For a long time our culture seemed to produce honest people doing work for an honest wage. They would be reluctant to "charge more than it's worth". There was a

For a long time our culture seemed to produce honest people doing work for an honest wage. They would be reluctant to "charge more than it's worth". There was an element of honor to it, and avoiding the shameful act of gouging your customer. If something takes 2 days to do, and it costs you $30/day to live, then you charge, say $120 - you're not only living, but also you're saving for a rainy day. It's a good thing. Cynical market manipulation has soaked into real world work at every level both public and private. Sociopaths with the balls to ask 10x or 100x the traditional, cost based price have succeeded totally, and have lured workers with 2x or 5x wages, essentially starving any potentially honest competition. It stuffs all the good workers into a profit-maximizing corporation that now has a lot of other priorities that often conflict with "an honest days work for honest pay". The city politicians and admins responsible for actually spending the peoples money are often unable and/or unwilling to actually take responsibility for the projects. Partly this is the moral hazard of spending other people's money; but partly it's passing the buck, not wanting to take on any risk associated with real project execution. The public's awareness is dim and short-lived, so the upside of project success isn't worth the risk. So you hire a firm to hire the firm to do the project, and you have plenty of scapegoats if things go sideways. I don't think successful projects can just happen. You need individuals, visibly, identifiably, running projects, and building reputations. I think it's wrong for a small town's admins to throw money at a big corp to do an infrastructure project, and pay themselves 6-figure salaries to "oversee" it for 10 years, "darn those overruns!" In fact, I think it would be great if infra project competence was second only to running a self-restrained police force as a topic of city elections (the distant third being capability in running other city services well). But from what I've seen American voters only show up if they have strong emotions, and don't know anything about government or the people running to rule them. So, this is what you get.