Are We Rome?

I am proposing a new capstone class for undergraduate, senior level engineering students. You could have a class for each discipline with the primary focus on multidisciplinary critical analysis of pressing problems facing the nation and engineers. Mechanical engineering students could look at energy issues in the context of economics and national security. The example that I am outlining is for civil engineers students where the focus would be on our national infrastructure and our corresponding political institutions. Let’s call the class - - CE 401 - - A Critical Analysis of U.S. National Problems.

The first part of the proposed class starts with the current state of our infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers currently gives our infrastructure an overall grade of D - - in 1988 the grade was a C. The cost of bringing all the systems up to adequacy is estimated at $2.2 trillion over the next five years. The problems are rather ominous - - from the average dam in the U.S. being 50 years old to water distribution systems that leak an average of 20 gallons per day per capita to more than 26 percent of the nation’s bridges are either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. Stephen Flynn, of the Center for National Policy has best stated the dilemma:

Our forebears invested billions in these systems when they were relatively much poorer than we are. We won’t even pay to maintain them for our own use, let alone have anything to pass to our grandchildren.

What is to be done? Our recent stimulus package spent the money, incurred the debt, and did very little to repair what most needs fixing. If this is the reality, what are we going to do about it? By 2050, 70 percent of the human race will be living in cities. If cities are to be the locus of 21st century innovation, what is the role of public infrastructure in terms of technological, economic, and societal advancements? Is our declining infrastructure the canary in our economic mineshaft? A key point of the class would be to examine these issues and problems in a multidisciplinary and critical manner. What are the issue assumptions? What are the reasons and root causes? How good is the supporting evidence? Are the statistics deceptive? What reasonable conclusions are possible? What are the ways that the civil engineering profession can move forward in improving our infrastructure?

The second part of the capstone, which interfaces directly with our declining infrastructure, is the old, broken and dysfunctional nature of our federal government. Are we Rome? Jonathan Rauch refers to this as “demosclerosis - - government’s progressive loss of the ability to adapt - - like hardening of the arteries, which builds up stealthily over many years.” When the U.S. Senate was created, the most populous state, Virginia, had 10 times as many people as the least, Delaware. Now the most populous state, California, has 69 times as many people as the least populous, Wyoming. Yet they have the same two votes in the Senate. More than half of all Americans live in the 10 most populous states - - which together account for 20 of the Senate’s 100 votes. No business organizational structure would ever be designed like this - - since it takes 60 votes in the Senate to break a filibuster on controversial legislation, 41 votes, is in effect, a blocking minority. States that together hold 12 percent of the U.S. population can provide that many Senate votes. What we have is a political system where politics matters more than long-term and effective governing. Where regionalization places a premium on the equality of benefit rather than on the equality of sacrifice necessary to achieve the benefit in question. As John Adams stated:

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never has been a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

Now we need ports and highways and an educated populace. We need 75-years worth of things - - in a world where corporations live by the quarter, cable news outlets by the minute, and a democratic system that cannot impose any short-term pain for long-term gain. The country was established as a marriage of the public and private sectors - - where things got done because we had private factories and public schools. But places like California illustrate what a private-public divorce looks like, a system engineered to ensure nothing can be done (In the 2004 election, out of 153 state and federal positions in California that were at stake - - not a single one changed party).

What are we to do? This is fundamentally the same as the infrastructure question and the critical interface point between the two issues - - “If this is the reality, what are we doing to do about it?” Do we work with our flawed governmental system despite its uncorrectable flaws or attempt to contain the damage that the system does to the rest of our society? Government has to function correctly for the private sector to flourish - - things like rule of law, expectations of physical safety, and public infrastructure that people can enjoy and depend on. What is the role and responsibilities of civil engineers in the context of our declining national infrastructure given the flaws and limits of our governmental institutions? What are the ways forward?