Au contraire, the US is so wealthy and efficient at food production that to waste food is much more efficient than to spend the manpower to allocate or recycle

Au contraire, the US is so wealthy and efficient at food production that to waste food is much more efficient than to spend the manpower to allocate or recycle it properly. (Most food waste goes into sewage and trash, which is efficient on a per worker basis.) On the other hand, the second round of China's high speed rail investments are not expected to ever pay themselves off, and so the question as how "good" HSR is in China requires considering its positive economic and environmental externalities. There is a case to be made that given the distances and ridership involved, China would have been better off building airline capacity between cities connected by HSR (which seems to be the US solution). The US certainly has a problem with decentralization making it harder to build large infrastructure, and the US path of infrastructure development has been corrupted by car companies, but I would argue the real vice of the US system is its failure to build maintainable infrastructure: roads are left to crumble quite simply because there are too many of them, serving too few people to make their maintenance affordable.