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In 1995 China and the U.S. both had essentially zero miles of high speed rail. Today China has tens of thousands of miles of high speed rail and the U.S. still has essentially zero miles of high speed rail. We did invest $6 trillion in 20 years of most less pointless warfare.

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I think this is the core of it, we have moved most of our resources to foreign wars and let our infrastructure to rot. That this is not even part of the public discourse shows the decay of the US as a country.

It is very much a part of public discourse, the military industrial complex has been discussed since the 70s. The problem is that - well, I don't know what the problem is. Maybe it is that everyone is too busy with the meaningless stuff that they show on cable news to be too concerned with things that affect their lives.

The problem is far too many americans take pride in how big and tough our military is. They equate military spending to might.

You propose "Hey, maybe 700 billion dollars on the military is excessive" and you get "But then china/russia/the terrorists/etc can invade us!"

2.1m service members, over 700k civilians employed by the military directly [0]. Then you have the endless stream of military contractors, and you're looking at almost 1 out of every 50 working age people in America benefits directly from the federal military activity.

So yeah, of course people are taking pride in a big military since it provides so much of their community income.

0: https://www.governing.com/archive/military-civilian-active-d...

That budget could still go to supporting their communities if we employed them doing more meaningful work rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, etc.

For some perspective, often this money and manpower DOES go into improving local infrastructure. New Orleans levies were substantially more resilient in the last few weeks as a result of the Army Corps of Engineers.

Often? The Army Corps of Engineers had a budget of less than $8B in 2021. The Army Corps of Engineers has three main missions, one of which is the civil side of things. I'm not sure how it breaks down budget-wise though.

But saying money spent on the military often flows into local infrastructure seems laughable.

Just because the military establishment is capable to pool together some skills/resources to polish its public image doesn't mean another non-militaristic public service (in whatever definition of the term) couldn't achieve same or better results.

It’s more than that. Culturally they US has a big population that is anti-large government social benefits, except in the concept of the military.

By joining the military you gain access to federally paid education, health care, social services, housing etc. that has broad political support. If you yanked those funds you’d decimate one of the foundational social safety nets in the States.

Nothing would be decimated if we yanked those funds other than our ability to destroy other nations. We could build a much better social safety system that covers far more people. It’s not as if military spending is the only option as far as this goes.

My point was that the military is a social safety net with broad political approval. Other options are much less popular.

I now understand and agree with your point.

> the military industrial complex has been discussed since the 70s

For...broad definitions of “the 70s”

---quote---

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

---end quote---

- Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the United States, Farewell Address, Jan. 17, 1961

Rail is "socialist" (not meant in a political way) in that it is generally a government investment for the people. My sense is the US is generally less apt to do this vs e.g. europe where there has been much more investment. I think this has more to do with it than the money not being available because of wars.

We could have done both. Opponents of rail decry it’s apparent inefficiency and call it wasteful spending. Even assuming it is wasteful spending it’d still have been much better spending $6 trillion on building trains than on the wars. Has so many resources ever been spent for so little gain?

We happily have planes and buses, which are usually superior to passenger trains. Removing the TSA would create more total value in infrastructure than adding more trains, even though some trains are worth it.

Is it much different than the Hoover Dam, or interstate highway system? We praise those accomplishments...

The interstate highway system is actually an interesting example, because US did have a bunch of private rail and trams, before the govt built the highways, subsidized suburbs and made it all much less relevant. Apparently building the cities around driving is now considered to have been the wrong choice. It's good that we know exactly what the right choice is /this/ time around, so we just need tons of taxpayer money to shove it thru ;) (for the record, I do not support either war or transit spending).

> My sense is the US is generally less apt to do this vs e.g. europe where there has been much more investment.

The US government has a lot of investment in infrastructure, however these investments almost always go to private contractors who produce bad results raking in a lot of money (comparatively to any sort of however-inefficient public service). Unfortunately European governments have been following this way for a few decades now and privatizing everything.

Of course, only profit is privatized. The private sector still largely benefits from considerable sums of public money, and States take action quickly to save endangered businesses (eg. banks). Or, to paraphrase some thinkers, "Socialism for the rich, exploitation for the masses."

> the money not being available because of wars

There's two assumptions that irk me in this sentence:

1) Capability has nothing to do with money. The entire value of money is based on public confidence in the monetary system. Whether you have those virtual (or paper) numbers of not, a community or State has considerable infrastructure, skills and resources it can leverage to help improve life for all. There's usually legal provisions to enable "requisition" of private resources/infrastructure in times of needs, but there's also nothing stopping a government from developing a volunteering-based economy without money (like a huge cooperative).

