Stripe CEO Patrick Collison has a hobby: he curates a list of examples of “people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together.” Sadly, of his examples from the physical world⁠—like ports and skyscrapers and railroads⁠—most come from before 1970.

For each impressive example of speedy construction from the early or mid-20th century, Collison includes a beleaguered project from today’s world for the sake of contrast: for example, the New York Subway system opened with 28 stations in 1904, just four and a half years after the first contract was awarded. By contrast, the 2017 Second Avenue subway opening, with just three stations, took seventeen years.

That might be a fine system if you’re already happy with the infrastructure you have, and living in a time of relative peace and stability. But we’re not, and we aren’t.

In recent years we have seen serious shocks to our economic order. Events like the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine⁠—or, on a longer time frame, climate change⁠—have forced us to speedily reassess how we do business, in substantial and material ways. Importantly, these shocks don’t just call for a response in the financial world, like shuffling about some numbers on a computer. They call for real, physical responses⁠—like redesigning city infrastructure or constructing new power plants.

I no longer have faith that we are capable of doing this on a reasonable timeline.

Sometime in living memory, the built environment of the U.S. began to freeze in place. I’d mark the time roughly at 1970, but it’s a process, not a single seminal event. It’s more like a prehistoric creature getting trapped in resin, losing strength fighting the sticky substance. If it doesn’t escape soon, that resin will polymerize and harden into amber, leaving its form preserved forever.

Today’s high gas prices are the perfect example. Americans are universally unhappy about the high short-run costs of energy and transportation. And in the longer run, they aspire to make our economic life more independent of foreign dictators and their wars.

This isn’t a pie-in-the-sky aspiration. We could start doing this now, with the technology we already have. We could break ground on power plants to supply more energy. We could reduce energy demand by building public transportation projects, or build homes more densely to shorten commutes and save on heating.

But these things are easier said than done. Not because we lack the construction workers or the engineering expertise, or even readily drawn-up plans, but because there are legal and political structures that stop each of those ideas from happening through procedural delays.

At best, this is an annoyance that wastes billions of dollars and years worth of time. At worst⁠—at least, if you agree with climate change hawks⁠—it’s the end of the world. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) believes in an urgent need for greener infrastructure, at any cost.

“The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,” she lashed out at critics in 2019, “and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?”

Forget how we pay for it, for a moment. The bigger problem is that urgency just isn’t there, money or no money. Ocasio-Cortez represents parts of Queens and the Bronx, where you might imagine public transit would be part of the green infrastructure mix. But new subway stops take decades, and are scarcely built anymore. Queens hasn’t gotten a new subway station since October 1989, the month she was born. The Bronx hasn’t gotten one since May 1941.

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