Where did the monuments go?

I recently moved to Sydney and my commute takes me across the Harbour Bridge. Every morning I get this ridiculous view of the Opera House sitting on the water, the bridge arching over the top, the whole lot framed against the harbour. It genuinely hasn't gotten old. These are two of the most recognisable structures on the planet and I just... ride past them on the bus to work.

Melbourne, where I lived before, doesn't really have an equivalent. The MCG is iconic in its own way, and Flinders Street Station is beautiful, but neither of them stops tourists in their tracks the way the Opera House does. Melbourne's landmarks are functional -- they're places where things happen. Sydney's landmarks are iconic on a global level.

And that got me thinking. Both of these were built decades ago. The Harbour Bridge opened in 1932. The Opera House opened in 1973. Auckland's Sky Tower -- probably the most recognisable structure in New Zealand -- opened in 1997. The Eiffel Tower, 1889. Statue of Liberty, 1886. These are all from... a while back. Where are the new ones? When was the last time a Western country built something purely iconic -- not a stadium, not an office tower, not a train station -- just a monument that exists to be impressive?

I couldn't think of one. So I started Googling how long these things actually took to build, how much they cost, and what I found sent me down a rabbit hole that lasted most of a weekend.

Turns out, our grandparents built things absurdly fast

The Empire State Building -- 102 storeys, tallest building in the world at the time -- took ONLY 410 days.

Started March 1930, opened May 1931. And done.

They were putting up four and a half storeys per week. The workforce built a mini railway system on each floor to move materials around to support this speed. Total project cost? US$41 million. The construction alone came in at US$24.7 million against a US$43 million estimate.

Under budget. In the 1930s.

Try saying "under budget" about any major construction project today and people will assume you're joking (or assume you're the property developer).

The Eiffel Tower was built in 2 years, 2 months, and 5 days. Gustave Eiffel ran the project so efficiently that only one worker died during construction, he insisted on guardrails and safety nets -- which was radical for the 1880s.

In today's money, the whole thing cost about US$44 million. Modern reconstruction estimates put the cost at roughly US$2 to US$2.5 billion.

Same iron. Same design. ~50x the price.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge took 8 years start to finish, but the arch itself -- that massive steel curve you can see from half the city -- went up in less than two. The two halves met in August 1930 after crews of 1,400 workers, drawn from all over the world, riveted 6 million rivets by hand. Auckland's Sky Tower was built in 2 years and 9 months. The Statue of Liberty cost about US$250,000 -- roughly US$8.5 million today -- and was crowdfunded. The French raised funds through lotteries and public entertainment. Americans crowdfunded the pedestal separately: 120,000 donations, 80% of them under a dollar.

The Golden Gate Bridge? Finished ahead of schedule and US$1.3 million under budget.

During the Great Depression.

I kept finding the same pattern. Fast. Cheap (or at least on budget). Iconic. And then at some point... we stopped.

So what actually happened?

This... construction is the only major industry on Earth that has gotten worse at its job over the past 50 years.

Between 2000 and 2022, construction productivity improved by just 10% -- or 0.4% a year. In the same period, manufacturing productivity improved by 90%. The total economy improved by 50%. Agriculture and manufacturing have increased productivity 10 to 15x since the 1950s. Construction is sitting at roughly the same level as 80 years ago.

Labour productivity index (1950 = 100)

Pretty wild. Every other industry got dramatically better at what it does. Factories automated. Farms mechanised. Software ate everything. And construction just... didn't. We build things slower and more expensively than we did in the 1960s, adjusted for inflation, and there's several reasons why.

1. Every building is a prototype; this is the one that surprised me most but makes total sense when you think about it. A car factory makes the same car 10,000 times and optimises each run. A construction project is a one-off every time. Different site, different soil, different regulations, different neighbours, different weather. A factory gives you control over your environment. A building site gives you geology and angry residents.

2. The paperwork multiplied; real spending per mile on Interstate construction more than tripled in real terms between the 1960s and 1980s. The inflection point? The early 1970s, when a wave of legislation gave citizens the right to sue, delay, and extract concessions from government projects. This isn't just an American thing. Berlin Brandenburg Airport opened 10 years late and 3x over budget because 700 kilometres of cable had to be replaced, thousands of fire extinguishers were installed incorrectly, and the ventilation system couldn't handle the load. London's (great!) Elizabeth Line came in 3.5 years late and £4 billion over. Sydney Metro West is already AUD$12 billion over its original estimate and "highly unlikely" to meet its 2030 target. Australian governments have collectively spent AUD$34 billion more on transport infrastructure over the past two decades than they told taxpayers they would.

3. The consultants get paid more when it costs more; on New York's Second Avenue subway, soft costs hit 21% of hard contract costs. Engineering firms often bill as a percentage of total construction cost. The incentive structure literally rewards expense. The more a project costs, the more everyone involved earns. It's like paying your mechanic a percentage of the repair bill and then asking them to keep costs down.

4. The industry barely uses technology; most construction companies spend less than 1% of revenue on IT. That's a fraction of what automotive or aerospace spends. The industry that builds the physical world is one of the least digitised industries in it. Most innovations focus on safety or design tools rather than fundamentally changing how stuff gets put together on site.

Wasn't Rome just built by slaves?

Those Depression-era projects were fast and cheap, yes. But they were also built on a foundation of people being treated roughly like office stationery.

