Maybe China can invest a lot more into the technology of today because it doesn’t have old, ailing infrastructure and debt to worry about. The US’s infrastructure was the envy of the world too when everything was new.
I’m curious how China’s pre-UHV power grid investments compare to the US’s. Did China build its conventional infrastructure at prices already reduced by the global market and therefore pay much less than the US did when it was trailblazing, like China is today? How is China going to manage it’s by-then outdated infrastructure 50 years from now?
Maybe more important for “long term thinking” isn’t how can we build the coolest thing today, but how can we do a decent job of keeping pace with innovation.
China did have ailing infrastructure. Entire cities with no bathrooms, no drainage systems, no solid roads, no road stripes, messy wires for electricity delivery.
The only difference is that the govt there can do whatever they want and they decided that infrastructure is the way to go.
American politicians don't have those visions of magnificient infrastructure any more. All they want to do is play divisive politics.
By ailing infrastructure I don’t merely mean poor infrastructure. I mean infrastructure that was originally a big investment and, one would hope, initially productive. I’m curious just how messy those wires were in 1960’s China. Sounds like they weren’t a huge investment and could be scrapped when it was time to actually build something.
Maybe American politicians don’t dream of magnificent infrastructure because we don’t have a clear dream today. Five decades ago there were so many highways clearly worth paving, so many drying machines needing power. Most of the infrastructure we’d probably agree we need today (trains, renewable energy, whatever) isn’t enabaling radically new possibilities like the first highways or energy grids did, even though it’s clearly worth building. There also isn’t as much universal appeal for building Big due to the progress of environment awareness, for example. Politicians sell dreams and maybe our dream for infrastructure is too murky to give them strong footing.
>> I’m curious just how messy those wires were in 1960’s China. Sounds like they weren’t a huge investment and could be scrapped when it was time to actually build something.
During electrification of America, American cities were tiny. This vast emptiness enabled massive planned wiring of cities to hubs and power plants from great distances. China was already massively populated. The fact that they have so much electrification within 20 years is just amazing.
>> Most of the infrastructure we’d probably agree we need today (trains, renewable energy, whatever) isn’t enabaling radically new possibilities like the first highways or energy grids did, even though it’s clearly worth building
I'm not sure how you get this. Trains are a proven great enabler. Beijing to Shanghai is 4.5 hours for 800 miles. LA to SF is 5.5 hours for 400 miles. 4.5 hours without having car ownership quite literally enables people and goods to move around more rapidly, causing opportunity to meet capital and talent. I cannot describe how important this is.
Renewable energy was a chance at creating another brand new manufacturing sector. The number of electric buses in Chinese cities are just mind boggling. It creates this massive industry of manufacturing and supplying parts, research, education in universities, smarter companies. America literally hemorrhaged this in favor of supporting rich buddies in oil.
I'm sorry. Maybe its time for enough Americans to travel abroad to see how rapidly these countries have developed from their almost medieval lives only 40 years ago.
The problem is that Americans don't travel. If they did they would see that America's infrastructure doesn't compare even with Europe's. In China they're reaching an entirely new level. Cars are going to 100% electric and there are trains everywhere. While this happens, I spend a good part of my day on congested roads which reduce my productive hours, full of cars stuck on last century's technology. And politicians in America still think it is funny to support the dying oil and auto industries.
> American politicians don't have those visions of magnificient infrastructure any more. All they want to do is play divisive politics.
Pinning it on politicians is somewhat fair, but the voters share responsibility on this one. They've made it pretty clear that if there is spare money in the budget it should be directed to checks US Federal Budget social security, healthcare and the military in that order.
I suspect China's programs in those areas are not as advanced as America's. That leaves more financial room for infrastructure.
I don't think Europe's infrastructure is exactly the envy of the world. Sure, they've got a decent train network. That's because it's much more densely populated than the US.
