Back in the day there were big infrastructure projects, the interstate highway system, nuclear fission reactors, USA was once a leader in rail, but now it seems USA can’t build any infrastructure at all, HDI is lowering, life expectancy is not as high as most other OECD countries. Anyone know what happened to cause this?
Mostly because of Neoliberalism, which started with Reaganomics. It’s the same here in Europe. The state can’t do anything directly. The only intervention states have is, either via public companies that have yet to be privatized, or taxes (which are slowly being removed).
For example, if you need a road fixed then the regional government has to create a public competition, for a bunch of private companies to enter against each other. The one that presents the lower cost wins, and then proceeds to fix said road. This needless bureaucracy slows down things a lot. Also, since reparations are being made by private companies, they have an incentive to do a shitty job, so that roads break down sooner (planned obsolescence).
So you see, every job that the state should do directly is being outsourced to 3rd party private interests. This creates a group of companies that need to leech of the state to survive, the more they leech the better their profits. They also have no real incentive to properly fix things. So this is why everything in the West is slowly becoming worse over time.