> Now, in 2018, people think it isn't feasible to build some train stations. And those people might be right! What happened to our ability (practically, politic

> Now, in 2018, people think it isn't feasible to build some train stations. And those people might be right! What happened to our ability (practically, politically, and financially) to get such things done? Over time and increasing population there is a evolutionary niche filling kind of process that occurs within social, political, economic, cultural and other axes/planes/spheres. After the density of these filled niches increase sufficiently over some threshold, our civilization experiences a calcification of movement across the niches. Each niche acts as a middleman to extract some portion of energy to successfully navigate across them. This takes the form of some kind of concession, trade, grant, swap, boon, promise, etc. Fill a path with enough niches that didn't use to exist before, and we experience it as "we can't get it done" because the cumulative energetic cost rises above a tolerable amount. Historically, the emergent property in most capitalist structures appears to naturally tend towards influencing government agents via the principal agent challenge to support/enforce increasingly rentier behavior over time and deviate from capitalist structures; I personally believe this is due to scaling issues (Adam Smith was not a fan of the kind of large-scale capitalism we take for granted today). This wasn't supposed to happen according to some economic schools of thought, but here we are. And niche filling, and use of our government to enforce stakeholder extraction claims, appear as another form that this behavior takes.