The Hoover Dam's official death toll is 96 -- but that's the sanitised number. Workers laboured 7 days a week in diversion tunnels that hit 60°C -- enclosed rock corridors with gasoline trucks running through them and almost no ventilation. Sixteen died of heat prostration in a single month during the summer of 1931. Workers alleged that the contractor classified carbon monoxide poisoning deaths as "pneumonia" to avoid paying compensation. They had a rigid government deadline and sacrificed safety to meet it.

Labourers in the 1930s earned as little as US$0.50 an hour. Workers laboured seven days a week. Yellow dog contracts banned union membership as a condition of employment. The Empire State Building was built in 410 days with 3,400 workers.

Five of them didn't go home.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge cost 16 lives. The Golden Gate Bridge, 11 -- ten in a single incident when a work platform collapsed. When Joseph Strauss insisted on safety nets for the Golden Gate (spending US$130,000 on them, a huge sum at the time), it was considered revolutionary. He also made it the first major construction site to require hard hats.

In 1933. That's how low the bar was.

So when I say "we used to build things faster", there's a massive asterisk. Part of the reason things were cheaper is that human life was factored into the budget as an acceptable loss. We don't do that anymore, and we absolutely shouldn't. The fact that a skilled construction worker in Sydney today earns around AUD$30 an hour with safety regulations, union protections, and an expectation of going home alive is a great thing. It's just also one of the reasons everything costs more.

Ok but someone's still building stuff

So here's the thing I didn't expect to find. While Western countries have mostly stopped building purely symbolic monuments, other parts of the world haven't. There's actually a boom happening.

India's Statue of Unity, completed in 2018, is the tallest statue in the world at 182 metres -- nearly twice the height of the Statue of Liberty. It cost US$422 million and the construction phase took 33 months.

It doesn't do anything. It's just big and impressive and it exists to be a symbol. The Philippines finished the Mother of All Asia -- the world's tallest statue of the Virgin Mary -- in 2021. Myanmar's Laykyun Sekkya, a 116 metre tall standing Buddha, was completed in 2008. There's almost an unofficial competition happening, and it's entirely outside the Western world.

Which raises an obvious question: what do these countries have in common that makes building these larger than life projects viable?

The biggest factor is labour cost. A construction worker in India earns roughly US$6 to US$13 a day. A construction worker in Sydney earns around AUD$30 an hour, or roughly US$155 for a standard day. That's a 12 to 25x difference. When your workforce costs a fraction of what it would in Sydney or London, a US$422 million monument becomes structurally possible in a way it just isn't in a high wage economy. GDP per capita tells the story: roughly US$2,500 in India versus US$65,000 in Australia. That ratio shows up in every line item of a construction budget.

There's also a governance factor. These projects tend to be national government initiatives where land acquisition, environmental approvals, and project governance operate under a more centralised authority. Compare that to Sydney Metro West, which is "highly unlikely" to meet its target partly because of "complicated and lengthy governance arrangements" across multiple agencies. In a country where the central government can marshal resources toward a single prestige project, the coordination cost that kills Western infrastructure projects mostly disappears.

The underlying economics here are hard to ignore though. Countries where monument-building is booming tend to have significantly higher wealth inequality and less developed labour protections than those where it's stopped. That's not a coincidence -- the conditions that make a US$422 million monument feasible are closely related to the conditions that keep a construction labourer working for US$6 a day. It's worth noting this isn't a judgement on any specific country. The Statue of Liberty was built by French craftsmen earning the 1880s equivalent of living paycheck to paycheck. The Sydney Harbour Bridge was riveted by men who knew they might not survive the job. Every generation's monuments carry the economic fingerprints of the era that built them.

So are we just being nostalgic?

There's a survivorship bias thing happening that's worth naming. When we look at the Eiffel Tower and the Harbour Bridge and the Statue of Liberty, we're looking at the buildings that lasted. We're not seeing the thousands of 18XX-19XX buildings that collapsed, burned down, or were demolished because they were rubbish. We compare the greatest hits of the past with the average output of today, and obviously the past looks better.

And there are modern buildings that may soon become tomorrow's icons -- they just haven't had 50 years to build that reputation yet. The Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku (2012), the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg (2017), the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art in Cape Town (2017, carved from old grain silos). These are spectacular. But they're also all functional -- a cultural centre, a concert hall, a museum. The West seems to have lost the appetite for building something purely because it'd be cool to look at.

Maybe that's fine. Maybe the era of "let's build a giant tower because we can" belongs to a time when governments had fewer competing priorities and taxpayers didn't have a say. In a democracy where every dollar is contested, a US$400 million monument that doesn't house anyone, transport anything, or treat the sick is a hard sell. You'd be voted out before the foundation was poured.

What I took away from this

The question isn't really "why did we stop building monuments?" It's more like -- we didn't lose the ability. We changed what we're willing to pay for it, in money and in human cost. Construction productivity has genuinely declined, and the reasons are structural: every project is a prototype, the incentive systems are broken, and technology somehow skipped the industry entirely. But the biggest change is that we decided construction workers should earn a living wage, go home alive, and that communities should have a say in what gets built next to their house.

The Eiffel Tower cost US$44 million in today's money. Rebuilding it would cost US$2 to US$2.5 billion. The iron hasn't changed. Everything around it has.

And most of what changed is stuff we'd choose again (hopefully).

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Disclaimer: Thoughts are my own and do not represent any other parties.