AI transcript
0:00:06 Hey there, it’s Steven Dubner.
0:00:11 We’re always hearing about innovation and disruption and the new, new thing.
0:00:14 And a lot of that stuff is wonderful.
0:00:18 But I’ve been thinking lately that we tend to overlook something equally important, maybe
0:00:22 more important, maintaining what we’ve already built.
0:00:28 And then I remembered that we made an episode about this idea back in 2016 called “In Praise
0:00:29 of Maintenance.”
0:00:35 So we went back into the archive, dusted off that episode, updated facts and figures as
0:00:38 necessary, and today we are playing it for you as a bonus episode.
0:00:40 I’d love to know what you think.
0:00:43 Our email is radio@freakonomics.com.
0:00:49 As always, thanks for listening.
0:00:54 A while back, I got obsessed with the notion of maintenance, or really the notion of how
0:00:56 much time maintenance takes.
0:01:01 You go to the gym to maintain your body, so it can do what you need it to do.
0:01:05 Maybe you go to a doctor, and a dentist, and a therapist too.
0:01:10 You spend a third of your life sleepings, your brain can do what it needs to do.
0:01:14 And think about all the time and resources that go into maintaining your work life.
0:01:18 The meetings, the memos, the productivity apps.
0:01:22 Of course, there’s also your personal life to maintain.
0:01:27 I got so obsessed with the burden of all this maintenance that I decided to precisely track
0:01:32 how many minutes I was spending of each day on different forms of maintenance versus all
0:01:34 the other things I was trying to accomplish.
0:01:39 But after just a couple days, I quit this ridiculous exercise because it had become
0:01:43 just another maintenance task that kept me from doing the stuff I really wanted to be
0:01:44 doing.
0:01:49 I decided that maintenance was simply a curse that had to be accommodated, that the less
0:01:52 I thought about it, the happier I’d be.
0:01:55 And then I read something that changed my mind completely.
0:02:01 Our thesis basically is that our culture’s obsession with innovation and hype has led
0:02:05 us to neglect maintenance and maintainers.
0:02:10 Today on Freakonomics Radio, in praise of maintenance.
0:02:15 Because there’s not only a need, but a certain nobility in taking care of what you’ve already
0:02:20 created, and maybe we shouldn’t look at maintenance as the enemy of innovation.
0:02:23 I think a great nation can walk and chew gum at the same time.
0:02:36 Or can we?
0:02:41 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with
0:02:54 your host, Steven Dubner.
0:03:00 There is a digital magazine called Aeon, A-E-O-N, that publishes essays about ideas and culture.
0:03:05 Just as I was having my personal crisis about the burden of maintenance, I came across a
0:03:09 fascinating piece in Aeon called “Hail the Maintainers.”
0:03:16 The subtitle, “Capitalism excels at innovation, but is failing at maintenance.
0:03:19 And for most lives, it is maintenance that matters more.”
0:03:23 Okay, I’m Lee Vinsel, and my name is Andy Russell.
0:03:27 They are the co-authors of the Aeon essay, “Vinsel First.”
0:03:32 I’m trained as a historian, and most of my work looks at the relationship between government
0:03:35 policy and science and technology.
0:03:40 Back when we first aired this episode, Lee Vinsel taught at the Stevens Institute of
0:03:41 Technology.
0:03:45 He is now an associate professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech.
0:03:50 Andy Russell is also an historian who studies technology and governance.
0:03:55 When we spoke with him, he was dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY Polytechnic
0:03:56 Institute.
0:03:58 He is now the provost of that university.
0:04:03 He and Vinsel had already come to believe that the American embrace of innovation had
0:04:10 led to, here, I’ll quote them, “a mountain of dubious scholarship and magical thinking.”
0:04:16 And then Walter Isaacson published a book called “The Innovators,” how a group of hackers,
0:04:20 geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution.
0:04:25 Basically Andy wrote me and a friend, a kind of joke email saying we should answer with
0:04:31 a book called “The Maintainers,” how bureaucrats, standards engineers, and introverts create
0:04:34 technologies that kind of work most of the time.
0:04:39 Yeah, and then we just decided to lay it out really clearly in an essay, so examining
0:04:45 where innovation rhetoric came from, what we call innovation speak, and then laying
0:04:50 out a more grounded vision of human life with technology.
0:04:53 I’ll ask you an impossibly broad question to start with.
0:05:01 How much are we, I guess, hurting ourselves or missing out on society-wise globally?
0:05:08 It gets more impossible to answer by the moment by failing to appreciate the value of maintenance
0:05:10 at the expense of innovation.
0:05:11 It’s a good question.
0:05:12 It’s a broad question.
0:05:17 One thing that we insist that’s important isn’t that we need to do only maintenance and get
0:05:18 rid of innovation.
0:05:21 We both appreciate innovation and creativity and new stuff.
0:05:23 So there’s no argument there.
0:05:29 I think in paying more attention to maintenance and maintainers, it’s really signaling a shift
0:05:35 in values away from glittery new things, consumer culture and those sorts of things, and toward
0:05:43 work, towards labor, towards maybe even sacrifice in the form of taxes or effort to sustain society,
0:05:46 and to pay a little bit more respect to the people whose jobs do that.
0:05:47 They’re not superstars.
0:05:49 They’re just grinding it out day to day.
0:05:53 But I guess one of my counters to that argument, and maybe I’ve just been brainwashed by the
0:06:01 innovation crowd, is that, well, one of the promises of technology is that it would eliminate
0:06:07 the need for much or, in some cases, all of that kind of handmade maintenance.
0:06:12 So if you’re talking about something literally like a cleaning person, a janitor, someone
0:06:18 who comes along to a public restroom in an airport eight, 12, 15 times a day to clean
0:06:19 it up.
0:06:25 I think, well, don’t I want the much-vaunted self-cleaning bathroom that was supposed to
0:06:26 be here by now?
0:06:30 Wouldn’t that technology, if it worked well, be better?
0:06:37 Because it would, A, do a good job, and, B, not require people to do that kind of work.
0:06:41 So why are you making the argument that that kind of work is so important?
0:06:42 Is it really a moral argument?
0:06:44 It is a moral argument.
0:06:45 That’s true.
0:06:48 But I think we also need to just take stock of where we’re at.
0:06:55 We live in a moment where lots of people are writing and talking about robots and artificial
0:07:03 intelligence, and all these machines and technologies, they’re going to come along and replace drudgery.
0:07:06 We’re not going to have to worry about that stuff anymore.
0:07:12 But I can show you movies put out by General Motors from 1955 that show the kitchen of
0:07:17 the future that’s not going to involve any labor for women.
0:07:19 And that didn’t come true.
0:07:23 And we have to be sober and say, yes, these things might come.
0:07:24 And that wouldn’t be bad.
0:07:25 That would be great.
0:07:29 But we can’t pretend that we can just forget about all the labor that’s going on right
0:07:36 now and is probably going to continue going on for the foreseeable future.
0:07:38 People always think about what’s new.
0:07:42 People always think about what can be named.
0:07:46 That is the Harvard economist Larry Summers, who has served as the president of Harvard,
0:07:51 as the U.S. Treasury Secretary, chief economist of the World Bank, and as President Obama’s
0:07:53 top economic advisor.
0:08:00 People always think more about how new ground can be broken than they think about how existing
0:08:07 institutions can be sustained or existing facilities can be maintained.
0:08:16 It leads to a constant trap where we underinvest in old things, then old things disappoint
0:08:23 us, then we feel a need for new things, then to satisfy that need for new things, we underinvest
0:08:27 more in old things, and the cycle goes on.
0:08:33 You see it in the fact that we pay the equivalent of 40 cents a gallon in gasoline taxes for
0:08:39 extra repairs due to the fact that we’re not maintaining our highways right.
0:08:45 You see it in an air traffic control system in the United States that still uses obsolete
0:08:49 technologies and doesn’t use GPS.
0:08:53 As a consequence, we all spend more time with air traffic delays.
0:08:57 We burn huge amounts, more energy.
0:09:00 We take greater safety risks than we need to.
0:09:07 You see it in developing countries where they’re always building new facilities, but then a
0:09:15 few years later those facilities sit in a sense of disrepair.
0:09:23 I think the fetish of novelty and the lack of glamour of maintaining and sustaining things
0:09:27 is a besetting problem.
0:09:32 One very important area where you see this is in the area of philanthropy where everybody
0:09:39 always wants to start a new institution or to do something new and then be a catalyst
0:09:41 and then have others fund their institution.
0:09:46 Well, not everybody can be the one who levers other money.
0:09:54 Some have to be levered, so I think it does lead to a fragmentation.
0:09:59 It does lead to returns that are lower than they need to be.
0:10:04 In cases like the U.S. public sector, it can lead to tragic underinvestment.
0:10:10 Okay, so let’s do a brief history of maintenance.
0:10:16 We’ll talk about our cities, our homes, our infrastructure, even how modern investors think
0:10:19 about maintenance versus innovation.
0:10:21 Let’s start way back here.
0:10:27 Certainly, Rome understood that engineering and infrastructure was a huge part of making
0:10:34 its city function, and it not only invested in that in Rome, but exported it elsewhere.
0:10:36 That’s Ed Glazer, another Harvard economist.
0:10:43 So the sewage starts with the Cloca Maxima in the sixth century before the Common Era,
0:10:47 and that’s associated with the last of the Tarquin kings, the Etruscans.
0:10:51 The Cloca Maxima was one of the world’s first sewage systems.
0:10:52 It was maintained.
0:10:58 There were people like Cato the Elder, who is particularly famed for uttering that Carthage
0:11:01 must be destroyed, Dylinda Carthagau asked at the end of every speech.
0:11:09 He was also heavily involved in water and sewerage, so this single-minded passion for the good
0:11:14 of the Republic translated into caring about infrastructure, and he made it one of his
0:11:15 pet themes.
0:11:18 It was also an Augustan theme as well.
0:11:23 Glazer wanted to be remembered for taking a city of brick and leaving it a city of marble,
0:11:27 but he was also attentive to the water and sewerage maintenance side of things.
0:11:32 Of course, Rome also was interesting in that they weren’t rich by modern standards, maybe
0:11:37 per capita income of modern dollars around 1500, but they had remarkable government capacity.
