You're right, Walmart isn't doing that. Part of the reason is that Walmart has essentially zero interest in building civic infrastructure. They have to just pass health & safety regulations and then they plan to do absolutely nothing more.

Public buildings and infrastructure, on the other hand, have other considerations in play. Durability, civic pride, long term safety ...

I travel around the US a lot and always marvel at the stuff that was built by/during the WPA. It is incredible - absurdly overbuilt by any current standards, but that very fact is at the heart of why they are still standing, still enjoyed, still viable.

Nobody will be saying that about any Walmart building in 90 years.

The WPA overbuilt everything because its underlying purpose was to reduce unemployment, even if it meant inefficient allocation of labor, because the alternative (massive unemployment) was considered even worse.

That entire system has since been discredited, because there is no actual need to allocate the labor inefficiently on purpose to reduce unemployment instead of still being as efficient as possible and just e.g. increasing the number or projects. Or even better, stimulating demand for labor by giving money directly to the general population.

But the problem in this case isn't high unemployment, it's high inefficiency. A program designed to reduce unemployment by increasing inefficiency is obviously not a solution for that.

I wasn't discussing the employment side of WPA in any way.

I was talking about what they built and comparing it to contemporary big box store architecture.

You're making an implicit claim that the labor was used inefficiently, which may be true. But unless that takes longevity and less easily measured attributes into account, I'm not sure you can prove that.

It's straightforward to compare the net present value of overbuilt boondoggles to modern commercial architecture which trades dramatically lower initial construction costs for modestly higher ongoing maintenance. The reason private entities overwhelmingly choose the latter is not that they prefer to waste their own money.

Moreover, longevity is often a cost. How many overbuilt old post offices and municipal buildings are we now effectively stuck with in places where they're no longer an appropriate size for the locality? The city's needs are going to be different in twenty or thirty years than they are now, so there is no point in designing ordinary structures to last longer than that when it so often makes more sense to build a new one after that period of time consistent with the needs of today rather than a generation ago.

There's an assumption there that its not possible to design and build things that can be adapative and function across a much longer timespan than a modern big box store's typical lifetime.

There's also an assumption that the cost of have an imperfectly adapated building is higher than the cost of multiple building efforts over time. Since both costs are rather variable, it's hard to assess if that is true.

Claiming that private entities are immune (or at least, less susceptible) to the same problems of temporal discounting that clearly affects both individuals and many north American governments seems without foundation to me. There are many incentives in play for private entities to favor short term gain over long term gain, and significant evidence that this affects their behavior just as much as it affects individuals and governments.

I don't agree that it's straightforward to compare "net present value". Go and visit the WPA constructions at many national parks. Nobody would agree to them being built today, so even if you could establish the cost to rebuild them, the fact that there's no way we would ever end up replacing them makes it extremely hard to establish their value to us as a society.

But I don't want to defend those old energy inefficient, hard-to-maintain structures to much. I'm thinking more about what their construction actually represented in terms of a society's willingess to invest (inefficiently!) in the future, and in a more-than-barebones aesthetic.

> There's an assumption there that its not possible to design and build things that can be adapative and function across a much longer timespan than a modern big box store's typical lifetime.

But that assumption is, by and large, true. If you look at hundred year old buildings, by modern standards they're extremely flawed. The insulation is typically poor or non-existent. They often had higher ceilings due to the limitations of contemporary lighting and HVAC systems, which are now a liability with respect to heating and cooling.

There is little reason to suspect that progress in building design has been discontinued, so a building from today would be expected to be similarly deficient by the standards of a hundred years from now, which means there is little reason to design it to last that long.

But the biggest flaw is often that the building is the wrong size. Decades ago you needed five stories and now you need ten. Or you needed five stories and now you need one. The obvious solution to that is to move to a bigger or smaller building as the need arises.

> There's also an assumption that the cost of have an imperfectly adapated building is higher than the cost of multiple building efforts over time.

Not at all, because the replacement building doesn't have to be on the same lot. You don't have to knock it down to build a new one consistent with your current needs. You can build a new one and then sell the existing one to someone who may be able to make productive use of it as it is. But then it's not the state reaping the benefits of any unusual longevity.

And that assumption may still be true in many cases regardless. If you have a five story building which over time comes to be surrounded by skyscrapers, it could easily be cost effective to remove it and make the lot available for another skyscraper, or for the new owner to do so and in so doing yield two dividends to the local government -- one from the sale of a lot with a high property value, and then another from the increased property tax revenue from the taller building.

> Claiming that private entities are immune (or at least, less susceptible) to the same problems of temporal discounting that clearly affects both individuals and many north American governments seems without foundation to me.

Temporal discounting isn't a problem, it's what you're supposed to do. An expense today is much more costly than the same dollar value expense in 50 years, because if you don't spend the money today, you get 50 years worth of interest on it (or don't have to pay 50 years in interest on having borrowed it).

> I'm thinking more about what their construction actually represented in terms of a society's willingess to invest (inefficiently!) in the future, and in a more-than-barebones aesthetic.

In which case you're essentially asking for the state to fund architecture as art with tax money. But if that's what the taxpayers want, why don't the buy it directly?

More saliently, spending tens of millions of dollars to re-tile a subway station isn't doing that anyway.

> If you look at hundred year old buildings, by modern standards they're extremely flawed. The insulation is typically poor or non-existent

You're assuming a certain type of climate. Hundred year old buildings with huge levels of thermal mass in year-round warm climates are exactly what you want, not insulation. The high ceilings are also extremely practical in such environments.

>There is little reason to suspect that progress in building design has been discontinued

Building design: no question that we've got new stuff that in the right conditions is better than what we had 100 years ago. We have some new stuff (e.g. insulated glazing) that is just better always. But there are many aspects of actual building construction that could be argued to have gone backwards in the last 100 years, mostly because of the rise of developer-led construction and the economics that this implies.

> the replacement building doesn't have to be on the same lot.

Fair point.

> An expense today is much more costly than the same dollar value expense in 50 years, because if you don't spend the money today, you get 50 years worth of interest on it

That assumes that you don't gain anything of value from the expense today. If what you are saying was so simplistically true, there would no point in investing in anything at all. If I put money into blue chip stocks with the expectation of earning profits, I do so with the idea in mind that these profits will exceed any interest I might have earned by saving it. If we collectively put money into a beautiful city hall or park lodge, we do with the idea in mind that what we will gain over the life of the building is worth more to us that the interest we might have earned by saving the cost instead.

> In which case you're essentially asking for the state to fund architecture as art with tax money

If you can't differentiate or acknowledge the concept or utility of public investment in public places, then I'm certainly not going to persuade you that this is not what I'm asking for.

>Public buildings and infrastructure, on the other hand, have other considerations in play. Durability, civic pride, long term safety ...

Who's paying? I can't express within the confines of the rules here how livid this sort of "we should spend taxpayer money on looking good to fluff our own egos" thinking is. The public is best served a vinyl tiled "Walmart subway" where the lightbulbs work and the trains run. Not a billion dollar marble monstrosity. Any bureaucrat opting to condone the latter is shirking their duty to use the resources at their disposal to deliver maximum results to the taxpayers.

It has nothing to do with "fluff our own egos".

I'm not advocating for "a billion dollar marble monstrosity". I'm advocating for the difference between a well built city hall and a Walmart store.