by the end of World War II, it was very clear to a victorious nation what needed to happen if we wanted to keep from sliding back into economic depression: We all needed to copy the success of Detroit. That is what we did.

What should baffle us, however, is how professionals and decision-makers are so possessed by faith in infrastructure spending. Cities with a mind-boggling backlog of unfunded road maintenance routinely go out and build new roads. Places with pipes crumbling and pumps failing from lack of maintenance give incentives to developers to build more pipes

I ran the numbers; it would take 37 years of my neighbors and I paying taxes for the city to merely recoup the cost they had initially put into building the road. That was longer than the road was going to last. It was a dead-end road; we were the only ones who used it. If my taxes weren’t even enough to cover the initial construction costs, who wa

This makes it sound like we can’t have anything nice. That is true only if we ignore the return on investment, if we don’t bother to ensure that the wealth we are creating generates sufficient revenues to cover our expenses. If we obsess about running a profit, we can have things that are very nice. Quite spectacular, in fact.

The little shop owner thus shared a common fate with other property owners in the city. It was not a zero-sum game, where one benefits only at the expense of others. I’m not suggesting they all lived in harmony, but they had a lot of selfish incentives for altruism.

The objective would shift from scoring the most runs to outlasting your opponent, from run production to lineup stability. An infinite game wouldn’t be played to win, but to survive.

For me, the evidence was pointing to a conclusion I found difficult to believe, yet impossible to ignore: The more our cities build, the poorer they become.

This is in stark contrast to everything we experience today regarding growth and development. Instead of private wealth leading, in today’s cities it is the collective public investment that leads. Governments frequently invest millions of dollars, or make long-term maintenance commitments worth millions, before any taxable private investment has b

What would it mean to break out of the Infrastructure Cult and make capital investments that had a real return on investment? First and foremost, it would require us to spend public money on infrastructure projects that covered their own costs, not only today but indefinitely into the future.