Meme Weeding: High Wages and Baumol's Cost Disease

Alon Levy · 22 Jun 2024

Others here said this too

Britain has a systemic problem building large infrastructure projects, including reservoirs

Their wordsIt’s turned entire countries, like the United Kingdom, incapable of building more than about one line per generation.

Also said by Hannah Ritchie

Read the piece on pedestrianobservations.com ↗

4 korrents from this piece ↓

Alon Levy did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
High infrastructure costs are not Baumol's cost disease: what a country pays per kilometre of subway barely tracks how rich it is.

Their wordsIn fact, even though growth in average infrastructure costs over time is documented, there is very little cross-national correlation between GDP per capita and per-km subway construction costs.
Our reading
The English-speaking world builds infrastructure expensively because it is behind, not because it is rich.

Their wordsIt’s not that the Anglosphere is rich; it’s that it’s the Anglosphere and builds inefficiently.
Our reading
New York's subway cost premium is overstaffing, oversized stations and procurement, not high wages.

Their wordsWell, we’ve divided the New York cost premium into three tranches: labor (mostly overstaffing, not high wages), station and system design, and procurement and soft costs.
Our reading
Britain has a systemic problem building large infrastructure projects, including reservoirs

Their wordsIt’s turned entire countries, like the United Kingdom, incapable of building more than about one line per generation.

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The other pieces are the ones whose claims are worded most like this one's. That measures language, not agreement: they may argue the opposite.