The Build-Nothing Country

Key Highlights

• America’s inability to build what it needs spans housing, transit, solar power, transmission lines, and semiconductor fabs. The country has the financial capital — it lacks the ability to build.
• The core diagnosis: money is not physical stuff. “Just because you earmark $5 billion for a subway in some Excel spreadsheet doesn’t mean a physical train has been created.”
• New York’s Second Avenue Subway became the world’s most expensive subway line — an order of magnitude more costly per mile than similar European projects. Culprits: overuse of consultants, oversized stations, poor coordination, pork-barrel spending.
• Housing: the recent price runup motivated developers to barely reach pre-2008 construction levels, now heading back to stasis as prices cool.
• Green energy: despite $400B IRA allocation, solar and wind projects face NIMBY opposition and supply chain issues from Biden’s China sourcing restrictions.
• The 2/3 of Americans who own homes can raise their paper wealth by attending local government meetings and arguing to restrict the local housing supply — a form of “costless subsidy” with very real costs to everyone else.
• “Physical stasis seems cheap, but it’s an incredibly expensive way to subsidize the lifestyles of Americans.”
• “If we insist on continuing to be the Build-Nothing Country, our once-mighty middle class will sink into a genteel poverty, and someone else will build the future on the bones of our civilization.”

Connections

• Noah Smith — author of the piece, writing on his Noahpinion Substack.
• Noahpinion — the publication where the essay ran.
• The Axis of Building — companion Noah Smith argument on the politics of who builds and who blocks.
• City Building — the broader theme of housing, transit, and physical-stuff construction the essay diagnoses as paralyzed.
• Abundance — the pro-build, supply-side framing that opposes the build-nothing dynamic described here.
• Real Estate — connects to the housing diagnosis: post-2008 construction stasis and homeowner incentives to restrict local supply.
• Climate Change — relates to the green-energy section, where solar and wind face NIMBY opposition despite the $400B IRA allocation.
• Distributed Energy Model — bears on the transmission-line and renewable-buildout obstacles the essay cites.
• Progress Studies — the wider question of why a wealthy country has lost the capacity to build the future.
• The American Age Was The Human Age — Smith’s 250th-anniversary essay explicitly calls back to this piece’s “equilibrium of sclerosis” diagnosis.