It’s also pretty obvious when you walk and drive around the United States that there hasn’t been any sort of substantial investment over the past 10-20 years in infrastructure, housing and manufacturing. A lot of the assets being expensive in the US is expensive because TINA.

An alternative explanation is the US doesn’t invest in shiny new objects if the rusty old one still functions. There are many bullet trains in Spain and ghost cities in China that look nice and make great conversation, but are not actually economically viable.

To me, bullet trains and ghost cities are speculation in the most traditional sense.

"If we build a 350kph train from Los Angeles to Phoenix, people will ride it" or "If we build 30,000 slapdash condos in a modern-day Brasilia, people will want to live there" is not really that much different from "If build an app for people to sub-lease their spare kitchen cupboard space to strangers, they'll watch advertisements to gain access."

The nice thing is that tangible-world speculation has a lower downside potential, because you're actually building something that has real-world utility to anchor its value. The ghost city might have to mark down their apartments until they finally find a selling price, but it's probably not going to be zero. The bullet train can fit into a larger economic development scheme, or worst case be cut up for scrap steel. In the process, you probably created a nice long cycle of blue-collar jobs, and worst case, you exit by selling out at 25 cents on the dollar.

When they turn out the lights at a random "tech startup" for the last time, you've distilled a few million investor dollars into a few unloved snippets of code released to the dark corridors of Github, a handful of obsolete MacBooks, and ugly trade-show gift items. There's nothing left to flog to get your money back because there was nothing there of real-world value in the first place.

I feel like this could be a welcoming alternative for some more cautious money-- risk-tolerant but not completely gambling. You know you're not going to get a "call up AWS and order more severs" growth moment, but you're not going to completely lose your shirt, and if it's done with competent people, the process is slow and relatively surprise-free.

A vast majority of the bridges in my city (Pittsburgh) are rated as structurally deficient. I don't buy the narrative that Americans are simply less motivated by shining things than the rest of the world.

Economic viability is a function of cost today and profit tomorrow. Cost today depends on how much practice you had yesterday. It could be that projects in Europe and China are economically viable because the cost of civil engineering is lower than in the US since their engineers get plenty of practice and there's enough ongoing projects to justify capital investments in steel, cement, and equipment production that keep per unit costs of building materials low.

Keep telling yourself that :-). Bullet trains are the money makers of most railways in European countries.

Aren't most of cities built 15 years ago, and classified as ghost cities at the time, now inhabited ?

Wow, I did not realize M2V had dropped off a cliff like that. I'd be interested to hear if you had more thoughts on what is behind that.

I'd say it's a mix of increased savings due to near-term economic/political uncertainty, and the fact that large-scale events (conferences, sporting events) that typically bring activity are also cancelled.

While e-commerce data does show that people are indeed spending and there are some pockets of increased spending, it doesn't seem like it nearly matches pre-COVID levels. I think people do want to spend their savings, but because of public health fears there's not much to spend it on.