I listened to a podcast recently about a book called Abundance, and while I don’t necessarily agree with all of the author’s points, it was accurate in describing the bureaucracy of the United States and why the situation you describe happens.
The US is a very litigation-happy country, where any given public works project of significance either needs to proceed at a crawl to make sure it is utterly unimpeachable, or spend years fighting lawsuits to begin work. Cost in time results in a cost in capital, budgets balloon, and a lot of projects that are needed for the public good simply become non-starters.
Emergency powers gets around that to an extent, which is where that scenario from Japan would come into play. And when emergency powers are invoked in the US, you see similar results (another example mentioned by the author of that book), but you can’t let “emergency” be the only standard by which anything actually gets done in a reasonable amount of time.
In my home state, there has been a long ongoing project for east-west high speed rail which would make it feasible for people to work in Boston while living further away from it. It would theoretically help alleviate ballooning costs of living here around the city and provide more economic opportunity to people in the western part of the state. But everyone accepts that the project will basically never happen, because the Big Dig is still a lingering collective memory for everyone here and no one wants to go through that again. So no matter how much potential good it could do for people, it will likely never happen as long as anyone is negatively affected by it.
I listened to a podcast recently about a book called Abundance, and while I don’t necessarily agree with all of the author’s points, it was accurate in describing the bureaucracy of the United States and why the situation you describe happens.
The US is a very litigation-happy country, where any given public works project of significance either needs to proceed at a crawl to make sure it is utterly unimpeachable, or spend years fighting lawsuits to begin work. Cost in time results in a cost in capital, budgets balloon, and a lot of projects that are needed for the public good simply become non-starters.
Emergency powers gets around that to an extent, which is where that scenario from Japan would come into play. And when emergency powers are invoked in the US, you see similar results (another example mentioned by the author of that book), but you can’t let “emergency” be the only standard by which anything actually gets done in a reasonable amount of time.
In my home state, there has been a long ongoing project for east-west high speed rail which would make it feasible for people to work in Boston while living further away from it. It would theoretically help alleviate ballooning costs of living here around the city and provide more economic opportunity to people in the western part of the state. But everyone accepts that the project will basically never happen, because the Big Dig is still a lingering collective memory for everyone here and no one wants to go through that again. So no matter how much potential good it could do for people, it will likely never happen as long as anyone is negatively affected by it.
I am reminded of this blog post.
The fact that less infrastructure is needed per person (or per building) in many places compared to North America is probably a contributing factor as well, especially if we’re comparing NA to Japan.