Uncouth Reflections

Blowhard, Esq. writes:

Paleo Retiree sent me this interesting interview with Bent Flyvbjerg, an Oxford professor of planning and author of the book Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition. Flyvbjerg studies the costs, benefits, successes, and failures of megaprojects, which he defines as any project costing half a billion dollars or more. Examples include Boston’s Big Dig, the Channel Tunnel, California’s proposed high-speed rail, NASA’s space program, and the rebuilding of Iraq.

Given the chronic cost overruns (double or triple the projected cost most of the time) and dubious benefits of many megaprojects, why do they keep getting built, what makes them so politically attractive? Flyvberg identifies two reasons. First, people have an innate optimism bias so we’re hard-wired to think the future will be rosy. Second, planners and other megaproject proponents are great liars:

Even so, psychological explanations are insufficient in my analysis. They are too optimistic in themselves. They look at human beings as well-intentioned, but faulty, and that’s nice. But it is not always like that with megaprojects. Working as a researcher and adviser, I come across instances again and again of what is called strategic misrepresentation. “Strategic misrepresentation” is the Orwellian euphemism planners and planning researchers like to use for deception and lying. This is not cognitive bias; it is calculated. So you also have politicians and planners involved in strategically misrepresenting projects in order to get the go-ahead to build them. A project brings immediate benefit to many people, including engineers and architects who develop the projects, planners who plan them, land owners, land developers, construction companies, lawyers, politicians who cut the ribbon. Stakeholders may have an interest in letting a project go ahead, even if it was completely useless, which projects rarely are. But even if a project was completely useless once built, many people would stand to benefit from just building it.

I’m not saying that promoters care only about building projects, but there are strong incentives to misrepresent the costs, benefits and risks of projects in order to get them built, for instance because different groups of promoters are competing against each other for limited federal funds. Therefore, psychological explanations do not fully account for the disastrous outcome of many megaprojects—political explanations are needed as well to account for strategic misrepresentation.

Related

• Back here I drew a parallel between the Crusades and the War on Drugs.