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The Megaproject Economy

anon_moxe said in #3236 1w ago:

https://www.palladiummag.com/2025/06/01/the-megaproject-economy/

Raises the question: what’s the closest human civilization has come to the megaproject economy? Pre-industrial societies had the mindset of distributing wealth to society scale projects. But they lacked industrial capabilities, so their “megaprojects” were stuff like palaces. Beautiful, but we can obviously do better. I think the closest to the industrial megaproject economy is probably the soviet union actually, with its economy oriented mostly around national goals. But they were communist, depressed the living standards of their middle class too much, and ultimately their megaprojects didn’t pan out. I think the mindset of redistributing wealth from the masses and away from entitlements, instead putting it towards national megaprojects, is pretty alien in the west, with our mass affluence and PMC. Interesting to picture what it would even look like.

Raises the question:

anon_vuci said in #3242 1w ago:

Megaprojects were practically the one thing the Soviets did right, massively right: first ICBM, first man in space, first satellite in space, first space station.

The U.S. also did megaprojects extremely well: Manhattan Project, first man on the Moon.

Modern China is also doing a version of maximum production, the government is almost explicitly intervening actively and optimizing to maximize consumer surplus rather than corporate profit. However they are still a consumerist society of course.

It seems pretty simple to move towards a megaproject economy: you need a values change among your elites so that they value the public works of megaprojects more than they value current stupid hobbyhorses like saving the climate, gold-plated pensions for every Boomer, infinite money for the Third World, and so on, and then instead of wasting all that money on windmills, Boomers, and Third Worlders, you waste it on engineers, manufacturing workers, and the young people who will work on megaprojects.

referenced by: >>3244

Megaprojects were pr

anon_lika said in #3244 1w ago:

>>3242
> The U.S. also did megaprojects extremely well: Manhattan Project, first man on the Moon.

Apollo was the last of the U.S. megaprojects, pushed by Kennedy, squeezed by Johnson's priorities, then killed under Nixon.

referenced by: >>3246

Apollo was the last

anon_vuci said in #3246 1w ago:

>>3244

What explicitly happened is that Western elites decided on a different megaproject: global race communism. The "Great Society" and "Global Development." That is where all this wasted money is going. Today, you can call this a political arrangement that cannot be changed. Back then, it was not yet a political arrangement. This shows you how intangible goals and value judgments can lead to unbelievable societal change and civilization death (or rebirth, sometimes?).

So basically we have always had a megaproject budget available to us, we've just been wasting it on a megaproject with awful negative externalities. The question is not whether we can imagine a system that spends on megaprojects as a core principle, the question is how we shift our values to value megaprojects that halfway make sense like space expansion rather than global race communism.

referenced by: >>3254 >>3255

What explicitly happ

anon_ketw said in #3253 7d ago:

You also see it in FDR-era mega projects like the roads initiative. The welfare state pre-LBJ used to be about using the public sector for the public good rather than parasitic bureaucrats trying to suck on the government teet.

You also see it in F

wakefieldkent said in #3254 5d ago:

Brilliant essay. Marko is one of the few people actually targeting our biggest problems (deindustrialisation and population decline) and coming up with Plans that may actually solve them.

>>3246
I think we can trace back in a mechanical way the root texts and ideas that served as the foundation for the squandered surplus in the post-war era. I’d be curious to hear others takes here, but to me, the critical texts were The Population Bomb and The Open Society And Its Enemies that served as the philosophical underpinning and justification for much of our deliberate deconstruction of sustainable industrial society.

Open Society is anchored by the motivation to find methods of change that also minimize violence. I think this is the seed that made our society bend towards gerontocracy. The Population Bomb planted the fatal seed that we actually have no use for surplus labor at all, it serves only as a burden and therefore requires control. “Population control” as such becomes this self fulfilling prophecy where if you focus on it as a standalone thing, you end up smothering it whereas when choosing sustainable directions (say, megaprojects) the population control takes care of itself. Population control does not need to be a standalone project, it sorts itself out when the right directions are chosen to begin with.

So if you buy my idea, and I’m still chewing on it myself, that there are a set of root ideas such as Open Society and Population Bomb and perhaps a few others that have acted as brainworms turned to egregores, then perhaps the same thing can be done to sow and reap new directions like a megaproject economy. Namely, if the correct but currently underdiscussed points that 1) the post-scarcity moment was 150 years ago, 2) we have overwhelming surplus that’s currently sitting “tied up” without direction, 3) that surplus is dwindling overtime because populations do not want to reproduce under this hyper-consumption and restrained state, and 4) we risk going into a dark age if a proper use for the surplus that also sustains populations isn’t figured out, are all delivered and planted in the heads of elites the same way the aforementioned ideas were, then maybe there’s a shot.

