[Retric]

Pivoting away still costs the initial investment. Creating canals seemed like an obvious win being a useful technology for hundreds of years which justified extreme investments. Until suddenly rail took over in a relative blink of the eye.

Authoritarianism tends to efficiently solve the wrong problems which results in an overall inefficient system. Private actors aren’t limited to only optimizing for today. Going to collage is a great example of long term optimization as is getting a 30 year mortgage etc. The difference is simply one of scale where private actors may not optimize the global problem, but global optimization is really difficult.

[technobabbler]

Private actors optimizing for their local maximum is in and of itself a sort of inefficiency.

In any case, it doesn't have to be an either-or situation (and arguably shouldn't be). For most of the last century we were able to juggle private needs with public works, using private talent to cooperatively tackle problems of national scale.

It was only in the last 2-3 decades that we really stopped believing in the country, and the government became increasingly dysfunctional. Then the last 5-10 years we really started circling the drain. I don't know what happened. Some of it looks to me like deliberate sabotage, a concerted effort to decrease public faith in government so that deregulation can benefit the elite. Some of it just looks like sheer incompetence.

Maybe it's just the natural end of our golden age. We've hit the limits of the sort of problems our system can reliably tackle, while the nationalists are still on the upward trajectory -- for now. China is especially scary because they've managed to invent a whole new sort of capitalism hybridized with nationalism-authoritarianism. It has the hallmarks of a free market at the lower levels, but the government has the final word on any business and can nationalize/co-opt corporations whenever they want. In that way they get the benefits of private innovation and enterprise along with the ability to essentially eminent domain entire businesses and sectors at will. It's worked scarily well for them, and they are on the verge of eclipsing our model in the next few decades. The severe cost of it, of course, is measured in lives and liberties, something that West would not (and should not) accept.

But the thing is, we have no answer to that at all. We don't really even discuss it anymore as a nation. There is no national debate about public works or long-term planning from anyone except a tiny portion of the left, while the rest of the political class argue about gender and race and toilets and guns and abortions. It's almost like all the culture wars are an intentional distraction from our failing system of government and economics, where the rich keep getting richer every year -- especially during covid -- and everyone else falls further and further down the ladder. We're so fucked without some sort of forward thinking. Wish we could see some actual leadership for once...

[Retric]

> Maybe it's just the natural end of our golden age.

Alternatively, America simply lacks obvious large scale investments to make.

High speed rail seems like a winner, but is it? We have a very efficient national train network for goods and both an interstate highway system and airlines. As a practical matter HSR is unlikely to change much and is really expensive to build and maintain.

Similarly rural high speed internet is pushed as a must have, but 5G and Starlink are much cheaper solutions to the same problems. Getting wired high speed internet to central Alaska for example is extremely expensive and probably not worth it. Where to draw this line in pure economic terms probably isn’t exactly where telecom companies picked, but there wasn’t a clearly better option.

Bridges and Dams have similarly been added to all the obvious locations. Should we build X is again a really difficult choice.

[0ldskool]

I would rather have a government that tries and builds solutions that are not the most optimal rather than giving up and not doing anything. Solutions do not have to be the best all the time, just better than what exists. Constant iterative improvements over time

[technobabbler]

Healthcare? Renewables? Carbon sequestration? Cybersec? Underground power lines? Housing? Repairing existing roads & bridges? Education?

There is so much we could & should build, but we don't...

[ddingus]

Tons of work to do, I agree.

The political will to do it, fund it properly just is not there.

Many want private entities to do it, many do not and that logjam has gotten in the way of a lot.

And there are teardowns. The Post Office has been damaged for politics, for example. Private entities want more of the business and do not want to compete with the PO. Or, they want the PO to work for them at a loss or as a subsidy.

There is a reluctance to make big public investments. There should not be.

[Retric]

Those are more complicated than just building infrastructure. Take healthcare, having more hospital buildings or equipment isn’t a fix. Same with education we don’t need more school buildings. Cybersecurity is again not solved by building more servers.

Carbon sequestration is an open technical problem without any known scalable solutions.

Under grand power lines and roads run into the same issue, building more means you need to maintain more. The solution to pot holes and old bridges are to remove old bridges and roads until we can afford what’s already built.

Renewables are the only pure infrastructure problem, but we are actually building a lot of Renewables. Look at the ratio of new wind/solar vs new coal/natural gas and the grid is only going in one direction. We could spend a lot more going faster, but the end result would be the same.

[dopidopHN]

In term of infrastructure: I would be happy with roads without potholes that are large enough to damage my car, schools, and a semi resilient power grid.