KENNEDY: The foundation of our success is crumbling

In my classroom, when I introduce the topic of infrastructure, a lot of students’ eyes begin to glaze over.

They shouldn’t.

James Carville famously insisted, “It’s the economy, stupid,” but economic activity requires infrastructure.

Think of it this way: Humans create governments to provide infrastructure, both social and physical. We depend upon those systems—those immense, interlocking webs of support—in ways large and small, and the extent of that dependence goes largely unnoticed.

A friend of mine, a colleague in the business school, once made an observation that has stayed with me. As he pointed out, in poor countries, people are no less entrepreneurial or hard-working than we who are fortunate enough to live in the developed world. They simply lack the infrastructure enterprises needed in order to have a chance of succeeding, beginning with enough people with the wherewithal to buy their goods (enough buyers to compose a market). They lack roads, trucks and railroads that would transport necessary raw materials or allow them to ship finished goods.

Even more important, many such countries simply cannot provide entrepreneurs with security and social stability, without which a business can’t engage in orderly planning.

Infrastructure is thus much more than roads and sewers, important as those are. Infrastructure—in its most expansive sense—includes important social supports like the rule of law. In most Western democratic countries, the health care system is considered part of a country’s essential social infrastructure.

You may or may not be a fan of Elizabeth Warren (I am), but she is one of the few elected officials focused on the essential role played by infrastructure. As she recently reiterated, “people who built great businesses worked hard. Most successful entrepreneurs worked their tails off. But those businesses needed good soil to grow—and that meant they need roads and bridges to get their goods to market, dependable and affordable power grids, access to clean water and safe sewers, up-to-date communications—the kind of basic infrastructure that we build together.

“Coming out of the Great Depression, we built those roads and bridges and power grids that helped businesses grow right here in America. We plowed money into our future, and as those businesses grew, they created great jobs here at home.

“But by the 1980s, our country sharply cut back on making those investments in our future, and now we’re getting left behind. Today, China spends 9 percent of its gross domestic product on infrastructure. Europe spends about 5 percent. They are building a future for their businesses—and better jobs for their people.

“The United States is investing only 2.4 percent and looking for more ways to make cuts. The American Society of Civil Engineers says we have about $3.6 trillion of deferred maintenance, repairs and upgrading—and every day we’re falling behind.”

America’s failure to attend to basic infrastructure is one of the most serious policy issues we face, and it is maddening to watch members of Congress in both parties posture for interest groups and play petty politics while our bridges and sewers crumble, our power grid degrades, and other countries’ wireless service exceeds ours in reliability and speed.

I think it was Eric Hoffer—the longshoreman/philosopher—who said we cannot judge the greatness of a civilization by looking at the roads and buildings it constructed, but by how well it maintained what it had built.

I agree.•

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Kennedy is a professor of law and public policy at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at IUPUI. She blogs regularly at www.sheilakennedy.net. She can be reached at skennedy@ibj.com. Send comments on this column to ibjedit@ibj.com.