Creative destruction can be defined as the "destruction" of goods and services in a free market by the creative efforts of entrepreneurs, who provide society with even more valuable goods and services. We often think of creative destruction as it relates to consumer goods such as televisions, computers and cell phones. These products are constantly "destroyed" in the race to become faster, smaller, and more powerful .
But creative destruction plays no favorites and can also be found hard at work in today's road construction industry. Materials such as asphalt and cement have been used in road and bridge construction for centuries but any comparison to the products and processes used by our earliest builders is merely coincidental. Today's construction products and processes are much stronger and more durable thanks in part to the ever expanding use of additives such as polymers, plasticizers and synthetic fibers.
But the story doesn't end here as this entrepreneurial industry has also learned to how to recycle. Materials that used to be placed in landfills can now be recycled and used again and again. In fact, construction materials are the most recycled products in the world. Try to do that with your old PC! Recycling has become an important method to preserve scarce natural resources as well as a valuable and necessary tool to keep from being creatively destroyed by the competition.
And how about construction methods? As late as the 1920's, we still placed most materials using rakes and shovels. A "heavy" truck was about the size of today's pickup truck and had about the same capacity. In the '20s, crews could hand finish around 10 tons per hour (about the size of your average driveway). Today, crews can routinely place 300 to 700 tons per hour using state of the art computerized equipment and even GPS technology.
And what has all this creative destruction done for society? For starters, the trip to grandma's house that used to take all day can now be done in a few hours. And the cost of having dinner at grandma's house has gone down (inflation adjusted) due to the efficiency of transportation. In this case, time is money! And what about the quality of the transportation network? Those orange cones you see on your drive home are the beginnings of smoother, more durable roads that decrease wear and tear on your vehicles which leaves you with more money in your pocket which leads to more trips to grandma's house, which leads to...
And the cycle continues.
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