London, Glasgow, Budapest and Paris all have metro systems that predate the New York Subway
There are multiple bridges that are still in use that predate European colonization of North America
While the oldest airport is in the US, (College Park), Hamburg, Bucharest, Bremen, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Sydney all follow very shortly after
AFAICT Skyscrapers is really the only example you give where the US canonically built the v1.0
I think that there are probably other reasons, my suspicion is primarily rent seeking
The underground in Glasgow was comprised of orange trains. They “ran like clockwork” and had the nickname “the clockwork orange”, which is where the Stanley Kubrick movie title came from. Allegedly.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_(novel)#Tit...
Never thought I'd get to know what Clockwork Orange actually means through a random comment on HN.
Before WW2 there wasn't much infrastructure to begin with, the big highways have been built after.
The metro lines from before are still there and the bridges that were built before the war have just been rebuilt in the same places (i.e. were the roads arrived and the river was narrow).
Most of the big cities also still have medieval and older city centers, and we're still using roman-era routes for roads.
There are bridges in use that predate Christianity.
US has more than 10,000 banks and credit unions. That combined with the fact that US the most "market driven" of the industrialized countries it has take a backseat approach of letting the "market" solve it
There have been attempts by the "market" e.g. wallets and lately "push to card" by VISA/MC and RTP by the The Clearing House but it has realized that the Federal Government needs to come up with a standard settlement network with specifications and a protocol that "market" i.e. private companies can build upon.
Given the timeline i.e. 2023-2024, it may be a little late since apps and companies building on top of P2C (Push to Card) and RTP (Real-time Payments ) are likely to corner substantial portion of faster 24x365 payments before FedNow is ready.
And don't forget even if it's ready on time it'll take another 2-4 years for all the Financial Institutions to connect to it
The main digital ID system was also made and is owned by the banks. The government just set legal standards for digital ID to fulfill to be legally valid, there were a few competitors (including one by a phone company), and the bank system won because everyone already had strong digital ID for internet banking.
The EU-wide international systems, however, have been pushed from above from the EU
Have there been studies about this? I'm pretty sure Adam Smith predates mass advertising, branding, modern marketing.
To put it simply, humans are creatures of habit. In a vacuum devoid of propaganda, we will still continue to repeat the habits we have developed.
Facebook or google don’t need to do any advertising to keep their audience on the platform. That pesky “g-o” you impulsively type into the address bar will do it for them!
The only saving grace for humanity is that people die, and not all of their habits get passed to the next generation.
The USA is a very strange mix of hyper-first-world and second/third-world, and a lot of it has to do with how taxes are raised and spent.
One aspect of US taxation and funding that seems wildly out of step: Primarily local funding of schools. Way to build inequality into the system!
None of these seem like very close comparisons to the US model. There isn't the same legal independence in Spain on a number of matters, from what I recall, but I'll see if I can find a source that provides a direct comparison. For starters, Spain could actually issue centralized coronavirus restrictions and has only recently devolved this to a limited degree to the autonomous communities.
A few EU countries may be more relevant, but I think the closest comparison I've found so far is with Switzerland where I currently live. However, the federalism in the US seems to involve a lot more infighting with frequent lawsuits between state and federal agencies.
That’s not true in banking though where many upgrades are software based and not so disruptive/expensive. The UK, and presumably other countries, did not start from the systems we have today - we moved from signatures to chip & pin, and from checks to bank transfers to instant bank transfers. My parents would write checks all the time when I was growing up, but I’m in my late 20s and have never written one in my life.
Solely as a side note: London has an underground system from 1863 that is still in use today. New York’s subway (the first in the nation) didn’t get going for more than forty years later.
Is that really true?
ATMs were first in Europe and Japan, BACS in the UK is older than ACH in the US.
I think this is more about lack of coordination (i.e. political reasons) than something like a natural first mover disadvantage.
German debit cards for example simply had both stripes and chip for the transition period.
1) I think US tend to think of itself as No.1 nation and makes it less likely to look at other countries doing things better and looking to follow. I think this becomes a mental limitation for many US citizens and policy makers.
2) There is too much corporate capitalism. Money in politics etc. Look at the internet system where Google tried to roll out fibre and there were regions passing laws stop competitors even going into the market. Look at the prices you pay for mobile services. For the world leading free market, there is way to much corruption where markets are restricted rather than government pushing to open established markets to new business when they become entrenched.
3) Over investment in military. US could have that budget, still be the largest military by a mile and be dropping hundreds of billions in building and repairing infrastructure.
4) Too much focus on making money vs doing things well. The desire to keep building a nation seems to be gone. same in my country of Australia. You read history from earlier in the 20th century and they had a view to get things done that would benefit a nation overall. Now its 'would a rail line really pay for itself and be cost effective' type mentality that limits visionary projects.
5) Career politicians. Like other nations I think many career politicians want to take the safe route for reelections. There is endless media criticism of these guys if something goes wrong, and big projects, things do wrong and no-one wants to hear were putting up taxes this year to pay for stuff. No idea how, but we need to filter better for people that believe in what they are doing and have a vision vs popularity based vote for me campaigning. And generally vet them for brains and ability vs I always vote for this party.
Take US healthcare. There are a lot of models for how you can deliver universal healthcare to all your country's residents. They're all different. They all have problems. They're all better than the current US situation. They're all cheaper for a start, most of them have better outcomes by some measures, often by almost all measures.
There was plenty of room for two political parties to have ideological disagreements about how to deliver universal healthcare to Americans as a result. Which examples to follow and which to reject.
But the Republicans didn't do that. They decided the hill they wanted to die on (or at least, for some of their voters to die on) was the ideological rejection of universal healthcare as a goal. They would literally tell people it can't be done, despite the fact that every comparable country already did it.
- It's primary purpose it to bill people, not to cure people. It is doing really well at this.
- The secondary purpose is to provide incredible care to the richest of people. It does pretty well at this as well. Not as good as it used to, but still probably good enough.
Pretty far down the list of priorities is to heal poor people and make sure they don't fall sick again. It is not something most people give a shit about. If they die, they hey they should have been rich instead.
It is slowly changing with the middle class that was rich enough to get good care being eroded away enough to realize no-one gives a shit about them but they have enough voting power that people have to pretend (similar situations happen all over the world, just maybe not with healthcare).
The coronavirus testing response, where the USA refused to use existing, proven, tests from Germany (or S Korea) proved this to me more than any other single event.
We have crappy old subways, airports, bridges, skyscrapers, and so on... because we built them early, versions 1.0. And they stuck around.
Other countries had the luxuries of building their versions decades later, when the technology was 2.0 and 3.0 and so on.
So the US is stuck with both old and crappier versions of a lot of stuff, but where it still doesn't make financial sense to rip them out and replace them with the newest.
Our financial system suffers from a lot of similar flaws. E.g. by the time other countries knew enough to base their credit cards on chips+PIN, the US was still stuck with a legacy installed base of stripes+signatures. Money transfers is just one more example.