This problem still occurs in countries that are far more stringent in their fundraising and campaign spending regulations. While I wouldn't say that campaign fi

This problem still occurs in countries that are far more stringent in their fundraising and campaign spending regulations. While I wouldn't say that campaign finance reform is a bad thing, it doesn't really fix this problem. The US has the most money in politics per capita in the western world, and yet, given how much a company can get per dollar spent, lobbying and donations are an absolute bargain. Handing money to a politician directly is very effective, but in practice, even a lobbying group that didn't spend a dime in elections would still be worthwhile for industry groups. The dynamics of collective action don't even need government to be true: You see the same behaviors in large corporations, where departments can cause a lot of overall damage to a company by causing small inefficiencies to everyone else: Not enough to organize against. Having worked in government and in big enterprise, if anything government is better, as the lobbying and the cajoling is far more visible. The solution to the general inefficiency problem in infrastructure in other countries is, against what you would think, is to align goals empowering government vs contractors. The places where we have more inefficiencies is where we are trading not money fork work, but knowledge for expertise: The more layers of expertise we borrow, the harder a contractor is to replace, and thus the higher the final markup. There's a great study on this regarding the Madrid subway. The subway authority has a budget, and in practice it will go up if they have more ridership. It's in their very best interest to have a large, high quality network, so to keep costs down, they do most of the planning themselves, have a lot of the engineering in house, and most of what they farm out is basic construction and drilling: They'll go as far as to give different contractors different sections to drill, because different sections of tunnel are easier to handle with different techniques and machinery. It's not as if Spain doesn't have insane infrastructure inefficiencies overall, but in this case there's enough goal alignment, and enough decision making outside of the political arena, that they save an order of magnitude per kilometer and per station than the US equivalent, while typical highway construction, decided at the political level and handed to big contractors, aren't really any cheaper. In software terms, it's the difference between handing the work to a small startup that lives and dies by its runway, or handing a project to big software contractors, healthcare.gov style: The big project handed to the big contractor will very rarely work right, and it will be incredibly expensive.