Totally escapes me too. I suspect deep-seated cultural differences. America is a more contentious, less cooperative society so we add layers of complexity to mediate between all these groups of people who can't agree on even basic things. In most European countries, for example, it's very difficult to block development projects through things like environmental review lawsuits. But there is also this basic level of trust that whoever is running the project won't build a chemical refinery next to an elementary school. Nobody has that trust in the U.S.

The real question is not why the US seems to lag behind it's peers in how effective our government is. It is, how is the US able to be so much better than it's peers?

You can't compare little state sized homogenous countries in Europe to the enormous, diverse landscape of the US. Compare the US to any other country of similar population and you will see a performance standout in almost all categories.

Cherry picking European countries and comparing them to the US is like asking why Vermont, Massachusets, Connecticut, or New York are so much better off than Europe.

I'm talking about countries like the France and Germany, etc. The U.S. continues to outperform those countries but I'm not sure you can chalk it up to the effectiveness of our government. I'd chalk it up to the U.S. having a head start from WWII and the major European powers being late to adopt market economies. Since then, they've caught up. For example, the U.S. had 50% higher labor productivity per hour of work than France and Germany in the 1970s. Today, it's identical: http://piketty.blog.lemonde.fr/2017/01/09/of-productivity-in....

But again, both countries have less than a third of the US population. And no, I don't think our government gives us any special advantage. But my point is that you can't begin to compare the US to these fractionally sized countries that have the advantage of chasing off all the poor into other cheaper countries in Europe due to high cost of living.

Why are Bel-Air and Manhatten so rich? They are just doing so much better than the rest of the US. They barely have any poor! Must be their local governments and better market economies!

The middle class, and rural America have a unique mix of deep ignorance of reality, and a legitimate complaint. Legit: they have been screwed economically, the rich have by every single measure gotten astronomically more wealthy, and the middle class has at best stagnated but also has shrunk.

Deep ignorance and denial how flawed their culture is. They believe their taxes go disproportionately to cities, and the poor, and that illegal immigrants get free health care who they also subsidize. They believe gays, gay marriage, women, and non-Christians are not equal to straight white men. And they HATE that they are forced by courts and laws to treat them as equal.

They've become skeptical of democracy because it's not working in their favor. When courts were siding with them on religion in schools and part of the public discourse, meaning they get to metaphorically slap minority gays and women around, it was great for them. But as they're on the losing end of these civil rights cases, they're not liking it.

Neither the economics, nor democracy are working for them. So they're attacking the entire system, and Republican politicians are really taking advantage of that in a variation of the Nixon southern strategy:

https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-inf...

Rural folk don't seem to understand that 100 miles of distributed water and sewage, shared by not that many people, will cost a lot to maintain. Yet they get pissed that city folk are paying less for water and sewer, totally not understanding the concept of economies of scale. They have no idea that rural telephones have been subsidized by city folk for upwards of 100 years to make hundreds of miles of copper more affordable, basically neutralizing the fact they live in the boonies.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jun/19/americas-grea...

I get all that and I agree with a lot of it. But that doesn't really explain, for example, why building a subway in NYC costs 7x per km what it costs in London or Paris.

http://www.amny.com/transit/subway-construction-in-nyc-costs...

America has taken local power to an extreme. There is just no pre-emption or exception to that local power which includes numerous fiefdoms within the county, the city, the utilities, a massive complex of competing federal, state, and city regulations. And then unions. To this day, if you do a trade show in Javits and take a computer power cord and plug it into a power strip, let alone BRING YOUR OWN power strip, you will get chewed out. A worker who sees it will chew you out, tell his buddy who will chew you out, tell his boss, and he his boss, and in sequence you will have a minimum of an hour of swearing, vitriol over how you're intentionally trying to fuck them over, cost them money, take their jobs, on and on. It is one of the worst union cities I've ever experienced.

Instead of protecting a right to work concept, they protect specific tasks. So even if that task becomes obsolete, you still have to pay that union guy with that specialty to stand around doing nothing.

If it weren't for all the people you'd disenfranchise from such a process, what you'd want is a business, neighborhood, city, state delegation to create a federal law that totally preempts all state and local laws, for each major project, to cut through the red tape. shrug

Oh and middle men. There's a middle man for everything. Especially in Manhattan, it's almost not hyperbole to say the doorman has an accountant, a lawyer, and a therapist. And anybody making more money than a doorman, has two or more of each of those.

Great city. And a shit hole.

EDIT: Also, I think the 2nd Ave project is a big fat classist waste of money. The Lexington Ave/Park Ave line is not that far away, Manhattan has already a very dense subway service compared to Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn.

Kind of an aside, but the need for the 2nd Ave Subway isn't so much about having to walk a couple of blocks but that the 456 line has too many riders which leads to overcrowding and delays.