How Blue NYC Is Strangling Itself
11th April 2015
New York’s transit woes are a portrait of the collapse of blue model in miniature. The factors that Renn argues are causing the high costs are the classic features of that out-dated system: burdensome regulations, cronyism, and corruption. The problems will be hard to solve because they are deeply rooted. Corrupt politics, rent-seeking crony capitalists, organized labor, NIMBY lobbies, administrative incompetence resulting from poorly organized and poorly run bureaucracies: it took a lot of cooks to spoil this broth.
But the good news is that studying America’s biggest problems and bottlenecks — like our expensive health care system, bloated higher ed system, collapsing infrastructure — offer us the chance to reform and redesign the outmoded systems that are holding us back. The old ways of doing things aren’t good enough any more; American society needs a new era of reform that can transform a social and political infrastructure developed for the needs of an industrial society to the smarter, sleeker and more efficient infrastructure that our emerging information society desperately needs.