It’s time we talk about The Blight.
First coined by our friend and entrepreneur Andrew Cote, The Blight describes the ever-growing bureaucracy that’s suffocating American prosperity.
The Blight is why your health insurance costs five times what it did in 2000. It’s why our bridges and roads are crumbling. It’s why houses are unaffordable.
For my entire lifetime, The Blight’s only gotten worse. But now, we have a real chance to expose and kill it. We can uncuff innovators and restore America back to a nation that builds great things.
This is our Berlin Wall moment. When that concrete barrier fell, it unleashed an explosion of human potential. Today, we face our own wall, but it’s made of paperwork.
First, let’s look at how The Blight impoverishes us. Then we’ll discuss our duty to take advantage of our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fix it.
It takes longer to build a house today than it did in 1971. Did we forget how to hammer nails or pour concrete? No. We let regulations get out of control.
In San Francisco, regulations add about $400,000 to the cost of building a single apartment. $400,000! Just to get permission to build.
The shakedown starts with a $50,000 environmental impact study that often takes 18 months—longer than it took to build the Empire State Building. Then comes the mandatory neighborhood meetings at $25,000 each.
California wins the gold medal for regulatory madness. But New York, Boston, and Seattle aren't far behind. No wonder young wannabe homeowners in these cities are angry. To whom should they direct their anger?
Well, homes haven’t gotten more expensive to build. Construction costs, adjusted for inflation, have barely changed in decades. It's the regulations.
We know this because, in America, most housing regulations are local. Some places still let builders build. Take Austin, Texas. It’s green-lighting new homes faster than any major city. Rents dropped 7%+ in the past year while prices soared elsewhere.
Source: Apartment List
It's not rocket science. Just let builders build.
One estimate suggests housing prices would drop by half nationwide if we simply let builders build until prices fell to near actual construction costs. Imagine cutting your biggest expense in half.
But the real gain would be a human one. My wife has thoughts on why people have fewer kids these days. “A bird doesn’t lay eggs without a nest,” she says. The Blight shrinks families.
I recommend Bryan Caplan’s new book Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation if you want to understand this topic better. I plan to have Bryan on the Rational Optimist Podcast soon.
Did you know Moderna had the first COVID-19 shot ready to go in 48 hours? It designed it over a weekend in early January 2020, two days after receiving the genetic sequence, before most of us had even heard of “coronavirus.”
I’m not debating the many, many problems with the rollout of the COVID shot. I’m pointing out that what typically takes 10+ years took just two days. We can design new drugs faster than Amazon can deliver a package!
So… why don’t we? We’ve discussed cancer treatments melting away tumors and gene therapies that help blind children see. But why aren't these breakthroughs available to the average person?
Blame bureaucracy. It now takes a decade and $2.5 billion, on average, to get a new drug approved and on pharmacy shelves. Every day a life-saving drug sits in regulatory limbo, someone's mother, father, or child dies while waiting for treatments that exist but aren’t “approved.”
Clinical trials cost 50 times more than they did in the 1970s. Thousands of promising treatments for rare diseases never leave the lab because the testing costs more than these drugs could ever earn back. Imagine finding a potential cure for a rare cancer but being told: “Sorry, not enough profit to cover the regulatory fees.”
The Blight is also the No. 1 reason why health insurance now crushes families at a cost of $25,000 per year.
Since 1970, healthcare “administrator” jobs have grown at least five times faster than doctors:
Source: Mother Jones
Today, for every doctor in a white coat treating patients, 10 people push paper.
Meta was planning to build an artificial intelligence (AI) data center powered by nuclear energy. But its plans were thwarted after a rare species of bee was discovered on the construction site.
This is just a tiny glimpse of how The Blight murdered America's nuclear future.
We know nuclear is the cleanest, safest, most abundant energy source in the world. America was on track to lead the world in nuclear energy. Then a bureaucratic beast named the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) was hatched.
See if you can spot the moment the NRC made it nearly impossible to construct new nuclear plants:
Source: The Idea Farm
The NRC didn’t exactly ban new nuclear energy, but it may as well have. To build a new reactor requires over 100,000 pages of documentation, takes 15 years, and costs tens of billions of dollars.
Turning our backs on nuclear was the greatest self-inflicted wound in American history.
It’s why we’re still fighting about climate change when we could be enjoying abundant, clean, cheap energy. In the ‘70s, producing electricity from nuclear cost about 1/3 of what it costs today.
Instead of embracing nuclear, we shackled it and replaced it with much dirtier coal and gas. A National Bureau of Economic Research study found replacing nuclear with fossil fuels stole 318 million years of human life globally through extra air pollution. Great job bureaucrats!
Screw this, we’re going to Morrocco. California hired France's national railroad company in the late 2000s to build a high-speed train from San Francisco to LA. After two years of zero progress, the French quit and went to... Morocco, saying it was less politically dysfunctional.
Morocco's bullet train has been zooming across deserts since 2018. Meanwhile, California spent 15 years and $5 billion and has laid zero miles of track.
Next time you’re stuck in traffic on rusty bridges or squeezed into a creaking subway car, blame the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and similar state laws. If The Blight had a face, this is it. It froze our ability to efficiently build new roads, bridges, airports, and railways.
These laws require “environmental reviews” for basically everything—houses, factories, roads, power plants. It takes 4.5 years, on average, to complete the paperwork.