Infrastructure in Paris or Madrid isn't much different than in New York or Boston. And infrastructure in the middle of nowhere Romania isn't that much different than infrastructure in North Dakota.
I've never been to New York and Boston, so I cannot compare.
I've been multiple times to San Francisco and Seattle though, which I still consider to be first-tier US cities and their overall infrastructure* is certainly no match for Western EU's first-tier cities.
IMHO, one area where US infrastructure is markedly superior is the financial infrastructure (availability of capital, legal system) which is on the intangible side of things.
* Roads, Rail, Power Grid, Water Grid, Fiber networks, Public transport, Schools, Hospitals, Police, Fire Departments
SF and Seattle have populations under 1 million in the city proper. London and NY are something like 8 and 9 million respectively. So I suspect population size matters (and density too).
That is itself a major issue with many American cities. There doesn't seem to be a way to force amalgamation, leaving the core city to handle more of the cost, and increasing the difficulty and overhead of regional infrastructure like public transit.
It'd be interesting to include things like how expensive it is to open a factory consuming a couple megawatts, rather than whether power lines are visible or not.
Europe's a big place, infrastructure development varies widely. Global top 10 according to the World Bank:
Germany 4.37
Japan 4.25
Sweden 4.24
Netherlands 4.21
Austria 4.18
Singapore 4.06
U. States 4.05
U. Kingdom 4.03
Switzerland 4.02
U.A.E. 4.02
China is #20, just behind Spain. I'd have to average EU, and European data to compare Europe as a whole with China and the US. (But which European nations should I include?)
I have lived in the UK, US and Sweden, and travel a lot to the Netherlands. There is an awful lot of difference in the 0.2 in those numbers. Just saying this, as it can be deceptive. Sweden’s and Netherland’s infrastructure are certainly more developed than what we see in the UK and the US.
I think that China, the US, and the EU, even though they are often compared to each other are each of them such a vast and differentiated geographical entity that often times general statements fail to hit their mark.
Like if I average the EU28 total I get 3.48 which is just below China and well below the US because there is the infrastructure of Bulgaria and Lithuania (on offence guys!) at the low end and Germany and Sweden at the high end. I am sure the infrastructure of Western China is a night-and-day difference to the coastal South and East. I imagine the US is a lot more uniform.
I was about to say something like this. I can't speak to the accuracy of these numbers, but they feel off. Every time I go to Germany, I am deeply disappointed by the quality of the roads. I know the roads aren't the only thing measured here, but it just feels off.
So the whole/average of the US infrastructure is superior to that of HongKong? Sorry, I don't buy that. Unless they are counting personal cars?
Here are a few things Hong Kong is superior: Cashless payments, extensive metro/train network, efficient/big airport, high speed internet.
New York is not even as good/efficient as Hong Kong. Now the case can be made that you make more money working in New York than in HK but the comparison is about infrastructure.
The NY subway is one of the shittiest I have tried (and it seems like it breaks often).
Actually infrastructure in Romania’s western Carpatian mountains (the “middle of nowhere”) is an excellent case study. In the mid-century, under communism, an impressive network of dams was built at huge cost. Some of them underground to withstand bombardment. Sadly I didn’t take a picture of a map of the hydro network I saw there recently but here it is low res on Street View [1]. The infrastructure today is in terrible disrepair and I believe much has been shut down as dependence on foreign electricity has grown [2].
Surely a lot of the troubles are Romania’s own fault managing the transition post communism, but I think the interesting part is how does the global market for energy, in this case, decentivize a country to maintain its own infrastructure?
Europe had the “advantage” of being carpet bombed in the mid-20th century. Planning out the infrastructure you would like to have in the absence of competing concerns and American support to do it is relatively straightforward.
I think it is easier for developing countries in general.
Japan continued its huge infrastructure build postwar but even by the 1970s (Narita airport) it was more difficult.
The next iteration of their high speed rail (SC Maglev) has been in development since the 1970s, with a test track built in 1990. It is under construction now and isn’t planned to be fully operational until 2037.
