6 ms·

Well that was disappointing. I thought he was on to something regarding projects being difficult to complete because of the common law system. But nope, it's th

by jbob2000 10y ago

Well that was disappointing. I thought he was on to something regarding projects being difficult to complete because of the common law system. But nope, it's the unions! Please...

sickbeard 10y ago
This trend of clickbaity titles with no actual content needs to stop.
SCAQTony 10y ago
The author even back-peddled on the unions argument bringing up French unions as example. "...Others have argued that labor laws governing infrastructure projects drive up costs. Gordon and Schleicher are dubious of that as an explanation for why the U.S. has higher costs than other countries, though, because “American laws would have to be tougher than those in Europe, where trade unions are much more powerful. (France, anyone?)” ..."
- gaius 10y ago
  The local culture makes French and German unions very different from US and UK unions. The former are wise enough not to kill the golden goose, the latter can't see any further than Christmas.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - pessimizer 10y ago
    I don't know if that's as much culture as that the former are institutionalized and have a say in every step of the process, and the latter are fighting to exist at all.
  - yourapostasy 10y ago
    > ...the latter can't see any further than Christmas. My limited understanding of US unions was that the ones which augured companies into the ground had a toxic, dysfunctional, non-communicative relationship with company management. Even when the company management was sharing and showing them the books and the mathematical certainty of everything shutting down if changes weren't made, the unions thought the company management was pulling the wool over their eyes. So they decided to call what they felt was company management's bluff, and called it wrong. I've never felt comfortable with the narrative that these particular US unions were so short-sighted they would cut their noses off to spite their face; that doesn't fit the prior narrative of the enormous amount of diligent, persistent work it took to organize in the first place. I'm more inclined to believe the narrative that there was such an antagonistic, distrustful, hostile atmosphere in those meetings that union and company management were together as doomed as a Greek tragedy. Any US union history buffs out there care to clarify what the current thoughts are here on what really happened?
    - aomurphy 10y ago
      The United States has a much more violent anti-Union history in comparison to most of Western Europe. Take a look at the Battle of Cold Mountain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain In 1921. In Europe by the early 1900s most Western European countries had accepted that unions would have to be included somehow in the political landscape, the Socialist Parties in France and Germany, Labour in the UK. Plus, American Unions have a long history of being racially divided, lacking the ability to organize all of the workers in the way that say workers in Germany were able to as well. From that history, American Unions have almost always believed that the government and the business owners were out to get them. Also, because the Southern American states have historically been the most anti-union, American corporations have had a much easier time moving from union friendly areas to anti-union areas then European companies. So, overall union-business relationships in the USA are much much worse then in Germany. American businesses routinely make decisions solely to hurt unions (a good modern example is Boeing which is moving production from Washington to North Carolina, a large part of which is about weakening the union, even though this has made logistics harder), American unions think of management as the deadly enemy. I think a model more like Germany's where Unions and Businesses tend to work together would be overall much better for both sides, but we're stuck in the current system. It's also not helped that now there is a strong political anti-union movement no matter what the situation (like when Volkswagen wanted to unionize their plant in Kentucky in order to practice business on a more German model local politicians and businesses were strongly opposed even though the actual managers wanted it).
  - tankenmate 10y ago
    Then again, the Germans and French management accept that unions are bordering on necessary, but UK and US management tend to think that unions are the work of the devil. Maybe this has to do with inquisitorial civil law in Germany and France, and adversarial common law in the UK and US?
    - randyrand 10y ago
