Why does it feel like we can’t build anything anymore? In this episode, Nick and Goldy talk with author Mark Dunkelman about his new book Why Nothing Works, which examines how well-intentioned progressive reforms created a “vetocracy” that makes major public projects nearly impossible. From Seattle’s decades-long waterfront rebuild to the dysfunction of Penn Station, they explore the messy trade-offs between accountability and action—and ask what it would take to make progress possible again.
Marc Dunkelman is a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and a former fellow at NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management. During more than a decade working in politics, he worked for Democratic members of both the Senate and the House of Representatives and as a senior fellow at the Clinton Foundation.
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Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back
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Nick Hanauer:
The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
Goldie:
The last five decades of trickle-down economics haven’t worked, but what’s the alternative? Middle-out economics is the answer because the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right.
Speaker 6:
This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out. Welcome to the show.
Goldie:
Hey, Nick. We’re recording on a Monday morning as the markets crash, and I’m wondering what a plutocrat like you did over the weekend.
Nick Hanauer:
Well, I tried not to worry about the collapse of Western civilization, but my wife and I did a really fun thing. We went downtown and we spent part of the day walking around Seattle’s new waterfront. And I’m not sure if you know, but Leslie and I gave one of the early gifts to the waterfront, the entity that managed the transformation of Seattle’s waterfront. And many of our listeners won’t know that over the last 10 years or so, the entire waterfront of the city of Seattle has been transformed. And my wife was on the executive committee of the waterfront for 10 years. And what happened, for those of you who don’t know and don’t live in Seattle, the waterfront of Seattle used to be dominated by a two-story highway, which we called the Viaduct.
Goldie:
Double-decker freeway along the waterfront.
Nick Hanauer:
Freeway along the waterfront. It was incredibly ugly. It was incredibly loud.
Goldie:
Yeah. I’ll tell you a story, Nick. My first trip to Seattle, my future ex-wife, we met in New York. She brought me out to Seattle trying to convince me to move out here, and she takes me down to Seattle’s waterfront and I lean over to her and I scream in her ear, “I can’t believe they built this fucking freeway across your waterfront.” And she turns to me and she says, “What?”
Nick Hanauer:
What? True story.
Goldie:
True story.
Nick Hanauer:
And I actually in my very younger years used to live in a condo complex in Pike Place Market, which is again, for those of you who don’t know Seattle, it’s Seattle’s historic public market that sat adjacent to this blight and the entire… So Seattle is one of the most beautiful waterfront views in the world. There’s no city in the world that has a view across the water and to the Olympic Mountains like our city does. And it was all blocked by this incredible thing and then there was an earthquake.
Goldie:
That’s very progressive of us, by the way, to have an earthquake that terminally damaged this freeway.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. And then they discovered that they’re either going to have to spend a trillion dollars to rebuild it or it needed to get knocked down. When we realized it needed to get knocked down, that precipitated a conversation about how to restore the waterfront. And I am just going to fast-forward and say we spent a huge amount of money as a state to tear that awful blight down, and we drilled a tunnel at great expense under the city to take most of the traffic and built the most spectacular park and public spaces and an absolutely gorgeous boulevard all along the waterfront to replace it. And because we have been traveling so much and because the weather has been so terrible, Leslie had not had really the time to get down there and see it in its final completed form. There’s still a few things that will be finished soon this summer, but it is absolutely spectacular.
Goldie:
And all it took Nick, was 15 years of political haggling followed by 10 years of slow construction.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. Goldie, are those numbers correct?
Goldie:
Well, what was it?
Nick Hanauer:
I don’t know.
Goldie:
It was 2001 when the earthquake happened and we just fought over it forever. I don’t think the decision…
Nick Hanauer:
I guess. You’re right. It’s 20 plus years, right? I mean it’s not…
Goldie:
Oh, I’m sorry, 24 years, but it’s not finished yet.
Nick Hanauer:
Okay. Well, but it is more or less finished.
Goldie:
So I think 25 years makes…
Nick Hanauer:
Okay. But whatever. I mean, but the thing is that it stands as one of… It has to be one of the greatest civic achievements in the country over the last 30, 40 years. You show me another city that has completely transformed its waterfront, it’s really remarkable. So I was thinking about our upcoming podcast today when I was walking around because today we’re talking to Mark Dunkelman about his new book, Why Nothing Works.
Goldie:
Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Bring It Back.
Nick Hanauer:
Right. Yeah. And I guess we could have done the project quicker, but I don’t think we could have done it better. But it’s such an interesting contrast or study in contrast between this remarkable civic achievement that we managed to get done in Seattle and the absolute fact that in many places, things like this just don’t happen or can’t happen. And that it is a very big challenge both for the country at large, but also for progressives, the party of government.
Goldie:
And by party of government, you mean the party that believes in government, not the party that’s actually running it at the moment nationally.
Nick Hanauer:
Correct. Correct. Correct. But with that, I think we should talk to Mark and explore this very, very timely subject.