0:11:42 Glazer, we should say, is an expert on cities, and he also thinks that cities are one of
0:11:44 the best things that humans have ever come up with.
0:11:49 He’s the author of a book called Triumph of the City, How Our Greatest Invention Makes
0:11:52 Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier.
0:11:56 In fact, all of these old imperial cities had remarkable government capacity because
0:11:57 that’s how you got to be an imperial city.
0:12:01 You had to have a government that was able to subdue all your neighbors.
0:12:05 So Julius Caesar was actually able to help the roads function by stopping wheeled traffic
0:12:09 from entering the city for the first 10 hours of every day, which helps in the maintenance
0:12:12 side as well, although it’s not a substitute for repaving the roads.
0:12:19 So cities are inherently dense, which means that a problem, whether it’s trash or crime
0:12:23 or bad streets or sidewalks, can affect a lot of people in a hurry.
0:12:27 So talk to me about the importance of maintenance, especially physical infrastructure maintenance,
0:12:29 especially in a city.
0:12:30 Oh, absolutely.
0:12:34 It’s both the fact that any problem can be magnified, and it’s the fact that just proximity
0:12:36 itself creates downsides, right?
0:12:41 Proximity means that someone’s bacteria are more likely to affect you.
0:12:44 Proximity means that we’re all sharing the same amount of road space and consequently
0:12:48 trying to gobble up the same real estate and facing the downside of congestion.
0:12:52 And of course, density also makes it easier for one person to steal from one another.
0:12:56 And on top of, of course, creating congestion, all those drivers and city streets wear down
0:13:01 the infrastructure, which is why we so often think of city streets as being places that
0:13:04 are full of potholes or full of other problems.
0:13:10 So cities need infrastructure of a variety of different forms, and that infrastructure
0:13:12 needs to be maintained.
0:13:17 And making sure that you have the institutions in place that can provide at least a modicum
0:13:24 of maintenance is really crucial to making city lives work.
0:13:28 Glazers spent some time in the Philippines learning how Manila deals with sewage.
0:13:33 Short answer, not nearly as well as ancient Rome.
0:13:39 These are septic tanks that flow right through pipes, right into sort of main corridors that
0:13:42 course through the city and often end up in the bay.
0:13:46 And the septic tanks are typically in the house, beneath the kitchen perhaps, outside
0:13:49 maybe on the driveway.
0:13:54 And the big project that the water companies, which take care of the sewage and the septic
0:13:58 tanks we’re involved in doing is trying to get people to clean out their septic tanks.
0:14:02 And it wasn’t that the water companies weren’t willing to provide it.
0:14:04 The people often didn’t even want it, right?
0:14:09 Whether they’d let it go 30 or 40 years without any form of cleaning of the septic tank, without
0:14:11 any desludging.
0:14:16 And the people were pushing against having it cleaned up because to get to it, you needed
0:14:20 to tear up someone’s kitchen and they didn’t see the upside of moving it.
0:14:23 And consequently, there’s a whole public health issue related to the fact that more
0:14:27 filth is spewing out through these pipes into the common areas.
0:14:30 So the problem of maintenance is really huge in this area.
0:14:37 So in a case like that, what’s a solution other than building infrastructure like a
0:14:43 septic tank in a way originally that it doesn’t require disrupting your life later on?
0:14:49 Certainly designing infrastructure from the beginning so that it is maintenance friendly
0:14:55 is surely the right way to go as the lower the cost can possibly be both for the large
0:14:58 scale entity that has to do the maintenance, but also for the individual that has to put
0:15:00 up with the inconvenience.
0:15:02 That’s clearly important.
0:15:07 But on top of that, when you’re looking at maintenance that’s required to keep a city
0:15:11 healthy, I’m a big fan of having some form of regulation and fine in place.
0:15:14 Look, I mean, as you know, I’m a Chicago PhD.
0:15:17 I think lots of areas of our lives are over-regulated.
0:15:19 I think entrepreneurship is over-regulated.
0:15:23 But there are areas like maintaining public health where I think it’s just fine to have
0:15:29 regulations and small fines that are put in place if people actually don’t do basic tasks
0:15:32 like desludging that are required for the public good.
0:15:37 I asked Glazer to name a modern city that gets maintenance right.
0:15:41 The meritocracy that is Singapore is quite impressive on the maintenance side.
0:15:45 This is no longer a new city and yet it still feels clean.
0:15:47 It still feels well taken care of.
0:15:51 And I think part of it is just they have enough smart people in government for whom this is
0:15:54 their job that they continue to focus on this.
0:15:57 I think it’s an open question as to whether or not all the shiny things that are being
0:16:00 built in China will wear all that well or will be protected.
0:16:02 I think we still have to see on that.
0:16:07 So when it happens well, whether in modern Singapore or ancient Rome, is it more a function
0:16:15 of design that was able to be maintained relatively easily or cost-effectively or is it a kind
0:16:24 of conscious devotion to maintenance that many individuals or nations just fail to factor
0:16:25 in or budget?
0:16:29 Well, I think in both the Singapore and Rome case, there are leaders who make it their
0:16:35 job and some in the case of Cato presumably thought that there was popularity be gained
0:16:41 by sticking up for the old Rome and for maintaining Roman virtues including decent infrastructure.
0:16:44 Most of the Roman infrastructure looks pretty simple from a modern perspective and consequently
0:16:48 it would have been easier to maintain than a more complicated infrastructure.
0:16:53 But that raises sort of larger technological changes, which is that as the world becomes
0:16:56 more complicated, as infrastructure becomes more complicated, there are more ways that
0:17:01 it can potentially go wrong and maintenance, if anything, becomes even more important.
0:17:05 So in a simpler world, maintenance was easier to get at than it is in the more complex world
0:17:07 of today.
0:17:11 I think we should be talking about what is the value of engineering.
0:17:14 That again is Lee Vinsel from Virginia Tech.
0:17:20 The value of engineering is much more than just innovation and new things, focusing on
0:17:24 taking care of the world rather than just creating the new nifty thing that’s going
0:17:26 to solve all our problems.
0:17:32 If you look at what engineers do out in the world, like 70 to 80 percent of them spend
0:17:35 most of their time just keeping things going, right?
0:17:40 And so this comes down to engineering education too when we’re forcing entrepreneurship and
0:17:48 innovation as the message is that we’re just kind of skewing reality for young people.
0:17:53 And we’re not giving them a real picture and we’re also not valuing the work that they’re
0:17:55 probably going to do in their life.
0:17:59 That seems to me just to be kind of a bad idea.
0:18:06 So all you guys need to do is make maintenance sexy for the American public and for politicians
0:18:07 and policy makers.
0:18:08 Do you have any plans?
0:18:09 How are you going to pull that off?
0:18:13 Yeah, we’re going to come up with some slogans like main-toe-vation.
0:18:18 We’re going to have professional wrestlers dance in front of bridges, you know, their
0:18:21 shirts off.
0:18:26 Coming up after the break, how well are we maintaining our infrastructure here at home?
0:18:29 I cannot imagine that that’s the right solution.
0:18:30 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:18:32 This is Free Economics Radio.
0:18:41 We’ll be right back.
0:18:46 Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers puts out a report card on
0:18:49 physical infrastructure in the United States.
0:18:55 On the most recent report card from 2021, our overall grade was a C minus.
0:19:01 Of the 17 categories that got a letter grade, only rail and ports scored higher than a C.
0:19:05 Rail got a B and ports a B minus.
0:19:13 Transit, meanwhile, got a D, roads, D minus, drinking water, C minus, bridges a C.
0:19:17 When I spoke with Ed Glazer for this episode a few years back, things were even worse.
0:19:22 The most recent overall grade then was a D plus.
0:19:26 This is the United States of America, an economic superpower.
0:19:28 So what the what?
0:19:30 How has this happened?
0:19:34 Well, I think the first thing we should do is we should be a little bit wary about infrastructure
0:19:39 groups that issue report cards whose ultimate bottom line is that trillions must be spent
0:19:41 in their industry.
0:19:45 That being said, there are obviously real issues around American infrastructure.
0:19:51 And what I worry about is that the answer to this will be just big checks cut in Washington.
0:19:54 And I cannot imagine that that’s the right solution.
0:19:58 I can certainly point to a bridge that crosses the Charles River near me, which has been
0:20:02 going on was initiated in part because of the promise of federal dollars that it’s awfully
0:20:06 hard to see the value that we got from four years of disruption for allegedly maintaining
0:20:08 this bridge and improving it.
0:20:11 It’s a remarkable and not a very happy tale.
0:20:12 That’s Larry Summers again.
0:20:17 The Anderson Bridge connects Harvard Square with the city of Boston.
0:20:20 It connects different parts of the Harvard campus.
0:20:23 It’s 75 yards from my office.
0:20:26 The bridge is 232 feet long.
0:20:30 It has been under repair now for a four and a half years.
0:20:35 To put that in some kind of perspective, Julius Caesar built a bridge over a span of the
0:20:43 Rhine that wasn’t 232 feet, it was over a thousand feet, and he did it in nine days.
0:20:47 And that was with the technologies that were available before Christ.
0:20:51 Today, we surely should be able to do much better.
0:20:54 In fact, a hundred years ago, the bridge we’re trying to repair and have been repairing for
0:21:03 four and a half years was built in less than one year from nothing with much earlier technologies.
0:21:06 So what accounts for this delay?
0:21:13 The delay was a combination of environmental requirements, historical commission requirements,
0:21:15 and just plain incompetence.
0:21:20 There were permitting issues, multiple redesigns, and in addition to the time overrun, there
0:21:25 were big cost overruns, which Larry Summers points out doesn’t even factor in all the costs.
0:21:31 Look, you do calculations, you add up all the thousands of cars that go across it.
0:21:38 You value the time that people suffer in delay because the bridge is in disrepair or because
0:21:41 the process of repairing it takes forever.
0:21:47 You figure out what people’s time’s worth, you know, even if you value it at $15 an hour.
0:21:53 I’d certainly pay much more than $15 an hour to avoid being stuck in traffic jams.
0:22:00 Often it ends up that big infrastructure investments will pay for themselves right out just in terms
0:22:04 of avoiding the delays that people suffer.
0:22:08 The Anderson bridge repair finally was completed.