      Indeed, I think just about every occupation should be unionized. It would even be beneficial to let small business owners unionize against larger companies. Imagine how much the economy and small business owners, say gas station owners, could benefit if they all unionized and could collectively bargain against Shell, and could collectively set the wage/prices they sell gas. One can dream...
      - tankenmate 10y ago
        The small business Groupon, instead of for customers, it's for suppliers!
      - fennecfoxen 10y ago
        I for one would strongly prefer an economy with meaningful competition, instead of one where a certain group of economically privileged insiders organize a cartel so that they can collude to fix prices and decide how much money to extract from the general populace which needs the goods and services they control... because you've basically just described what they call a "trust" when they make antitrust legislation. (Alternatively, you've described the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, later found unconstitutional - leading to FDR's infamous court-packing attempt - and considered by a little under half of economists to have been a major contributing factor which prolonged the Great Depression.) Getting more power to ordinary workers is laudable when it comes at the expense of the power of their large-corporation employers... not if it comes at the expense of everyone else in the economy.
      - gaius 10y ago
        Companies unionizing is called a cartel, and very illegal.
ams6110 10y ago
I thought overuse of consultants and overdesign made more sense.
HCIdivision17 10y ago
I thought it was at least going to be something interesting about US infrastructure, but it's really focused on NYC. Unsurprisingly, the US does not place getting costs down for subways to be one of its higher priorities. Anecdata, admittedly, but I've seen very little talk about controlling union costs for MTA workers in the rural midwest; those poor guys are supporting a subway system that's barely there! Really, though, infrastructure stuff is neat, and we probably should start fixing it up. The main problem is the size of the US infrastructure is outstandingly staggering. There's an article [0] that's an argument for pouring money back into the highway funds (and the like), and the cash involved is worse than astronomical. At the very least, I didn't know there were over 600000 bridges in the US... I honestly don't know where we put them all. (Are overpasses included?) [0] http://www.budget.senate.gov/democratic/public/index.cfm/repairing-our-infrastructure http://www.budget.senate.gov/democratic/public/index.cfm/rep... I don't go to senate.gov much, so I'm guessing this is pretty partisan, but there's a crapton of followup links that are at least interesting.
- jbob2000 10y ago
  On that note about bridges; When I was in Cuba, the tour guide made a special note to point out this bridge they had that connected one part of the island to another over a large valley. Apparently it was a big deal to get this bridge built? The Russians built it for them in the 80s, but before that, it was a nightmare moving around. It didn't look like much to me, a regular bridge that I've seen a thousand times here in Canada. It put in perspective for me how expensive bridges really are. They couldn't afford to build one, crucial bridge. It took a major super power to do it.
  - VLM 10y ago
    I pulled the data and superficially a random square mile of Cuba is about 100x more likely to get hit with a mag 7 earthquake than a similar square in Canada gets hit by a mag 6. Cuba gets spanked every two or three decades with a serious mag 7 or so. Your 80s bridge survived the '92 quake, assuming you saw it after '92 of course. That was a biggie. Earthquake proof bridges are no joke to build.
  - 10y ago
wpietri 10y ago
I was disappointed that planning methods didn't come into it. US business and civil culture has shifted heavily to very plan-oriented approaches. But there are other ways to do things. As Mary Poppendieck explains, the Empire State Building was built on schedule and under budget in 18 months. When they started work on the bottom floors, they hadn't even finished designing the top floors. But that was fine, because they were working in a flow-oriented approach: https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of-the-plan/ https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of... (It's also covered in one of her books, and I think it's "Leading Lean Software Development".) As we know with software, big up-front design approaches can get unnecessarily long, confusing, and expensive. (See, for example, the healthcare.gov fiasco.) But we also know that approaches that optimize for cost- and time-effectiveness can work much better. (See, for example, Lean Startup methods or the healthcare.gov rescue.) We haven't really learned the lesson in software yet, so I can't blame people for not rediscovering it in other spaces yet. But I hope one day they will!