Mark Dunkelman:
My name’s Mark Dunkelman. I’m a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute. I’m a former political hack who got frustrated with politics and didn’t understand why things weren’t working. So I spent some time trying to figure that out. And the result is a book called Why Nothing Works.
Nick Hanauer:
Your book opens with a simple but infuriating question, why we can’t seem to build anything anymore. First, what led you to explore this problem? And go ahead and lay out the basic thesis of your book.
Mark Dunkelman:
So I was living in DC, and then we moved to Providence. And in both places, I was commuted into New York a lot. And at one point I was reading The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Robert Moses, who rebuilt or built, totally changed the landscape of New York City during his reign of power from the 1930s to the 1960s, including among other things, building the Cross Bronx Expressway, which most people believe laid as an urban wasteland, one of New York’s most vibrant working class enclaves in the 1950s. And I was reading that as as my train pulled into Penn Station, which was and is the world’s second most heavily trafficked transit hub, a place where more people traverse than LaGuardia, Kennedy and New York airports combined on any given day. And I was thinking to myself, I don’t know how frequently you all go through Penn Station, but certainly back then 10 years ago, Penn Station was really a rat’s nest.
Mark Dunkelman:
You got out of the train and you climbed up through dingy fetid corridors. It was just nasty. And yet it was the Global Financial Capital’s front door. And the question in my mind was why was it that Robert Moses was able in the 1950s to destroy an entire borough of the Bronx or an entire portion of that borough with almost everyone screaming no, as Robert Caro delineates in the power Broker. And then here we were a half century later and despite years and years of discussions about wanting to redo Penn Station, basically at that point, nothing had gotten done, and I just didn’t understand. It was an honest question. I didn’t understand what had changed. Why was it that Moses had been able to do his bad project despite everybody was screaming no. And now this seemed like a good project. There are no real objections to a nicer Penn station, but despite everyone screaming yes, it couldn’t get done. I wanted to understand what had changed.
Mark Dunkelman:
And so I spent several years just talking to the people involved in that project and asking what had happened. And what I found was that there was no particular bad actor. There was no… My suspicion was that there was going to be one group that was just in transient and wouldn’t get off there, wouldn’t finance it, wouldn’t get out of the way, and everyone sort of was basically supportive. But in the end, there were too many veto points in the system. We had created a gauntlet that any public project has to traverse in order to be erected. And there was no ill will here. There were no bad intentions. It was just that this had happened after Moses. So the book’s thesis is that in the heart of progressivism, in the heart of every progressive, no matter whether they’re on the far left and vilify neoliberalism all the time, or they’re in the center left and they’re not so sure, there are neoliberal shill, in the heart of all those progressives are two competing impulses which exist at the same time and are constantly in tension.
Mark Dunkelman:
One, which I call a Hamiltonian impulse, is to see the world as a series of tragedies of the common. We can’t build a sewage system in this neighborhood. We can’t get a better educational system. We can’t do these things, none of which can be solved by individuals alone. So the Hamiltonian solution in those challenges is to push power up into some powerful institution that will do a big thing, build a school system, build a sewage system, build a port, you name it. And then we have a second impulse, which I call it Jeffersonian impulse, which is to say, “Look, here’s a situation where power has been agglomerated in some powerful institution that is oppressing the people below it.” And so you look at reproductive rights, the fear among progressives is that some bureaucrat is going to tell a woman what to do with her body.
Mark Dunkelman:
But what I’m saying to you is that the Hamiltonian Jeffersonian impulse want to push power up into a powerful institution and the other to push power down from a powerful institution are both at the heart of progressivism. They’ve been there from the very beginning. And that the challenge for us as a movement is to find the proper balance between the two. And that what had happened over the course of New York’s development was that we’d gone from a system that was too Hamiltonian. Robert Moses had too much concentrated power and was able to do things despite everyone saying no to a system where we had the Jeffersonian impulse was so powerful that we had diffused power and decision-making authority so thoroughly that no one had the power to say yes. And neither of these ideas is good or bad per se. They’re both worthwhile. They’re both terrible when abused, but they need to be put by progressives in proper balance if we’re going to solve big problems as we claim to want to do.
Goldie:
But regardless of ideology, because your book mostly talks about progressives. There’s an occasional Republican, but usually a progressive Republican like Rockefeller mentioned, regardless of your actual ideology, these conflicting impulses, don’t they just reflect the way the real world actually works, that there is this balance naturally in how you get things done in a complex society? I mean, you mentioned Penn Station. I lived in New York in the late 80s, early 90s. It was horrible then, but the old Penn Station was destroyed by the same what you would call Hamiltonian tools. I mean, they created this mess. So it’s what you do with it as well as what the balance is. Had Robert Moses been more benevolent, we might’ve had a better New York, but he wasn’t. So I struggle with why this is only an issue that progressives need to talk about and not conservatives, not the laissez-faire impulses. Because what I see across our nation’s history is this, there’s basically two ways of approaching the government. It’s do nothing and do something. And the do nothings seem to be getting off Scott Fray in the book.
