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Addressing most of your laundry list will not result in discernible added value. We can add arbitrary effort to the GDP to make the GDP grow, but we may have al
by humanrebar 11y ago
Addressing most of your laundry list will not result in discernible added value. We can add arbitrary effort to the GDP to make the GDP grow, but we may have already seen all the benefits of that effort by the time it's measured.
The best examples you listed are infrastructure and housing. Both are valuable, assuming we build the things people actually want or need. But, again, we could build a thousand bridges to nowhere and a million new housing units in Detroit, boost our GDP, and waste money in the long run.
Senior care, education (qua education), and climate change mitigation are not obviously profitable, even in the long term. Maybe they're good, but good doesn't address the lack of wage growth for the under-four-years-of-college set.
- sophacles 11y agoI'm not sure that infrastructure projects need to be bridges to nowhere or housing in dead cities to be useful. There are plenty of infrastructure projects to be done in vibrant, growing cities/regions. Overdue road repair/maintenance, water and sewage modernization, park updates, library modernization and so on could do a lot with long-term benefits. Fiber as infrastructure has some promising potential (that is the city or county or whatnot installs and owns last mile fiber, with connection to one of several competitors for internet service).