I was thinking of the Manhattan project. Apollo. The Russian H-bomb. The Panama Canal. These seem to have all had one or two strong personalities at the top. I don’t know about the Interstate Highway project.
The Panama Canal is a interesting example. The French tried to build a sea-level canal under Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had previously done the Suez Canal. Somehow the same team messed up in true megaproject style (I reluctantly correct my original ‘magaproject’ typo), throwing more and more money and people at something that was obviously failing. The US effort that followed ran into difficulties, mainly tropical disease; but they were largely saved by management who stopped digging until the vegetation on either side of the canal has been cleared, and fever hospitals had been built at regular intervals along the site.
There’s a logical conundrum. When one attempts something that has never been done before - such as flying to the moon, for example - it is impossible for the accountants to accurately budget all costs since they can’t possibly know what will be necessary, in terms of labor or materials, until they get more than halfway done building the whatever.
Since everyone has Dunning-Krueger (including you and I, dear reader) the politicians and accountants would be unlikely to comprehend what true research and engineering costs would be even if there weren’t a logical impossibility involved.
So nothing really news would ever get built if accurate cost projection was a requirement, since accurate cost projection is impossible. We’re just guessing.
However, we did make the money back, both by by licensing use of pictures taken from Apollo spacecraft (Totally not kidding. Of course somehow many of those nearly priceless pictures have ended up in private hands…) and from the technology return program, which NASA says has returned between $7 and $21 for every dollar spent in space (value depending on year and program).
It’s another case of the impossibility of predicting the future with 100% accuracy. We can try to predict the consequences of innovation (for example I predicted that there would be a revolution in policing, because youtube and ubitquitous cell phone cameras would make it impossible to hide rampant police brutality, and boy was I ever wrong) but it’s just guessing. To some extent you have to build the Internet before you can know how it will sabotage political discourse.
Indeed the single Vehicle Assembly Building linked with mobile crawlers to two different launch pads was designed to enable an Earth Orbit Rendezvous mission profile as was envisioned in early planning. This involved launching two large Saturn-class rockets into Earth orbit, and either mating them together or using one to refuel the other. Then the command module, and all the fuel needed to get it to the moon, down onto the moon, back up from the moon, and back towards Earth would be sent on their way.
In the end, much weight was saved by not bringing the heat shield and the fuel needed to return to Earth down to the lunar surface and back. It also made landing on the moon simpler.
Color me suspicious of this assertion. After all, as “works of the United States Government,” those pictures are not protected by copyright. Certainly there were plenty of spinoffs, but many of them, like integrated circuits would probably have been developed even without the Apollo program. The technology was on the cusp and all the money being spend on the Moon accelerated the development process rather than being the sole driver.
In software engineering, they say one can consistently improve one’s ability in estimating project costs, multiply by your age. That’s why only young, naive software engineers can create great new software. I say that half tongue in cheek. Software engineers got this advice from civil engineers, engineers who have had thousands of years of experience in pricing and scheduling large projects.
There were lots of other failed megaprojects. For example, the railroads. Late 19th century estimates were that the transcontinental railroads wasted from one to three billion dollars in olde timey money. The Brooklyn Bridge was notoriously over-budget and took way longer than expected to build. The bends, who knew? Do you want to place bets on the Roman Road contracts? One classic was the early Roman sewer system, a project started by the Tarquin kings. It ran so far over budget that Rome revolted. It’s still in use, though it was a failure at the time.
If, as the evidence indicates, approximately one out of ten megaprojects is on budget, one out of ten is on schedule, and one out of ten delivers the promised benefits, then approximately one in one thousand projects is a success
This assumes that these three variables are independent, but of course they’re not. “On budget” and “on schedule” are highly correlated.
Eh, I don’t exactly lack faith in large government projects and was in fact trying to come up with one, off the top of my head, that seems to have worked and apparently struck a nerve with some of you. At this point, I consider my job complete
Just checking. I know some people who think they were “promised” flying cars because someone made a kiddie cartoon of a future that featured flying cars. (-:
The obvious answer to “Where’s my jetpack?” is, “I dunno – aren’t you working on building one?”
The future doesn’t happen by itself, you know. (-:
That’s pretty much exactly what I was referencing in my mind as I commented…somehow my thought stream wasn’t injected into the comment and some of the meaning was lost.
Your suspicion was well justified. Although supposedly those pictures generated more income than the cost of the entire space program, the money didn’t go to the government or benefit the taxpayer, so I was dead wrong, I’ll fix my post.
Well, possibly, but we’ll never know (maybe we’d have invented better stuff, eh?) The historical inevitability argument isn’t resolvable, and in this branch of a hypothetical multiverse, it was NASA that gave us efficient motor controllers, ICs, etc.
Came to post this. The interstate project was, like everything else, late, over budget, and don’t forget the wrecked cities. Hardly a paragon of success. More like the paragon of “as long as people see some benefit while hiding the cost they’ll overlook the negatives and the public has never cared about opportunity costs anyway”.
He addresses the problem with applying a multiplier in the section about the hiding hand. Essentially all of the current incentives line up to make all of the least reasonable and least well thought out proposals look better. Multiplying all of the costs by any factor would still make the unreasonable projects seem like the best outcome, only by a larger margin. The argument that other things would still be built is baked into the bidding process analyzed. There were generally other more reasonably specced alternatives in the bidding process. The more reasonable alternative to the 10 billion dollar subway that ends up costing 20 isn’t X number of new schools. It is the 11 billion dollar slightly less ambitious plan that doesn’t require emergency funding at a higher rate of interest late in the project, allowing for later schools to be built on their usual schedule.
Flybjerg’s other work actually makes the case much better than this paper. He did a bunch of work with some mass transit systems to restructure their bidding processes and design standards which resulted in their large projects coming in either at or close to budget and roughly on time. The problem is that a lot of that work is aimed at a specialist audience and doesn’t make for snappy blog reading.