0:22:12 There are, meanwhile, thousands of other bridges in the U.S. that need repair.
0:22:17 Summers argues that forestalling such maintenance has a larger drag on the economy than you
0:22:18 might think.
0:22:22 I think infrastructure is the right thing in the short run for the United States because
0:22:24 it puts people to work in a substantial scale.
0:22:29 It’s the right thing in the medium term because it expands the capacity of our economy and
0:22:35 it’s the right thing in the long run because it takes a burden off of our children.
0:22:38 We will eventually, as a country, fix Kennedy Airport.
0:22:43 It’ll just be much more expensive if we delay and the cost of fixing Kennedy Airport will
0:22:50 compound at a far greater rate than the one and a half percent in bonds we print ourselves
0:22:55 that represents the yield today on long-term U.S. government bonds.
0:23:01 The New York airports are often used as being the textbook examples of declining American
0:23:02 infrastructure.
0:23:04 It’s Ed Glazer again.
0:23:09 Everyone has an awful experience at one of them that they can recount about the chaos
0:23:11 that JFK can often be.
0:23:13 These airports are complicated.
0:23:15 They sit on city land.
0:23:19 They are run by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which answers to two
0:23:24 different governors and is responsible for a lot of other things.
0:23:29 It is a very big and sprawling agency and it has structural problems that almost surely
0:23:31 need reform.
0:23:36 Probably the airports actually should be split up and made into completely separate agencies.
0:23:41 None of that reform will occur if the authority simply gets more cash infusions from Washington.
0:23:45 That is a recipe for non-reform, not for reform.
0:23:50 There’s absolutely no reason why the well-heeled travelers who go in and out of JFK Airport
0:23:52 can’t pay for that infrastructure themselves.
0:23:57 There’s absolutely no reason why that infrastructure needs to be subsidized by ordinary taxpayers
0:23:59 in any way.
0:24:04 I’m 100% on board the need for a massive infrastructure overhaul in the U.S.
0:24:07 I think though that if we go down the route of saying that that just means big items in
0:24:10 the budget, we go completely in the wrong direction.
0:24:14 We need to take a hard look at institutional reform, we need to figure out how federal
0:24:19 nudges and federal money can be used in a way that’s productive, rather than simply
0:24:21 a recipe for maintaining the status quo.
0:24:25 Since we made the original version of this episode, New York City’s airports have been
0:24:28 an infrastructure bright spot.
0:24:33 Last year, we made a series about airline travel called Freakonomics Radio Takes to the Skies.
0:24:38 In one of those episodes, we toured the new and much improved LaGuardia Airport, which
0:24:43 has benefited from fast-track funding put forth by former Governor Andrew Cuomo, along
0:24:47 with a multi-billion-dollar investment by Delta Airlines.
0:24:52 Construction has also begun on a $19 billion overhaul of John F. Kennedy Airport.
0:24:58 All that new spending and construction sounds great, but Ed Glazer says we need to be careful
0:25:01 about how these massive projects are funded.
0:25:06 So my favorite way of paying for infrastructure, other than user fees, is with local property
0:25:09 taxes or with property development, even.
0:25:15 So Hong Kong’s mass transit system funds itself by developing skyscrapers on top of
0:25:19 new subway lines, and it manages to keep the fees low because it can do well enough by
0:25:24 extracting the value that commuters are willing to pay to be right there.
0:25:28 So linking up, I think, in the space of public transit, linking up the payments that developers
0:25:32 are willing to pay, let’s say, to build very high-res buildings near subway stops with
0:25:34 funding for the infrastructure.
0:25:37 I mean, I don’t actually want America’s transit system to be building skyscrapers
0:25:40 on their own, but I’m happy for them to get some flow of tax revenues in exchange for
0:25:43 the ability to build higher buildings next to the subway stops.
0:25:45 That would seem like a desirable thing.
0:25:51 In the case of roads, I think the key is embracing things like congestion pricing whenever it’s
0:25:52 at all feasible.
0:25:56 Any time you build a new highway, you really want to slap a fee on it from the beginning
0:26:00 because it’s just a sort of political endowment effect that seems to be very strong, which
0:26:06 is that if I take a road that’s free and then slap a toll on it, you have riots in the
0:26:07 street.
0:26:08 People are incredibly angry.
0:26:09 It’s a political nightmare.
0:26:14 If you introduce a new road that has a toll from the beginning, people nod.
0:26:17 They may not be pleased about it entirely, but they think that they never saw that road
0:26:18 before.
0:26:19 That road comes with a toll.
0:26:20 They can accept that.
0:26:22 So what role does Glaser see in this for the federal government?
0:26:27 I think actually the best role for the federal government in infrastructure is to actually
0:26:33 be in the business of inspecting, rating, local infrastructure projects, to check whether
0:26:37 or not the maintenance is good, to publicize when the roads or the bridges are unsafe,
0:26:42 and then perhaps to have federal money that’s targeted not to new projects, but specifically
0:26:47 to maintenance, perhaps structured as a matching fund for local monies.
0:26:51 So it’s a structure in which we think actually having a bit more local buy-in at the beginning
0:26:53 is probably helpful.
0:26:56 But you inevitably come up against a fundamental budgeting question.
0:27:01 How to balance the cost of maintenance with the cost of making new things, the cost of
0:27:02 innovating?
0:27:03 I’m all for maintenance.
0:27:09 I’m all for infrastructure, but I don’t think they should be framed as the enemy of innovation.
0:27:10 Larry Summers again.
0:27:13 I think we want to be able to produce in new ways.
0:27:14 We want new products.
0:27:18 We want businesses to organize themselves in new ways.
0:27:22 We want to be the place in the world that has the most cutting-edge science.
0:27:28 We want when new uses of software, new uses of artificial intelligence are developed,
0:27:30 we want them to happen here.
0:27:38 So I do believe in a very strong case for infrastructure investment, but I want to be careful about
0:27:41 saying that I’m somehow against innovation.
0:27:46 I think a great nation can walk and chew gum at the same time.
0:27:52 In 2021, President Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a bipartisan effort
0:27:57 to fund infrastructure, including roads, bridges, trains, airports, and more.
0:28:01 The price tag, $1 trillion.
0:28:06 This has helped launch 40,000 infrastructure projects across the country.
0:28:12 Coming up on Freakinomics Radio, how innovation and maintenance compete for our money.
0:28:19 Large public companies in mature markets tend to invest primarily on maintenance, and often
0:28:23 they don’t have the additional capital you need to do large innovation.
0:28:26 How innovation and maintenance compete for our time.
0:28:32 I started out with the assumption that technological change had reduced women’s labor so much
0:28:37 that they could enter the workforce, and it took me about three years to discover that
0:28:39 I was wrong.
0:28:43 And I finally get serious about some personal maintenance.
0:28:46 It’s all about prioritization one step at a time.
0:28:59 Ruth Schwartz Cowan is an historian of science, technology, and medicine.
0:29:03 I’m a retired faculty member from the University of Pennsylvania.
0:29:09 Like Lee Vincel and Andy Russell, Cowan thinks we put too much emphasis on innovation.
0:29:12 There are basically very few innovators.
0:29:14 There are a huge number of maintainers.
0:29:20 And when you start paying attention to it, you begin to understand how essential it is.
0:29:24 My late husband used to say, and I used to think it was a joke, but I think now that
0:29:31 he’s absolutely right, plumbers are on the world, and we may kind of resent our dependence
0:29:32 on them.
0:29:37 In fact, that may be a larger part of why we don’t pay attention because we really would
0:29:40 like to think of ourselves as independent of all of that, but we’re not.
0:29:46 We are very dependent on a lot of people who don’t have PhDs.
0:29:50 We’re very dependent on a lot of people who don’t have high school diplomas.
0:29:55 Cowan has done a lot of research on one particular form of maintenance, housework.
0:30:01 The name of my book is More Work for Mother, the ironies of household technology from the
0:30:03 open hearth to the microwave.
0:30:04 That’s right.
0:30:08 She found that home inventions that were supposed to free up women from labor often
0:30:09 led to more labor.
0:30:16 I started out with the assumption that technological change in the household, mainly the electrification
0:30:22 of households, had reduced women’s labor so much that they could enter the workforce,
0:30:25 married women’s labor, and enter the workforce.
0:30:29 It took me about three years to discover that I was wrong.
0:30:30 Wrong how?
0:30:34 There are two components of work, and one is time, but the other is what we might call
0:30:41 metabolic labor, and most of the new technologies saved metabolic labor.
0:30:46 It was much harder to wash clothing.
0:30:51 When you were doing it by scrubbing the clothing on a scrubbing board and hauling the water
0:30:58 from the stove to whatever vessel you were using to wash the laundry, then it was to
0:31:02 do it when you had a washing machine and running water.
0:31:04 There’s no question about that.
0:31:07 But with more and more machines to help with chores…
0:31:13 Housewives began to spend more time doing their chores.
0:31:17 In rural America, the standard routine for underwear was that you slept in it and you
0:31:21 changed it maybe a couple of times a year.
0:31:29 So in the modern, let’s say post-World War II, standard household, vastly more wash gets
0:31:32 done than in any previous time in history.
0:31:37 And even for the modern woman or man who does work outside the home…
0:31:43 There are women who are, and men too in some cases, who are doing what sociologists have
0:31:46 come to call a double day.
0:31:51 They’re doing almost as much maintenance work as their grandmothers might have done
0:31:56 or grandfathers might have done if their grandfathers were living on farms.
0:32:03 They’re doing almost as much unpaid maintenance work as they are paid work by hours.
0:32:10 So that’s an interesting and perhaps humbling lesson from the past, that innovation doesn’t
0:32:14 necessarily decrease the time we spend on maintenance.
0:32:19 Which brings us back to how we’re supposed to pay, not only in dollars but in time, for
0:32:22 the maintenance we need to do even if we don’t want to do it.
0:32:28 I think that there can be a false dichotomy when it comes to maintenance, which is maintenance
0:32:31 is required clearly.
0:32:36 But in order to effectively do maintenance, I think you need to innovate.
0:32:37 That’s Martin Casado.
0:32:41 He’s a general partner with the venture capital firm Andresen Horowitz.
