I really wish other major powers would commit to similar projects. In my opinion, communities need larger goals to strive towards, to provide a sense of continued belonging and reinvestment for the future.
There is African Union's "Great Green Wall (for the Sahara and the Sahel)" initiative, the 8000x15km wall of trees to stop desertification of the Sahel from the Sahara.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(Africa)
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/africa-great-green-wall-...
That's how autocratic regimes can take on megaprojects without a lot of the red tape that leads to, for example, a paralytically slow rollout of Seattle light rail.
You choose your poison.
Denmark, where I live now, has the luxury of commanding massive taxes from its citizens to finance its projects, all while putting a pittance of its share to its military. Denmark is also much, much, smaller than the US so the red tape that would be apparent at the size of the US is less apparent at the size of 6 million people.
We also overspend on grotesque, predatory contracting firms, just as the US does, to finance our public projects.
Well, so does the US - which is also able to do defict-spending much more easily due to the USD's role as a global reserve currency. But as you've pointed out, a huge part of it feeds the military-industrial complex - and that's a part (but not nearly the most important part) of how it struggles to expend on public infrastructure. Also, red tape is mostly not a per-capita thing; that kind of red tape is mostly in distributed execution rather than decision-making, legislation and such.
But point taken regarding Danish overspending on predatory contractors.
China is showing that with 21st century needs, technologies, and planning that may no longer be the case.
They still get some optimization and some otherwise-impossible-projects. I'd say the jury is still out on this strategy.
A caveat I'd add is that the Chinese government is subjective to the party. China's accomplishments are significant but they tend to be secondary to the political wellbeing of the CCP.
That wellbeing is secured though the harsh and thorough quashing of dissent.
I'd criticize China but CCP's most repressive aspects seem to be finding widespread appeal here in the US.
And so does Russia, which is another effective repressive dictatorship. From my perspective, they're just exceptionally adapt at pushing their propaganda abroad.
Historically, the USA was the only one doing that, but it's no longer the only player. (To be clear, I meant spreading propaganda abroad. The USA is at least currently not a repressive dictatorship. And I doubt it will become so before I die.)
How much longer will the jury be out? Will it come back in my lifetime?
The question is whether the Chinese economy will take a similar trajectory now to the Japanese one in the late eighties and through the nineties, with a period of extreme growth followed by mostly stagnation.
It could very well be that the Chinese model is good at catch-up growth so to speak, up to the level of an advanced economy.
I agree with the op that the jury is out on this and it might go different ways.
and yet, are the citizens getting their fair share of said productivity growth? Or has it been obsorbed by the CCP, in which the wealth is then allocated to something that said citizen would not have chosen to allocate to?
People tolerate the CCP because of the clear material gains they have seen in their lives. If some strongman authoritarian stood with a megaphone on Main Street and credibly promised Americans one tenth of that gain in prosperity, they'd elect him dictator for life.
they know they won't be - people's demand continues to grow, and not just material wants, but "spiritual" wants (aka, they want more representation in the political system to make decisions). Of course, this only manifests after some material wealth threshold has been reached.
It's also why i conspiratorially believe that the CCP is deliberately ensuring chinese yuan is continuously debased, and kept artificially low. It ensures that the people's wealth in general is not high enough to reach that threshold i mentioned above.
I wanted to give China a chance, but if you don't... :)
maybe. a considerable number of chinese projects are very flashy and the planning doesn't take into account upkeep. a good example is country gardens forest city:
That's not really a sign of central planning failure, any more than, say, California City — failure, sure, but not due to what distinguishes economic central planning from capitalist diversity's self-balancing.
Socialist or Communist countries did some good projects, I saw quite a lot. Implementation, management and long term operation went bad.
Also they march people out into fields and execute them at point blank range. Worth keeping in mind.
Some of us think the US's predicament with lethal injection drugs is quite funny and bringing back firing squads would improve things.
I think the problem is that American "democracy" is frequently undemocratic. If a clear majority of voters support a project or policy, it may still be blocked through various political/legal/regulatory means.
thing is, projects run into reality. if a majority voted to build the starship enterprise today would it make sense to do it just because a majority wanted it
suppose a rare disease is only well researched in a few white families. lets say, the mennonites. curing the disease is possible, but expensive. should everyone else be forced to subsidize it? what if the markers are known and parents choose to have kids anyways even though they have the markers.
does the situation change if its sickle cell anemia?
this is a real thing. Gaucher's disease, while anyone can get it in principle, is almost entirely a disease that afflicts ashkenazim. the treatment is cerezyme, which is one of the most expensive drugs, and you must take it for life.
and you missed the comment about sickle cell (only affects west africans and people of west african descent). which is now curable, but VERY expensive to cure.