2) The money is pretty much there, and it's spent not just on the military. There's a lot of infrastructure money that's being misspent on contractors doing a poor job and not doing any form of maintenance. There's a lot of bureaucracy money spent on managers making life miserable for field workers and making sure they can't do their job properly: education, health, regulation enforcement... As an outsider to the USA, i found a lot of Last Week Tonight episodes enlightening in this regard. You could also take Medicare for example, which is designed as a scheme to siphon money into private healthcare (insurances and cliniques), where it appears funding a public socialized healthcare infrastructure (as in many other countries) is far less costly overall.

I've found this humorous rap clip from the 2016 elections to summarize the situation pretty well overall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Qv6S_GtLo (to watch with your favorite invidious instance).

To be fair a lot of Chinese rail is extremely wasteful and more of a government run full employment program than a direct economic benefit.

But I'll agree it would have probably been better to spend the Iraq/Afghanistan war money domestically on any number of things.

What's wasteful about that?

What’s wasteful about paying millions of people to shovel dirt? Now take your answer and apply it to your question.

Nothing, if you need dirt shoveled...

Jobs programs make us poorer on net.

Its not black and white some of these jobs might be shitty but atleast someone gets a paycheque, the other alternative is that these people depend on unemployment benefits and then vote for demagogues who promise to bring back jobs and drive out immigrants who stole those jobs.

I can't see how it would be better than if huge swaths of people didn't do anything and lived in squalor. Who cares how much it affects the GDP. Honestly I'd probably find it more rewarding to operate a train for some people than all of the professional programming work I've done.

Wasteful in that rail laid per dollar is not good or wasteful in that the rail in underused?

Nothing wrong with government subsidized rail. The government subsidizes cars too by funding the roads. I assume you're not in favor of turning all interstates into toll roads? Also in the end it's cheaper to get started with laying down rail early than to wait until after people have moved into the area and you have to displace some of them in order to build the rail line.

People argue about how the demographics of china make this possible, america is too spread out, blah blah blah...

I would rather have a thousand miles of pointless HSR than pointlessly bombing a bunch of taliban who are now back and no worse for wear

China's high speed rail is going to places where they want to increase the Han population.

Like between Beijing and Shanghai?

Please don't take HN threads on flamewar tangents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yeah, the demographic density argument fails to hold up to the fact that spending $6 trillion on high speed rail would have been much more beneficial to society than spending it on Iraq/Afghanistan.

I'm not trying to be a troll with this, but is that true?

I don't mean the fact that Iraq and Afghanistan were failed missions. But I've heard that 90% of the money spent on those wars went to Americans in some way or another, military contractors, suppliers, etc. all the way down the line to people like me in tech who may work on software used by the military.

you could make sure 90% of the money spent on high speed rail went to americans. that’s orthogonal to what the outcome of paying those americans is.

That goes back to the Milton Friedman quote I love: “what’s good for me is good for the country.”

You could spend all that money employing contractors producing weapons and weapons research. Or you could spent that money employing contractors producing high speed rail.

More interestingly, if instead of bombing Afghans you built them a nice high speed rail network along a nice freight network, economically integrating the traditionally independent regions, they may be grateful enough to make the Taliban lose political power.

Or, more interestingly, you could abandon the "contractor" model which is just a way to siphon public money into the hand of private shareholders, and fund self-organized public services. Self-organized, as in not centralized/authoritarian bureaucracies, but actual field workers coming together and deciding on strategies to do their job (turns out they're usually much better than managers at doing that).

Right now, the money went to Americans and the result was we blew up countries the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia. Imagine instead if the money went to Americans anyway, AND we had much better national infrastructure. You could even pitch it as necessary for national defense anyway.

According to this Adam Tooze article the wars cost around 800,000 dead people. Then there is the incalculable emotional cost to survivors and participants. This alone means that spending $6 trillion building trains would have been much better than on war.

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-34-how-we-paid-fo...

Dont forget that the some of the kids who watched their parents being killed by American drones would have the desire to take revenge later when they grow up.

If it’s a choice between paying Americans to dig and fill 2.5 trillion dollars worth of holes and the only deliverable after 20 years is dead Americans and Afghanis, versus paying Americans 1/3 that amount, and the deliverable is a durable high speed rail network and all the economic knock-on effects that would bring in coming decades, what rational person would choose the former?

