focusing on failures neglects the fact that even those shoddy projects build institutional knowledge. It's funny that there's one place in the US that works the exact same way, the VC/tech industry.

The wins pay for the failures ten times over. And while everyone laughs at ghost cities, with what people learned there you can build the next real city twice as fast. Effectiveness, getting things done, is more important than efficiency. In the EU and NA we now routinely need to bring military, nuclear or civil engineers out of retirement, because we've built so little that we've lost generations of knowledge.