Denied parkways generate vast insider wealth, creating endemic political corruption incentives.

Evidence

Politicians who had a say in which firms received those contracts could expect financial remembrances from a successful firm, if indeed they—or a relative or a trusted associate known in political terminology as a “bag man”—did not actually own a piece of it. Parkways meant real estate transactions, generally either purchase or condemnation, both methods under which landowners could expect to do well financially; state public works officials, anxious to begin construction and not too concerned about price because the money they were offering was not their own, were traditionally more generous than private buyers. If politicians were the landowners—if they bought the land at pre-parkway prices, from owners who didn’t know the parkway was coming, and then sold it to the state at right-of-way prices—they could expect a large profit. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 911

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Milgrom on the law merchant and institutions that make reputation/trust work in markets; here the opposite — structural corruption incentives built into public infrastructure. — connects to: Robber barons fused corrupt legislative power with personal wealth to control resources. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 650
• SEED: Angle: ‘infrastructure as patronage cradle’ — how every megaproject in history has had a shadow economy of insiders milking land and contracts; modern analog could be congestion-pricing or subway-adjacent property deals.