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Notes -
Why is transit in the US so expensive?
The starting point for this video is an upcoming report on why transit, most notably subways, cost so much more in American than in other developed countries. However, the discussion covers much more than just transit, and discusses how cost disease effects pretty much all public works projects, from roads to sewage. While there are many individual pieces that contribute to inflated prices (outside consultants, unions, red tape, bureaucrats, etc.), they don't really like this explanation. As Chuck points out shortly after 31:00, each of the 2 major political sides can point to a few of these issues to fuel their particular narrative. But, he says, they're incomplete, and miss the real underlying causes. If I were to summarize their description, it seems like the question is mostly one of attitude:
No one cares about cost. People will say they do, but their actions say otherwise. Voters don't, especially with the ability to borrow from the future by issuing bonds. Which means politicians don't, because why would they? And the appointed heads of agencies don't consider it their responsibility to account for cost; they treat cost as fixed and let the legislature decide how to pay for it. Possible sub-point: We treat a lot of these projects as jobs programs and so end up hiring more people than necessary.
There's an underlying assumption everywhere that everything has to be the best, no matter what. Roads in rural areas, that in other countries would be very narrow and winding, are in the US flat, smooth, paved asphalt with 2 lanes in each direction. We don't treat money as a constraint, we just decide we want a thing and then go and get it without regard for the future. Of course, this attitude depends on what one is used to. Boomers, especially, are not used to having these sorts of constraints; Millennials also feel a certain sense of entitlement, but at least have more experience with these constraints. (The latter sentence seems to be more or less speculation, they don't cite any research here).
The conclusion is that nothing will really get fixed until it accumulates to the point of a major economic recession or depression, at which point we'll be forced to actually do something, but not until after we have wasted enormous amounts of time, effort, and resources on poorly planned public projects. Or, if we collectively decide to actually care about these things before then.
Addendum, entirely my own opinion: One reform that I would like to try is to make lawsuits default to "loser pays." Almost every other developed country requires the losing side in a lawsuit to pay for the other side's legal fees. I think it's generally well known that lawsuits are often a tool used to bully people into complying by making that cheaper than defending the lawsuit. Meritless lawsuits are still very expensive to defend, and almost every story I read about cost inflation seems to mention lawsuits at some point. Suing over a missed period in an environmental impact review as is common in CA, or suing because a building would be taller than surrounding "historic" buildings like in Miami, or for minor procedural limitations like with Austin's CodeNext, or Cambridge suing Boston because of "visual impact" of a bridge redesign during the Bid Dig, is very common. I think this happens in medicine, too: Malpractice insurance isn't cheap, but probably far more expensive is the vast amount of extra tests done for reasons of "CYA." Loser pays would discourage lawsuits that are likely to fail, but costly to defend.
(The only thing preventing me from declaring this the Solution to All Cost Disease is that I haven't seen a lot of discussion of lawsuits in educational cost disease. However, one might also think about the attitudes described above in both of those contexts: Do we insist on expensive and impressive-looking inputs, regardless of cost or efficacy? Are we highly insensitive to price? Is it considered unethical to reject the "best" solution because it's costly? Do bears shit in the woods? etc.)
But also, I think you can see similar attitudes reflect in the people filing those lawsuits, or otherwise being obstructionist (such as county officials who drove up the price of CA's HSR by demanding it take circuitous routes). They would rather tank an entire project to benefit millions of people, than not get their pound of flesh or deal with a minor inconvenience of something changing or having their property appreciate in value slightly less quickly. Even as a libertarian who's usually very suspect of "people being selfish ruin everything" style arguments, it seems like borderline narcissism or sociopathy.
The classic rebuttal to this, which I haven't really seen a solution for, is that this effectively makes corporations immune to anything but a very well-funded class action lawsuit, since no individual can afford to pay Disney or Microsoft's legal fees (or that of, say, their hospital) if they lose a lawsuit.
I've seen that as well, but don't find it a convincing argument. It seems to me like that's the exact same situation as exists today. No individual can afford to bring a suit against a giant corporation even without having to pay their legal bills if they don't win.
That's...really not true. The big companies get involved in legal disputes constantly. There are employment disputes, products liability, premises liability, derivative shareholder actions, contracts claims, etc. etc. etc. You just don't hear about it much because:
not every legal dispute turns into a suit; sometimes the initial discussions after a demand letter is sent reveal one side or the other to be obviously correct, and so a resolution is reached before any suit is filed,
many disputes get swept up in binding arbitration (aka a civil suit's less-formal and more-biased cousin) rather than the actual courts, and
well-north of 90% of the matters that make it into civil court settle, almost always with confidentiality/non-disclosure clauses in the agreement.
Almost everything about the civil courts in the U.S. is designed to encourage this result; would you want your complex, potentially multi-million dollar civil suit to get decided on by a handful of whatever random weirdos weren't smart (or busy) enough to get out of jury duty this week?? Of course not! Also, lawsuit procedure is, as you say, expensive, both to the litigants and to the state (thus the taxpayer). There's a lot of people and infrastructure that go into running modern courts, and fighting modern lawsuits. It's also time-consuming and complicated, and not just for the lawyers you hire to handle the case for you! Discovery procedures can be quite invasive, and do you really want to spend your/your employees' time searching through years and years'-worth of documents to determine what's responsive to the other side's fishing-expedition-style requests**, particularly when you could get in real trouble if you screw it up and miss something? Do you want to have to hire expensive experts to testify to the scientific validity of things that you know, the other side knows, you know the other side knows, etc. etc.? Do you want to have to waste days in preparation for, and then actually sitting for, depositions? No, legal procedure sucks. You don't want to rely on it to resolve all your disputes if there's more efficient ways of doing so.
(Of course this begs the question of why civil procedure got so complicated in the first place, and what the point of the court system is if it's encouraging people to find alternate mechanisms of doing the one thing that courts are allegedly there for in the first place - authoritatively and conclusively determining the various rights and obligations of disputants, and satisfactorily resolving disputes. But this is not a history of American law, nor a treatise on jurisprudential theory, so I'll stop there).
** for the other lawyers on this board, yes I know discovery is supposed to not be a fishing expedition, but let's be real and call a spade a spade here.
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