Probably less than you'd think. Levy is delivering a punchy oneliner here; what the Transit Costs Project research indicates is that what's often missing in cou

Probably less than you'd think. Levy is delivering a punchy oneliner here; what the Transit Costs Project research indicates is that what's often missing in countries with high construction costs isn't so much bureaucrats as it is in-house engineering and technical program management resources. A lot of the design and program management work they do needs to be done by someone, but in countries with high construction costs this work mostly tends to be done either by consultants or by the contractors themselves, and that leads to misaligned incentives. They do get into these things a little bit later in the interview, but the surprisingly simple conclusion is that when an organization is buying something, the people working out the deal need to understand what it is they're buying, or the organization gets ripped off. It sounds simple to the point of being silly when I put it like that, but it's actually true. And this should feel familiar to a lot of people in tech; how many times have you had to use or implement some very stupid system that got purchased because of buzzwords or because the people deciding what to use aren't the people using the system? (Education is particularly plagued by these problems.) What the Transit Costs Project finds is that this is a thing in public works as well: if your civil service has insufficient in-house technical expertise in its field, or if it doesn't trust its own technical expertise, that tends to make costs go up. It's far from the only contributing factor, but it's an important one. When cost overruns for these types of projects can routinely be measured in billions of dollars, I think it's not that hard to justify hiring a few dozen civil engineers to keep things under control. The "big" civil service Levy talks about doesn't necessarily need to be big in terms of team size, but it needs to have weight.