0:32:46 As a venture capitalist, you’re looking for opportunities to invest in that you believe
0:32:48 will be large opportunities.
0:32:53 I wanted to hear from someone like Casado because it struck me that if some startup
0:32:57 goes to a venture capitalist with some terrible but innovative idea, it would probably still
0:33:01 generate a lot more interest than a startup with an excellent idea that deals with just
0:33:03 maintenance.
0:33:08 So with crumbling bridges and outdated airports and all the rest and a federal government that
0:33:14 often can’t get out of its own way, are the private equity markets really askewed toward
0:33:15 innovation as I imagined?
0:33:16 Yeah.
0:33:17 Yeah.
0:33:18 I think it’s a super interesting question.
0:33:25 And in fact, I think the public markets have done a really good job of factoring in maintenance
0:33:28 into its expectations on values of companies.
0:33:33 In other words, there’s one pool of money, including the stock markets that values maintenance,
0:33:38 whether it’s for physical infrastructure or increasingly digital infrastructure.
0:33:43 And there’s another pool of money, including that from venture capital firms that seeks
0:33:44 out innovation.
0:33:52 Large public companies in mature markets tend to invest primarily on maintenance, and often
0:33:56 they don’t have the additional capital you need to do large innovation.
0:34:04 So for example, between say 2011 and 2015, growth companies, companies that are in fast
0:34:10 growing areas, spent two times more than legacy companies on research and development.
0:34:16 So as companies mature, the majority of their investment in their spend is in kind of maintaining
0:34:18 existing technologies and so forth.
0:34:21 And this is largely because of the pressure from the public markets.
0:34:27 And so then the way that these kind of legacy enterprises innovate is through inorganic
0:34:30 growth where they buy often startups.
0:34:33 So if you look at the same group over the same period, you’re saying, okay, they say we
0:34:36 have a legacy enterprise and kind of a newer growth enterprise.
0:34:43 Over the last between say 2011 and 2015, legacy enterprises spent something like 10 times
0:34:49 more, it’s about nine times more than the growth enterprises to acquire innovation.
0:34:52 So if you tease apart what’s happening here, what’s happening is the public markets say,
0:34:56 listen, if you are in a mature company, we know that that will keep the lights on.
0:35:01 We know that that’s what you need to do to get predictable returns and public markets
0:35:03 like predictable returns, correct?
0:35:08 However, there’s going to be another pool of money and another ecosystem that can take
0:35:10 the risks, right?
0:35:11 And these are startups.
0:35:12 These are like venture capitalists.
0:35:17 So we make these very risky investments on these companies that may be wildly successful
0:35:18 or not.
0:35:21 And then it’s up to the growth enterprises on whether they want to buy them after this
0:35:22 has proven out or not.
0:35:26 And so I think the public market has created this bifurcation nicely in an economic fashion
0:35:29 where they’re saying, yes, we don’t want you to innovate.
0:35:33 And in fact, we’re going to keep your margins fixed so you can’t innovate.
0:35:39 And so they do invest in what they’re currently doing versus the more private startup side.
0:35:44 Casado also points out that behind all those sexy high tech firms that attract billions
0:35:49 of investment dollars, there’s a lot of unsexy infrastructure that makes it all possible.
0:35:54 Think about like the brick and mortar of computing, the core IT infrastructure.
0:35:58 You know, IT infrastructure, it’s a $4 trillion market.
0:35:59 It’s massive.
0:36:04 Every time you go to Amazon, you’re connecting to this massive building, think like football
0:36:08 stadium size massive building and inside that building, you’ve got tons of storage arrays
0:36:09 that store the data.
0:36:11 You’ve got tons of computing power.
0:36:14 You’ve got tons of networking equipment that connects it all together.
0:36:18 You’ve got a whole bunch of software that just provides kind of the underpinnings for
0:36:19 the application itself.
0:36:20 You’ve got databases.
0:36:22 You’ve got security equipment.
0:36:28 I mean, all of that is infrastructure.
0:36:33 Not often, but once in a while, I take the time to marvel at the fact that so many people
0:36:38 do so much work behind the scenes to keep the world humming.
0:36:42 Whether it’s the internet, the roads, the electricity grid, you name it.
0:36:45 Of course, it’s easy to point out the failures.
0:36:49 They’re visible, whereas the bulk of maintenance is practically invisible.
0:36:57 In praise of maintenance, let me just say this, it’s necessary work, it’s hard work,
0:37:01 and for people like me, who are always in a hurry to make the next new thing, it can
0:37:07 be really unappealing work, which means that sometimes you need help.
0:37:10 So I went out and got some help.
0:37:15 I like to think that I’m a fairly orderly person, but my office has become increasingly
0:37:20 crowded with a small mountain of files and notebooks and photos and audio tape and other
0:37:23 byproduct from years of writing, making music and so on.
0:37:28 I didn’t want to throw it out, but I also didn’t want it to become increasingly inaccessible
0:37:32 in an ever larger mountain, so I sought professional help.
0:37:34 Well, tell us more about that.
0:37:38 Chris Licinic runs a company in Brooklyn called AV Preserve.
0:37:41 They help all sorts of institutions manage their archives.
0:37:46 They worked with Yale University, Museum of Boundary Art, United Nations, and the New
0:37:47 York Public Library.
0:37:52 Well, first, we did a big inventory to inventory their audio, video, and film holdings, which
0:37:54 were over 800,000 items.
0:37:55 How big?
0:37:56 How many?
0:37:57 Over 800,000 items.
0:38:02 I’m not quite in the same league as the New York Public Library, but my desire is similar
0:38:08 to maintain a history, to make it more organized, more accessible, hopefully more useful.
0:38:12 What is the ideal outcome of this project that you envision?
0:38:19 I want everything that I’ve ever documented or created, I kind of want it preserved with
0:38:23 differing degrees of accessibility.
0:38:29 Memory is just so narrow and incomplete and bad that when I think about things that I’ve
0:38:34 done or written about or reported on in the past and not written about, I remember them
0:38:39 so incompletely and so poorly that I think it would be really nice to have that preserved
0:38:42 for who knows whatever reasons.
0:38:50 I want all of that easily and instantly accessible, but I want that point of accessibility to
0:38:56 be so easy that everything going forward from today I can put in the appropriate basket
0:39:05 without acquiring mountains, whether physical or virtual, that have to be sorted later.
0:39:08 The ultimate vision to be able to find everything easily and accessible, but if we think about
0:39:13 that as the ultimate outcome and we realize that there’s a lot of steps in between there
0:39:20 and here, we look at this project as phase one, the first steps, do you have any thoughts
0:39:24 on what the outcome of this phase, what to find success for you?
0:39:28 It would be we finish this meeting like 20 minutes and you say, “I’ll be back tomorrow
0:39:33 and I’ll take care of everything,” and then next Monday you’ll have a hard drive where
0:39:34 everything is there.
0:39:38 That’s my … I mean, you asked.
0:39:39 I’m trying to give you a realistic.
0:39:40 No, I know that’s not real.
0:39:42 You asked what I want.
0:39:43 Right, right, right.
0:39:48 Okay, so Chris Licinic persuaded me it wasn’t going to be so easy, but he started helping
0:39:49 me draw up a plan.
0:39:50 This is about maintenance.
0:39:53 It’s losing the 200 pounds and then staying that way.
0:39:56 But he said it wasn’t as scary as I thought.
0:39:57 I’m sure it feels that way.
0:39:58 But it’s not.
0:40:03 It’s all about prioritization one step at a time.
0:40:06 And so we’ve begun.
0:40:10 Licinic and his colleagues are doing most of the hard work, enumerating and measuring the
0:40:16 amounts of different media, then categorizing by media, paper, audio tape, digital audio,
0:40:17 et cetera.
0:40:22 And then eventually I sit down with them, file box by file box, and figure out whether
0:40:28 and how to preserve a particular thing and how to make it live in a place where I can
0:40:30 visit it whenever I want.
0:40:34 The key for me is one thing Licinic said.
0:40:38 It’s all about prioritization one step at a time.
0:40:46 Okay, I hope you enjoyed this bonus episode, but I have to tell you, I failed miserably
0:40:52 in my attempt to consolidate and downsize my work product from the last many years.
0:40:55 In fact, the mountain has gotten a bit higher.
0:40:58 Marie Kondo would be horrified.
0:41:03 On some days I do think about attacking this mountain, but I have decided for the time
0:41:06 being that the right thing to do here is nothing.
0:41:11 A lot of psychologists talk about decision making that leads to action, but I have read
0:41:17 some psychological research, which says that deciding to not make a decision can sometimes
0:41:18 be a good move.
0:41:21 And that’s what I’m going with, at least for now.
0:41:24 Thanks for listening to this bonus episode of Freakonomics Radio.
0:41:27 We will be back very soon with a new episode.
0:41:32 Until then, take care of yourself, and if you can, someone else too.
0:41:35 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:41:41 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app also at freakonomics.com, where we publish
0:41:43 transcripts and show notes.
0:41:48 This episode was originally produced by Irva Gunja and has been updated by Dalvin Abouaji.
0:41:53 Our staff also includes Alina Kulman, Augusta Chapman, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman,
0:41:58 Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippen, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, John Schnars,
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0:42:04 Theo Jacobs, and Zac Lipinski.
0:42:10 Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhiker’s Hour Composer is Luis Guerra.
0:42:14 As always, thank you for listening.
0:42:16 Does AOL still exist and buy things?
0:42:19 Yeah, yeah, yeah, they do.
0:42:20 I missed out on that.
0:42:32 The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.
0:42:32 Stitcher.
0:42:35 (upbeat music)
0:42:37 you
0:00:11 We’re always hearing about innovation and disruption and the new, new thing.
0:00:14 And a lot of that stuff is wonderful.
0:00:18 But I’ve been thinking lately that we tend to overlook something equally important, maybe
0:00:22 more important, maintaining what we’ve already built.
0:00:28 And then I remembered that we made an episode about this idea back in 2016 called “In Praise
0:00:29 of Maintenance.”
0:00:35 So we went back into the archive, dusted off that episode, updated facts and figures as
0:00:38 necessary, and today we are playing it for you as a bonus episode.
0:00:40 I’d love to know what you think.
0:00:43 Our email is radio@freakonomics.com.
