Introduction

Today's guest is Clifford Winston of the Brookings Institution. We discuss infrastructure, particularly roads and airports, and the incentives faced by their users. Bad incentives create congestion problems that can't be solved by simply throwing more money into infrastructure; you need to fix the incentives! Clifford's work on privatization shows how it could improve incentives and reduce the costs of congestion.

Clifford argues that self-driving cars will fix some of the problems created by bad policy. We also discuss the letter grades issued for infrastructure by the American Society of Civil Engineers and what they do and don't tell us about the quality of American infrastructure.