In Praise of Maintenance

The United States prides itself on being a nation of innovators. We invented baseball, jazz, the mass-market automobile and the iPhone. Silicon Valley — Apple, Google, Facebook — and its bustling startup culture are the envy of the world. America is all new, new, new; now, now, now.

What often gets lost in all the excitement over innovation, however, is its equally important (yet far less sexy) cousin: maintenance. After all, our baseball parks, highways and telecommunications networks won’t stay pretty and functional forever; hardworking humans have to keep them that way, and we tend to place far less value on that crucial labor.

This unfortunate inclination to emphasize novelty over conservation — a propensity arguably shared by much of the developed world — certainly isn’t lost on Larry Summers, the former U.S. Treasury secretary, who believes it can lead to a vicious cycle: “People always think more about how new ground can be broken than they think about how existing institutions can be sustained or existing facilities can be maintained. [This] leads to a constant trap where we underinvest in old things, then old things disappoint us, then we feel a need for new things, then to satisfy that need for new things we underinvest more in old things.”

One of the results of this cycle, at least in the United States, is a crumbling infrastructure. Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers releases a report card on the country’s physical infrastructure. The most recent report gave the U.S. an overall grade of D+. Of the 16 categories that got a letter grade, only “solid waste” scored higher than a C. “Transit” and “roads” both got a D.

Meanwhile, Google and Tesla are busy developing driverless cars.

So what’s to be done? First off, Americans need to recognize maintenance in general, and infrastructure maintenance in particular, as an inherent economic good, just like tech innovation. Here’s Summers again: “I think infrastructure is the right thing in the short run for the United States because it puts people to work in a substantial scale. It’s the right thing in a medium term because it expands the capacity of our economy. And it’s the right thing in the long run because it takes the burden off of our children.”

Summers argues that putting off repairs to bridges or roads or America’s famously dilapidated airports will just make these repairs more expensive when we finally get around to them.

But we shouldn’t rely entirely on financial support from the government to do the job, at least according to Harvard economics professor Ed Glaeser, author of “Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier.” If we do, we’ll continue to end up with disasters like the Anderson Memorial Bridge (located close to Glaeser’s Harvard office in Cambridge, Massachusetts). A concerted effort to restore the historic bridge, supported by federal funding,has languished for over four years, snarling traffic in the process.

Instead of direct federal investment alone, Glaeser envisions a creative mix of local property taxes and user fees like congestion pricing and highway tolls. He points to Hong Kong’s hugely successful mass transit system, which funds itself in part by developing property along its subway lines.

According to Glaeser, the government shouldn’t be the primary funder and fixer, but rather the chief inspector — the guy in charge of assigning ratings to infrastructure projects, ensuring that maintenance is up to standard and informing the public when roads or bridges aren’t safe.

Whatever the government’s role ends up being in rehabilitating our infrastructure, nothing much will get done if Americans don’t change their mindsets about maintenance and stop seeing it as the enemy of innovation. Ultimately we don’t have to choose between them — conservation and creation are simply two sides of the same high-functioning economy. Or as Summers puts it: “I think a great nation can walk and chew gum at the same time.”