> Poland is a wrong example, it had almost 30 years on uninterrupted growth and has better infrastructure and services than the nearby Germany. Not wrong, but

> Poland is a wrong example, it had almost 30 years on uninterrupted growth and has better infrastructure and services than the nearby Germany. Not wrong, but I think that when you're growing and building things tend to be "easy(-ier)" than later on when you're maintaining. When you don't have anything it's easy to say "We need X.", but it's harder to justify to folks "We need to maintain X."—there's not as much ribbon cutting for maintenance projects: If there's no highway bridge over some chasm, building the bridge can be obvious. When there's a bridge already there spending (tens/hundreds of) millions to rehabilitate or rebuild it will get more pushback. China had little infrastructure and has built a whole bunch (e.g., high speed rail) over the last few decades: I'll be curious to see how things are in fifty or so years when they have to rebuild things.