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Comment by 4ndrewl | Hacker News Reader

"The reason is that France ‘does a good job building the things that Britain blocks: housing, infrastructure and energy supply.’"

Britain has roughly the same population as France, but France is approx 5 times the geographical area. This matters wrt building infrastructure.

[edited to make clear the France is a larger country than Britain]

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Your pronoun antecedents got confused there, but just to be clear, France is 5x larger than the UK in terms of land area.

I don't know that this really points in one direction or another. The UK might have more difficulty doing large projects due to being relatively "crowded" and having less free space, but on the other hand it might also benefit from needing to build less total mileage of road and rail, and for amenities which are mostly bound by the travel distance to them being needed in less quantity.

Fixed, thanks.

Your point about total mileage of road/rail etc is interesting though isn't that contrary to the point the OP is making - building more stuff makes you richer?

Building infrastructure that gets productively used makes you richer, if the infrastructure costs less than the productive use of it. Spending more money for the same amount of infrastructure productivity is bad. There's no magic here where, ceteris paribus, spending more money on infrastructure is itself good.

The problem Britain has had in the last 30 years is that government was scared of offending Nimbys, so nothing got built. Not power infrastructure or homes. Even new airport runways. They're such a bunch of cowards.

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