[bluGill]

What innovation is left? Concrete has been around for centuries in modern forms - we can tweak the formula a lot, but still the same basic idea as when it was invented 100 years ago. Most of what passes for innovation has been tried before. Other things were not tried because anyone who understood the problem knows they are cannot be cost effective. Unfortunately the people who fund this cannot be experts in the field, and thus can easily be persuaded to fund things by scammers that anyone who really was an expert could tell you in a few hours of study are a bad idea.

The problem isn't that the politicians are not experts in construction - there is far too many things politicians fund for them to become experts in even a fraction of them all (they also have to fund medical studies, military spending...). The problems is politicians don't respect trained experts, thus don't keep people around to become deep experts, and in turn there is nobody around with deep technical knowledge to say what is a good idea. Or if there are such people around they are not in a position where they can be listened too, instead any scammer is allowed to present their pitch for "innovations".