There Is No Business Case for Civilization
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This is the crux of the issue. Assessing the “business case” will vastly underestimate the upside and overestimate the downside of infrastructure projects. There are emergent effects that businesses never get to tap into but governments can, because they have a monopoly on being the government. It’s a scarcity mindset.
Compare with various Chinese megaprojects like the infrastructure connecting Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Macau, and Guangzhou in China.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangdong%E2%80%93Hong_Kong%...
Aside from transforming the region into an economic powerhouse (most of your electronics were probably manufactured there) better transportation makes it easier to attract talent, lowers the cost of housing, and makes a generally more productive workforce. It makes businesses possible that would otherwise not be.
How many Americans have turned down jobs in nearby cities because poor transportation options force a choice between family and work? Hell, even though San Jose and San Francisco are basically neighbors commuting from one to the other (2+ hours in traffic) is a non-starter.
Further, because the Chinese have built so many railroads, China can export their expertise to other countries. Chinese subway companies built metros in Portugal, Mexico, and Turkey.
If Western governments instead had a growth mindset for their economies I think we would see a lot more infrastructure being created because they enable network effects in which the whole is better than the sum of its parts.
Democracies are messy, but a lot less warlike. Current peace in Europe, after centuries of endless bloodshed, is nice to have. NIMBY is a bad problem for growth, but I am positive we can overcome it one day. Some places already did, by clever legislation (NZ, Israel, several cities in the US).
Even without wars, you can have autocrats making stupid economic decisions. I am not convinced that a septuagenarian apparatchik like Xi can wisely decide that software bad, manufacturing good. And yet he makes such decisions on behalf of 1,5 billion people and thus shapes the investment flows and future of the Chinese economy for decades to come, decades that he personally won't even live in.
Democracies are much nicer places to be citizens of but not particularly less warlike. And the more peaceful times in Europe isn't because of democracy it's because of US hegemony
Is it?
The US is very lightly present on the continent, as it has significantly would down its forces since the end of the Cold War. Its influence on most European affairs is mostly soft power than hard power.
If Italy and Austria wanted to duke it out over who owns South Tirol, the putative US hegemony would not prevent them from doing so, much like it didn't prevent the almost full decade of regional wars in the wake of the disintegration of Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia was basically outside the US sphere or influence, and it was a regional conflict(not of vital importance) so the actions by the US were more limited. Also that's a weird example to bring up in support of Democratic peace theory as "Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Montenegro and the Serb Autonomous Regions were all formal multiparty democracies" [1]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_between_democraci...
Within the community of formally democratic countries, countries that democratized only very recently (last 10 years of their existence or so) form a very specific sub-club. Some of those might be autocracies by other name, some others too chaotic to be even a -cracy.
It takes some time, I would say, at least three or four full election cycles with peaceful transfer of power, before a people learns to be a democracy.
It’s like 80 years, let’s not get carried away. Europe seems woefully unstable to me.
To be more direct, the ability to build infrastructure that benefits a region or the whole country is entirely orthogonal from the style of government. It’s a matter of vision and political will. The US built the interstate highway system and plenty of other infrastructure projects.
But you can optimize for the types of graft you want. Do you want them paying 20 labourers to do the work of 10? Or inserting a mountain of consultants and converting cash into PowerPoints? Or simply marking up materials and labour? I'd expect different projects attract different types of leakage.
I think it is somewhat separate from the style of government, but not entirely orthogonal. It is obviously easier to build infrastructure and to keep building it for decades and decades, if you can disregard much of the popular backlash.
The golden age of Western infrastructure building ended with people electing all sorts of NIMBY or Green-adjacent politicians who imposed a lot of bureaucratic rules on further development.
Such a thing is basically impossible either in China or in places like Saudi Arabia (cough NEOM, cough). There, you can either try to "petition the court" somehow (only works for certain people and their interests), or, in much more risky way, try to cause some unrest and hope that the authorities will back down instead of responding by crushing you.
It was similar in late stage Communist Eastern Bloc; and the comrades were rightly afraid, because the eco-movement played some role in bringing down the system.
I'm in favour of infrastructure but I think the history of Shenzhen is more market capitalism made it an economic powerhouse and then the government cranked up the infrastructure. From the Wikipedia page
>in May 1980 the Central Committee designated Shenzhen as the first SEZ in China, which was promoted by then-paramount leader Deng Xiaoping as part of China's reform and opening-up. Its objective is to be an experimental ground for the practice of market capitalism within a community guided by the ideals of socialism with Chinese characteristics.
And then the capitalism experiment worked. It benefited a lot from being near Hong Kong where people had money and skills while Shenzhen provided cheap labour and a place where Chinese entrepreneurs could go and build stuff.
In the US we already have market capitalism so there’s not much to gain there. But infrastructure is lacking. That’s the key takeaway.
Not the Apollo guidance computer, though. The D-17B Minuteman guidance computer, from 1962.[1] Long before Apollo. The USAF was for most of the 1950s and 1960s the largest purchaser of semiconductors.
Nor is NASA responsible for Velcro, Teflon, or Tang.
The Apollo Guidance Computer came out in 1966, by which time transistorized computers were a mature technology. The IBM 1401, all transistor, came out in 1959. IBM System/360 systems came out in 1964.
>...quip that SpaceX would send a human to Mars before the UK government could get a high speed train
I get what he's saying but it's kind of ironic that SpaceX is a business that's cracking away, while the government planning is a mess.
Also the British rail network was built out in a hurry during railway boom of the 1840s by private businesses.
I imagine a lot of what we call civilisation was built by businesses rather than some great bureaucrat.
In theory you can earn money and then spend it, thereby directing society towards satisfying your wishes, but the richest people in the world do not earn money to spend it. They earn money to earn even more money. There is no end goal here.
It is an existential crisis, because in a long chain S -> I1 -> ... -> In -> C, if C never happens, then In becomes meaningless, then I(n-1) becomes meaningless all the way to I0 and S. You worked for nothing.
What you did was meaningless and it served no purpose, but it is dominating the system and imposing a meaningless life on everyone else.