Blog Extra: The Crisis Column (Extended Edition)

The New Year begins with no shortage of crisis. Economic. Geopolitical. Confidence.  Then there is the need for rebuilding the things on which communities rely to get stuff done - roads, bridges, airports, water, sewer, electricity and, lest we take it for granted, the Internet.

Friedman, the Chicago school free-market economist, would hardly think so but Keynesian-style public works had been an old idea lying around that is now gaining currency because building roads, bridges, grids and networks create jobs and help renew confidence - with more direct, measurable impacts than economic rescue plans and stimulus packages.

Public works is a not an instant remedy.  It reflects a long term commitment from investors based on what might be best characterized as a patient urgency, recognizing that government is uniquely able to invest as both a means and an ends - the means of kick starting a stalled economy and the ends of making needed improvements.  

Here are five smaller ideas that have been lying around that are worth considering as we think about the path forward:

1.    Be Like Ike
On inauguration day 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower made this note in his official, "My first day at the President's Desk. Plenty of worries and difficult problems."  His was a post-war, post-depression presidency into which Eisenhower introduced what is widely credited as the greatest public works project in history - the interstate highway, defense and communications system.  It became the backbone of a resurgent economy, supported national defense and did more to bring Americans together than any other law in the twentieth century.  The 47,000 mile system cost about a half trillion inflation-adjusted dollars.  That sounds about right, because trillion has become the denominator of choice in estimating the levels of investment needed for national renewal, competitiveness and sustainability.

2.    Smart is Second to Nothing
Dr. Robert Atkinson, President of the non-partisan Information Technology and Innovation Foundation argues that investments in what he calls "digital progress" is vital to: improved productivity, competitiveness, and quality of life; collaboration among public, private and not-for-profit organizations; and, solving intractable problems.  He concedes that investments in making digital progress is hard to attract because it invisible and intangible or both, yet it is much stronger economic driver that the industrial age institutions that are going to Washington, DC in search of a bail out.

Likewise, IBM chief executive Samuel J. Palmisano recently told the Council on Foreign Relations that more intelligent, efficient and smarter systems for modernizing utility grids, traffic management, food distribution, water conservation and health care are central to economic recovery as is the need for huge levels of public and private investment.  For Palmisano, smart is not just a metaphor. "I mean infusing intelligence into the way the world literally works -- the systems and processes that enable physical goods to be developed, manufactured, bought and sold... services to be delivered... everything from people and money to oil, water and electrons to move... and billions of people to work and live."

If, as the New York Times observes, this approach "potentially providing a foundation for innovation and growth across a range of industries," digital progress and smart systems should not take a backseat to any incumbent industry in the competition for new investments.

3.    Action is at the Edges
For Palmisano, being smart is synonymous with the rise of "the globally integrated enterprise" -- perhaps one with three initials in its name.  The conjoining of the two may put us at risk of losing out on the great lesson of the Internet - that innovation, growth and community always happen at the edges of a federation rather than the center of an enterprise.  The network has forever inverted center-periphery relationships in the hinterland's favor.  

4.    Value is in what public works make possible
Engineers and policy makers both have a tendency to talk about investments in terms of the thing itself rather than the value the thing creates.  In a political context, a bridge is much less an engineering marvel than a cost effective way to reduce congestion, improve safety and increase opportunities for residents and businesses alike.  The same holds true for investments in digital renewal - engineering and wizardry in the ether means far less to elected officials and taxpayers than how it improves quality of life and opportunities for their kids and communities.

5.    Watch Our Language
This column will doubtlessly be meta tagged as being about infrastructure but I have been at pains not to use that word here.  It is a useful shorthand among technologists but - according to no less authorities than Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Director of the Annenberg School of Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania and MSNBC commentator Chris Mathews on an unlikely point of agreement - "infrastructure is an awful word."  The task ahead is too important for our potential friends and allies to be turned away from something good by an apparently awful label.  While we are it, we should probably lay off the practice of using software-style versioning numbers - as in Government 2.0 - to talk about things that are more important than the name lets on.

A fellow economist reminds us that there is something to learn here from Milton Friedman, who was particularly effective as a "popularize" with even his most polemical work "beautifully and cunningly written. There is no jargon; the points are made with cleverly chosen real-world examples."

Perhaps that is our charge for making the case for things that matter: be clever, beautiful and cunning.

For the last seven years, the editors of Government Technology and I have usually found a way to shoehorn my often over length columns into the available space on the back page of the magazine.  The first few drafts of the January 2009 column, originally titled The Case for Patiently Urgent Public Works, were much longer than they should have been.  I took the axe to it to get it down to the size but I still like the longer version better.  Now, if a guy had a forum or a platform, maybe he could surface the longer version ... wait, they have blogs on the Internet now.