31 March

It costs up to 5 times as much to maintain ‘infrastructure’ over time than it costs to build it in the first place. Buildings, roads, sewers, pipes, parks etc. That funding is rarely forthcoming. Many local councils for example have ongoing deficits of maintenance in the tens of millions of dollars. It’s not their fault, the vast majority of the money from taxpayers goes to the federal level, but services are delivered by state and local levels. If we want a politics and a society that is focused on the longer term, this is how to do it. Put the focus on infrastructure. The long-term is built right into the operating system. Infrastructure isn’t a technology or an engineering thing, it’s the way societies exist over multiple generations. They used to build cathedrals using multiple generations of tradespeople. A commitment to infrastructure is a commitment to social longevity, it binds people together over multiple generations. We think it’s progress to decry ‘materialism’. But I think it’s the secret to society itself.