The Enduring Impact of a Bridge

Tom Friedman is surely right to say that investing in our education system would be a good idea. But not only does the specific proposal he makes suffer from the problems Kevin Carey details, but he’s dead wrong about this purported contrast:

Sure, we’ll waste some money doing that. That will happen with bridges, too. But a bridge is just a bridge. Once it’s up, it stops stimulating. A student who normally would not be interested in science but gets stimulated by a better teacher or more exposure to a lab, or a scientist who gets the funding for new research, is potentially the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. They create good jobs for years. Perhaps more bridges can bail us out of a depression, but only more Bills and Steves can bail us into prosperity.

This is totally wrong. A bridge doesn’t “stop stimulating” the economy once it’s done. Well-functioning bridges are integral to economic prosperity. The economic success of Northern Virginia is built in part on a solid foundation of a highly educated workforce. But it’s also built on the fact that there are bridges across the Potomac River. The most important economic impact of the bridges over the river isn’t the immediate job-creation effect that building them had. It’s that first the construction of highway-bridges created the NoVa DC suburbs and second that the construction of rail bridges allowed the creation of the dense corridors of economic activity that shape and define Arlington County.

Right now, the country is suffering tens of billions of dollars in lost economic productivity each year due to traffic congestion in the vicinity of our major metropolitan areas:

Relieving that congestion will due us enormous enduring economic good. And to relieve it, we’ll need new infrastructure. Probably not very many new bridges, as it happens, though we certainly should do repair work on our existing highways and bridges. But new investments in mass transit and freight rail infrastructure will do a lot to mitigate these problems. And combined with state-of-the-art congestion pricing—which, in turn, would require some infrastructure investments to be workable—we could solve the congestion problem and do ourselves a world of good.

This is largely independent of the stimulus question, but insofar as we’re looking to spend money it definitely makes sense to find smart ways to use stimulus funds to kick-start some of the needed activity. That’s not to deny the importance of education. Rather, smart investments in education are in exactly the same basket as smart investments in physical infrastructure—both will help the country enormously over the long-run.