Ezra's Bookshelf

Why Nothing Works

by Marc J. Dunkelman · 437 pages · ~8 hrs

Politics & GovernmentUrban Planning & ArchitectureHistory

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Marc Dunkelman, a researcher at Brown University, argues that the United States has lost the capacity to build and execute large projects—housing, transit, energy infrastructure, climate adaptation—and that progressives are partly responsible. His central claim is that twentieth-century American liberalism contained two competing impulses: a 'Hamiltonian' tradition that trusted strong public institutions to deliver collective goods, and a 'Jeffersonian' tradition suspicious of concentrated power and committed to procedural checks. After the disasters of urban renewal and Vietnam, Dunkelman argues, the Jeffersonian impulse won decisively, embedding itself in environmental review, community participation requirements, and litigation rights designed to constrain government overreach. The result, in his telling, is a country that can no longer build a subway extension, site a solar farm, or open a homeless shelter without years of process and the threat of veto from any small constituency. Dunkelman tells the story through case studies—the failure of California high-speed rail, the contortions of Penn Station rebuilding, the saga of New York City housing—and through the intellectual history of figures like Jane Jacobs, Ralph Nader, and Robert Caro. The book is part of a wave of recent 'abundance' arguments urging liberals to recover a politics of building, and it has become a touchstone in those debates.

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