Mark Dunkelman:
That’s a fair swipe. Let me try to address it. You are right that the impulse to push power up and pull it down, that those two impulses exist outside of the progressive realm. When I give a speech…
Nick Hanauer:
This is the oldest story in human society, right?
Mark Dunkelman:
Correct.
Nick Hanauer:
I sort of come from the business world, and there’s a reason that giant companies usually fail, and that is because they become captured by the arithmetically expanding critical interdependencies that come from trying to operate a giant enterprise.
Goldie:
Ossified by their inner bureaucracies.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right.
Goldie:
Yeah. But yet you need bureaucracy because you couldn’t run a large company or a government without it.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Microsoft bought my very high functioning company for six and a half billion dollars, 3000 employees, 200 million in EBITDA or something like that, growing 40% year over year. And within 18 months they had destroyed it, which is a classic example of this ossification, right? They simply did not know how to let a thing like this operate in the world. I mean, I think you’re onto one of the most important questions that complex societies face, which is how do you balance these things? But I guess for Goldie and I, we’re like, there’s a reason that Biden was the one that passed the infrastructure bill and Republicans didn’t, and the reason, as Goldie said, they’re do-nothings, right?
Goldie:
That’s laissez-faire. Leave it alone.
Nick Hanauer:
It costs too much. It costs too much. Which is not to say that progressives should not look very carefully at our weaknesses, which is what you’re trying to do. You cannot fix the Republican Party. You may be able to help us be more effective.
Mark Dunkelman:
Yes. I mean, they benefit from breaking the government, right? We are the party of government. We are the ones when government doesn’t work that get slaughtered at the ballot box. It’s incumbent upon us. We spend all of our time complaining that they are not doing the right thing to make government work, that they’re breaking government, that they’re greedy, that we’ve got a litany of complaints that we hear all the time about them, which makes it even more important for us, that when government does have power, it is used effectively. And the truth is that if you look at why things don’t work today in many blue places, it’s because of things that we have done to protect against Robert Moses doing terrible things to the city.
Nick Hanauer:
It is, I think you call it, how do you say it, a vetocracy.
Mark Dunkelman:
It is a vetocracy, but beyond that, we have a cultural aversion to power. I was listening to your…
Nick Hanauer:
That’s for sure.
Mark Dunkelman:
Yeah. I was listening-
Nick Hanauer:
Come on, Goldie. Admit that’s true.
Goldie:
Well, look, look. Democrats, certainly that’s a pathology in the Democratic Party. They’re afraid to use power. For example, recently Schumer’s refusal to Filibuster, to use the Filibuster to force a clean budget resolution.
Mark Dunkelman:
But fair enough. I think my point though is that there was a time when at the root of progressivism was a cultural inclination to power. It was seen that there were farms across the upper south that weren’t being connected to electricity. So people were living 19th century standard lives during the middle of the 20th century that the utilities in the South, namely the Commonwealth and Southern Company, did not have the incentive to build the wires to those farms because they didn’t think that they would draw enough load to make the investment worthwhile. That there was no alternative to having a big, powerful federal bureaucracy come in and bring lights to the Upper South. And that was the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Mark Dunkelman:
That was taking power as it existed at the time in the 1920s and early 1930s, and pushing it up into big bureaucracies. And the standard operating procedure of progressivism before then and through the 1960s, 1970s, was to say, “Here is a huge problem. What bureaucracy can we empower to solve it? What public bureaucracy? How are we going to use public authority in a powerful, robust way to solve some tragedy to the common?”
Mark Dunkelman:
And then we got to this point in the 60s and 70s where we looked at the people that we had empowered to solve these problems, and we said, “Whoa.” These people have done a terrible job. They are more like Robert Moses than they are the guy who led the Tennessee Valley Authority, David Lilienthal. They are people like Robert McNamara who got us into a terrible war. They are people who embrace urban renewal and slum clearance, which just turns out to be a travesty. They’re people that support… All the people that Ralph Nader railed against were progressives of the old school, of the old Hamiltonian school. And so quite rightly, we said, “This is out of whack. This is out of balance.” The old “establishment,” the city fathers, the people that you couldn’t vote out of office, but who were powerful for a whole variety of reasons, like Robert Moses, the challenge was how do we sort of get a choke hold on these guys so they can’t do this anymore?
Mark Dunkelman:
And so we created a whole litany of new hurdles and new barriers and new standards and new judicial procedures that would make sure that the little people who were getting bulldozed by the Robert Moses types would be protected against the next would be Robert Moses. And you could see it. It wasn’t just this was a cultural zeitgeist. And Goldie, to your point, it wasn’t just progressives. The movies of the early 70s, Chinatown was about some villain who was trying to take water from the valley and bring it into the city of Los Angeles or network. The tagline of network was, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” That was about the old establishment that progressivism had built. Nick, I mean the famous Apple ad from 1984, they run in and they’re marching along and they take, what a slingshot or whatever, and break through the… It’s straight out of Ayn Rand or…
Goldie:
It’s 1984.
Nick Hanauer:
It’s 1984.
