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All of our major systems: from infrastructure to employment to graduate work, is built on the assumption of eternal exponential growth. All of these past infra

All of our major systems: from infrastructure to employment to graduate work, is built on the assumption of eternal exponential growth. All of these past infrastructure decisions would've been fine if we continued to have exponential economic and population growth. More taxes/funding would come in and there'd be new money to continue to grow forever. Except it can't grow forever. Eric Weinstein coined the phrase "Embedded Growth Obligation" (EGO) to describe this phenomenon. >"An embedded growth obligation is how fast a structure has to grow in order to maintain its honest positions," Weinstein says. "If you have a situation in which you have trial lawyers and they're supported by various associates, and the associates all want to become partners and trial lawyers themselves, then what you have is a situation where the law firm has to grow at a very fast clip if all those people are going to be satisfied with their job decisions. Well, very quickly that ability to grow runs out, and then people want to know, "Why am I stuck in a position going nowhere?" https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/eric-weinstein-intellectual-dark-web?rebelltitem=2#rebelltitem2 https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/eric-weinstein-intelle...

mywittyname 6y ago
I really don't think this is the case here. Cities like Lafayette are just plain inefficient, and the inefficiency scales with growth: the more growth you have, the more sprawl you have, which means the more expensive things are, which leads to more inefficiency. This is probably one of the forces constraining the growth of cities like this. The problem with most of suburban America is that it's completely unsustainable. Almost all suburban cities in the US require a constant injection of Federal funds to maintain infrastructure. Most people don't realize this because it's really something politicians score brownie points for, hence the accounting subterfuge they engage in (as mentioned in the article), as do most small cities in the USA. We have no idea how long this Federal subsidy will be maintain, making it difficult to plan for. So many Americans want this idyllic, unsustainable suburban life-style that no politician will keep their job if they try to "take it away" (read: address the issue). But the longer we wait to build more sustainable cities, the worse things will be during the inevitable implosion. America needs to be building medium-density, car-adverse cities now. The country can't afford to continue subsidizing driving to the degree that it has post-WWII. If this doesn't happen, most of the country is going to enter a serious depression.
- Consultant32452 6y ago
  The trick here is the federal government invests in this infrastructure using debt/bonds. The expectation is that there will be a return on this investment. Jobs are created or whatever, there's future increased tax revenue. Now you have more money to maintain the old infrastructure and/or build new. The fact that in this case the debt is incurred is at the federal level doesn't change the system. It's expected to result in greater federal taxes in the future.

mywittyname 6y ago

I really don't think this is the case here. Cities like Lafayette are just plain inefficient, and the inefficiency scales with growth: the more growth you have, the more sprawl you have, which means the more expensive things are, which leads to more inefficiency. This is probably one of the forces constraining the growth of cities like this. The problem with most of suburban America is that it's completely unsustainable. Almost all suburban cities in the US require a constant injection of Federal funds to maintain infrastructure. Most people don't realize this because it's really something politicians score brownie points for, hence the accounting subterfuge they engage in (as mentioned in the article), as do most small cities in the USA. We have no idea how long this Federal subsidy will be maintain, making it difficult to plan for. So many Americans want this idyllic, unsustainable suburban life-style that no politician will keep their job if they try to "take it away" (read: address the issue). But the longer we wait to build more sustainable cities, the worse things will be during the inevitable implosion. America needs to be building medium-density, car-adverse cities now. The country can't afford to continue subsidizing driving to the degree that it has post-WWII. If this doesn't happen, most of the country is going to enter a serious depression.

Consultant32452 6y ago
The trick here is the federal government invests in this infrastructure using debt/bonds. The expectation is that there will be a return on this investment. Jobs are created or whatever, there's future increased tax revenue. Now you have more money to maintain the old infrastructure and/or build new. The fact that in this case the debt is incurred is at the federal level doesn't change the system. It's expected to result in greater federal taxes in the future.