566. Why Is It So Hard (and Expensive) to Build Anything in America?

566.为什么在美国建造任何东西都如此困难(而且昂贵)?

Freakonomics Radio

社会与文化

2023-11-23

54 分钟
PDF

单集简介 ...

Most industries have become more productive over time. But not construction! We identify the causes — and possible solutions. (Can you say ... “prefab”?)

单集文稿 ...

  • This episode is about a problem.

  • It's a problem that has to do with how we build things in the US, but it's not a new problem.

  • The Department of Housing and Urban Development saw it coming more than 50 years ago.

  • There's a report called a decent home from 1968, which was commissioned by the Johnson administration that basically said that construction productivity in the US had grown about 2% per year in the forties and fifties and had, in the sixties, flatlined.

  • And that is Ivan Rupnik.

  • He is a professor of architecture at Northeastern University.

  • Productivity, as you probably know, is how economists measure the relationship between the resources that go into a process money, time, labor, things like that, and what comes out the other end.

  • Humankind has become much, much, much more productive over time, although not always, and not in every situation.

  • Let's say you get a new software program that helps you work work faster, maybe even better.

  • That might lead to a gain in productivity.

  • But if that same program is too complicated or glitchy, you might not get a gain in productivity.

  • Or maybe the new software is fantastic and fantastically fun and you spend hours doing something other than the work you're supposed to be doing, then your productivity might fall.

  • So the productivity arrow doesn't always travel in the direction you anticipate.

  • And what happens if productivity declines in an industry that is absolutely essential to our economy?

  • Here is what that Johnson administration report said.

  • There was a potential for major societal impact, not just for the construction industry, but for citizens, if that productivity either continued to flatline or decline.

  • The concerns expressed in that report turned out to be valid.

  • According to a new paper by the economists Austin Goolsbee and Chad Severson, productivity in the construction sector has fallen significantly over the past 50 years.

  • The value added by a construction worker today is about 40% less than it was in 1970.

  • This is exactly the opposite of how productivity has changed in most other industries like agriculture, manufacturing, information, technology.