Mark Dunkelman:
It’s 1984. Right. Right. Right.
Goldie:
It’s the Orwell.
Mark Dunkelman:
It’s Orwell. But the notion in all of those cases is that the old establishment, which progressivism had once lionized is bad, and we progressives are going to break through it so that good ordinary people can live their fullest life. And the irony here, and this gets to your very first question, the irony here is that it was us. We are the ones who were culturally averse to all these old powerful figures. Even as Reagan is doing his shtick about government isn’t the solution and the government is the problem, and going on Johnny Carson, and that’s his thing. It is in our DNA, the Watergate babies are not a group of progressives who want to build up institutions. They are very nervous about big establishment institutions, and they spend their time building up tools that ordinary people can use to protect themselves against the old establishment.
Mark Dunkelman:
This is our creation. We made this mistake. It was right to do at the time, but it has gone so far. It’s been 50 years of us doing this, and now we’ve got a thing where when we are in power and Biden makes all these investments, we don’t actually get the bang for the buck because it’s impossible to actually build things.
Nick Hanauer:
So I mean, I guess the way in which this instinct was institutionalized, or I’m not saying this very well. I mean, the challenge of, I think progressivism and the difference, I think in many ways between progressivism and conservativism, or at least how I think about these problems and how some other people think about these problems, is that you’re always trying to, if you’re going to do something, you’re trying to do it in, and this is not exactly the right word, but in an empathetic way. If you’re going to build something, you’re going to try and build it in a way that doesn’t harm the environment and doesn’t displace a bunch of poor people, and doesn’t create a bunch of social and cultural and economic harms that if you just said, “Screw it, we’re just going to build it,” often does, right?
Mark Dunkelman:
Yes.
Nick Hanauer:
There’s a school of thought which is screw those issues and screw those people. If we’re going to build something, let’s pay people as little as possible. Let’s not worry about the poor people and who cares what happens to the fish? If that’s your view, it is very, very easy to build things.
Goldie:
Like in China.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Like in China. They just build things, and if you’re in the way, you just get bulldozed and displaced. But that, I would call it civilized approach to building things is intrinsically more complex than the old-fashioned, screw it. Let’s just charge ahead and build it.
Goldie:
Can I add a caveat to this, which is just Roosevelt could spin up the Civilian Conservation Corps overnight because all you needed to do was gather up the men and give them shovels, and it didn’t take much time to teach somebody how to use a shovel, and it was very easy to put people back to work when the economy was so much simpler and technology was so much less complex. You can’t just put people to work building multifamily housing without months and months of training and apprenticeship and so forth. It’s not possible to build things today like we could build because it’s not manual labor anymore.
Nick Hanauer:
But I just want to zero in on this one issue because look, here’s the thing, is if you can crack this problem, it’s a really great and important thing, right? But how do we as progressives, how do we balance these issues and make more progress building things all at the same time? I mean, is it simply pulling back on our concern for these other externalities, if you want to call them?
Mark Dunkelman:
Sure.
Nick Hanauer:
My language is not very good here, right?
Mark Dunkelman:
You’re describing what Ezra Klein calls “the everything bagel problem.” And the term, which I think was sort of a genius way to describe it, but was the notion that if you want to do something big, Democrats say, “Okay, let’s do the big thing, but let’s pay a fair wage. Let’s make sure that the products are made in the US. Let’s make sure that we don’t harm the bald eagles. Let’s make sure that the costs are equitably distributed between different communities.” And by the end, you’ve got a project that if you had just done it, like they used to, like the Tennessee Valley Authority did, or China would, you’re at four or five times the cost because you’re being-
Nick Hanauer:
Absolutely.
Mark Dunkelman:
That’s what you’re describing.
Nick Hanauer:
Yes, but the problem with Ezra’s analysis is everything bagels are the best bagels. That’s the problem. Is it-
Mark Dunkelman:
Are they worth five times as much?
Nick Hanauer:
Okay.
Mark Dunkelman:
But fair enough. My concern with Ezra’s analysis, and I think there’s a lot to it, is that in the end, the question isn’t whether you take all these other concerns into account. It’s how do you metabolize all the different concerns?
Nick Hanauer:
Correct.
Mark Dunkelman:
Is it that every single one, if the standard isn’t met, the project doesn’t go through? Or is that you say, “Look, here’s the challenge that we’re facing. Here are the costs. Here are the extras that we could add to make it so that we are diminishing the externalities.”
Mark Dunkelman:
Somebody needs the power to say, “Look, we want to build this transmission line that will get clean water power from Quebec into the Massachusetts Grid.” It has to go across one of the various beautiful natural sites in Northern New England, whether it’s going to be the White Mountains in New Hampshire or the woods in Northern Maine. It’s going to have to go through one of these things. One of the problems is that if you go through Maine, the line is going to endanger a rare orchid species that is only in the north of Maine. And the question isn’t is the equivalent of taking 700,000 cars off the roads every year? Is that equivalent of clean energy worth this orchid species? Or among the ingredients atop the everything bagel, is it that we need to worry about the orchid species and every other endangered species and X and Y and Z?