0:00:49 As always, thanks for listening.
0:00:54 A while back, I got obsessed with the notion of maintenance, or really the notion of how
0:00:56 much time maintenance takes.
0:01:01 You go to the gym to maintain your body, so it can do what you need it to do.
0:01:05 Maybe you go to a doctor, and a dentist, and a therapist too.
0:01:10 You spend a third of your life sleepings, your brain can do what it needs to do.
0:01:14 And think about all the time and resources that go into maintaining your work life.
0:01:18 The meetings, the memos, the productivity apps.
0:01:22 Of course, there’s also your personal life to maintain.
0:01:27 I got so obsessed with the burden of all this maintenance that I decided to precisely track
0:01:32 how many minutes I was spending of each day on different forms of maintenance versus all
0:01:34 the other things I was trying to accomplish.
0:01:39 But after just a couple days, I quit this ridiculous exercise because it had become
0:01:43 just another maintenance task that kept me from doing the stuff I really wanted to be
0:01:44 doing.
0:01:49 I decided that maintenance was simply a curse that had to be accommodated, that the less
0:01:52 I thought about it, the happier I’d be.
0:01:55 And then I read something that changed my mind completely.
0:02:01 Our thesis basically is that our culture’s obsession with innovation and hype has led
0:02:05 us to neglect maintenance and maintainers.
0:02:10 Today on Freakonomics Radio, in praise of maintenance.
0:02:15 Because there’s not only a need, but a certain nobility in taking care of what you’ve already
0:02:20 created, and maybe we shouldn’t look at maintenance as the enemy of innovation.
0:02:23 I think a great nation can walk and chew gum at the same time.
0:02:36 Or can we?
0:02:41 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with
0:02:54 your host, Steven Dubner.
0:03:00 There is a digital magazine called Aeon, A-E-O-N, that publishes essays about ideas and culture.
0:03:05 Just as I was having my personal crisis about the burden of maintenance, I came across a
0:03:09 fascinating piece in Aeon called “Hail the Maintainers.”
0:03:16 The subtitle, “Capitalism excels at innovation, but is failing at maintenance.
0:03:19 And for most lives, it is maintenance that matters more.”
0:03:23 Okay, I’m Lee Vinsel, and my name is Andy Russell.
0:03:27 They are the co-authors of the Aeon essay, “Vinsel First.”
0:03:32 I’m trained as a historian, and most of my work looks at the relationship between government
0:03:35 policy and science and technology.
0:03:40 Back when we first aired this episode, Lee Vinsel taught at the Stevens Institute of
0:03:41 Technology.
0:03:45 He is now an associate professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech.
0:03:50 Andy Russell is also an historian who studies technology and governance.
0:03:55 When we spoke with him, he was dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY Polytechnic
0:03:56 Institute.
0:03:58 He is now the provost of that university.
0:04:03 He and Vinsel had already come to believe that the American embrace of innovation had
0:04:10 led to, here, I’ll quote them, “a mountain of dubious scholarship and magical thinking.”
0:04:16 And then Walter Isaacson published a book called “The Innovators,” how a group of hackers,
0:04:20 geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution.
0:04:25 Basically Andy wrote me and a friend, a kind of joke email saying we should answer with
0:04:31 a book called “The Maintainers,” how bureaucrats, standards engineers, and introverts create
0:04:34 technologies that kind of work most of the time.
0:04:39 Yeah, and then we just decided to lay it out really clearly in an essay, so examining
0:04:45 where innovation rhetoric came from, what we call innovation speak, and then laying
0:04:50 out a more grounded vision of human life with technology.
0:04:53 I’ll ask you an impossibly broad question to start with.
0:05:01 How much are we, I guess, hurting ourselves or missing out on society-wise globally?
0:05:08 It gets more impossible to answer by the moment by failing to appreciate the value of maintenance
0:05:10 at the expense of innovation.
0:05:11 It’s a good question.
0:05:12 It’s a broad question.
0:05:17 One thing that we insist that’s important isn’t that we need to do only maintenance and get
0:05:18 rid of innovation.
0:05:21 We both appreciate innovation and creativity and new stuff.
0:05:23 So there’s no argument there.
0:05:29 I think in paying more attention to maintenance and maintainers, it’s really signaling a shift
0:05:35 in values away from glittery new things, consumer culture and those sorts of things, and toward
0:05:43 work, towards labor, towards maybe even sacrifice in the form of taxes or effort to sustain society,
0:05:46 and to pay a little bit more respect to the people whose jobs do that.
0:05:47 They’re not superstars.
0:05:49 They’re just grinding it out day to day.
0:05:53 But I guess one of my counters to that argument, and maybe I’ve just been brainwashed by the
0:06:01 innovation crowd, is that, well, one of the promises of technology is that it would eliminate
0:06:07 the need for much or, in some cases, all of that kind of handmade maintenance.
0:06:12 So if you’re talking about something literally like a cleaning person, a janitor, someone
0:06:18 who comes along to a public restroom in an airport eight, 12, 15 times a day to clean
0:06:19 it up.
0:06:25 I think, well, don’t I want the much-vaunted self-cleaning bathroom that was supposed to
0:06:26 be here by now?
0:06:30 Wouldn’t that technology, if it worked well, be better?
0:06:37 Because it would, A, do a good job, and, B, not require people to do that kind of work.
0:06:41 So why are you making the argument that that kind of work is so important?
0:06:42 Is it really a moral argument?
0:06:44 It is a moral argument.
0:06:45 That’s true.
0:06:48 But I think we also need to just take stock of where we’re at.
0:06:55 We live in a moment where lots of people are writing and talking about robots and artificial
0:07:03 intelligence, and all these machines and technologies, they’re going to come along and replace drudgery.
0:07:06 We’re not going to have to worry about that stuff anymore.
0:07:12 But I can show you movies put out by General Motors from 1955 that show the kitchen of
0:07:17 the future that’s not going to involve any labor for women.
0:07:19 And that didn’t come true.
0:07:23 And we have to be sober and say, yes, these things might come.
0:07:24 And that wouldn’t be bad.
0:07:25 That would be great.
0:07:29 But we can’t pretend that we can just forget about all the labor that’s going on right
0:07:36 now and is probably going to continue going on for the foreseeable future.
0:07:38 People always think about what’s new.
0:07:42 People always think about what can be named.
0:07:46 That is the Harvard economist Larry Summers, who has served as the president of Harvard,
0:07:51 as the U.S. Treasury Secretary, chief economist of the World Bank, and as President Obama’s
0:07:53 top economic advisor.
0:08:00 People always think more about how new ground can be broken than they think about how existing
0:08:07 institutions can be sustained or existing facilities can be maintained.
0:08:16 It leads to a constant trap where we underinvest in old things, then old things disappoint
0:08:23 us, then we feel a need for new things, then to satisfy that need for new things, we underinvest
0:08:27 more in old things, and the cycle goes on.
0:08:33 You see it in the fact that we pay the equivalent of 40 cents a gallon in gasoline taxes for
0:08:39 extra repairs due to the fact that we’re not maintaining our highways right.
0:08:45 You see it in an air traffic control system in the United States that still uses obsolete
0:08:49 technologies and doesn’t use GPS.
0:08:53 As a consequence, we all spend more time with air traffic delays.
0:08:57 We burn huge amounts, more energy.
0:09:00 We take greater safety risks than we need to.
0:09:07 You see it in developing countries where they’re always building new facilities, but then a
0:09:15 few years later those facilities sit in a sense of disrepair.
0:09:23 I think the fetish of novelty and the lack of glamour of maintaining and sustaining things
0:09:27 is a besetting problem.
0:09:32 One very important area where you see this is in the area of philanthropy where everybody
0:09:39 always wants to start a new institution or to do something new and then be a catalyst
0:09:41 and then have others fund their institution.
0:09:46 Well, not everybody can be the one who levers other money.
0:09:54 Some have to be levered, so I think it does lead to a fragmentation.
0:09:59 It does lead to returns that are lower than they need to be.
0:10:04 In cases like the U.S. public sector, it can lead to tragic underinvestment.
0:10:10 Okay, so let’s do a brief history of maintenance.
0:10:16 We’ll talk about our cities, our homes, our infrastructure, even how modern investors think
0:10:19 about maintenance versus innovation.
0:10:21 Let’s start way back here.
0:10:27 Certainly, Rome understood that engineering and infrastructure was a huge part of making
0:10:34 its city function, and it not only invested in that in Rome, but exported it elsewhere.
0:10:36 That’s Ed Glazer, another Harvard economist.
0:10:43 So the sewage starts with the Cloca Maxima in the sixth century before the Common Era,
0:10:47 and that’s associated with the last of the Tarquin kings, the Etruscans.
0:10:51 The Cloca Maxima was one of the world’s first sewage systems.
0:10:52 It was maintained.
0:10:58 There were people like Cato the Elder, who is particularly famed for uttering that Carthage
0:11:01 must be destroyed, Dylinda Carthagau asked at the end of every speech.
0:11:09 He was also heavily involved in water and sewerage, so this single-minded passion for the good
0:11:14 of the Republic translated into caring about infrastructure, and he made it one of his
0:11:15 pet themes.
0:11:18 It was also an Augustan theme as well.
0:11:23 Glazer wanted to be remembered for taking a city of brick and leaving it a city of marble,
0:11:27 but he was also attentive to the water and sewerage maintenance side of things.
0:11:32 Of course, Rome also was interesting in that they weren’t rich by modern standards, maybe
0:11:37 per capita income of modern dollars around 1500, but they had remarkable government capacity.
0:11:42 Glazer, we should say, is an expert on cities, and he also thinks that cities are one of
0:11:44 the best things that humans have ever come up with.
0:11:49 He’s the author of a book called Triumph of the City, How Our Greatest Invention Makes
0:11:52 Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier.
0:11:56 In fact, all of these old imperial cities had remarkable government capacity because
0:11:57 that’s how you got to be an imperial city.
0:12:01 You had to have a government that was able to subdue all your neighbors.
0:12:05 So Julius Caesar was actually able to help the roads function by stopping wheeled traffic
0:12:09 from entering the city for the first 10 hours of every day, which helps in the maintenance
0:12:12 side as well, although it’s not a substitute for repaving the roads.