Well that was disappointing. I thought he was on to something regarding projects being difficult to complete because of the common law system. But nope, it's the unions! Please...

sickbeard 10y ago

This trend of clickbaity titles with no actual content needs to stop.

SCAQTony 10y ago

The author even back-peddled on the unions argument bringing up French unions as example. "...Others have argued that labor laws governing infrastructure projects drive up costs. Gordon and Schleicher are dubious of that as an explanation for why the U.S. has higher costs than other countries, though, because “American laws would have to be tougher than those in Europe, where trade unions are much more powerful. (France, anyone?)” ..."

gaius 10y ago
The local culture makes French and German unions very different from US and UK unions. The former are wise enough not to kill the golden goose, the latter can't see any further than Christmas.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- pessimizer 10y ago
  I don't know if that's as much culture as that the former are institutionalized and have a say in every step of the process, and the latter are fighting to exist at all.
- yourapostasy 10y ago
  > ...the latter can't see any further than Christmas. My limited understanding of US unions was that the ones which augured companies into the ground had a toxic, dysfunctional, non-communicative relationship with company management. Even when the company management was sharing and showing them the books and the mathematical certainty of everything shutting down if changes weren't made, the unions thought the company management was pulling the wool over their eyes. So they decided to call what they felt was company management's bluff, and called it wrong. I've never felt comfortable with the narrative that these particular US unions were so short-sighted they would cut their noses off to spite their face; that doesn't fit the prior narrative of the enormous amount of diligent, persistent work it took to organize in the first place. I'm more inclined to believe the narrative that there was such an antagonistic, distrustful, hostile atmosphere in those meetings that union and company management were together as doomed as a Greek tragedy. Any US union history buffs out there care to clarify what the current thoughts are here on what really happened?
  - aomurphy 10y ago
    The United States has a much more violent anti-Union history in comparison to most of Western Europe. Take a look at the Battle of Cold Mountain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain In 1921. In Europe by the early 1900s most Western European countries had accepted that unions would have to be included somehow in the political landscape, the Socialist Parties in France and Germany, Labour in the UK. Plus, American Unions have a long history of being racially divided, lacking the ability to organize all of the workers in the way that say workers in Germany were able to as well. From that history, American Unions have almost always believed that the government and the business owners were out to get them. Also, because the Southern American states have historically been the most anti-union, American corporations have had a much easier time moving from union friendly areas to anti-union areas then European companies. So, overall union-business relationships in the USA are much much worse then in Germany. American businesses routinely make decisions solely to hurt unions (a good modern example is Boeing which is moving production from Washington to North Carolina, a large part of which is about weakening the union, even though this has made logistics harder), American unions think of management as the deadly enemy. I think a model more like Germany's where Unions and Businesses tend to work together would be overall much better for both sides, but we're stuck in the current system. It's also not helped that now there is a strong political anti-union movement no matter what the situation (like when Volkswagen wanted to unionize their plant in Kentucky in order to practice business on a more German model local politicians and businesses were strongly opposed even though the actual managers wanted it).
- tankenmate 10y ago
  Then again, the Germans and French management accept that unions are bordering on necessary, but UK and US management tend to think that unions are the work of the devil. Maybe this has to do with inquisitorial civil law in Germany and France, and adversarial common law in the UK and US?
  - randyrand 10y ago
    Indeed, I think just about every occupation should be unionized. It would even be beneficial to let small business owners unionize against larger companies. Imagine how much the economy and small business owners, say gas station owners, could benefit if they all unionized and could collectively bargain against Shell, and could collectively set the wage/prices they sell gas. One can dream...
    - tankenmate 10y ago
      The small business Groupon, instead of for customers, it's for suppliers!
    - fennecfoxen 10y ago
      I for one would strongly prefer an economy with meaningful competition, instead of one where a certain group of economically privileged insiders organize a cartel so that they can collude to fix prices and decide how much money to extract from the general populace which needs the goods and services they control... because you've basically just described what they call a "trust" when they make antitrust legislation. (Alternatively, you've described the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, later found unconstitutional - leading to FDR's infamous court-packing attempt - and considered by a little under half of economists to have been a major contributing factor which prolonged the Great Depression.) Getting more power to ordinary workers is laudable when it comes at the expense of the power of their large-corporation employers... not if it comes at the expense of everyone else in the economy.
    - gaius 10y ago
      Companies unionizing is called a cartel, and very illegal.

ams6110 10y ago

I thought overuse of consultants and overdesign made more sense.

HCIdivision17 10y ago

I thought it was at least going to be something interesting about US infrastructure, but it's really focused on NYC. Unsurprisingly, the US does not place getting costs down for subways to be one of its higher priorities. Anecdata, admittedly, but I've seen very little talk about controlling union costs for MTA workers in the rural midwest; those poor guys are supporting a subway system that's barely there! Really, though, infrastructure stuff is neat, and we probably should start fixing it up. The main problem is the size of the US infrastructure is outstandingly staggering. There's an article [0] that's an argument for pouring money back into the highway funds (and the like), and the cash involved is worse than astronomical. At the very least, I didn't know there were over 600000 bridges in the US... I honestly don't know where we put them all. (Are overpasses included?) [0] http://www.budget.senate.gov/democratic/public/index.cfm/repairing-our-infrastructure http://www.budget.senate.gov/democratic/public/index.cfm/rep... I don't go to senate.gov much, so I'm guessing this is pretty partisan, but there's a crapton of followup links that are at least interesting.

jbob2000 10y ago
On that note about bridges; When I was in Cuba, the tour guide made a special note to point out this bridge they had that connected one part of the island to another over a large valley. Apparently it was a big deal to get this bridge built? The Russians built it for them in the 80s, but before that, it was a nightmare moving around. It didn't look like much to me, a regular bridge that I've seen a thousand times here in Canada. It put in perspective for me how expensive bridges really are. They couldn't afford to build one, crucial bridge. It took a major super power to do it.
- VLM 10y ago
  I pulled the data and superficially a random square mile of Cuba is about 100x more likely to get hit with a mag 7 earthquake than a similar square in Canada gets hit by a mag 6. Cuba gets spanked every two or three decades with a serious mag 7 or so. Your 80s bridge survived the '92 quake, assuming you saw it after '92 of course. That was a biggie. Earthquake proof bridges are no joke to build.
- 10y ago

wpietri 10y ago

I was disappointed that planning methods didn't come into it. US business and civil culture has shifted heavily to very plan-oriented approaches. But there are other ways to do things. As Mary Poppendieck explains, the Empire State Building was built on schedule and under budget in 18 months. When they started work on the bottom floors, they hadn't even finished designing the top floors. But that was fine, because they were working in a flow-oriented approach: https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of-the-plan/ https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of... (It's also covered in one of her books, and I think it's "Leading Lean Software Development".) As we know with software, big up-front design approaches can get unnecessarily long, confusing, and expensive. (See, for example, the healthcare.gov fiasco.) But we also know that approaches that optimize for cost- and time-effectiveness can work much better. (See, for example, Lean Startup methods or the healthcare.gov rescue.) We haven't really learned the lesson in software yet, so I can't blame people for not rediscovering it in other spaces yet. But I hope one day they will!