Mark Dunkelman:
What we need, it seems to me we have created a gauntlet where each of the challenges is by itself capable of vetoing the project as a whole rather than a process by which we take all the things, throw them in the pot, have someone say, “Look, there’s some trade-offs here. I am the political leadership, and I am going to decide.” So if you look at, for example, congestion pricing, I keep on meaning to write this, and I haven’t written it yet, but I want to, if you look at congestion pricing, back in Robert Moses’ day, he decides to do this highway across the South Bronx. Everyone’s screaming no, but he just moves forward. Who is the person in the congestion pricing fight who has that power? There’s no one. I don’t even… If you asked me who is in charge of congestion pricing, I don’t even know who it is.
Mark Dunkelman:
Maybe it’s sort of Hokel like she sort of could turn it on and off. Maybe it’s sort of General Lieber who’s the head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. He sits in Robert Moses’ seat, but not really. If the governor of New Jersey is going to sue, he could turn the whole thing off. If he sues and it makes it to a courtroom, Matt Judge is basically in charge. Is it Trump who’s threatening to withhold funding? Who is in charge of deciding whether among all the various pros and cons of charging people a little bit more to go into Midtown and Southern Manhattan, who ultimately makes the call? And we’ve created a system where that was once well understood. In fact, progressivism was born in the late-19th, early-20th century to solve this very problem. People didn’t understand who is in charge of building the sewage system, building the transit system, building a good school system.
Mark Dunkelman:
We are going to create people that are going to decide. We’re going to create school boards. We’re going to create public authorities. We’re going to create blue ribbon commissions. This is what progressivism was about originally, was figuring out, taking power as it was dispersed and spread out and confusing and putting it in the hands of people who would do the right thing. We’ve now gone the other direction because it turned out that sometimes those people didn’t do the right thing. And now we’ve got a situation where beyond wanting to protect the environment, have equitable costs, endangered species, environmental, housing preservation, non-gentrification, bapidibapidap, like all of those things, each by themselves can upend a project rather than us saying, “Here are the trade-offs. Someone ratify a deal.”
Goldie:
But isn’t the dispersed power when you bring up congestion pricing, the fact that there is no one person who can turn it on or off, isn’t that insulating congestion pricing from being turned off?
Mark Dunkelman:
Mike Bloomberg was mayor when they had this idea. They’d spent five years on an environmental review process. I don’t know. You’re saying that I hope as a supporter of congestion pricing, I hope that Trump doesn’t work some deal where all the money that is dispersed to the Department of Transportation for the New York State isn’t predicated on Kathy Hogan turning it off. I don’t know what’s going to happen. That does not seem like a program that is beyond the reach of some nefarious actor.
Goldie:
Right. But that’s the point about dispersing power. When you have somebody with the power to turn something on or off, they can turn something on or off regardless of…
Nick Hanauer:
Okay. But the problem with this is that if good people are in charge, good things happen. And if bad people in charge, terrible things happen. And that’s just kind of the way it goes. And
Goldie:
By your definition, I’m more of a Hamiltonian than a Jeffersonian. But with Trump in the White House, I’m leaning heavily Jeffersonian at the moment because it depends on circumstance. I mean, more to the point, I grew up in Philadelphia. I lived in Philadelphia and New York until I was like 27, 28. And there are things Nick and I are attempting to do here in Seattle that I would never, ever, ever attempt to do in Philadelphia because it is so corrupt. I wouldn’t trust them to build housing like I would trust the King County government to do it out here. It’s a different government. It’s a different situation. It requires different solutions. I can centralize authority in a city like Seattle, in a county like King County because it’s relatively clean government without corruption, and it’s a bunch of progressive do-gooders. I wouldn’t trust some of these ideas to pioneer them in my Native Philadelphia because it’s this old, corrupt democratic machine. And there’s still a lot of that there.
Mark Dunkelman:
Well, let me push back you on that a little bit by saying this. My sense is that when people see that government doesn’t work, and they are frustrated by the fact that there’s a housing crisis or the electricity is getting more expensive, we’re talking about the clean energy revolution and not actually taking advantage of it, or you name it. When it feels that government doesn’t work, voters look for a Trumpian figure to save them.
Mark Dunkelman:
In the introduction of my book is this little story about how when Ed Koch was mayor of New York City and wanted to redo the Wollman Rink, he assigned it to the Parks and Recreation Department, and the Parks and Recreation Department just screwed it up. It supposed to be just a year or two off the… When people couldn’t skate in the rink, which is Central Park, and that they would redo it, and they spent several extra years. It was closed. Finally, they claimed to reopen it. They flipped on the switch and it didn’t work. And it was a huge humiliation to Koch. And the reason that it hadn’t worked is because a generation earlier progressives worried about corruption as you just worried about corruption in Philadelphia, that they would create bullshit. Can I say that on this? [inaudible 00:32:40]
Nick Hanauer:
Yes, you can.
