Comment by mike_hearn
2 months ago
> Where in the US can one find the secret, cross-country high-speed rail built in the roaring twenties?!
Nowhere because the USA has an excellent internal flight and interstate highway system instead. Railways were already becoming uncompetitive by the 1920s and now live on mostly in parts of the world where they already exist, where land is at a premium.
The reason people think China will crash is that their system isn't unique, has been tried many times before and eventually always fails. That isn't circular reasoning, it's reasoning based on prior experience. China is still a communist country: we know how that story ends and why. Remember that for much of the history of the USSR people in the west were dazzled by its rapid industrialization and apparent achievements. First country to put a man in space! Many people in that era genuinely wondered if central planning was just a superior way to do things. In hindsight we can say that it wasn't: with enormous focus such economies were able to pull off heavy engineering projects at scale, but at the cost of ignoring consumer goods and with a dysfunctional economy that was brittle to its core.
End result: when Yeltsin visited NASA in the 1980s he demanded a surprise inspection of a local supermarket. NASA didn't impress him, but the 30,000+ products for sale in a mundane shop blew him away. He was shaken to his core and cried on the flight home, asking himself what they had done to Russia's poor people. The USSR collapsed just a few years later, Yeltsin became president and moved Russia in the direction of a market economy.
Warren Buffet (as Berkshire Hathaway) bought Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) for a reason - it is very profitable.
The merger of Canadian Pacific with Kansas City Southern is even larger, and is now a railway that spans North America from Vancouver to Veracruz.
The freight railway system in North America is massive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNSF_Railway
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Pacific_Kansas_City
Yes but we're not talking about freight. HSR is never used for that.
Amtrack mostly runs on freight lines. BNSF actually controls a Metra line in Chicago out of their headquarters.
> Nowhere because the USA has an excellent internal flight and interstate highway system instead
Both being impossible to decouple from fossil fuels consumption at current scale, essentially.
> End result: when Yeltsin visited NASA in the 1980s he demanded a surprise inspection of a local supermarket. NASA didn't impress him, but the 30,000+ products for sale in a mundane shop blew him away
I have no idea whether this anecdote is true, but it wouldn't be surprise me one bit for an always-drank dude who made the army shell the parliament of his own country.
Yeltsin was trying to reform the Soviet system. He was a party higher up, surely he knew what he’d find in a supermarket. He’d had a long political career by the. My guy says the supermarket tour was “staged” in the sense that he knew what he was going to find and he knew what reaction would be politically helpful for his project.
This isn’t to say the Soviet Union was, like, a good pleasant place to live. But we shouldn’t accept Soviet propaganda just because it happens to align with our priors.
He didn't according to his biographer, and it definitely wasn't staged. The bafflement of his hosts is well recorded, as were his questions and his expressions as he explored the shop, see the photo on this page:
https://www.cato.org/blog/happy-yeltsin-supermarket-day
Soviet supermarkets were drastically more impoverished at that time. No comparison.
Censorship is a problem because it affects everyone, especially the higher ups. That's why he'd got into the habit of demanding surprise inspections. As a factory manager he'd accepted that everyone was always hiding the truth from him. In systems like that there isn't any point in the hierarchy where you your boss takes you to one side and says Boris, listen, there's a vault with all our secrets and truths, let me show you. It never happens. The people at the top have to believe in the system the most of all.
> The bafflement of his hosts is well recorded, as were his questions and his expressions as he explored the shop,
This isn’t really evidence that it wasn’t staged by him though. That is, he doesn’t need to tell the host that he’s going to react strongly. He was a political operator, I’m sure he’d be happy to dupe some supermarket owner.
> Soviet supermarkets were drastically more impoverished at that time. No comparison.
> Censorship is a problem because it affects everyone, especially the higher ups. That's why he'd got into the habit of demanding surprise inspections. As a factory manager he'd accepted that everyone was always hiding the truth from him. In systems like that there isn't any point in the hierarchy where you your boss takes you to one side and says Boris, listen, there's a vault with all our secrets and truths, let me show you. It never happens. The people at the top have to believe in the system the most of all.
Sure, but this wasn’t secret information. America was broadcasting information about our wealth around the world. I guess we probably have people on this site who were in the Soviet Union during the 80’s. Maybe they can recall what they thought was going on over here.
