Procurement and Infrastructure Costs
New podcast interview with Zach Liscow, former OMB Chief Economist and current Yale Law School professor.
Interviewing the author of a new paper on the topic
Why does it cost so much to build infrastructure? is a question of increasing importance to the nascent abundance movement and in general. Part of the answer lies in the familiar NIMBY barriers expressed via proceduralism and property rights. Some of it is the increasing cost of inputs via inflation and trade channels. Some of it is labor supply issues, including immigration policy and the decimation and incomplete comeback of the construction sector post-2008. But there are other reasons as well, including for example the unique aspects of market structure that relate to building Big Things that comply with government regulations (a job few firms can do!).
To deepen our understanding of the scale and scope of the challenges, my co-host Jeff Lin (economist at the Philadelphia Fed) and I recently sat down with Zach Liscow, who served as Chief Economist at the White House Office of Management and Budget from 2022-23 and teaches at Yale Law School, for the latest episode (Spotify; Apple) of our podcast Densely Speaking: Conversations about Cities, Economics & Law.
Our conversation is based on a new paper, “Procurement and Infrastructure Costs,” Zach co-authored with William Nober and Cailin Slattery.1 The paper collects new project-level data and conducts surveys of state DOT officials to document variation in infrastructure procurement costs across states and identify cost drivers, including capacity and competition. We had fun with the conversation despite (okay, because of) the weedsy nature of the topic. Readers of this newsletter are pretty much the target audience, so enjoy it.
You can listen (and subscribe!) to Densely Speaking on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your shows. We always appreciate ratings and reviews—they help other people find the show.
A plug for Marron
The broader question of enhancing the efficiency of transportation capital and operating expenses is one that I hope to explore more in the years ahead. This was one motivation behind my joining the Transportation and Land Use team at the Marron Institute at NYU as a fellow this month. They’re best known for the Transit Costs Project but if you look at their page they have a bunch of other cool work with this angle.
Greg