Review: Why Nothing Works

This review is part of a special collaboration between Planetizen and Booked on Planning, a biweekly podcast where AICP planners Stephanie Rouse and Jennifer Hiatt chat with authors of the latest books shaping urban planning today. Listen to the episode with today’s author in the player below. 

In today’s political climate, it often feels like we can’t accomplish anything, despite a history of accomplishing massive feats like building the interstate highway system or creating the Tennessee Valley Authority. Marc Dunkelman argues in his book “Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — And How to Bring it Back” that America’s stifled progress can’t wholly be blamed on conservatives, but that progressivism’s own fear of “The Establishment” is to blame. 

This book will take you back to the founding of our democracy and the initial battle for control between Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian approaches to governing and the lasting legacy of the pendulum swing between each. As Dunkelman’s book shows, the desire to get things done is hampered by a desire to limit government. This tension has led the general public to lose faith in public institutions and stifle progressivism’s ability to deliver on its promises.  

Dunkelman argues three main points in his book: 1) progressivism is defined by two diverging impulses (Hamiltonian vs Jeffersonian) 2) these two impulses have waxed and waned through time shifting the movement’s underlying zeitgeist, and 3) the balance that’s emerged excessively towards Jeffersonianism is a liability for the movement.

While this isn’t your standard urban design or planning book, it illuminates why the work we are trying to achieve — building more affordable housing, reducing climate impacts, replacing failing public infrastructure — is hamstrung by our own good intentions to “insert so many checks into the System that government has been rendered incompetent.” Look no further than the environmental review process. “Environmental impact statements, initially imagined at NEPA’s birth to be 150 page documents, eventually came to be volumes long, the length born of a bureaucratic desire to insulate any given decision from criticism that a concern had not been sufficiently considered.”

This added bureaucracy, meant to help protect the public, can largely be seen during the period of rampant road building following the passage of the Interstate Highway Act of 1956. These added checks and balances stopped power hungry builders like Robert Moses, but Dunkelman asks “how can we clear a path for progress without beckoning another Robert Moses?” While he does not lay out a clear path in his book to answer this question, he does note that reformers need to find a balance between centralized power and individualized safeguards. He is realistic in asserting that not everyone will agree, hence why we have had such a push and pull in tendencies over the centuries of government, but “in the end, someone needs to be empowered to choose.”

If we want to green the grid, build more affordable housing, create more inclusive, and welcoming cities, we must resolve the issues within the progressive movement that are hamstringing progress. “Why Nothing Works” doesn’t provide a clear path to the solution, but the narrative read will give you the understanding of how we arrived at the current gridlocked system and offers a direction for moving forward.