If you’re dead set on arguing about an arbitrary imaginary definition of a word, the world is your oyster. You can say sickle cell or Methuselah Syndrome or Tandy’s Malady, it’s all gravy if you can convince your mark that whatever you’re talking about is the same thing as the broad concept of healthcare.
im not the one arguing from a made up definition here. almost ANYONE would consider cancer, rare cancer, sickle cell treatments, and gauchers treatments "healthcare". its disingenuous to put those outside the bag of things called healthcare just because its inconvenient to your worldview
Now we have utopia
A good example of such a libertarian utopia would be a recent experiment in Grafton, New Hampshire. They had a real bear of a time.
https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-int...
buy a gun and bearspray, if you dont want to have bears invade your property, put a fence. If someone doesnt want to pay for that and risk it, well, I am kinda okay with that too. If someone breaks their legs and needs help to complete their bear fence, I will help them too, but if they DEMAND and insist they have a god(=government) granted right to force me to help them with their fence under the threat of imprisonment, I will not, and I will consider them criminals as they are
They have fewer bear attacks
We (Americans) absolutely built big public projects in reasonable timeframes a century ago, and we don’t now. Attributing it to the form of government seems to miss the mark.
If you cut the whole thing down at once, yeah, maybe it won't come back. But if you do a reasonable section, it comes back alright.
So, current management practices are only cut down what you need to produce lumber and other wood products and wood adjacent stuff; plus the extras that get cut and don't make it to the mill whatever.
I think the proposal is to cut more, and drop them off into deep ocean where they won't decompose much. As trees grow, they turn environmental carbon dioxide (and other inputs) into wood, but an established forest is mostly steady state in carbon dioxide... cutting it down and depositing it into the ocean is a way to keep the existing carbon dioxide as wood and turn more carbon dioxide into new wood.
I’m sure that won’t come with any unintended consequences
Logs that long ago got stuck on river bottoms on the way to mills are pretty valuable now if they're in good shape.
Maybe what is needed is a project to teach people how to think without making unforced errors.
> some elaborate supply chain would arise to provide plant seedlings at 10x the normal price
The beauty of it is, this one stone could kill many birds, even giant ones like this.
For carbon storage it would make more sense to regrow forest in places that naturally have water and soil that support forest.
American engineering around the Mississippi River is massive. As is our hydroelectric engineering, and reclamation of urban and farm land. We don’t really have a lot of fucked territory that needs to be terraformed.
Our barge use is crippled by the Jones Act, not water levels. Make it lucrative to ship by barge and the incentives will get the levels back up.
E: Like don't get me wrong, internal waterways is a geographic blessing for US, but it also always required enormous/expensive (army) engineering efforts to keep it viable for modern operations (larger barges etc). It's one of those case where terraforming/technology has outstripped natural capacity, but it's possible to augment geography to facilitate more technology, but right now augmentation efforts are not sufficient, not just to improve through put, but to maintain it, because geography can decline.
The point is with the Jones Act there isn't much value in barges. So other uses of the water are prioritised. Adding water doesn't have an ROI commensurate with alternative uses.
""" It requires that all goods transported by water between U.S. ports be carried on ships that have been constructed in the United States and that fly the U.S. flag, are owned by U.S. citizens, and are crewed by U.S. citizens and U.S. permanent residents """
I have no idea how effective today’s efforts are compared to efforts of the past. They could have solved the water problem with irrigation or are using more drought resistant trees. It could be that the green belt is going to stick around this time, if the experience is different from the Gobi experience somehow.
That makes no sense. It takes more effort to plant a tree upside down and not irrigating it than it takes to plant it the regular way and not irrigating it.
[0] https://www.bbcearth.com/news/five-ways-the-great-green-wall...
[1] https://sequoiares.org/research/posts/The-Great-Green-Wall
Monitoring (or lack of) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(Africa)#Moni...
That is amazing.
"As the Ottoman state attempted to modernize its infrastructure and army in response to outside threats, it opened itself up to a different kind of threat: that of creditors."
That's the closest thing I found related.