I like inter-city travel via train more than flying or driving, but even in the Northeast Corridor, which is the most well-serviced rail area in the US and certainly has the demographic density, it's not always worth it in practice.

Boston to Providence is 45 minutes, faster than driving, very happy to take that trip. (For those who don't know, Providence traffic is more ridiculous than Boston traffic, so even my more car-oriented friends tend to like this trip via train)

Boston to NYC is about 3 and a half hours, with the convenient location of Penn Station, the lack of airplane+airport bullshit, it's not bad. I like it more than flying, plus you can just buy a ticket and travel on a whim.

But Boston to DC is 7 hours assuming everything goes smoothly, and much longer if it doesn't. I can't justify the DC trip by train, it's only a 90 minute flight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Corridor

Wikipedia says "Concepts for improvements to achieve "true" high-speed rail on the corridor, which have been estimated by Amtrak to cost $151 billion, envision cutting travel times roughly in half, with trips between New York and Washington that would take 94 minutes."

But I remember something similar being on the Wikipedia page when I was in college, and I graduated a decade ago. We really have no excuse to not have spent that money on our own infrastructure. We could have Boston to DC in 3 hours. Suddenly the train would be a lot more viable for a lot of people.

> We did invest $6 trillion in 20 years of most less pointless warfare.

Where does this 6 trillion dollars figure come from? It is my understanding that budget of the military is higher (not accounting for hidden/secret budgets), and that according there's (potentially dozens of) trillions of dollars that are just unaccounted for, as the Pentagon is the only federal service that hasn't passed an audit ever.

1995 is an interesting year, because China's GDP overtook Brazil's then.

It is now ~10x larger.

Public transportation is (almost always) an inferior good. If one country is consuming more of an inferior good than another country, it means that they are poorer than that other country.

"A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation." -Gustavo Petro

See London or Paris or even New York City. Just getting everyone a car only creates cities which are contain more parking lots than buildings and green spaces.

The richer you are in New York City, the less you spend on public transportation. That's an inferior good.

Look at the "Park & Ride" concept in the Seattle area (I am sure it exists in other cities). I've seen a lot of people that are very comfortable financially take the bus to work. Public transportation only becomes inferior when its infrastructure is horrible, and it is humiliating to take a bus because of the wait time, delays or how packed they get.

If someone in Seattle goes from 200,000 a year in income to 2,000,000 a year in income, do they spend more or less money on Park & Ride?

In San Francisco and New York at least, one important reason public transportation is inferior is you are regularly confronted with mental illness, disgusting sights and smells, and sometimes violence.

I've always wondered why there haven't been more efforts to offer certain benefits (more comfort and privacy) to those who can pay more to ride public transportation. This would provide more funding for these systems and is not too different from what we already see on planes and trains.

And that’s precisely why public transport is an inferior good in NYC.

It depends on how one measures poorer. Economists will look at a society with more cars per person as a good sign. I view it as a bad one if the country is already wealthy. The profligacy of Americans is obscene and makes us poorer in spirit, morality, and we pay for it with unhealthy lives. The accompanying lack of walking by Americans alone leads to a less healthy lifestyle. We also lose out on the mental benefits that walking provides. We gain a higher amount of pollution due to emissions from cars and the increased amount of resource extraction that comes with it.

Widely used public transportation is usually a sign of an efficient and well-developed economy.

When the economy is poorly developed, people have to do many things on their own, because comparable services are not available on the market for a reasonable price. A more developed economy enables a higher level of specialization. When people can buy the services they need from someone else, they can spend their time and money on higher-value activities.

The right comparison is not public transportation vs. private car, but driving your own vehicle vs. buying transportation as a service. The latter can include anything from city buses to chartered jets.

When people get rich they spend more money on private cars and less money on public transportation.

America got rich, people bought cars. That's the way it went down.

Also, the US explicitly designed new development around the idea of people owning cars. Public transportation is kind of a moot point when you just have tracts of housing completely separate from commercial areas.

All you have to do is visit Seoul or Tokyo to see how valuable and useful public transportation is, when it's done correctly and city planning takes it into account. Even if one is rich, actually driving and parking is a complete hassle most of the time in cities. It's so much more convenient to take a bus or train.

When you go from thousandaire to millionaire to billionare, your spending on busses or trains goes down. That's an inferior good.

I don't really understand why you're fixated on this one particular viewpoint. That statement does not look at -context-.

Cities are not designed around the rich or the ultra-rich. Transportation systems are not designed around the rich or the ultra-rich. If all of us had infinite money we would just use private jets or something, but that doesn't mean that jets are strictly superior to cars... this is an apples to oranges comparison.

