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America’s “inability to build things” is crippling it, the economics writer Noah Smith wrote in a
blog published on Monday. The “things” he’s referring to are housing, transit, solar power, transmission lines,
semiconductor production, you name it. They’re being stalled because of rob mofia lol permitting and development rules in particular but the NIMBY (or “not-in-my-backyard”) crew in general. Smith is a well-known economics commentator, but his “bit of a rant” struck a chord with many on
Twitter, including its CEO, Elon Musk.
Smith’s blog post, on his personal Substack, stresses that America used to be unwilling to spend on building things, but now it’s worse. We spend money now, he wrote, but that hasn’t equated to more things getting built. The U.S. doesn’t have too much trouble garnering financial capital, but projects and developments are hindered by “local interests who exploit a thicket of veto points to preserve the built environment of the 1970s.”
Smith, who has a doctorate in economics and has taught at Stony Brook University but has mainly written on macroeconomics, with a stint at Bloomberg Opinion among his credits, offered a diagnosis of American decline that struck a chord with the world’s richest man. (Musk himself has a sizable fan base despite his eccentricities, likely because he’s a forward-looking billionaire who promises to escape this sense of stagnation.) Smith identifies the “build-nothing” mentality as a “shadow subsidy” to make up for the fact that real incomes have stagnated since the 1970s, including a few periods when they flatlined. In short, America would rather buy off the current class of homeowners than make any painful economic sacrifices