0:12:19 So cities are inherently dense, which means that a problem, whether it’s trash or crime
0:12:23 or bad streets or sidewalks, can affect a lot of people in a hurry.
0:12:27 So talk to me about the importance of maintenance, especially physical infrastructure maintenance,
0:12:29 especially in a city.
0:12:30 Oh, absolutely.
0:12:34 It’s both the fact that any problem can be magnified, and it’s the fact that just proximity
0:12:36 itself creates downsides, right?
0:12:41 Proximity means that someone’s bacteria are more likely to affect you.
0:12:44 Proximity means that we’re all sharing the same amount of road space and consequently
0:12:48 trying to gobble up the same real estate and facing the downside of congestion.
0:12:52 And of course, density also makes it easier for one person to steal from one another.
0:12:56 And on top of, of course, creating congestion, all those drivers and city streets wear down
0:13:01 the infrastructure, which is why we so often think of city streets as being places that
0:13:04 are full of potholes or full of other problems.
0:13:10 So cities need infrastructure of a variety of different forms, and that infrastructure
0:13:12 needs to be maintained.
0:13:17 And making sure that you have the institutions in place that can provide at least a modicum
0:13:24 of maintenance is really crucial to making city lives work.
0:13:28 Glazers spent some time in the Philippines learning how Manila deals with sewage.
0:13:33 Short answer, not nearly as well as ancient Rome.
0:13:39 These are septic tanks that flow right through pipes, right into sort of main corridors that
0:13:42 course through the city and often end up in the bay.
0:13:46 And the septic tanks are typically in the house, beneath the kitchen perhaps, outside
0:13:49 maybe on the driveway.
0:13:54 And the big project that the water companies, which take care of the sewage and the septic
0:13:58 tanks we’re involved in doing is trying to get people to clean out their septic tanks.
0:14:02 And it wasn’t that the water companies weren’t willing to provide it.
0:14:04 The people often didn’t even want it, right?
0:14:09 Whether they’d let it go 30 or 40 years without any form of cleaning of the septic tank, without
0:14:11 any desludging.
0:14:16 And the people were pushing against having it cleaned up because to get to it, you needed
0:14:20 to tear up someone’s kitchen and they didn’t see the upside of moving it.
0:14:23 And consequently, there’s a whole public health issue related to the fact that more
0:14:27 filth is spewing out through these pipes into the common areas.
0:14:30 So the problem of maintenance is really huge in this area.
0:14:37 So in a case like that, what’s a solution other than building infrastructure like a
0:14:43 septic tank in a way originally that it doesn’t require disrupting your life later on?
0:14:49 Certainly designing infrastructure from the beginning so that it is maintenance friendly
0:14:55 is surely the right way to go as the lower the cost can possibly be both for the large
0:14:58 scale entity that has to do the maintenance, but also for the individual that has to put
0:15:00 up with the inconvenience.
0:15:02 That’s clearly important.
0:15:07 But on top of that, when you’re looking at maintenance that’s required to keep a city
0:15:11 healthy, I’m a big fan of having some form of regulation and fine in place.
0:15:14 Look, I mean, as you know, I’m a Chicago PhD.
0:15:17 I think lots of areas of our lives are over-regulated.
0:15:19 I think entrepreneurship is over-regulated.
0:15:23 But there are areas like maintaining public health where I think it’s just fine to have
0:15:29 regulations and small fines that are put in place if people actually don’t do basic tasks
0:15:32 like desludging that are required for the public good.
0:15:37 I asked Glazer to name a modern city that gets maintenance right.
0:15:41 The meritocracy that is Singapore is quite impressive on the maintenance side.
0:15:45 This is no longer a new city and yet it still feels clean.
0:15:47 It still feels well taken care of.
0:15:51 And I think part of it is just they have enough smart people in government for whom this is
0:15:54 their job that they continue to focus on this.
0:15:57 I think it’s an open question as to whether or not all the shiny things that are being
0:16:00 built in China will wear all that well or will be protected.
0:16:02 I think we still have to see on that.
0:16:07 So when it happens well, whether in modern Singapore or ancient Rome, is it more a function
0:16:15 of design that was able to be maintained relatively easily or cost-effectively or is it a kind
0:16:24 of conscious devotion to maintenance that many individuals or nations just fail to factor
0:16:25 in or budget?
0:16:29 Well, I think in both the Singapore and Rome case, there are leaders who make it their
0:16:35 job and some in the case of Cato presumably thought that there was popularity be gained
0:16:41 by sticking up for the old Rome and for maintaining Roman virtues including decent infrastructure.
0:16:44 Most of the Roman infrastructure looks pretty simple from a modern perspective and consequently
0:16:48 it would have been easier to maintain than a more complicated infrastructure.
0:16:53 But that raises sort of larger technological changes, which is that as the world becomes
0:16:56 more complicated, as infrastructure becomes more complicated, there are more ways that
0:17:01 it can potentially go wrong and maintenance, if anything, becomes even more important.
0:17:05 So in a simpler world, maintenance was easier to get at than it is in the more complex world
0:17:07 of today.
0:17:11 I think we should be talking about what is the value of engineering.
0:17:14 That again is Lee Vinsel from Virginia Tech.
0:17:20 The value of engineering is much more than just innovation and new things, focusing on
0:17:24 taking care of the world rather than just creating the new nifty thing that’s going
0:17:26 to solve all our problems.
0:17:32 If you look at what engineers do out in the world, like 70 to 80 percent of them spend
0:17:35 most of their time just keeping things going, right?
0:17:40 And so this comes down to engineering education too when we’re forcing entrepreneurship and
0:17:48 innovation as the message is that we’re just kind of skewing reality for young people.
0:17:53 And we’re not giving them a real picture and we’re also not valuing the work that they’re
0:17:55 probably going to do in their life.
0:17:59 That seems to me just to be kind of a bad idea.
0:18:06 So all you guys need to do is make maintenance sexy for the American public and for politicians
0:18:07 and policy makers.
0:18:08 Do you have any plans?
0:18:09 How are you going to pull that off?
0:18:13 Yeah, we’re going to come up with some slogans like main-toe-vation.
0:18:18 We’re going to have professional wrestlers dance in front of bridges, you know, their
0:18:21 shirts off.
0:18:26 Coming up after the break, how well are we maintaining our infrastructure here at home?
0:18:29 I cannot imagine that that’s the right solution.
0:18:30 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:18:32 This is Free Economics Radio.
0:18:41 We’ll be right back.
0:18:46 Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers puts out a report card on
0:18:49 physical infrastructure in the United States.
0:18:55 On the most recent report card from 2021, our overall grade was a C minus.
0:19:01 Of the 17 categories that got a letter grade, only rail and ports scored higher than a C.
0:19:05 Rail got a B and ports a B minus.
0:19:13 Transit, meanwhile, got a D, roads, D minus, drinking water, C minus, bridges a C.
0:19:17 When I spoke with Ed Glazer for this episode a few years back, things were even worse.
0:19:22 The most recent overall grade then was a D plus.
0:19:26 This is the United States of America, an economic superpower.
0:19:28 So what the what?
0:19:30 How has this happened?
0:19:34 Well, I think the first thing we should do is we should be a little bit wary about infrastructure
0:19:39 groups that issue report cards whose ultimate bottom line is that trillions must be spent
0:19:41 in their industry.
0:19:45 That being said, there are obviously real issues around American infrastructure.
0:19:51 And what I worry about is that the answer to this will be just big checks cut in Washington.
0:19:54 And I cannot imagine that that’s the right solution.
0:19:58 I can certainly point to a bridge that crosses the Charles River near me, which has been
0:20:02 going on was initiated in part because of the promise of federal dollars that it’s awfully
0:20:06 hard to see the value that we got from four years of disruption for allegedly maintaining
0:20:08 this bridge and improving it.
0:20:11 It’s a remarkable and not a very happy tale.
0:20:12 That’s Larry Summers again.
0:20:17 The Anderson Bridge connects Harvard Square with the city of Boston.
0:20:20 It connects different parts of the Harvard campus.
0:20:23 It’s 75 yards from my office.
0:20:26 The bridge is 232 feet long.
0:20:30 It has been under repair now for a four and a half years.
0:20:35 To put that in some kind of perspective, Julius Caesar built a bridge over a span of the
0:20:43 Rhine that wasn’t 232 feet, it was over a thousand feet, and he did it in nine days.
0:20:47 And that was with the technologies that were available before Christ.
0:20:51 Today, we surely should be able to do much better.
0:20:54 In fact, a hundred years ago, the bridge we’re trying to repair and have been repairing for
0:21:03 four and a half years was built in less than one year from nothing with much earlier technologies.
0:21:06 So what accounts for this delay?
0:21:13 The delay was a combination of environmental requirements, historical commission requirements,
0:21:15 and just plain incompetence.
0:21:20 There were permitting issues, multiple redesigns, and in addition to the time overrun, there
0:21:25 were big cost overruns, which Larry Summers points out doesn’t even factor in all the costs.
0:21:31 Look, you do calculations, you add up all the thousands of cars that go across it.
0:21:38 You value the time that people suffer in delay because the bridge is in disrepair or because
0:21:41 the process of repairing it takes forever.
0:21:47 You figure out what people’s time’s worth, you know, even if you value it at $15 an hour.
0:21:53 I’d certainly pay much more than $15 an hour to avoid being stuck in traffic jams.
0:22:00 Often it ends up that big infrastructure investments will pay for themselves right out just in terms
0:22:04 of avoiding the delays that people suffer.
0:22:08 The Anderson bridge repair finally was completed.
0:22:12 There are, meanwhile, thousands of other bridges in the U.S. that need repair.
0:22:17 Summers argues that forestalling such maintenance has a larger drag on the economy than you
0:22:18 might think.
0:22:22 I think infrastructure is the right thing in the short run for the United States because
0:22:24 it puts people to work in a substantial scale.
0:22:29 It’s the right thing in the medium term because it expands the capacity of our economy and
0:22:35 it’s the right thing in the long run because it takes a burden off of our children.
0:22:38 We will eventually, as a country, fix Kennedy Airport.
0:22:43 It’ll just be much more expensive if we delay and the cost of fixing Kennedy Airport will
0:22:50 compound at a far greater rate than the one and a half percent in bonds we print ourselves
0:22:55 that represents the yield today on long-term U.S. government bonds.