Compare that with the bullet train, which began development in 1939, construction in the 1950s, and was done in time for the Tokyo Olympics in 1964.
A trackway eats up a massive amount of land and cuts through many different county lines and property boundaries. Even the guy who planned out Market Street in San Francisco had to flee across the Golden Gate on a Ferry once large property owners got wind of his enormous boulevard cutting diagonally across the city.
No matter what you build, or when you build it, people are going to object. I think what changes is the denser your body of law, the easier it is for people to drag projects into the court room, even many different times, for many seemingly legitimate objections. Maybe you don’t stop a project legally, but you halt progress long enough that the costs go up substantially, in a labour market which is already quite expensive and unions fairly common.
If you could easily steamroll any objections, seize the property you want to use without going to court, didn’t have to face environmental concerns, didn’t have to hire unionized labor, and essentially didn’t have to answer to anybody, I imagine the CAHSR would have been built 5 years ago, ahead of time, under budget, and already planning extensions to Redding, Las Vegas and up the Golden Gate Bridge through the Sonoma Valley and up the North Coast with long term (10 year) plans to run a line from San Diego to New Orleans. Alas, we have the Rule of Law, and the Law is very thick.
By spending money on upgrading it, astonishingly. The problem with US infrastructure is very simple. Money. There’s no magic secret that everyone else has.
Except that it costs astronomically more to build advanced infrastructure in the US. Same problem with health care too. Too many people taking a cut? Structural profiteering?
I think that's partially economies of scale and experience; the US does not, as a rule, build modern infrastructure, so there's naturally going to be a learning curve when it tries.
The cost per km of the proposed California high-speed line is somewhat greater than similar lines in European countries, say, but you'd expect this, because no-one's ever built one in the US before (except for small sections of the Acela one).
US government entities borrow at lower rates than anyone else. Public debt isn't a real problem, it's a bugaboo that people raise because they don't like public services.
I guess they must not like the competition or something.
The truth of that varies wildly depending on what you think 'a real problem' is. Debt is great fun for everyone until the paying-it-back part really sets in. When governments consume resources for their own ends someone has to go without.
You probably already know the standard arguments, but to rehash government services tend not to 'compete' they tend to 'crush'. Competition is bound by the fact that all the players have to create more value than they consume, putting a floor under what companies will attempt. Governments have no such constraint, and can easily create ventures that provide more than private concerns by devoting more resources to it than a rational person would, destroying value along the way.
That is great in the micro- and woeful in the macro- because now some other more important thing is not being done.
I think the problem with comparing public to private service provision is that many public services are things nobody would ever rationally pay for privately, in the form the public sector is able to provide it.
Take libraries for example, if all the public libraries were closed, nobody would open up a new privately funded and operated for-profit library service, except perhaps for very narrow specific geographic and topical markets. It could never make money in the form the public sector is able to provide it. The same goes for many other such services.
The closest we get to private sector participation for such things is the public sector contracting out public services to private providers. The problem with that is there often isn't really a functioning efficient market for such services since there's only one buyer and very often only a few practical providers, so it can be very hit and miss if such arrangements turn out to be efficient.
Clearly it sometimes is possible for the public sector to provide services competitively with private alternatives. Nobody in Europe is clamouring to copy the dumpster fire that is the US health insurance system. Conversely SpaceX is proving that something that was always assumed to be only within the capability of a state is actually quite tractable to private initiative and commercialisation. I think in these things it pays to be flexible and watch out for inflection points.
I’m curious how China’s pre-UHV power grid investments compare to the US’s. Did China build its conventional infrastructure at prices already reduced by the global market and therefore pay much less than the US did when it was trailblazing, like China is today? How is China going to manage it’s by-then outdated infrastructure 50 years from now?
Maybe more important for “long term thinking” isn’t how can we build the coolest thing today, but how can we do a decent job of keeping pace with innovation.