I once found some old price catalogues (early 20c) for shoes etc. and estimated the items there are barely any cheaper today in real terms. Now obviously that's partly because we have cheaper substitutes today, so we've lost economies of scale when building things the old-fashioned way and the modern equivalent has to be made bespoke... but it's still pretty alarming given we should be ~10x richer.
But consider an example which can't be blamed on that. My city (Melbourne) has a big century-old tram network. The network used to cover the city, now it covers only the inner city because it hasn't ever been expanded. We can't expand it because it's too expensive. Why could we afford to cover the whole city a century ago when we were 10x poorer? With increasing density it should be even more affordable to build mass-transit.
Obviously people blame the latter example on declining state capacity, but I'm not sure state capacity is doing any worse than Google capacity or General Electric capacity.
But consider an example which can't be blamed on that. My city (Melbourne) has a big century-old tram network. The network used to cover the city, now it covers only the inner city because it hasn't ever been expanded. We can't expand it because it's too expensive. Why could we afford to cover the whole city a century ago when we were 10x poorer? With increasing density it should be even more affordable to build mass-transit.
Obviously people blame the latter example on declining state capacity, but I'm not sure state capacity is doing any worse than Google capacity or General Electric capacity.