Larry Summers is, I think, not the only Ivy League economist to moan about the condition of American airports, most specifically those in the neighborhood of New York, New York. In a review mostly devoted to an excellent put-down of the pretensions of Thomas Piketty, Larry let out with the following cri de cœur:
“Look at Kennedy airport. It is an embarrassment as an entry point to the leading city in the leading country in the world.”
This is the perennial cry of the “they do things better in Europe and Asia” crowd. Why can’t we have those fabulous airports like they do! Well, often they don’t do things better in Europe, as Paul Krugman has noted, with increasing irritation. Trains in the UK are worse than Amtrak! Groupthink on the euro has destroyed the economy of Greece!
I think Paul is right on the money on both of those examples, and Bloomberg News brings us another, the stunning, €6 billion money pit known as the Berlin Brandenburg International Airport, intended as a monument to the latest in Teutonic pomo cool, but now emerging as a monument to a more traditional European failing, hubris.
Afterwords
Check out the article. The Berlin Brandenburg International is no Big Dig, but it’s funny.1
- Boston’s Big Dig, still unfinished, cost more than twice as much as BBI. ↩︎
