apples and apple squishing machines and stuff like that.

And that's his producer price index.

And then you can measure a consumer price index for apple juice, which is the price at which the apple juice producer sells the apple juice to consumers.

But unfortunately, for roads and bridges and ports, it's not quite so clear.

And it's not clear because the government is both a producer in its purchasing, but it's also the final consumer, too.

So there's I mean, there's a lot that happens between the initial price tag and taxpayers finally paying the bill.

That's right.

And what we do really, really well is we measure the initial price tag.

Sure.

And that's his producer price index, and then you can measure a consumer price index for apple juice, which is the price at which the apple juice producer sells the apple juice to consumers.

But unfortunately, for roads and bridges and ports, it's not quite so clear.

And it's not clear because the government is both a producer in its purchasing, but it's also the final consumer, too-

Right, right.

Which arrived in the, in the late '60s and early '70s as a response to truly awful things that the federal government did.

But in response, we've created a system where not only do you give input before a project starts, but you give input endlessly after the project continues, sometimes in the form of litigation.

But litigation also drags out projects, and the longer the project takes, the more expensive the project becomes.

[laughs]

You know, they have, they have noise walls, they get wigglier, um, they're more elevated highways over time.

So the highways are just, um, fancier in a highway kind of way.

So putting all those three together, what does, what does that get you? Okay.

We argue that these three findings suggest a rise of citizens' ability to impact government decision-making in a way that increases costs.

Um, and we call this the rise of citizen voice.

So I think it's not just the construction of the noise wall that drives the increase, it's that before even y- before you even construct the noise wall, you have a fight about whether to construct the noise wall, and that delay in construction and that del- that sort of process of deciding where to put the noise wall, and should we put the noise wall, and how big is the noise wall, all of that, all of that is additionally costly, which is why maybe you can build noise walls in Poland if you just decide you're gonna build them everywhere, and you do, you know, without any kind of debate about whether we should or we shouldn't, or if you have a threshold and we build them everywhere where population density is more than this, and we just build them, and otherwise we don't build them.

[laughs]