[baazaa]

I once found some old price catalogues (early 20c) for shoes etc. and estimated the items there are barely any cheaper today in real terms. Now obviously that's partly because we have cheaper substitutes today, so we've lost economies of scale when building things the old-fashioned way and the modern equivalent has to be made bespoke... but it's still pretty alarming given we should be ~10x richer.

But consider an example which can't be blamed on that. My city (Melbourne) has a big century-old tram network. The network used to cover the city, now it covers only the inner city because it hasn't ever been expanded. We can't expand it because it's too expensive. Why could we afford to cover the whole city a century ago when we were 10x poorer? With increasing density it should be even more affordable to build mass-transit.

Obviously people blame the latter example on declining state capacity, but I'm not sure state capacity is doing any worse than Google capacity or General Electric capacity.

[typewithrhythm]

Melbourne specifically is cooked by the rate of growth, and declining tax revenue per capita.

When we funded the majority of the big infrastructure pushes our rate of growth was lower, and gdppc (and revenue/PC) was exploding. This generally ended with the start of big multicultural Australia policy in the late 60's.

So in comparison, the amount of infrastructure we need to build is greater per capita, as it has to try to cover the future population predictions, it needs to be done over less years as well.

Then we can get into the migration policy that's causing a decline in gdppc.

[jimnotgym]

Since the beginning of Australia as a colony it has been: more people=more labour=more production capacity=more wealth.

So did we just run out of useful things to do with people? Or did we concentrate the wealth away from the masses and blame the same immigration that created Australia in the first place?

[ViewTrick1002]

I would say it is because of the Baumol effect.

Construction is not massively more efficient today compared to a century ago, while salaries have massively increased.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

[mitthrowaway2]

I often wonder the same thing. My conclusion has been that automobile infrastructure swallowed the budget.

[baazaa]

Definitely this is what was happening mid-century (when indeed everyone else was ripping out their tram networks entirely).

But I think if you look at modern light-rail projects there really has been such insane cost-inflation it wouldn't be worth covering the city with trams even with a much bigger budget. Also because such a large fraction of the price is admin etc., it creates a bias towards more expensive infra (heavy rail) because the paperwork overhead is similar either way so you get more bang for your buck.

[andai]

What declined is will, which is a function of testosterone (down about 50% since 1970).

[disgruntledphd2]

> What declined is will, which is a function of testosterone

That's a really interesting claim. Do you have any sources that explain this further?