Emperor Walls and Snail Governments

In 122 AD, the Roman emperor Hadrian was fed up from the Scotts attacking his northern province of Britain and he decided to build a formidable wall from coast-to-coast along the Tyne River. The project was enormous even by modern scale: a 2-meter wall that spans 73 miles with forts every 5 miles, towers in between, and a +2 meter deep ditches before and after the wall across a hilly landscape. It took the romans only 6 years to complete this formidable project.

Nineteen centuries later, the British Cross Rail project was initiated in 2009 by the ancestors of the Hadrian Wall builders and is coincidently of similar length (ie 73 miles). The project was expected in 9 years, but the new timeline is more like 14. The cost is a staggering ￡18 billion and counting. 

You would expect that civil engineering and government management would have improved by  x100 folds over 19 centuries. It didn’t. Government projects are consumed by overdesign, delayed by complicated regulatory processes and inefficient decision making, and restricted by meaningless standardization.

Sometime you wonder if emperors of the past (and of the present like Trump) should rule the world.  A decision is made by one man and executed at a speed of light or a drop of a sword.

PS. To prove this point further, see how Elon Musk has reinvented many government led initiatives like space, trains, and boring tunnels.