Goldie:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Mark Dunkelman:
That they would create bullshit public works projects. And then the mayor would then hand that project off to his brother-in-law in Schenectady. So they created something that’s called the Wicks Law. And the Wicks Law required that in every given municipal project that the electricity, the plumbing, the concrete, all be separately bid. So you couldn’t have a general contractor and it couldn’t be graphed that way. And it was that reason, that seemingly well-intentioned gauntlet that made it so the Parks and Recreation Department couldn’t do Wollman Rink the right way. So what did Koch do? He was about to have to rip up the rink a second time, figure it out again, and he gets a letter from a developer who says, “Just give it to me. I will do it. If it’s less expensive, you’ll get the savings. If it’s over budget, I’ll cover the costs. Let me just do it for you.”
Mark Dunkelman:
And Koch who’s looking for a way out, says, “Fine.” So he gives it to the developer. He gives it to the developer.
Nick Hanauer:
Who was that? That was Donald Trump.
Goldie:
Donald Trump.
Mark Dunkelman:
It was Donald Trump. And he does. He delivers. In liberal New York City, there’s an interview after the thing opens and they ask this guy who’s skating on Wollman Rink as it’s reopened, “What do you think?” And he said, “In this city, anyone who can get anything done deserves a ticker-tape parade.” And you can imagine Donald Trump sitting there in Trump Tower opening the New York Times or the New York Post or wherever that quote was, and imagining himself the focus of a ride down the canyon of heroes. He would’ve loved that. But the point is that, and this gets back to your very first point, Goldie, the fact that government doesn’t work is the reason that voters are attracted to the other side. If government doesn’t work, they’re going to be attracted to the populism of the right. And so it is not only a policy necessity to make government work if you are a progressive, it is politically necessitated by the fact that a broken government is an invitation to populism.
Goldie:
So when I was reading that anecdote in the book, the thought occurred to me, has anybody looked into how many contractors Trump stiffed in order to bring that project in under budget? Because we know from the accounts of the casinos that that’s what he did. He just stiffed contractors and paid them pennies on the dollar.
Mark Dunkelman:
I haven’t read that, but it very well could be.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. So Mark, let’s turn to… We’ve gone over time, which is fine. It’s a fascinating conversation. What should we do? Fix this for us, please.
Mark Dunkelman:
Yeah. So my argument in the end refers back to the point we just made about the everything bagel. I think that we need to remain cognizant of all the externalities, Nick, to use your term, to be cognizant of all the things that Robert Moses didn’t care about, and frankly, that David Lilienthal, the Tennessee Valley Authority, didn’t care about, the environmental costs, the disparate costs among communities of color and poor communities. There’s a whole host of things that doing things of social and economic costs to making progress, and we should be cognizant of those things. I think that in the end, we need to empower someone to decide as we are designing programs, as we are passing the IRA or the bipartisan infrastructure bill or rural electrification or building electrical vehicle chargers across the country.
Mark Dunkelman:
We need to have in mind, in the way we design and promote policy, that in the end, someone is empowered to ratify the various trade-offs they’re going to have to face. If you listen to this podcast a few episodes ago, and you had a series of people speak about their essays in Democracy Journal, the first essay, and I forget the name of the essay, but it was a classic progressive view that power today is in the hands of oligarchs and in the hands of the powerful view, and that the progressive mantra needs to be to hold those people to account. And I’m not… In cases of… I think we should do antitrust prosecutions when it’s clear that we’ve got monopolies or cartels but the-
Nick Hanauer:
Concentrated corporate power is different than government power.
Mark Dunkelman:
Well, except… Not to Ralph Nader. This is the thing that progressives haven’t understood about themselves is that they have taken a view that anytime there is concentrated power, public or private, we need to disperse it. And that’s led to a dysfunctional government, and that’s lousy for everyone.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, that’s the price you pay. That’s the price you pay.
Goldie:
Who would’ve thought, Nick, growing up in the 1970s that Ralph Nader would someday become one of the greatest villains of neoliberalism? He comes up all the time, how much he contributed to the world we live in today.
Nick Hanauer:
So Mark, a couple of final questions. First, the benevolent dictator question, which is, if you were in charge, what would you do?
Goldie:
We’re giving you your dream here. You get to be the decider.
Nick Hanauer:
But obviously we could just put Mark in charge of making decisions and all these things. I’m asking a slightly more nuanced question, which is, if you were going to reconstitute these procedures and processes, is it as simple as just saying somebody has to be in charge? What would you do? If you were going to give advice to the state of New York or the advice to the state of Washington? What is it?
Mark Dunkelman:
Yeah, it is that if you… I mean, it gets very technical very quickly, but the core of it is that we need a process by which everyone has a voice, and no one has a veto. So right now-
Nick Hanauer:
It’s a nice alliteration. I have to think about it carefully, but it’s well said.
