roads becoming semi-undrivable after some time.

    There are numerous ways to repave roads that don’t involve as much inconvenience to the driver, for example there is an in-place recycling technique where the ground-up asphalt aggregate of a road can be used to replenish the surface, which cuts down on the time the road is out of use.

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