0:23:01 The New York airports are often used as being the textbook examples of declining American
0:23:02 infrastructure.
0:23:04 It’s Ed Glazer again.
0:23:09 Everyone has an awful experience at one of them that they can recount about the chaos
0:23:11 that JFK can often be.
0:23:13 These airports are complicated.
0:23:15 They sit on city land.
0:23:19 They are run by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which answers to two
0:23:24 different governors and is responsible for a lot of other things.
0:23:29 It is a very big and sprawling agency and it has structural problems that almost surely
0:23:31 need reform.
0:23:36 Probably the airports actually should be split up and made into completely separate agencies.
0:23:41 None of that reform will occur if the authority simply gets more cash infusions from Washington.
0:23:45 That is a recipe for non-reform, not for reform.
0:23:50 There’s absolutely no reason why the well-heeled travelers who go in and out of JFK Airport
0:23:52 can’t pay for that infrastructure themselves.
0:23:57 There’s absolutely no reason why that infrastructure needs to be subsidized by ordinary taxpayers
0:23:59 in any way.
0:24:04 I’m 100% on board the need for a massive infrastructure overhaul in the U.S.
0:24:07 I think though that if we go down the route of saying that that just means big items in
0:24:10 the budget, we go completely in the wrong direction.
0:24:14 We need to take a hard look at institutional reform, we need to figure out how federal
0:24:19 nudges and federal money can be used in a way that’s productive, rather than simply
0:24:21 a recipe for maintaining the status quo.
0:24:25 Since we made the original version of this episode, New York City’s airports have been
0:24:28 an infrastructure bright spot.
0:24:33 Last year, we made a series about airline travel called Freakonomics Radio Takes to the Skies.
0:24:38 In one of those episodes, we toured the new and much improved LaGuardia Airport, which
0:24:43 has benefited from fast-track funding put forth by former Governor Andrew Cuomo, along
0:24:47 with a multi-billion-dollar investment by Delta Airlines.
0:24:52 Construction has also begun on a $19 billion overhaul of John F. Kennedy Airport.
0:24:58 All that new spending and construction sounds great, but Ed Glazer says we need to be careful
0:25:01 about how these massive projects are funded.
0:25:06 So my favorite way of paying for infrastructure, other than user fees, is with local property
0:25:09 taxes or with property development, even.
0:25:15 So Hong Kong’s mass transit system funds itself by developing skyscrapers on top of
0:25:19 new subway lines, and it manages to keep the fees low because it can do well enough by
0:25:24 extracting the value that commuters are willing to pay to be right there.
0:25:28 So linking up, I think, in the space of public transit, linking up the payments that developers
0:25:32 are willing to pay, let’s say, to build very high-res buildings near subway stops with
0:25:34 funding for the infrastructure.
0:25:37 I mean, I don’t actually want America’s transit system to be building skyscrapers
0:25:40 on their own, but I’m happy for them to get some flow of tax revenues in exchange for
0:25:43 the ability to build higher buildings next to the subway stops.
0:25:45 That would seem like a desirable thing.
0:25:51 In the case of roads, I think the key is embracing things like congestion pricing whenever it’s
0:25:52 at all feasible.
0:25:56 Any time you build a new highway, you really want to slap a fee on it from the beginning
0:26:00 because it’s just a sort of political endowment effect that seems to be very strong, which
0:26:06 is that if I take a road that’s free and then slap a toll on it, you have riots in the
0:26:07 street.
0:26:08 People are incredibly angry.
0:26:09 It’s a political nightmare.
0:26:14 If you introduce a new road that has a toll from the beginning, people nod.
0:26:17 They may not be pleased about it entirely, but they think that they never saw that road
0:26:18 before.
0:26:19 That road comes with a toll.
0:26:20 They can accept that.
0:26:22 So what role does Glaser see in this for the federal government?
0:26:27 I think actually the best role for the federal government in infrastructure is to actually
0:26:33 be in the business of inspecting, rating, local infrastructure projects, to check whether
0:26:37 or not the maintenance is good, to publicize when the roads or the bridges are unsafe,
0:26:42 and then perhaps to have federal money that’s targeted not to new projects, but specifically
0:26:47 to maintenance, perhaps structured as a matching fund for local monies.
0:26:51 So it’s a structure in which we think actually having a bit more local buy-in at the beginning
0:26:53 is probably helpful.
0:26:56 But you inevitably come up against a fundamental budgeting question.
0:27:01 How to balance the cost of maintenance with the cost of making new things, the cost of
0:27:02 innovating?
0:27:03 I’m all for maintenance.
0:27:09 I’m all for infrastructure, but I don’t think they should be framed as the enemy of innovation.
0:27:10 Larry Summers again.
0:27:13 I think we want to be able to produce in new ways.
0:27:14 We want new products.
0:27:18 We want businesses to organize themselves in new ways.
0:27:22 We want to be the place in the world that has the most cutting-edge science.
0:27:28 We want when new uses of software, new uses of artificial intelligence are developed,
0:27:30 we want them to happen here.
0:27:38 So I do believe in a very strong case for infrastructure investment, but I want to be careful about
0:27:41 saying that I’m somehow against innovation.
0:27:46 I think a great nation can walk and chew gum at the same time.
0:27:52 In 2021, President Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a bipartisan effort
0:27:57 to fund infrastructure, including roads, bridges, trains, airports, and more.
0:28:01 The price tag, $1 trillion.
0:28:06 This has helped launch 40,000 infrastructure projects across the country.
0:28:12 Coming up on Freakinomics Radio, how innovation and maintenance compete for our money.
0:28:19 Large public companies in mature markets tend to invest primarily on maintenance, and often
0:28:23 they don’t have the additional capital you need to do large innovation.
0:28:26 How innovation and maintenance compete for our time.
0:28:32 I started out with the assumption that technological change had reduced women’s labor so much
0:28:37 that they could enter the workforce, and it took me about three years to discover that
0:28:39 I was wrong.
0:28:43 And I finally get serious about some personal maintenance.
0:28:46 It’s all about prioritization one step at a time.
0:28:59 Ruth Schwartz Cowan is an historian of science, technology, and medicine.
0:29:03 I’m a retired faculty member from the University of Pennsylvania.
0:29:09 Like Lee Vincel and Andy Russell, Cowan thinks we put too much emphasis on innovation.
0:29:12 There are basically very few innovators.
0:29:14 There are a huge number of maintainers.
0:29:20 And when you start paying attention to it, you begin to understand how essential it is.
0:29:24 My late husband used to say, and I used to think it was a joke, but I think now that
0:29:31 he’s absolutely right, plumbers are on the world, and we may kind of resent our dependence
0:29:32 on them.
0:29:37 In fact, that may be a larger part of why we don’t pay attention because we really would
0:29:40 like to think of ourselves as independent of all of that, but we’re not.
0:29:46 We are very dependent on a lot of people who don’t have PhDs.
0:29:50 We’re very dependent on a lot of people who don’t have high school diplomas.
0:29:55 Cowan has done a lot of research on one particular form of maintenance, housework.
0:30:01 The name of my book is More Work for Mother, the ironies of household technology from the
0:30:03 open hearth to the microwave.
0:30:04 That’s right.
0:30:08 She found that home inventions that were supposed to free up women from labor often
0:30:09 led to more labor.
0:30:16 I started out with the assumption that technological change in the household, mainly the electrification
0:30:22 of households, had reduced women’s labor so much that they could enter the workforce,
0:30:25 married women’s labor, and enter the workforce.
0:30:29 It took me about three years to discover that I was wrong.
0:30:30 Wrong how?
0:30:34 There are two components of work, and one is time, but the other is what we might call
0:30:41 metabolic labor, and most of the new technologies saved metabolic labor.
0:30:46 It was much harder to wash clothing.
0:30:51 When you were doing it by scrubbing the clothing on a scrubbing board and hauling the water
0:30:58 from the stove to whatever vessel you were using to wash the laundry, then it was to
0:31:02 do it when you had a washing machine and running water.
0:31:04 There’s no question about that.
0:31:07 But with more and more machines to help with chores…
0:31:13 Housewives began to spend more time doing their chores.
0:31:17 In rural America, the standard routine for underwear was that you slept in it and you
0:31:21 changed it maybe a couple of times a year.
0:31:29 So in the modern, let’s say post-World War II, standard household, vastly more wash gets
0:31:32 done than in any previous time in history.
0:31:37 And even for the modern woman or man who does work outside the home…
0:31:43 There are women who are, and men too in some cases, who are doing what sociologists have
0:31:46 come to call a double day.
0:31:51 They’re doing almost as much maintenance work as their grandmothers might have done
0:31:56 or grandfathers might have done if their grandfathers were living on farms.
0:32:03 They’re doing almost as much unpaid maintenance work as they are paid work by hours.
0:32:10 So that’s an interesting and perhaps humbling lesson from the past, that innovation doesn’t
0:32:14 necessarily decrease the time we spend on maintenance.
0:32:19 Which brings us back to how we’re supposed to pay, not only in dollars but in time, for
0:32:22 the maintenance we need to do even if we don’t want to do it.
0:32:28 I think that there can be a false dichotomy when it comes to maintenance, which is maintenance
0:32:31 is required clearly.
0:32:36 But in order to effectively do maintenance, I think you need to innovate.
0:32:37 That’s Martin Casado.
0:32:41 He’s a general partner with the venture capital firm Andresen Horowitz.
0:32:46 As a venture capitalist, you’re looking for opportunities to invest in that you believe
0:32:48 will be large opportunities.
0:32:53 I wanted to hear from someone like Casado because it struck me that if some startup
0:32:57 goes to a venture capitalist with some terrible but innovative idea, it would probably still
0:33:01 generate a lot more interest than a startup with an excellent idea that deals with just
0:33:03 maintenance.
0:33:08 So with crumbling bridges and outdated airports and all the rest and a federal government that
0:33:14 often can’t get out of its own way, are the private equity markets really askewed toward
0:33:15 innovation as I imagined?
0:33:16 Yeah.
0:33:17 Yeah.
0:33:18 I think it’s a super interesting question.
0:33:25 And in fact, I think the public markets have done a really good job of factoring in maintenance
0:33:28 into its expectations on values of companies.