Mark Dunkelman:
I would like a system in which all the people who were to whom Robert Moses turned to deaf ear have the ability to say, “Don’t run this through my park. Don’t run it through my building. Don’t destroy the neighborhood. This is going to have deleterious effects on the X, Y, and Z.” They should all have a voice. And then someone should be able to decide that we are going to take these concerns into account or that this particular project is worth those costs, that getting people in and out, getting them off the roads, getting them out of their polluting cars and onto electric trains that are very fast because we’ve created new right of way, that that is worth the cost to this neighborhood or to this environmental thing. I want that to be an expeditious process. I don’t want anyone to feel as if there is no opportunity for them to have their concerns voiced and considered, which is how it used to be. But I also don’t want them to feel as though if they say no, everything is dead in the gyms.
Goldie:
Yeah, it’s interesting. And if the courts say no, do we ignore the courts the way the Trump administration is?
Mark Dunkelman:
No, the courts have a crucial role. But I mean, I do think that we, as progressives, should recognize the contradiction within our own thinking, right? Right now we’re way pro-court, right? And when the courts started intervening in the 60s and 70s, the lawsuit, it’s called Overton Park, which made it so that basically no transportation project, no transportation dollar can be spent on any project that would affect a blade of grass in a public green space. When the New York Times covered that in 1973, they called it that it was as important as Yorktown or Gettysburg in the fight against highways. We love the courts in those cases.
Mark Dunkelman:
But a year ago when the court overturned the Chevron deference, we were outraged that judges might impose their will on the executive branch, on the experts. And at the very beginning of progressivism, like Felix Frankfurt, the early progressives, their villains were, the courts, were the four horsemen of the Supreme Court who were stopping them from doing minimum wages and certain hour work weeks. The courts are good and bad in different situations. Each branch of government has a proper role to play. Right now, what we have is too little executive function.
Goldie:
I will say that there’s a big difference between Lochner and the decisions you’re citing, and that is Congress could change one line in the code, and now with that particular objection no longer applies. Whereas Lochner was based on constitutional rulings, overriding legislation. So there are things, a lot of what you write about in the book, Congress could fix.
Mark Dunkelman:
I think in many cases, certainly the legislation has a role to play, but the core of it here is that both Congress and the courts have been, even among our peers in the left and the center left, we have been supportive of putting new and additional restrictions on the bureaucrats who need to do the right thing. And that’s a disaster for us in the long run.
Goldie:
And it’s all probably a moot point anyway, as people in my office know. I think we’re going to end up with Lochner again soon, because that’s been the 75-year mission of the right is to reimpose Lochner in some form or another.
Mark Dunkelman:
I mean, I haven’t heard that, but I can see it. I can see it.
Nick Hanauer:
And one final question. Why do you do this work?
Mark Dunkelman:
Well, I believe in the progressive creed. I don’t think it works at the moment, and I want it to succeed.
Nick Hanauer:
Great. Awesome. Well, Mark, this has been a fascinating conversation. I hope you fix all this. Because it’d be awesome if you could.
Mark Dunkelman:
Your mouth to God’s ears.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, nice to meet you, Mark.
Mark Dunkelman:
Great to meet you. Thank you for having me on.
Nick Hanauer:
I thought that was a fantastic conversation, Goldie. And I don’t come away confident that there’s an answer. I would like to think it’s more complex than just leaning more towards getting stuff done and a little less towards the critical interdependencies. This issue, which is endemic to every society, this has nothing to do with progressives and conservatives. It has to do with the natural tension in any system between progress and stability. It’s a very tough problem. But I do agree. Here’s one of the things I do agree with, that if you care about society and care about progressivism, which I think is a strand of political thought that very much wants to take into account the externalities, right? Environmental issues, cultural issues, economic issues, so on and so forth, how do you do it better and faster? Right?
Goldie:
Right. We would like these decisions to be democratic, right?
Nick Hanauer:
Right.
Goldie:
We want the interest of the public at large. And I think I want to go back to you brought up in the intro, the Seattle’s waterfront. And to point out, look, Mark is absolutely right that we have made it too difficult to do certain things. And housing is the great example. And he brings it up in the book. All of the land use restrictions right now, this is an issue that’s near and dear to our heart, and absolutely right. We need to make it easier to build. We need to free up people to use their land more efficiently.
Goldie:
We need to reduce the power of design review boards and court cases to block things indefinitely until it’s so expensive, you can’t build it anyway. But I don’t necessarily see this as something that’s peculiar to progressives or progressivism, except in the sense, as I said in talking to him that progressives are the ones that believe the government should do stuff. And the other side who’s just let off scot-free in this conversation both here, and let’s be clear, this is an abundance adjacent conversation we’re having, and that’s the big book that everybody’s talking about right now.
Goldie:
And I want to use the waterfront as an example, because that double-decker viaduct freeway that was built during the era when we could build big things and build it fast, and we built this thing across our waterfront, which granted, at the time, was a working waterfront and not a tourist destination, but with very little vision for the future. And if you remember the conversation at the time, our governor, Christine Gregoire, a Democrat, her preferred solution was to rebuild the viaduct, was to build a new double-decker freeway in its place because a tunnel was too expensive. And it was one of the reasons why this took so long is that there were three competing visions. One was a tunnel, one was a double-decker freeway, and the other was we referred to as the road and surface option. Do nothing, right? Just get rid of the freeway, don’t replace it with anything.
