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 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.”
