2006-08-14 - 1:35 p.m. - Great Planning Disasters, by Peter Hall
When "big planning" goes wrong - whether through flawed forecasts of future needs or bureaucratic intransigency - the result is a tremendous waste of public resources. Whatever their merits, the Concorde, the Sydney Opera House, San Francisco's BART and the other "disasters" discussed in this volume, all went shockingly over budget, took longer than anticipated to complete, and never fulfilled their original missions in some way or another. This book does an admirable job establishing the what, when, and who, delivering the "how" alongside...then stumbles awkwardly in its second half, which attempts to address the "why," but reads more like an endless lit review. The seemingly directionless summary of different sociological theories on government, interest groups, bureaucracy and so on really arrests the momentum of the disasters - when he finally gets back to discussing specifics it's really too late. The sections on the disasters themselves, though, are meaty, if now very dated (the American edition was published in 1982, before many of these disasters had really concluded). Overall, good stuff if you're into that kind of thing - but you can safely gloss the second half and jump to the final chapter.