What happened to U.S. public infrastructure?
8 octor_stranger 6 8/3/2025, 1:37:13 AM
Where is the high-speed bullet train, the high-power dam, and the new skyscraper? It seems like U.S. public infrastructure peaked in the '90s and has stopped developing.
When I was a kid, I always looked up to the U.S. as a modern, first-world country. I thought they had to keep developing—but it seems like everything peaked in the '90s and 2000s and then just stopped. Now, the U.S. mostly consists of rural areas, rows of private houses, a Walmart here and there, and massive highways. That’s it. What happened?
US was ahead of the world 25 years ago, it supposed to be ahead of the world 25 years as of right now but we don't see it's the case anymore compare other country similar in size like China.
People are so individually different in values/ambitions/knowledge/skill/personality etc etc they start thinking about their own needs and run in different directions. Sooner or later what holds the group together is nothing. Philosopher Charles Taylor calls it the immanent frame but they don't teach Philosophy these days.
Things that last are Religion (shared stories that hold people together).
Religions have learnt long ago (the hard way) keeping very different types of people together for the long term, involves making them focus on something much larger than themselves.
So we still have the Vatican or Islam or Judaism or Hinduism etc that have lasted longer the Nations. Nations come and go.
Why does the Vatican survive collapse of empires, nations, world wars, plagues, internal schisms, the enlightenment, reformation, revolutions etc etc? And they have identified so many pieces. Ask ChatGPT. Ask it to talk about what Charles Taylor, Wendy Brown, Arnold Toynbee, Lynn Margulis say about longevity.
Its not about optimization and efficiency. Because the system has to survive unpredictability. More complex. More unpredictable. Something Engineers/Technologists are trained to avoid. Which is why they are all quite lost when it comes to transforming social/political systems. Priests (doesn't matter which Faith) and Politicians are trained to deal with it. Not sweep it under the carpet and pretend to be clever. The bill shows up sooner or later.
A lot of infrastructure was built in the first half of the 20th century: water, sewer, roads, dams, bridges, electricity, inner city houses, factories, etc. The New Deal programs helped with that. At one point, everything was shiny and new--100 years ago. But nothing stays that way, even if it still functions well. But how something looks is often not enough to warrant rebuilding unless there is an economic incentive to do it.
Some parts of the old infrastructure are functionally failing now and are ready for replacement or redevelopment. It has to happen; but most likely slowly, and when absolutely necessary--economically.
A big factor in infrastructure development or redevelopment is that the demographics of the country have changed. The once large and busy industrial cities of the east and midwest are no longer as populous as they once were. The factories are gone. And many people moved out of cities into suburbs. Some moved to a different part of the country where there were better work opportunities--and more sunshine. Places like Florida, Texas and the west coast have grown dramatically in population over the past 50 years. Greater LA had a population of 5 million in 1950. Now, it's 18 million. So development will likely happen where the people--and the economics--are.
Unfortunately the tax bases of the old cities are now insufficient to pay for their redevelopment. And the infrastructure in the "booming" areas is newer but mostly suburban, not urban. The ratio is something like 5:1 in spending (suburbs vs. cities).
So we aren't seeing a lot of shiny new urban skyscrapers, at least as much as before. NYC along with many other cities has a glut of commercial office space. Again, it's the suburbs along with work-from-home.
Infrastructure like trains, streetcars, etc. were once absolutely necessary to get people to/from work in industrial cities. People needed to live where the transportation was. The infrastructure served working class people--the economy depended on it. Now a large number of people either work from home or can use a car to drive to work. And they enjoy living in suburbs.
Anybody that travels in the U.S. does not want to spend 6-12 hours stuck on a train when they can fly faster or drive with flexibility. (The average distance between major metropolitan areas in the U.S. is twice that of Europe.) So domestic train travel largely vanished after the 50's once other options like jets and interstate highways became available. New train rights-of-way for high speed trains just aren't possible: the cost of land is too high for it to make sense--not to mention regulations for noise, animal habitat, etc.
The U.S. is doing better than fine economically even if there has been a major shift to service work (as opposed to factory work) as a result of technological changes and supply chain shifts to other countries. So even though we don't have trophies like bullet trains and shiny new skyscrapers, we do have a tremendous amount of economic activity--the state of Florida (23 million people) alone has the economic output of the entire country of Mexico (130 million people) or Spain (50 million people).
China and Japan, for example, have pretty skyscrapers--for now. In 50 years they won't be that shiny new anymore.