zlacker

>>obscur+(OP)
The US is another good example of being “too rich.” For example, consider American infrastructure costs. The US spends >5x on infrastructure versus other developed countries [0]. NYC spent $2.6 billion dollars per mile to build the 1.2 mile Second Avenue Subway extension. Meanwhile, Paris spent $450M/mile [1]. A 500 mile high speed rail line connected LA and San Francisco is conservatively projected to cost $89-128 billion [2]; meanwhile, in Spain, it cost $60 billion to build 2500 miles of high speed rail [3]. It’s not just public spending that’s extreme relative to other industrialized countries; private construction is much more expensive in the US [4].

Wasteful spending on infrastructure is but one concrete example; we also see gross inefficiencies manifest in costs of American healthcare, education, defense, etc. While there are many complex factors contributing to such waste, a major underlying reason is that there’s simply so much money to go around that nobody bothered to optimize for costs, to the point that they’ve ballooned so unsustainably that the US is increasingly incapable of building anything at all.

[0] https://bettercities.substack.com/p/americas-infrastructure-...

[1] https://betweenhellandhighwater.com/2023/06/22/the-paris-met...

[2] https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2024-Draft-Bus...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/11/spains...

[4] https://archive.is/pEDpn

>>MontyC+Nk
This is just poor governance, which is a symptom of the over-centralization of political power, not of being "too rich". The people of San Francisco and LA would never shell out that kind of money (>100K for every man, woman and child in LA and San Francisco combined) to build 500 miles of rail. Only in Sacramento and D.C. can leaders become so detached from reality that they'll mindlessly drop two Apollo Programs' worth of funding on a regional rail project.

If your mayor proposed to spending $100K per citizen on a rail project, they'd be thrown out on their ear. There would likely be no more important issue on the ballot, so you could make them pay for their awful decisions. But if your US House Rep voted for such a thing, what could you do? Become a single-issue voter on a rail project in California? You have no recourse whatsoever, because the democratic feedback mechanism simply does not work effectively on a continental scale. The people cannot guide our government's policy when the entire universe of policy decisions are boiled down to an absurdly simplistic "choice" of "red or blue?". So of course we get garbage outcomes.

There are solutions to this problem (Federalism, disunion, etc), but it'll take a lot more pain before people are willing to make the necessary changes. In the sense that people are too comfortable to contemplate systemic change, perhaps we are in fact "too rich".