Rod Stewart decided to try to repair the road near his own home, because “my Ferrari can’t go through here at…

Rod Stewart decided to try to repair the road near his own home, because “my Ferrari can’t go through here at all.” (The humanity.) Like any good tabloid story though, it’s overflowing with insight into our current culture. The universal is always right there, in the detail. /1 https://t.co/rpS6DIXiUD

I do a lot of work with road engineers. Roads are either not fixed, or only patched by quick pothole backfills, because there’s no money to do anything else. It’s a matter of extreme frustration for them, because they know how to make roads that don’t have these problems. /2

Interestingly where I live highway repairs in recent years have taken a very different approach. Whole sections of damaged road have been ripped out, and replaced with top-quality resurfacing, using really thick layers of hot mix, normally reserved only for critical roads. /3

It’s MUCH more expensive. But this is where it gets interesting. Because it’s only much more expensive NOW, in the present. The calculation has finally been done that it actually *saves* money, over the longer term, a 35-40 year timeframe. /4

Cheaper to do this than send road crews out continuously over that 35-40 year period to patch damage. We can extend this to anything really, including Covid. We’re patching holes there, mopping up the continuous damage. Baulking at the cost of proper disease elimination. /5

But that’s a false economy. Slowing disease and death in the present will not prevent that ongoing infection and disease costing you more, in lives and dollars, over the longer term. It’s always the area under the curve, not the peaks and troughs of the present. /6

But economic politics married to populist politics doesn’t do long-term. It has an attention span of about 10 minutes. All that matters is winning elections and protecting the economic status quo. To finish by coming back to Rod. /7

Because another insight into our culture is the populist response to it. Nobody asks why rich rock stars have the money to do things like fix rods and buy MRI machines (another Rod project), while local authorities don’t. Much easier to take cheap shots at the authority. /8 https://t.co/U4w3BanecR

Populism starves public institutions of the resources they need to do their job, and then performs symbolic acts of outrage in the ruins. I doubt Rod understand that his shovelling gravel into potholes makes him legally liable if that inadequate repair causes an accident. /9 https://t.co/LcMRraOudE

That would be just the first of many things populism doesn’t understand. New Civil Engineer’s article on this is worth a read: https://t.co/CNFoOgHR19 /end