Review: The Power Broker

 After reading Robert Caro's series on Lyndon Johnson, I bought (through audible) the audiobook version of The Power Broker, which is his biography of Robert Moses, who essentially built most of the infrastructure and parks of the city of New York. The book took me 18 months to listen to the finish.

The biography centers around Robert Moses control of various transportation agencies and authorities, generating revenue from bridges, toll highways, and maybe even parks. It's astonishing how he managed to get the laws written such that no elected official could stop him, and he could build with impunity. There are lots of places where he abused his power, and one of the reasons he got away with it for so long was that he never abused his power in order to enrich himself, but rather, to get more power. So he could always legitimately claim that he didn't personally benefit from holding all those posts that generated revenue, he could hand out largesse to an army of contractors, concessionaires, engineering firms, and even restaurant owners.

The book is even handed. When you give someone like Robert Moses the power to ignore voters and elected officials, you get stuff done. Parks were built quickly, as were roads and highways. Unfortunately, Moses was not a fan of public transit or affordable housing, or poor people, or non-whites. So the cost of getting all the done was that neighborhoods full of vulnerable people were bulldozed, and those people became more impoverished. What's interesting was that Moses was politically savvy enough to ensure that the various mayors, etc got invited to the ribbon cuttings of various openings so they could share in the credit for the infrastructure improvements, so there was never any incentive for even the elected officials to oust him.

This book explains why housing and infrastructure built in the USA today is so bad. The backlash to the existence of someone like Robert Moses all but ensured that nothing can get done without tons of oversight. The book is a valuable counterpoint to Abundance, but I hope that the country can get to a point where it can build again.

I enjoyed the book but probably should have gotten it in electronic format so I could read it rather than endure 50 hours worth of listening to it.