A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

Infrastructure demands providence and sharing; sociopaths offer imprudence and shortsighted self-interest, and that translates to neglect. Excluding national defense, gross total infrastructure spending has been falling for some time, to about 2.5 percent of GDP, significantly less than the United States spent in the 1960s (around 4 percent) and less than what many of America’s industrialized peers spend today.3 The situation in publicly funded infrastructure is especially alarming. Larry Summers, president of Harvard and a former Treasury secretary, argued that net government investment was zero, adjusting for depreciation (roads do wear out). Zero was only the slightest exaggeration: it was, under the most generous calculations, 0.5 percent of GDP in 2014 (versus around 3 percent at its midcentury height).