[kalu]

Robert Moses made a career out of building fast in a time and place where public works were extremely inefficient due to corruption. He rose to power at a time when jobs were handed out as currency to collect votes. Robert Caro describes in great detail scenes where, for example, hundreds of city workers who were supposed to be working would instead camp out in parks passing around prostitutes and brown paper bags. The city was a wasteland of corruption and incompetence. Moses turned this around in a matter of years to build massive public works projects quickly and at a high level of quality.

I guess my point is that things were very bad in New York before the 1920s. And one man found a way to turn that around. So we shouldn’t act as if the status quo is our destiny. That we are somehow witnessing something that is new in this country. Things can change. We can change them. It happened before.