Infrastructure Fantasy
Yesterday, as we rode through the countryside north of Barcelona up into the Pyrenees Mountain area, it was hard to miss how lovely it all was. Yes, the weather was perfect, which for a motorcycle tour is paramount, but there was also the issue of the roads. The first half of the journey sort of went from urban to industrial (I didn’t really see so much of what we think of as suburban, but I saw lots of commercial buildings that seemed to be productively engaged in making the Spanish economy tick). I doubt Kaz picked a route to highlight the Chamber of Commerce favorite hits, so I tend to think the area was just typical Spanish work-a-day zones. They reminded me of my 2014 visit to China when I was chasing down EB-5 immigration financing money and saw the same sorts of industrial and commercial areas of China. The scale in China was much larger than here in Catalonia, but the look is very similarly efficient and relatively modern, not so much in a design sense, but in a very pragmatic and practical sense. I remember being unexpectedly impressed by what I thought would be a thin veneer of infrastructure in China that turned out to be a solid infrastructure base with plenty of apparent construction quality underlying it. I get the same feeling here in Spain, a country just above the “Fucked” level of EU members when it comes to the overall numerical fiscal measures.
I remember our trip to Greece in 2017 when we crossed the Charilaos Trikoupis Bridge (the longest multi-span cable-stayed bridge) that connects the Peloponnesus to the mainland on the western side of the area. We then drove on a beautiful private toll highway and marveled at how a country that was so deep in the financial hole could have such great infrastructure. The answer, of course was that they are part of the EU and thus get the support they need for infrastructure from their big brother in Berlin. When you stop and think that Germany was the ultimate European bad boy only eighty years ago, it’s amazing both how economically strong they have become and how much good they have done and continue to do for their European neighbors like Greece and Spain.
I was a naysayer about the Euro when it launched in 1999, figuring that the divisiveness and national pride among the EU members would prevent any lasting cooperation or success. With the Euro recently sinking to parity or below, I suppose I could claim some degree of righteousness in that stand, but I actually think I was more wrong than right. The EU has more or less held together and become a global player of some strength and, more to the point, done a good job of using collectivism in the infrastructure space as well as the general economic support of its weaker members. At this point I have to declare the EU and Euro experiments a success albeit not an overwhelming success since they still rely heavily on outside resources, especially in the energy sector. But what I have come to appreciate about Europe in this new age is that they have done, in my opinion, a far better job of creating a broad middle class and a prosperous society than we have over that same period in the U.S. Granted, we were higher up on that standard pole to start with, but that is no excuse for letting the place fall apart the way we have both in terms of infrastructure and, in many ways, public tech buildout in areas like cell service and broadband.
I am always amazed in coming to Europe as to how advance the technology is compared to the U.S. As an example, we were in Andorra today. This little country of 77,000 has a GDP of a mere $3.2 billion, a fraction of the size of the U.S. and its economy and yet, when we crossed the street there were imbedded red or green lights in the sidewalk to make pedestrians more aware of when to cross and thereby improve public safety. That’s typical of life in Europe, the proverbial “Old Country”, that is actually much more advanced and providing a better lifestyle to a greater number of its inhabitants than the U.S currently. This is not my imagination. The UN produces a Sustainable Development Index and Ranking with Sustainable Development defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. That strikes me as a pretty good standard for measuring advancement of a country. I would bet that in my youth (there were no SDG standards back then), the U.S. would have topped the list. Today, we sit at #41, with literally EVERY EU member scoring above us (even Ukraine sits at #37). In fact, we rank just below Cuba and above Bulgaria. That seems pretty disgraceful to me as an American. What happened? Was this some plot by the liberal democracy crowd? Actually, if you define the FDR era as beginning that push, you realize that it was that governance rubric that pushed us to what I suspect was the top of that chart and it has more likely been the post-Reagan supply-side, trickle-down economics that have led to the demise of our sustainable development to such an extreme level. That period may have helped a select few to accumulate massive wealth, but the collective wealth of the nation has simply not done so well.
The easiest place to see this is in infrastructure, but the wealth distribution statistics show it as well. Our national population simply doesn’t have the benefit of the superior lifestyle that Europeans with their more consistent continuation of the liberal democratic regimes have been able to create for their people.
This trip is doing a fine job of highlighting this once again for me. The roads we are riding through the Pyrenees are simply superb. They are far better than almost any roads we ride on in the U.S. The result is that this is not only a more pleasant lifestyle arrangement here in Europe than in most parts of the U.S., but I suspect it will start to show up gradually in the economic growth numbers relative to the U.S. It makes me want to shake some sense into my conservative Republican friends who worry more about their own pockets and lower tax bills than thinking long term about the health of our nation. It is hilarious to me that the war cry of that team is Make America Great Again. They really don’t get it. America was great and what made it less so was the Reagan-initiated economic program which has denuded collectivism in favor of wealth creation. There was a time when good businessmen insisted on good infrastructure and were willing to pay higher taxes to get it (oh yeah, it was during the Eisenhower years when marginal taxes were the highest on wealthy people and those funds were used to do things like build the interstate highway system). Smart businessmen know that they need such infrastructure to do good business and they know that they need a consumer-fueled economy to create both happy employees and more buyers for their products and services. Today’s conservatives have been blinded by greed and are in the process of cutting off their own noses to spite their faces.
As I ride through this magnificent countryside I am thrilled to be able to enjoy what the EU has wrought and saddened that the U.S. infrastructure cannot hold a candle to it. MLK might have had a dream, but I have a fantasy, an infrastructure fantasy.