Comment by seu
11 days ago
The article is great and very informative. But I feel there's a general vibe of "privatizations are great". For example, they do mention that privatizations didn't work in Argentina (they were a total mess and the total railway went from something like 50k kilometers to two thirds of that - if) but they don't mention enough of it - or other cases - to understand which regulations and why worked the way they did. It feels too much like it's all about integrating corporations, and that's it.
S.Y. Lee wrote an excellent series on the privatization of Japan National Railways (JNR). This is part 4 of 4: https://www.substack-bahn.net/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-japans-...
If I remember correctly, the privatization of JNR was mostly political, and has little relation to the subsequent successes or failures of the railways. In other words, keeping it public would not necessarily have changed the outcome for passengers.
I'm not surprised that the article has that vibe and that you noticed it. Works in Progress, the magazine that published the article, is notorious for having a preference for market-oriented solutions, "laissez faire" policies and neoliberalism. They are open about it. Nothing wrong with that, of course.