This piece originally appeared at at Prototyping Politics.
One pillar of an emerging “abundance” argument is that infrastructure takes too long to build in the U.S. because of too much permitting, too much planning, too many meetings. This argument rightly applies to energy, to housing, and many other issues. I’m sympathetic—but that diagnosis skips a step. Politics?
We rarely ask:
Was there ever the political will to do the thing in the first place?
Too often, we collapse political problems and process problems—and in doing so, we misdiagnose what’s actually going wrong.
