Re:The Raising of Chicago
by comrade_ogilvy on Thursday August 29, 2013 @07:00PM
(#6299185)
In times of rapid economic change, the risk of doing nothing is often far worse than a grand project that is merely less than fully successful. Chicago feared it would become a big flat toilet, for many good reasons.
When things work pretty well, it can be more difficult to allocated resources for bigger projects, I suppose.
But it so happens that government projects today are very often financial disasters, particularly when backed by bonds or tax increases. There's no law of the market that says this should happen either, but it seems to be a feature of ossified political systems.