Hillary wants to spend $250 billion on infrastructure. Bernie wants to spend $1 trillion. Infrastructure investment is good. Economists all say so. Politicians who care at least a little about reality all say so. The American Society of Civil Engineers says so. I happen to be a civil engineer so it is definitely good for me.

The idea is that the infrastructure we have in the ground now wears out gradually, and we almost never do enough maintenance to keep it in its original condition. So there is a constant loss of value to the economy. You can also think of infrastructure as reducing friction, transaction costs, wasted time, effort, and energy in the economy. If people and goods can get where they need to go efficiently and cheaply, they can do more productive work and produce more value each day with less waste. The same idea applies to getting energy and water around. Finally, there is the economic idea that when economic growth is below capacity, as it is now, you could pay people to dig holes and fill them back in again, and there would be a net economic gain. So any infrastructure investment, even if it is not optimal, has even more benefit and it is a sort of free lunch, something for nothing, two birds with one stone. And interest rates are so low that it makes sense for the government to borrow money, or even print it, and realize this almost automatic, guaranteed, magical return on the investment. Politicians who oppose infrastructure investment on debt or deficit grounds just don’t understand or don’t care about reality, or else they are telling a cynically calculated story to people who don’t.

Optimal, planned infrastructure investment would be even better, of course. We really don’t do any planning at the national scale in the United States. Maybe we are still trying to differentiate ourselves from the Soviet planned economy, but seriously, it is time to get over that particular hangover.

I like Elon Musk’s Hyperloop because it is a big idea and it asks if we should be considering something bold, big, and different, not to mention more efficient and cost-effective than the same old ideas from the 1950s! But we need to remember infrastructure is not just about transportation, it is about energy, water resources, food, commerce, trade, information, environmental quality and ecosystems. Infrastructure has an ecological footprint which needs to be measured and considered in decisions. Let’s think big, take a holistic, long-term look at the whole system, and ask what kinds of investments would be best. What kind of integrated infrastructure system do we think would make sense in the future, and what steps would we take today to get there? One of the hard things about infrastructure, though, is that it is long-lived. The technology available actually changes much faster than the infrastructure wears out, so blindly repairing and perpetuating old infrastructure ends up retarding the pace of change. A good plan needs to take a long-term view, but it has to be flexible enough to adapt to changing technology, environmental, climate and socioeconomic conditions during the course of its implementation. This is the essence of good planning, but it is hard for many of today’s hyper-specialized, local- and short-term-thinking professionals to pull off.