Infrastrucure is Fate

Until the collapse of the Mississippi River Bridge in 2007, in all my 89 years I had not thought much about infrastructures. But the collapse of our economic system in 2008 revived that dramatic memory of collapse and heavy costs of poor attention to infrastructure needs, and made me wonder whether America’s failure to maintain appropriate infrastructures might have a lot to do with its economic collapse. So I started to look for answers to the question, ”What is infrastructure?” and how it constantly changes to satisfy Thomas Jefferson’s principle that “…laws and institutions must keep pace with the development of the human mind”. The story of infrastructures over the centuries reflects their critical connections to the unique needs of their times.
Infrastructure for Egypt’s civilization was the structure of its priesthood and the vast pyramids it built to secure the after-life of its god-king.. For the Roman republic, it was its army, the Plain of Mars where it celebrated its importance, the roads on which it moved, and the aqueducts that supplied it with water. The Eastern Empire added St. Sophia and other Christian churches.
England’s infrastructure was the Christian and military components inherited from the past and added new political mechanisms for parliamentary government in a constitutional monarchy. Further infrastructure made food production less labor-intensive, established cottage industries like weaving, factories in the cities, and financial markets. Finally came transportion and housing infrastructure for the Industrial Revolution, and the public education needed in a more complex society.
America expanded it with Vanderbilt’s railroads and giant infrastructures of steel, steam, and oil to match the vastnesses of the country. Obeying the constitutional ban on establishment of religion, the spiritual component was limited to waivers of taxation and official association (but no funding) with the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral in Washington. In the financial area, before 1837 I found that America actually had two central banks in succession, modeled on the Bank of England. After they were abolished, the Federal Reserve was the principal infrastructure in financial matters. It failed to prevent the Great Depression, which I believe was caused when most of the benefit of the increased productivity of factories went into profits rather than into consumer purchases, and was ended by massive infrastructure construction projects by Hoover and Roosevelt: the Hoover Dam, the Interstate highway system, and the Coulee Dam paid for by high marginal tax rates that continued up to 92% in the prosperous Eisenhower years.
By 2008, after three decades of deregulation of financial markets and lagging investment in high-wage infrastructure jobs, the stage was set for trouble. So when robots and computers and arcane financial manipulations were replacing - and multiplying - the productivity of hands and brains, and jobs were going overseas, the financial collapse reminded me of 1929  consumers were again losing their share of the benefits from increased productivity when investors chose technology or overseas workers instead of American workers, or debt manipulation in a market economy dominated by debt. And even American businesses that did hire workers in the auto industry but paid for health care were under a competitive disadvantage with foreign producers.
But robots and computers also could have meant the beginning of a changed social system that needed less human labor and demanded more leisure time to be supported by the productivity of technology. The logical conclusion should be new infrastructure  health care and higher public education to free American production to be competitive, generous unemployment, and retirement benefits with retraining and restructuring to create more jobs in human care and structural infrastructure repair and improvement. None of those ideas were accepted or even discussed for application to America.
Countries of Western Europe, their people perhaps transformed by the tragic legacy of a troubled past, responded to the miracles of information technology as a path to a “mature” society with that new infrastructure and the gift of more leisure time. That would mean higher unemployment and high marginal tax rates, less wealth inequality and slower growth, but also a stable economy with a proper infrastructure that was better able to withstand the impact of the global financial collapse and adjust to other demands of future change.