Matt Yglesias @ Slate: Old Infrastructure Is Hard Infrastructure:

“So the question is, what’s a mature superpower to do? It’s all well and good for China to go from poor to middle income and build a bunch of new infrastructure. But America’s infrastructure isn’t old out of perversity, it’s old because we genuinely built this stuff a long time ago. And having built it, people shaped their lives—dwellings, commerce, commuting patterns—around the presumption that it would be there. Turning it off temporarily to fix it doesn’t just carry a financial cost, it’s extremely annoying to the people who are hoping to use the infrastructure. Yet at the same time, deferring needed upkeep is very much a kind of false economy.
You can handle this dilemma better or worse and everything I know tells me we’re not handling it optimally. But a lot of comparisons between the U.S. and newly industrializing Asia, or even between the Northeast and the Sunbelt, seem to me to not adequately recognize that aging physical infrastructure poses an inherent difficulty.”