
In Praise of Maintenance - skmurphy
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/in-praise-of-maintenance/
======
skmurphy
they use a quote by Larry Summers to frame the tension between innovation and
maintenance:

    
    
        SUMMERS: People always think more about how new ground can be broken than 
        they think about how existing institutions can be sustained or existing 
        facilities can be maintained. It leads to a constant trap where we 
        underinvest in old things, then old things disappoint, us then we feel a 
        need for new things, then to satisfy that need for new things we underinvest 
        more in old things and the cycle goes on. 
    
        You see it in the fact that we pay the equivalent of 40 cents a gallon in 
        gasoline taxes for extra repairs due to the fact that we are not maintaining 
        our highways right. You see it in an air-traffic control systems in the 
        United States that still uses obsolete technologies and doesn’t use GPS.
     
        And as a consequence, we all spend more time with air-traffic delays,we burn
        huge amounts more energy, we take greater safety risks than we need to. You 
        see it in developing countries where they’re always building new facilities, 
        but then a few years later those facilities sit in a sense of disrepair. I 
        think the fetish of novelty and the lack of glamor of maintaining and 
        sustaining things is a besetting problem.

