The Anglosphere has a pathalogical fear and hatred of competent public
sectors, so projects get pulled in lots of directions by vested
interests. By contrast, Scandinavian countries[1] (and Switzerland)
have a strong public sector that is able to make comprehensive plans,
and a political class that trusts them enough to take guidance from
them rather than demand they follow the party line of whoever is
currently in power. I don't know why Anglosphere countries get tied up
in "red tape" whilst Scandinavian countries don't, but I suspect this
is a big part of it: there's more of an adversarial approach here
whereas there they are more consensus-driven.
[1]
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/05/03/construction-costs-in-the-nordic-countries/
—I'd highly recommend reading the comments as well for some further
insight.
On Thu, 2019-05-16 at 09:31 +1000, Matthew Geier wrote:
> On 15/5/19 5:36 pm, Robbie Smith wrote:
>
>
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> > I read a recent article[1] about why infrastructure costs are
> > so much higher in English-speaking countries (particularly
> > the
> > US, but there are parallels here), and it boils down to us
> > being
> > terrible at project management and asset utilisation.
> >
>
> I suspect the UK can make the US look reasonable. I once saw a
> figure for project management costs vs other engineering costs
> for
> HS1 in the UK. Despite those impressive bridges and all the
> tunneling, Civil or indeed any 'hard' engineering discipline
> wasn't top of the list....
> 'Project Management' is going gang-busters at the Uni I work for
> - it's the most popular strand in Engineering at the moment.
> Students are flocking to it because they think there are better
> prospects at actually getting a job after spending 3 to 4 years
> getting a degree. (We are turning out more
> civil/mechanical/electrical engineers than there are actual
> jobs
> for them)
> If anything we are now over supplied with project managers, but
> all those large infrastructure projects the government keeps
> talking about need project managers and lots of them due to the
> 'compliance' work required for government contracts. Actually
> paying some tradies to do some actual work is way down the
> list.
>
>
> And further down the feeding chain we are not turning out enough
> trades as no one wants to do hard work and the long hours. And
> because not enough people are doing trades, the ones that do
> get
> through can make plenty of money, but they do long hours to get
> it.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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