> No, but another key insight is that it helps corruption very much if it's completed and delivers the promised benefits, since it means less chances for people

> No, but another key insight is that it helps corruption very much if it's completed and delivers the promised benefits, since it means less chances for people to complain, and for later investigations (e.g. by political opponents) to deduce wrongdoing... Again, a nice theory, but one that does not match reality. High-corruption projects rarely get done, or have serious flaws if they do. You can see this all over the world: from Russia’s Vostochny Cosmodrome (still not fully complete, money all embezzled) to Mexico City’s Metro Line 12 (inferior concrete saved Carlos Slim some money but killed 26 passengers). There is no accountability for the perpetrators of these failures precisely because of the corruption that enabled them in the first place, so they do not need to concern themselves with the benefits of the project. That’s why corruption fundamentally breaks the incentives for good governance. Meanwhile low-corruption countries build lots of great infrastructure. > As for the California example, this is in a place with supposedly less or no corruption Surely you can’t be serious > So, "Local/regional special interests and parasitic consultants and contractors" messing up the project is more about a huge bureaucracy and a too disjointed process, with baroque procurement laws, and decision makers who have to satisfy and yield to all kinds of interested parties along the way. What huge bureaucracy? The problem is that there is none, that all decision-making has either been passed up to politicians or down to consultants. CA HSR authority barely exists—all there is is a self-serving political board and a bunch of self-serving private consultants with virtually no one in the actual civil service technically competent to check their work. The politicians like Rod Diridon of San Jose use their positions to improperly benefit their cities (corruption) and the design-build consultants use their lack of oversight to improperly enrich themselves by making intentionally expensive design choices (also corruption). The rest of what you said about the process is correct, and is another way to say “institutionalized and legalized corruption”.