GEN: We’ve seen the thesis of your book play out over the past six months of the pandemic. Our government has failed to pass legislation that would maintain Americans’ quality of life — how far did that $1,200 payout go? — preferring legislation that forces people, places, and institutions to hit rock bottom and rebuild.
We’re encouraged to “innovate” ourselves out of trouble rather than preventing trouble from happening in the first place. Why is America like this?
Andrew L. Russell: It originated from overuse of what we call in the book “innovation speak,” a tendency to refer to anything we want to call attention to as “new” or “innovative.”
Lee Vinsel: The pandemic has made clear the problems America has with maintenance. For instance, the federal government had ventilators it could have used in hospitals, but it hadn’t taken care of them. Because there’s a failure at the federal level when it comes to funding right now — it looks like we’re going to let things continue to degrade and become dilapidated.
The first weeks of the pandemic, there was a graph on the front page of the New York Times showing employment going down, down, down, down, down — a catastrophic number of unemployment claims that would strain the system for months. At the same time, in Europe, people were paid by their governments to stay in their jobs. How did we get here, culturally?
Lee Vinsel: We have an idealization of the individual as being able to cope with change. We’ve had real benefits over the last 150 years from technological change — railroads, automobiles, concrete, electric systems. Those things did upended the world. We saw the value in that.
But the way we started thinking about innovation, especially from the ’90s onwards, became disruption for disruption’s sake. Disruption became a value in itself.
It’s a mixture of older American cultural values — our celebration of inventors, cowboy culture, and pioneer individualism — with more recent thinking from economists that focuses on innovation growth as the answer to all social problems.
Andrew L. Russell: Americans have a weird hypocritical relationship with dependence on the state. In this country, corporate welfare is fine, but individual welfare is not. Powerful, connected institutions get bailed out, but ordinary folks tend not to.
The second part is in keeping with how economists and business leaders have thought about the last 50 years of economic and technological change. Their patron saint is Joseph Schumpeter and his famous soundbite about “creative destruction.” In times of plenty, it’s the “creative” part that’s gotten all the attention. But when you’re talking about closed storefronts in New York, or failed restaurants, it’s the destruction now that’s really notable. The way that people have read Schumpeter, they don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about our responsibilities to manage destruction and try and minimize its impact on people’s lives. In part because we’ve had a culture of abundance for some time.
As a person who works in media, I have definitely lost jobs to creative destruction — situations in which your job is replaced for the purpose of being replaced, so that someone higher up can say, “Look, I did something.” How do you create a management culture that prides itself on maintenance rather than “innovative” destruction?
Lee Vinsel: I think it will take a switch to longer-term thinking. The rise of so-called shareholder value in the 1980s made the goal of the corporation to maximize value for stockholders.
Today there’s a lot of people calling that growth into question, and trying to find a way out of that short-term, growth-oriented mindset. It’s not that growth is implicitly bad, but it’s bad when we worship it. I think it would help surface the importance of maintainers in organizations.
How have we reached a place where developers are replacing beautiful old stone buildings with buildings made from cheaper materials?
Lee Vinsel: When it comes to federal infrastructure policy in the U.S., the incentives are just sick, right? Localities can get federal money to build new infrastructure, but in doing so, they are agreeing to maintain it for the long-term. So there’s incentive to take on things cities can’t afford in the long term. Most cities in the United States have far more infrastructure than they actually have a taxpayer base. It’s unsustainable development.
There’s also a culture of dilapidation in America. In Europe there’s a whole industry of people who take places of manufacturing and close them down gracefully, turning them into public parks that are aesthetically beautiful. But here in the States, buildings just fall in on themselves. We have a culture of building things unsustainably, and then not shutting things down with grace.
Maintenance is also the first thing to go when it’s time to cut the budget. The New York Times just reported that the parks budget has been cut in half, just when people are using them the most, resulting in trash everywhere and signs admonishing parkgoers to pick up after themselves — it’s your fault for making the parks dirty.
Andrew L. Russell: That kind of short-term thinking is just blindingly obvious because you can see the trash building up. It’s less visible when budgets are cut for bridge repair, road repair, or railroad track repair. We’re a very affluent society — it’s not like there’s no money. It’s that we’re making collective choices not to put the money in some places, and to put it in other places instead.
There’s a drive to keep taxes low — whether it’s personal taxes, or corporate taxes, or gas taxes. In some cases, no matter how high taxes are, there’s no amount of tax revenue that can save a city’s infrastructure because you just can’t get there with the tax base.
I think the real answer is to have leaders who have an awareness of these long-term costs. And to be more mindful about those costs, and to communicate those costs better to their constituents.
Running a political platform on “maintaining things” isn’t exactly sexy. You can’t show your work.
Lee Vinsel: We call it the ribbon-cutting paradox, where there’s photo ops to be done around new pieces of infrastructure. And you can imagine creating grading systems for politicians around whether they’re doing a good job at maintaining things. But as you’re pointing out naturally, there’s not the same incentive to do the maintenance. And honestly, maintenance failure doesn’t get pinned on politicians in the same way new infrastructure does.
You write that teachers, lawyers, and engineers are all maintaining professions. They often rely on the work of people who have come before them. You’ve seen the work of maintainers explode during the pandemic. Teachers, for example, have been forced to rewrite the rules of their vocation from the ground up.
Andrew L. Russell: If you believe the rhetoric that touchscreens or videoconferencing will solve all your problems, you’re going to be really disappointed. But if you understand that these new things can be put in the service of other goals, and not just be deployed for their own sake, and that it takes a lot of work, and time, and investment to achieve those goals, and use the tools to meet those goals. If that goal, again, that everyone is saying is they want to feel connected, then that’s the way to do it. But this quick fix, you just install the software, and you’re off, and all your problems are solved is… I think all parents and all students are learning what a shallow way that is to look at the world.
Are there jobs that don’t have the pressure to innovate?
Andrew L. Russell: Being a lawyer, or a teacher, you preside over a body of knowledge, and it’s that person’s role to uphold that, and represent it. Why we would want these people to be innovative in the first place, is the real question that I would bring. And it’s the same with engineers — people want to think that engineers are fundamentally innovators. But the research that we’ve seen is that between 60% and 80% of the work of either an individual engineer or an engineering department has to do with maintenance and keeping things going. And so, this idea that you get into engineering to build new things is just not true. It’s not borne-up by evidence. The premise that we all need to be innovators is the real problem here.
Is there a path that falls halfway between innovation and maintenance? Between respecting a body of knowledge, and recognizing that body of knowledge can be reevaluated?
Lee Vinsel: Within innovation culture, you often see a real disrespect for professionals. You have people coming into government offices, pretending they have some method in their pocket for creating positive change — and completely disregarding the expertise that’s already in the room.
Part of becoming a professional involves learning from the past and then seeing the gaps in that education, often in a totally incremental way. Most innovation, whether it’s in cities or engineering, is very small. It’s all these small steps added together that gives us massive change over time.