As someone who's lived in Chicago, Seoul, and South Carolina, I can say that our public transportation systems are wholly inferior to Korea and Japan's public transportation systems. It's not strictly a matter of money or not, it's a multifaceted cultural topic.

The whole idea of ranking transportation systems by what rich people do or don't do makes absolutely zero sense.

"If all of us had infinite money we would just use private jets or something, but that doesn't mean that jets are strictly superior to cars"

That would mean cars were an inferior good over that income range.

Then you need to quantify your statement.

-> _For the ultra-rich_, trains and other public transportation are inferior options.

This is completely different from saying that public transportation is an inferior good overall. It's not that simple.

If your income goes up and you spend less on something, that's an inferior good. That's pretty much the definition of an inferior good.

Yes, in economics this is called an inferior good. This does not make public transportation a bad investment or mean that society wouldn’t be better off overall with it. We are local optimization machines and sometimes our desires are not overall beneficial to us. It is an inferior good as that phrase is used in economics but it is the right choice. Economics primarily deals with desire and ‘utility’ functions. It does not provide insight into what is best for society as a whole. Particularly since in our system negative externalities are not built into price.

>> We are local optimization machines and sometimes our desires are not overall beneficial to us.

Who decides what is beneficial for me in your opinion, me, you or the government?

Sometimes government, sometimes the individual. It’s a balancing act. My neighbor might think it’s in his best interest to dump toxic waste on his property because he needs/wants money. In this case, thankfully, government is there to look out for the benefit of society as a whole.

Classification of a good as inferior in economics is not a judgment about that particular good, it's just a historical observation about a particular income-demand curve. Let's just quote the Wikipedia article:

> Inferiority, in this sense, is an observable fact relating to affordability rather than a statement about the quality of the good. As a rule, these goods are affordable and adequately fulfill their purpose, but as more costly substitutes that offer more pleasure (or at least variety) become available, the use of the inferior goods diminishes. Direct relations can thus be drawn from inferior goods to socio-economic class. Those with constricted incomes tend to prefer inferior goods for the reason of the aforementioned observable inferiority.

Many of these goods are eschewed by the rich due to cultural / status phenomena that are constructed artificially by people trying to sell so-called luxury goods.

In the context of how to plan our cities, this has little bearing on the discussion. Should we use mechanical clocks to keep time because when people get rich they're more likely to buy watches with mechanical movements? Certainly those have emerged as a status symbol, but that's entirely constructed and could be otherwise. It's not based on any inherent superiority.

>> In the context of how to plan our cities, this has little bearing on the discussion.

I'm not sure where you get that. If public transportation is an inferior good, then to the extent we need people planning our cities those planners need to take into account that the demand for public transportation will decrease as people get wealthier.

Rich people don't ride the bus. Maybe that's OK?

You're confusing absolute and relative wealth. Sure, wealthier people in a particular metro area may be less likely to take transit than less wealthy people in that metro area. Plenty of wealthy people move to dense urban areas from car dependent suburbs and then stop driving as much.

> Rich people don't ride the bus. Maybe that's OK?

It's not practical to have a dense urban environment where everyone drives everywhere, because cars and car infrastructure take up an incredible amount of physical space. So if people want to live in those areas (and clearly many people do - they're willing to pay a premium for it), then a good percentage of people in those areas need to walk, bike, or take mass transit. If they don't, the city will shut down due to gridlock and nobody will get anywhere.

>> Plenty of wealthy people move to dense urban areas from car dependent suburbs and then stop driving as much.

And when they move there, the wealthier they are, the less likelier they are to use public transportation. Because public transportation is an inferior good.

>> (and clearly many people do - they're willing to pay a premium for it)

Not true, high density housing costs more per square foot than single family detached and sells at a discount to it. People are willing to pay a premium for single family detached housing.

You're being deliberately obtuse. People are willing to pay a premium for more space in the same dense metro area. Why are there condos worth $2MM in SF when you can buy a house in central PA for $40,000? It's because people want to live in dense urban areas with other people. Those dense urban areas are simply not workable with everyone driving everywhere. It wouldn't matter if everyone's a billionaire, you can't have a dense urban core with everyone driving. Those dense urban areas are the most expensive real estate markets in the country.

Which goes for more, the condo in SF or the single detached home in SF?

You may be interested to read the analysis of Ivan Illich (and others) on car-oriented infrastructure. Turns out cars, both for individuals and for society, are very arguably an "inferior good".

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