Andy G on Substack: "You are effectively agreeing with Michael. I will grant you that “ability to build a good transit system” not only correlates with but actually causes a country not to be poor. Or in the words of this discussion, the ability to build a good transit system does predict relativel…"

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Charles Fain Lehman

Apr 2

The Causal Fallacy

The Purpose of a System is What It Does

Michael LeMay

Apr 2

I don’t find all of this convincing. The ability to build a good transit system *does* predict GDP growth, and the link is state capacity to build things and enforce rules. There’s a reason that the countries that put together the state capacity to build or enforce rules are rich. There is no requirement that you can only be good at some subset of things that require state capacity. There is no trade off, there is only gain from doing the job better.

Trying to improve that capacity, and reorient…

Michael Magoon

Apr 2

What evidence is there that the “ability to build a good transit system does predict GDP growth.”

Western Europe and Japan build excellent transit system (likely the best in the world), but their economies are relatively stagnant.

mathew

Apr 3

Their stagnation has little to do with their high speed rail though, a LOTS to do with an over regulated private sector in particular labor markets.

Andy G

Apr 4

Andy’s Substack

You are effectively agreeing with Michael.

I will grant you that “ability to build a good transit system” not only correlates with but actually causes a country not to be poor. Or in the words of this discussion, the ability to build a good transit system does predict relatively decent versus relatively poor GDP *LEVEL*.

But that is very different than saying in the modern world - call it the last 50 years - the the ability to build a good transit system does predict ONGOING GDP *growth*.

California (and I am *no* fan of today’s CA governance) vs. Japan and Europe demonstrates decidedly that it does not.

Apr 4

8:23 AM