[bryananderson]

This book is by Bent Flyvbjerg, the lead author of the paper being discussed here. He’s done a lot of great scholarship on how megaprojects go haywire, and uniqueness bias is definitely a big piece of it.

You especially see this bias with North American public transit. Most of our transit is greatly deficient compared to much of the rest of the world, and vastly more expensive to build (even controlling for wages). But most NA transit leadership is almost aggressively incurious about learning from other countries, because we are very unique and special and exceptional, so their far better engineering and project management solutions just wouldn’t work here and aren’t even worth considering.