Why is Everything "Infrastructure" Now, and Does it Matter if it Is?
One of the heavily remarked-upon aspects of the American Jobs Plan—which you may just know as the Biden infrastructure bill—is the expansiveness of it. The bill includes large amounts of proposed spending for things that aren't conventional public works, including $400 billion to support home and community-based care for elderly and disabled Americans, $213 billion for housing initiatives, and $137 billion for public education.
There's a debate raging about whether it's right to call that stuff "infrastructure" at all. You can easily find a definition of the word itself to suit either side. (Merriam-Webster is no help.)
Plenty of pundits have pointed out that all of these systems are interrelated, and that there's a strong argument to be made that social programs may, in many cases, more powerfully underlie people's ability to thrive in society than the condition of roads, rails, bridges, pipes, and ports. They are just as much the chassis on which a prosperous society is built—in other words, infrastructure. I’m sympathetic to this line of argument, which concludes that, after all, why shouldn't the question be, "What's worth spending money on?" not "What fits into the arbitrary box we've set for ourselves?"
Image via Flickr.
On the other hand, you might ask, quite reasonably, why elder care and bridges are in the same bill, even if we do grant that both are worthwhile expenses. What purpose is served by bundling all of this stuff instead of debating each piece on the merits? The answer to that isn’t really about philosophical disagreement on the definition of "infrastructure” at all. This is an issue of how Congress functions. Or doesn't.
In a world in which we had two parties with some meaningful ideological overlap and a common understanding of what they're in D.C. to do, we might have lots of little debates about the details of policy programs, and more room for individual compromises to be hashed out and passed on individual, narrow areas of policy. Like home-based care for seniors.
We don't live in that world; we live in one almost devoid of bipartisan cooperation, and where passing any major legislation at all is a massive public-relations and political endeavor. There is simply no way the Senate as it exists in 2021 is going to pass a dozen separate bills that cover the ground the American Jobs Plan attempts to cover. It's become conventional wisdom that a party that manages to control both Congress and the White House gets one big shot, early in the presidential term, to pass its agenda, and so they'd better throw everything at the wall and create a unified narrative around it.
But there is something pernicious about that unified narrative, even if the people head-scratching about the definition of “infrastructure” are being willfully naïve about how politics work.
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If Infrastructure Is Always Good, Then of Course Everything Is Infrastructure
For decades, the bipartisan consensus around “infrastructure spending” in the abstract has been an incredibly shallow "If it's infrastructure, it's good!" mantra. Here’s a 2014 piece by Larry Summers (the high priest of this sort of thinking) that exemplifies the absolute lack of critical analysis on this issue even from the people who are supposed to be the brightest minds of the policy world.
Summers informs us with great confidence that we can spend as much as we want on infrastructure, and it will pay for itself by making the rest of the economy more productive. A bold claim which warrants bold evidence, but what we get—and have gotten for decades, from almost every pundit who makes this sort of claim—is ridiculous hand-waving. Boldface emphasis mine:
Why does the IMF reach these conclusions? Consider a hypothetical investment in a new highway financed entirely with debt. Assume – counterfactually and conservatively – that the process of building the highway provides no stimulative benefit. Further assume that the investment earns only a 6 per cent real return, also a very conservative assumption given widely accepted estimates of the benefits of public investment.
You can try to find the “widely accepted estimates” Summers alludes to and I promise you, nothing gets clearer down that rabbit hole. How could it? This is absurd reasoning on its face: imagine if a nutritionist advised you that food is, generally speaking, good for you, and you should eat food. Why do we take it any more seriously when policy experts inform us that building stuff for the public to use is, generally speaking, good for us, and we should do it?
I’m sure Summers’s “6% return” is based on a real study that I could read and cite. But I’m also sure that study averages out so many different “public investments” in so many different contexts that the average is meaningless as a guide to whether any particular project warrants investment. Have you heard the one about the statistician who drowned wading across a river that was an average of 3 feet deep?
Doesn’t matter what the stuff is. Doesn’t matter where it is. Build, baby, build. This is the cultish level that the discourse has operated at for years.
And the logical conclusion of this sort of thinking is foregone. If “infrastructure pays for itself” is conventional wisdom, then what political party wouldn’t try to package all its favored initiatives as infrastructure?
The thing we should care about is return on investment, which is independent of scale. But the context in which huge, moonshot federal bills are debated and passed makes it impossible to talk about return on investment in a meaningful way. The text of this bill, even in all its granular detail, is several layers of bureaucracy removed from implementation on the ground. And yet the actual return on investment will depend entirely on the details of the implementation of all of these programs, and those details are mostly illegible to Congress and national journalists and pundits. Should we be heartened that the bill doesn’t explicitly propose to fund new roads, or should we be dismayed because it leaves room to “modernize” roads, a word which DOTs have used for years as code for “expand”? I don’t know. And you don’t either. Because it depends on where the money actually gets spent, and what guardrails or incentives are in place to direct it.
Even if we thoughtfully design the guardrails—and I don’t want to pretend there isn’t a lot of thoughtful detail in this proposal—money deployed at this kind of scale will produce effects so complex, interlocking, and far-reaching that there’s no way to even do the rigorous policy analysis to determine what the return on $2 trillion in investment is going to be. There’s more uncertainty than any model can deal with. And suppose you did the best, most rigorous possible study: what level of confidence would you have that its conclusions would influence the vote of a single senator?
This is not a system that’s institutionally capable of producing nuanced assessments of how to get real return on investment. The feedback loops are too long and opaque. The officials making policy face zero consequences for whether or not the policy improves people’s lives. They might face consequences based on how the economy as a whole performs, but the specific consequences of specific bits of spending get written out of the narrative, because those things are only legible when we localize decision-making.
We argue about what is or isn’t “infrastructure” precisely because we’ve set ourselves up in a situation where the actually important questions about this legislation are almost impossible to answer.
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is also a founding member of the organization. His work at Strong Towns focuses on housing issues, small-scale and incremental development, urban design, and lowering the barriers to entry for people to participate in creating resilient and prosperous neighborhoods. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota, with a concentration in Housing and Community Development.
Daniel’s work with Strong Towns reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children.