We built the Golden Gate Bridge, Empire State Building, and Hoover Dam in less time than it takes to complete a NEPA review!
California's high-speed rail was approved in 2008. The environmental review finally finished five months ago. NEPA lets anyone sue any project for almost any reason on environmental grounds. So nothing gets built. Nothing gets better. And we all pay the price.
If you think NEPA protects the environment, think again. One company tried to build America's largest solar farm. It would’ve cleanly powered 500,000 homes. The project was blocked because 114 desert tortoises would’ve had to be relocated. I’m not making this up.
We let The Blight fester one regulation at a time.
Time to tear it all down.
For the first time in my life, we have a real chance to deregulate America. This isn't about politics. It's about unleashing American innovation and creating prosperity for all.
Unlike 2016, Trump isn’t staffing up with career bureaucrats. He’s bringing in builders. Exhibit A: Chris Wright, the Secretary of Energy nominee.
Chris played a hand in America’s shale revolution. He’s built Liberty Energy into a top fracking company. And he’s also a big supporter of nuclear energy. Wright is an investor in and board member of Oklo, the publicly traded small nuclear reactor startup.
He also understands energy is the master resource that underpins all innovation. In one research report his team wrote: “Energy is essential to life and the world needs more of it!”Then there’s Elon Musk. He’ll co-lead the new Department of Government Efficiency, tasked with “dismantling Government Bureaucracy, slashing excess regulations, cutting wasteful expenditures, and restructuring Federal Agencies.”
People who build things, and who’ve been on the wrong side of America’s crushing regulatory state, will now shape government policy.
Again, this isn’t about political parties. In June, an important bridge on I-95 North collapsed near Philly. Under normal rules, repairs would’ve taken two to five years. Pennsylvania's Democratic Governor used emergency powers to sweep aside bureaucracy. They rebuilt the bridge in 12 days!!
Writer Scott Alexander summed up the shift happening before our eyes: “It feels like the United States, after a fifty-year binge on over-regulation, has woken up, wiped the vomit off its chin, noticed it’s lost half its net worth, and started to consider doing something else.”
It’s time to launch “Operation Warp Speed” for everything.
OWS cut through regulations to take the COVID-19 shot from the lab to mass distribution in record-breaking time. It accelerated our return to “normal” by years. This was a huge triumph that shows we can do great things quickly if we just get out of our own way.
(It’s a great shame this accomplishment was tarnished by politicians and public health officials who exaggerated the benefits and downplayed the risks of the covid shot.)
In its first 100 days, the new administration should launch several Warp Speeds. Here are three no-brainer ways to start:
Free every nuclear and solar project from the shackles of environmental reviews by eliminating NEPA.
Although most housing regulations are local, Washington can “nudge” states to move faster by attaching conditions to the billions of dollars in housing funding it hands out. Want federal dollars? Build baby build.
Put obstructionist agencies on a “shot clock.” The Nuclear Regulatory Commission typically spends seven years reviewing applications. Order it to approve or deny requests within six months, or refund the fees.
Pennsylvania tried this approach. Now applications move twice as fast. Incentives matter.
Imagine… nuclear reactors rising from empty fields in months. Housing developments breaking ground while the ink is still wet on their permits. Cancer treatments reaching patients before it’s too late.
We can do it. We used to do it. We have the technology. All we have to do is let builders build.
Two centuries ago, only 1 in 10 people could read and write. Today, 9 in 10 can. Widespread literacy unleashed human potential.
Source: Our World in Data
Today, we face a different kind of illiteracy, one that's blinding us to what's really holding America back.
When our kids can't afford a home, it's easy to blame greedy landlords. When your energy bills skyrocket, it's tempting to point fingers at corporate profits. When bridges crumble, everyone demands more government oversight.
But The Blight lurks behind it all.
What can you do about it?
Start at home. When friends complain about housing costs, tell them about the apartments that died in committee because some bureaucrat with a clipboard decided three stories was too many.
When family grumbles about energy bills, tell them how we kneecapped nuclear. Help this knowledge spread like wildfire.
You can also support reform locally, especially housing. Support YIMBY (Yes in My Back Yard) initiatives.
Remember, we put a man on the moon in eight years. We built the Empire State Building in 410 days, under budget. Walt Disney brought Disneyland to life in one year.
The technology isn't holding us back. The money isn't holding us back. The only thing holding us back is us.
This is our moment. The Blight won't defeat itself. Will you join the fight to set America free?
Great news for human lives
My friends at Human Progress highlight good news that’s rarely covered in the corporate media. Here’s some: We’re safer than ever from natural disasters:
Source: Human Progress
It’s not that earthquakes, storms, floods, droughts, and wildfires happen less often today. It’s that we deal with them better through technology. Better buildings survive earthquakes… weather satellites warn us early of an impending weather event… and so on.
Still, more than half a million people have died from natural disasters since 2000, almost all of them in poor countries that lack the wealth and technology to protect themselves. One of the many reasons we must keep growing and progressing.
Hey, You don’t have to wait until the end of the week for good news.
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Writer: Stephen McBride: https://x.com/DisruptionHedge
Editor: Dan Steinhart: https://x.com/dan_steinhart
Rational Optimist Society: https://x.com/RationalOptSoc