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In Praise of Maintenance
- skmurphy 10y agothey use a quote by Larry Summers to frame the tension between innovation and maintenance: SUMMERS: People always think more about how new ground can be broken than they think about how existing institutions can be sustained or existing facilities can be maintained. It leads to a constant trap where we underinvest in old things, then old things disappoint, us then we feel a need for new things, then to satisfy that need for new things we underinvest more in old things and the cycle goes on. You see it in the fact that we pay the equivalent of 40 cents a gallon in gasoline taxes for extra repairs due to the fact that we are not maintaining our highways right. You see it in an air-traffic control systems in the United States that still uses obsolete technologies and doesn’t use GPS. And as a consequence, we all spend more time with air-traffic delays,we burn huge amounts more energy, we take greater safety risks than we need to. You see it in developing countries where they’re always building new facilities, but then a few years later those facilities sit in a sense of disrepair. I think the fetish of novelty and the lack of glamor of maintaining and sustaining things is a besetting problem.