0:33:33 In other words, there’s one pool of money, including the stock markets that values maintenance,
0:33:38 whether it’s for physical infrastructure or increasingly digital infrastructure.
0:33:43 And there’s another pool of money, including that from venture capital firms that seeks
0:33:44 out innovation.
0:33:52 Large public companies in mature markets tend to invest primarily on maintenance, and often
0:33:56 they don’t have the additional capital you need to do large innovation.
0:34:04 So for example, between say 2011 and 2015, growth companies, companies that are in fast
0:34:10 growing areas, spent two times more than legacy companies on research and development.
0:34:16 So as companies mature, the majority of their investment in their spend is in kind of maintaining
0:34:18 existing technologies and so forth.
0:34:21 And this is largely because of the pressure from the public markets.
0:34:27 And so then the way that these kind of legacy enterprises innovate is through inorganic
0:34:30 growth where they buy often startups.
0:34:33 So if you look at the same group over the same period, you’re saying, okay, they say we
0:34:36 have a legacy enterprise and kind of a newer growth enterprise.
0:34:43 Over the last between say 2011 and 2015, legacy enterprises spent something like 10 times
0:34:49 more, it’s about nine times more than the growth enterprises to acquire innovation.
0:34:52 So if you tease apart what’s happening here, what’s happening is the public markets say,
0:34:56 listen, if you are in a mature company, we know that that will keep the lights on.
0:35:01 We know that that’s what you need to do to get predictable returns and public markets
0:35:03 like predictable returns, correct?
0:35:08 However, there’s going to be another pool of money and another ecosystem that can take
0:35:10 the risks, right?
0:35:11 And these are startups.
0:35:12 These are like venture capitalists.
0:35:17 So we make these very risky investments on these companies that may be wildly successful
0:35:18 or not.
0:35:21 And then it’s up to the growth enterprises on whether they want to buy them after this
0:35:22 has proven out or not.
0:35:26 And so I think the public market has created this bifurcation nicely in an economic fashion
0:35:29 where they’re saying, yes, we don’t want you to innovate.
0:35:33 And in fact, we’re going to keep your margins fixed so you can’t innovate.
0:35:39 And so they do invest in what they’re currently doing versus the more private startup side.
0:35:44 Casado also points out that behind all those sexy high tech firms that attract billions
0:35:49 of investment dollars, there’s a lot of unsexy infrastructure that makes it all possible.
0:35:54 Think about like the brick and mortar of computing, the core IT infrastructure.
0:35:58 You know, IT infrastructure, it’s a $4 trillion market.
0:35:59 It’s massive.
0:36:04 Every time you go to Amazon, you’re connecting to this massive building, think like football
0:36:08 stadium size massive building and inside that building, you’ve got tons of storage arrays
0:36:09 that store the data.
0:36:11 You’ve got tons of computing power.
0:36:14 You’ve got tons of networking equipment that connects it all together.
0:36:18 You’ve got a whole bunch of software that just provides kind of the underpinnings for
0:36:19 the application itself.
0:36:20 You’ve got databases.
0:36:22 You’ve got security equipment.
0:36:28 I mean, all of that is infrastructure.
0:36:33 Not often, but once in a while, I take the time to marvel at the fact that so many people
0:36:38 do so much work behind the scenes to keep the world humming.
0:36:42 Whether it’s the internet, the roads, the electricity grid, you name it.
0:36:45 Of course, it’s easy to point out the failures.
0:36:49 They’re visible, whereas the bulk of maintenance is practically invisible.
0:36:57 In praise of maintenance, let me just say this, it’s necessary work, it’s hard work,
0:37:01 and for people like me, who are always in a hurry to make the next new thing, it can
0:37:07 be really unappealing work, which means that sometimes you need help.
0:37:10 So I went out and got some help.
0:37:15 I like to think that I’m a fairly orderly person, but my office has become increasingly
0:37:20 crowded with a small mountain of files and notebooks and photos and audio tape and other
0:37:23 byproduct from years of writing, making music and so on.
0:37:28 I didn’t want to throw it out, but I also didn’t want it to become increasingly inaccessible
0:37:32 in an ever larger mountain, so I sought professional help.
0:37:34 Well, tell us more about that.
0:37:38 Chris Licinic runs a company in Brooklyn called AV Preserve.
0:37:41 They help all sorts of institutions manage their archives.
0:37:46 They worked with Yale University, Museum of Boundary Art, United Nations, and the New
0:37:47 York Public Library.
0:37:52 Well, first, we did a big inventory to inventory their audio, video, and film holdings, which
0:37:54 were over 800,000 items.
0:37:55 How big?
0:37:56 How many?
0:37:57 Over 800,000 items.
0:38:02 I’m not quite in the same league as the New York Public Library, but my desire is similar
0:38:08 to maintain a history, to make it more organized, more accessible, hopefully more useful.
0:38:12 What is the ideal outcome of this project that you envision?
0:38:19 I want everything that I’ve ever documented or created, I kind of want it preserved with
0:38:23 differing degrees of accessibility.
0:38:29 Memory is just so narrow and incomplete and bad that when I think about things that I’ve
0:38:34 done or written about or reported on in the past and not written about, I remember them
0:38:39 so incompletely and so poorly that I think it would be really nice to have that preserved
0:38:42 for who knows whatever reasons.
0:38:50 I want all of that easily and instantly accessible, but I want that point of accessibility to
0:38:56 be so easy that everything going forward from today I can put in the appropriate basket
0:39:05 without acquiring mountains, whether physical or virtual, that have to be sorted later.
0:39:08 The ultimate vision to be able to find everything easily and accessible, but if we think about
0:39:13 that as the ultimate outcome and we realize that there’s a lot of steps in between there
0:39:20 and here, we look at this project as phase one, the first steps, do you have any thoughts
0:39:24 on what the outcome of this phase, what to find success for you?
0:39:28 It would be we finish this meeting like 20 minutes and you say, “I’ll be back tomorrow
0:39:33 and I’ll take care of everything,” and then next Monday you’ll have a hard drive where
0:39:34 everything is there.
0:39:38 That’s my … I mean, you asked.
0:39:39 I’m trying to give you a realistic.
0:39:40 No, I know that’s not real.
0:39:42 You asked what I want.
0:39:43 Right, right, right.
0:39:48 Okay, so Chris Licinic persuaded me it wasn’t going to be so easy, but he started helping
0:39:49 me draw up a plan.
0:39:50 This is about maintenance.
0:39:53 It’s losing the 200 pounds and then staying that way.
0:39:56 But he said it wasn’t as scary as I thought.
0:39:57 I’m sure it feels that way.
0:39:58 But it’s not.
0:40:03 It’s all about prioritization one step at a time.
0:40:06 And so we’ve begun.
0:40:10 Licinic and his colleagues are doing most of the hard work, enumerating and measuring the
0:40:16 amounts of different media, then categorizing by media, paper, audio tape, digital audio,
0:40:17 et cetera.
0:40:22 And then eventually I sit down with them, file box by file box, and figure out whether
0:40:28 and how to preserve a particular thing and how to make it live in a place where I can
0:40:30 visit it whenever I want.
0:40:34 The key for me is one thing Licinic said.
0:40:38 It’s all about prioritization one step at a time.
0:40:46 Okay, I hope you enjoyed this bonus episode, but I have to tell you, I failed miserably
0:40:52 in my attempt to consolidate and downsize my work product from the last many years.
0:40:55 In fact, the mountain has gotten a bit higher.
0:40:58 Marie Kondo would be horrified.
0:41:03 On some days I do think about attacking this mountain, but I have decided for the time
0:41:06 being that the right thing to do here is nothing.
0:41:11 A lot of psychologists talk about decision making that leads to action, but I have read
0:41:17 some psychological research, which says that deciding to not make a decision can sometimes
0:41:18 be a good move.
0:41:21 And that’s what I’m going with, at least for now.
0:41:24 Thanks for listening to this bonus episode of Freakonomics Radio.
0:41:27 We will be back very soon with a new episode.
0:41:32 Until then, take care of yourself, and if you can, someone else too.
0:41:35 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:41:41 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app also at freakonomics.com, where we publish
0:41:43 transcripts and show notes.
0:41:48 This episode was originally produced by Irva Gunja and has been updated by Dalvin Abouaji.
0:41:53 Our staff also includes Alina Kulman, Augusta Chapman, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman,
0:41:58 Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippen, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, John Schnars,
0:42:02 Julie Canfer, Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levy, Neil Caruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilly,
0:42:04 Theo Jacobs, and Zac Lipinski.
0:42:10 Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhiker’s Hour Composer is Luis Guerra.
0:42:14 As always, thank you for listening.
0:42:16 Does AOL still exist and buy things?
0:42:19 Yeah, yeah, yeah, they do.
0:42:20 I missed out on that.
0:42:32 The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.
0:42:32 Stitcher.
0:42:35 (upbeat music)
0:42:37 you
We revisit an episode from 2016 that asks: Has our culture’s obsession with innovation led us to neglect the fact that things also need to be taken care of?
- SOURCES:
- Martin Casado, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
- Ruth Schwartz Cowan, professor emerita of history and sociology of science at University of Pennsylvania.
- Edward Glaeser, professor of economics at Harvard University.
- Chris Lacinak, founder and president of AVPreserve.
- Andrew Russell, provost of SUNY Polytechnic Institute.
- Lawrence Summers, professor and president emeritus of Harvard University; former Secretary of the Treasury and former director of the National Economic Council.
- Lee Vinsel, professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech.
- RESOURCES:
- “Hail the Maintainers,” by Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel (Aeon, 2016).
- “A Lesson on Infrastructure From the Anderson Bridge Fiasco,” by Lawrence Summers and Rachel Lipson (The Boston Globe, 2016).
- Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier, by Edward Glaeser (2008).
- More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave, by Ruth Schwartz Cowan (1983).
- EXTRAS:
- “Freakonomics Radio Takes to the Skies,” series by Freakonomics Radio (2023).
- “Edward Glaeser Explains Why Some Cities Thrive While Others Fade Away,” by People I (Mostly) Admire (2021).
- “Why Larry Summers Is the Economist Everyone Hates to Love,” by Freakonomics Radio (2017).