[Dr. Sivana]

The whole article presumes an authoritarian/bureaucratic utopian mindset. The author also admits that we have survived one genration of this. The suburbs started in earnest in the post WWII era, and kicked into high gear with the Interstate highway system that was largely in place by the late ‘60s. It has been largely paid for by the folks who use the same highway system in the form of gasoline and excise taxes.

Seventy years later, it is perhaps the MOST sustainable of our system, much moreso than health care, prisons, and “education”. It works better than all three, too.

[old curmudgeon]

I can't find it, but one of the founding fathers said that as long as the country was primarily rural, democracy would survive and that the growth of large cities wout eventually become a great threat.

We see today the reality of that observation.

[Alberta's Child]

I would suggest that the suburban model simply hasn't had enough time to run its course in many respects. I disagree with many of the things the author presents here, but from my own experience I can tell you that there's a lot of truth to what he says.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I'm a civil engineer by profession, and I come across a lot of the things discussed in this article more frequently and more closely than a typical layperson.

If I were to identify one unmistakable trend in U.S. public policy -- almost always reflecting the individual private attitudes of even the most educated and well-intended voters in this country -- that drives so much of the dysfunction in our governing systems, it is this: Our combination of private initiative and unlimited government spending drives us to overspend on health care and education, and undervalue infrastructure and other hard assets.

The reason for this, as I see it, is a simple three-part proposition:

1. People have a natural tendency to value "health care" above all else because it is an inherently personal benefit, no matter what the cost -- especially if these costs can be shared with others or passed on to them. In simple terms, this means a person who is healthy (or perceives himself to be healthy) has built and maintained the most important "asset" they have -- an asset that also gives them the most flexibility to pursue other areas of interest in life.

2. After health care, education comes next because -- as with health care -- it is an inherently personal benefit. It also (like health care) has the advantage of being completely mobile. In other words, your health and your education go wherever you go.

3. Infrastructure, on the other hand, is a "hard" asset that remains in place long after it is built. This means its value to any individual user diminishes over time, and has a value of $0 when any given individual stops using it. It also means that in our increasingly mobile society, the life cycle of this asset far exceeds the period of time over which any one person actually uses it.

This combination of factors drives all kinds of distortions in the "free market" as it relates to political decisions that are made on behalf of voters. For example, it is the underlying issue that drives the financial disaster that afflicts many of our older suburbs around Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, etc. Time and time again I've come across situations where voters continually approve enormous property tax hikes to support their local school systems, while opposing investments in anything except the most obvious and sorely-needed infrastructure improvements. These voters don't mind spending exorbitant sums of money on education because they think there's an even greater value for their own children ... but they don't want to invest in any infrastructure with a long life cycle because: (A) they are already making plans to move somewhere else; and (B) they know their children aren't coming back to live there.