This brief interview is the best summary of Georgetown University Press author Sadek Wahba's forthcoming BUILD: INVESTING IN AMERICA'S INFRASTRUCTURE that I've read so far. It also gives a great indication of how the book is written--straightforward, to the point, with detailed examples from around the world of public-private partnerships in action.
Sadek says the book took two years to write, and I love this part of the interview: "Producing the manuscript for?Build?required Wahba to carve out time on weekends and holidays. 'You wake up early and you give yourself two hours in the morning and then you have to stop. It forces you to be disciplined and to be efficient,' he says. 'Fortunately, my Jesuit education and earning a Ph.D. in economics instilled that discipline and organization—they force it on you, whether you like it or not!'"
For me, this book took 17 years to come to fruition, because I first attempted to commission a book on our crumbling infrastructure when the Minneapolis bridge collapsed on August 1, 2007, a few months after I'd just moved there. The first book proposal, by a local professor, centered on municipal tax policies and politics, and was much narrower in focus. The project ultimately fell apart over disagreements over the outline and scope. The second and much more recent attempt, with different authors, had more historical depth than the first, but it was about ten times too long. In retrospect, I'm glad those projects did not work out, because Sadek Wahba's BUILD is much more relevant and interesting than I could have hoped for. It also looks very attractive on the shelf!
Sadek Wahba is an investor with a plan to fix America’s infrastructure.
The Chairman and Managing Partner of I Squared Capital has published a new book on the mounting costs of America’s inertia and ideological gridlock on infrastructure.
Ahead of the book’s publication, he spoke with Alex Yankus about a way forward.??Read their conversation here: https://lnkd.in/eNt2vr3y
