On Cultures That Build
I have a heuristic. A &#x27;code smell&#x27; for social science articles, which is something like, is all of Western society explained by happenings in the USA?<p>Caveats: there&#x27;s nothing wrong with writing an American article about America. And it&#x27;s not to deny the many incredible achievements of the USA. The &#x27;smell&#x27; occurs when you read (in other articles) that inflation was invented by the Fed, or that public schooling was invented for American social cohesion. That such and such US president caused a global long-term phenomenon.<p>This article is a bit like that. Nothing wrong with focusing on what the USA should be doing, but neglects that the same powerful economic forces operate in all kinds of places - it&#x27;s hard for Australia to build, for Germany to build, for Turkey to build, for Japan to build. The author perhaps starts from the view that none of those can build great things in the first place and only the USA could be any different. And here are some nineteenth-century Tocqueville quotes to prove it. But it risks going down blind alleys.<p>How was the industrial revolution built in Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester? How was the Sydney Opera House built? The trans-Siberian railway? The Suez Canal? How was post-war Japan reconstructed? How were the expeditions of the Spanish and Dutch empires put together? The answers might be related to the author&#x27;s ponderings about the nineteenth-century American spirit, but it&#x27;s not a perfect correlation.<p>Building stuff is straightforward where there&#x27;s not much stuff already - because it&#x27;s wilderness, or everything has been bombed, or it&#x27;s something new like the Internet. And stuff can be built where there&#x27;s hardly any government, and also when the government has huge powers. Building is hardest and costliest when population density is high, when &#x27;land&#x27; (or equivalent resource) is in small parcels, and property rights are strong - but those are exactly the conditions that lots of people love to live in.<p>If societies can figure out how to build new infrastructure in cities, they can also figure out how to build super-projects. Both of those are hard problems. I agree with the article author that it requires co-operation, self-organisation, recognition of common interests and allocation of a decisive authority. But there&#x27;s no answer yet to the problem of the legitimacy of that authority in places where there are many competing and dissenting interests.