4min chapter

RadicalxChange(s) cover image

Jo Guldi: Professor of Digital Humanities, Historian of Political Economy, and Author

RadicalxChange(s)

CHAPTER

The Problem With Public Infrastructure

There's a way of thinking in which there are simple forms of infrastructure like sidewalks where it's really easy for the state to invest in them. But if something is really new, like the railroads, well, then we need entrepreneurial investment because we need to keep up with the latest innovation, so therefore private investment. The classic case of this is in the American West, where you have lots of railway startups getting started and collapsing Richard White wrote a book about it called railroaded.

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