Abundance

by Ezra Klein

the United States is notable for how much we spend and how little we get. It costs about $609 million to build a kilometer (about 0.6 miles) of rail here. Germany builds a kilometer of rail for $384 million. Canada gets it done for $295 million. Japan clocks in at $267 million. Portugal is the cheapest country in the database, at $96 million. All those countries build more tunnels than we do,54 perhaps because they retain the confidence to regularly try. The better you are at building infrastructure, the more ambitious you can be when imagining infrastructure to build. We looked into it, and it turns out that all those countries also have governments. So the problem cannot simply be government. Nor is the problem unions—another favored bugaboo of the right. Union density is higher in all those countries than it is in the United States.