Goldie:
And we kind of compromised a bit because that tunnel is not the same sort of thing that the freeway was. There aren’t on ramps and off ramps in the city. It just takes traffic through the city for the most part. And it’s told and so forth. But it took a long time to fight this out. If we had let the governor, if the governor had had the power all on her own to make the decision, instead of all of these competing interests fighting over this, we would’ve ended up with another double-decker freeway through our waterfront for the next 50, 75 years.
Goldie:
And so it was this process that slowed everything down to a crawl that eventually led to us building the beautiful waterfront that you strolled on over the weekend, right? So there are trade-offs to all this. I remember at the time I was working at The Stranger and Dan Savage, who’s from Chicago originally joked about how after the Nisqually quake, had this been Chicago, the [inaudible 00:47:41] would’ve been torn down and replaced with something in three to four years instead of the 25 years it took us. It would have cost about 30% more than it should have. And several people would’ve gone to prison over the grab, but it would’ve gotten done. That’s the Chicago way.
Goldie:
And he called it the corruption tax. And that one of the reasons why things take so long in Seattle is that our politicians are not corrupt enough. Nobody’s getting paid off to do this stuff. And yeah, I mentioned, I come from Philadelphia, that’s how it worked. When I was a senior in college, I watched an entire city block burn down. From one of the high rises on the Penn campus, I saw an entire city block burn down because the Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on a house from a helicopter and wasn’t prepared for the consequences. And then after that was done, the city had to rebuild that entire block for the residents and then some, because part of another block burned too. And it took them years and they did it.
Goldie:
And then within a few years, they had to tear it down and rebuild it again because there was so much graft that went in. The contractors did such a poor job. It was uninhabitable. So understand, Nick, when I talk about building a public option in Seattle about the city building, affordable middle-class housing building and owning it comes from that background. And having lived here for 40 years and realizing, oh, things are different here, right? Or 30 some years, it’s different. It’s different here. We can do big things here. They may take a long time, but we can do things here because we have a different kind of political culture that doesn’t exist everywhere in this country.
Goldie:
And so I think if you’re a progressive like me, you can lean towards what Mark calls the Hamiltonian side of that progressive thinking and say, “Yeah, we can use government to build big things,” but I wouldn’t have that confidence everywhere in this country because we know it doesn’t work quite that way. And I certainly don’t have that confidence in the White House and in Congress right now. I don’t trust them to do anything. So there’s a healthy skepticism.
Goldie:
And this gets to my frustration with the book, and I didn’t tell him this. I was listening to it over the weekend as I was enjoying the sun like you and gardening and doing housework and other stuff. And I got to tell you, it was really uncomfortable. It gave me pits in my stomach. I resented a lot of the book, and this is same with the whole abundance conversation, that somehow this is all a pathology of progressivism. And I agree that Trump is partially a manifest of the failure of progressives to build big things. We’ve talked about this, that had we done a better job when we were in charge, perhaps we wouldn’t be here. But the entire conversation ignores the other side.
Goldie:
What we’re up against is an opposing ideology that believes in tearing everything down, or at the very least, not doing anything. It’s laissez-faire. Hands off. Though right now, the Trump administration is doing a pretty good job of deconstructing the entire global economy. And so to lay it all on the heads and shoulders of progressives and the mistakes we’ve made, this is a failure of progressivism. Look what we’re fucking up against.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, no, that’s true. That’s true.
Goldie:
Forever. I mean, that’s neoliberalism, laissez-faire. We have a whole book on this. They have been fighting progress for 150 years.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Yeah. All of that’s true.
Goldie:
And they have all the money. Other than you, they have all the money on their side side.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s true.
Goldie:
So I find it frustrating and a little infuriating to have to take the blame for this.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s true. And it is good to be self-aware and reflective on what you can do better.
Goldie:
Yes. Absolutely. And yes, we need to take this to heart. Look, what we want to do in housing is going to be very difficult with the current restrictions on local governments in terms of, look, if we could hire contractors who didn’t pay union wages and didn’t actually pay all of their subcontractors, it would be a lot cheaper.
Goldie:
So it’s harder and more expensive to build in an ethical fashion, and those are the types of trade-offs that might have to be made. But we’re not going to build… I don’t know. Like I said, I resent this self-loathing progressivism where it’s all our fault. We need a lot more introspection. It just makes me really uncomfortable not to just blame the other side.
Nick Hanauer:
All right.
Goldie:
Okay. Well, if you want to read the whole book instead of my take on it, there is a link in the show notes to Mark Dunkelman’s book, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Bring it Back. Spoiler alert, it kind of says progressive skilled progress, but I’ll let you judge for yourself.
Speaker 5:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to follow rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on other platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Threads at Pitchfork Economics. Nick’s on Twitter and Facebook as well @NickHanauer. For more content from us, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Pitch over on Substack. And for links to everything we just mentioned, plus transcripts and more, visit our website pitchforkeconomics.com. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.