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> Nowhere because the USA has an excellent internal flight and interstate highway system instead. Railways were already becoming uncompetitive by the 1920s and now live on mostly in parts of the world where they already exist, where land is at a premium.
The fact that railways were becoming uncompetitive in the mid-1900s is why high-speed rail was developed. The Japanese pioneered high-speed rail in the 1960s, dramatically increasing the speed that passenger trains could run. That not only made trains competitive again, but hands-down the best mode of transportation for distances of a few hundred kilometers. The result is that new high-speed rail networks are being built around the world, not just in places where rail is already prominent.
In places where high-speed rail exists, it has taken most of the market share away from short-haul flights. If you want to get from Paris to Brussels (300 km), or from Beijing to Shanghai (1200 km), you take the train. This is despite the fact that Western Europe and China have excellent highway networks (China's highway network is now superior to the US interstate system) and plenty of airports.
> China is still a communist country: we know how that story ends and why.
China is not at all like the USSR.
> NASA didn't impress him, but the 30,000+ products for sale in a mundane shop blew him away.
China has an absolutely crazy abundance of consumer products. These days, Americans turn to Ali Express to get random widgets or knick-knacks of any kind. China is the place where you can pull out your smartphone, order pretty much anything, and have it arrive by courier 15 minutes later (okay, that's a slight exaggeration, but not much of one).
People take HSR sometimes because it's heavily subsidized, especially in China. Without government intervention rail can't compete against airports and roads. China's railway is in a staggering amount of debt due to mass overbuilding of the sort that would have bankrupted any normal company in a market economy long ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/vt7jrz/a_whopping_90...
> China is not at all like the USSR ... China has an absolutely crazy abundance of consumer products
Products for export, yes. It doesn't have a particularly strong consumer economy because its model is to keep Chinese labour poor whilst building up huge foreign reserves and gutting foreign competitors. That's why Chinese consumption is still far below the US:
https://capx.co/xi-jinpings-coercion-is-destroying-his-own-e...
"private consumption accounts for just 39% of the economy – extremely low by world standards (the figure in the US is 68%). But there is no consumer confidence, with 80% of family wealth tied up in property and no meaningful social safety net."
The TGV in France makes a profit. As does the Shinkansen in Japan. Intercity routes in the UK aren't high speed but are all profitable. Rural rail lines are not profitable and commuter lines are about break-even, depending on the fares charged. E.g. the tube in London is break even as it receives no operating subsidy, but it's quite expensive compared to e.g. the Paris / Madrid / Berlin metros. If you want to lubricate congestion in your city an easy way to do it is to encourage people to take a more space efficient form of transport by subsidising this. As a business proposition it probably makes sense for the overall region in the same way that it makes sense for a factory to move stuff around on conveyer belts rather than having everyone carry stuff from one station to the next. Britain has low productivity compared to the western EU average. It is posited that one of the big reasons for this is that our infrastructure is a bit shit.
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Air travel is also heavily subsidized, and road travel even more so. One of the real reasons for the interstate highway system (not the purported reason -- defense -- that got the bill through Congress) was to break the back of the rail monopolists (and, importantly, the rail unions). The American state chose to literally invent a whole new kind of socialized transport (marketed as a form of consumer individualism) than just nationalize and upgrade the railroads like every other civilized country.
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> People take HSR sometimes because it's heavily subsidized, especially in China.
Most forms of transportation are subsidized. Good transportation infrastructure benefits the entire economy, so governments subsidize it. The fact that people can travel between cities easily and quickly facilitates business.
> China's railway is in a staggering amount of debt due to mass overbuilding
HSR is heavily utilized in China. A lot of the continued rail construction is because existing lines are butting up against capacity constraints.
> Products for export, yes.
I'm talking about products in their own shops. Chinese consumers have access to a much wider array of consumer products than Americans have.
> private consumption accounts for just 39% of the economy
Now, you're mixing completely different topics. Lower spending on consumption isn't because there aren't products on the shelves. It has to do with things like Chinese people's propensity to save, China directing more of its GDP into investment, and on the flipside, the United States' trade deficit.
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