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Comment by jcrawfordor | Hacker News Reader

Yes? The postwar economy of the 1950s was one of the most prosperous the US has ever seen. Large swaths of the population and the economy were moved pretty directly from the war machine to infrastructure and homebuilding. The scale of the nation, in terms of population, urban area, and commerce rapidly expanded in the late '40s through the '50s. Entire cities were basically born in that decade. This didn't entirely trail off until the '70s and especially in the West it is very common to see that nearly everything in terms of infrastructure was built between 1945 and 1975 or so.

The US population shows a trend of "aging out" right now due to the population boom of the mid-century... infrastructure shows the same effect much more strongly.

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Yes? The postwar economy of the 1950s was one of the most prosperous the US has ever seen.

This is simply false. US GDP per capita in the 50s was less than a third than what it is right now. Growth in the 50s was sluggish compared to the 60s, 80s or 90s. US is by any means more prosperous today than it was in the 50s, both on individual level and also as a whole.

And? The graphs show costs growing exponentially as area expands in two dimensions. A few times productivity improvements can't keep up forever, and they aren't.

Federal deficit spending and cost-disease are also things. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to think forward a decade or two.

GDP doesn't explain whether infrastructure projects are sustainable or not. You have to at least look at debt to GDP ratio.

The thing about the 50's prosperity is that it derives from the federal and international theaters: The US won the war, and it went into debt to do so, but in exchange got willing borrowers. This was the formation of the military-industrial complex Eisenhower spoke of: Infrastructure projects with military application got a lot of support from both government and business. Among these was the interstate highway system, one of the landmark projects of the 50's, and one with military application.

As a result of the new highways, municipalities all of a sudden had this form of growth driven into them through infrastructure that wasn't on their balance sheets, and a lot of pent-up demand for housing from the Depression and war years. Automobiles were ready for widespread use. All they had to do was approve more housing starts and millions of people suddenly could afford homeownership. That is the unique new thing that happened, and it can't be reflected just in GDP.

But...if the whole premise of the highway system is based on borrowing, it's a house of cards waiting to fall. People can get their homes in the 50's, become bigger consumers in the following decades...debt to GDP falls sharply as the gains of building are reaped, and then the infrastructure bill starts coming due in the late 70's. At that point debt to GDP starts climbing again, but now the emphasis is on kicking the can down the road, not on renewing national infrastructure. "No more pork barrel spending" is a mantra of the Reagan era and beyond, as is an emphasis on outsourcing and lower taxes over long-term investments in the domestic workforce. It remains easier to build new than to maintain old. And all the while the debt ratio - at the national level - is climbing and climbing. There is still a lot of federal money going to those highways. But just borrowing and kicking the can down the road ain't enough to keep them.

So Strongtowns can still be correct, if you zoom out a little!

Our GDP today is largely based on intangible services. GDP could have been (and was) lower in the past and still stronger in terms of delivering tangible infrastructure projects.

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