Planting these ideas is step 0 before any hard adjustments can be made to our system and this alone can take decades. Conveying these ideas in candid essays such as this, but also in novels, film, talks, etc. Identify the current root ideas, structure your own ideas, then evangelize them.

referenced by: >>3260

Brilliant essay. Mar

anon_fygo said in #3255 5d ago:

>>3246

> Western elites decided on a different megaproject: global race communism [...] That is where all this wasted money is going.
> The welfare state pre-LBJ used to be about using the public sector for the public good rather than parasitic bureaucrats trying to suck on the government teet.

Money diverted to "global race communism" or parasitic bureaucracy is a real issue, for sure.

But it's important to keep perspective. Neither of these are anywhere close to the main expense.

Take a look: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/2023_US_Federal_Budget_Infographic.png

By far the #1 expense is retirement, the "Social Security" and "Other" slices.
The #2 expense is healthcare, Medicare and Medicaid.
Both have ballooned in the last two decades and will continue to for the forseeable future.

Overall, a large majority of American government spending is transfer payments to Americans. Taking #1 and #2 together, the recipient demographics are similar to the population as a whole.

--

Instead, wokism and rentier bureaucracy are both symptoms of a cultural sickness. Both, in their own way, feed into the idea that we can't do great things--the former based on guilt and retribution and anti-greatness in principle, and latter because seeing enough California High Speed Rails burns people out on the idea of trying anything big and breeds cynicism.

The reality is that our problems are primarily spiritual, not fiscal.

A hundred years ago, several cities including Chicago and San Francisco were openly vying to unseat NYC as America's premier metropolis. Civic ambitions today are far smaller and more parochial--and that's for "YIMBYs" who have ambitions at all, to say nothing of the NIMBYs who'd prefer cities to shrink so there's more free parking.

A hundred years ago, megaprojects like the Hoover Dam completed on time and on budget. There was a culture of competence and speed that has been lost.

The provocative way to say it is: maybe GRC is too optimistic. Global Race Communism sounds like a grand ambition. The name evokes those early Soviet futurist art posters, the Belt and Road Initiative, and so on. What we have on our hands looks more like Peronism: a small-minded democracy of decels, each concerned with their own group's pie allocation and otherwise broadly opposed to change.

The Trump-Elon split is just the latest chapter. We have a huge deficit, continued increase in boomer entitlements, yet at the same time a massive budget cut for NASA. The left and a significant chunk of the maga base are revealed-preference unconcerned with American greatness or achieving great works, each in their own way.

--

Let me summarize my argument precisely:
1. It is true that we've lost the will and ability to execute megaprojects.
2. This is not because we've diverted funding from those to "GRC" etc. Fiscal mismanagement is a real but secondary problem caused by entitlement spending, not revolutionary wokes taking control of the pursestrings.
3. The root problem is some kind of spiritual malaise where the bulk of our society no longer has any kind of definite-optimist ambition. Woke, "GRC", and nimby decel property-tax-exempt pension-maxxing boomer gibs culture are all downstream of this loss.

referenced by: >>3260 >>3264

Money diverted to "g

anon_fygo said in #3256 5d ago:

On a more optimistic note, megaprojects are both the coalmine-canary of the problem and the most likely solution.

How do we restore definite optimism? By planning and executing great works. Do whatever it takes. "Show, don't tell."

In a few years we'll have livestreams--7 minutes delayed, due to the speed of light--of men walking on the surface of Mars. Inshallah we'll have at least one major US city building grand and inspiring projects at China speed. This will help.

The meta question remains "grand projects for what?". As discussed at length in the Unitarian thread, there is no longer any shared religion. There's no longer an open frontier on Earth. The likeliest candidate right now is a bigger better version of the Free World narrative from the cold war. The idea that the Western form of civilization is precious and worth protecting; that while China is the main adversary, our differences go deeper than mere geopolitical alignment; and that acceleration is the way to keep the free world alive.

And here, we have a nice ray of light from tech world. The main way I think Elon / Palmer Luckey Thought etc still falls short is that it's missing civic ambition. Starbase, remote gigafactories and "Irvine, California" only get you so far. At all points in history the leading civilization has produced the leading metropolis. This is a very concrete test of state capacity that the US has abdicated for 50 years now, and I am confident that there's no way out of this without restoring that and the ambition that motivates it.

referenced by: >>3260

On a more optimistic

normieanonymous said in #3257 5d ago:

The loss of megaproject building is concommitant to the broader degradation of time prefrence in Western societies owing to a myraid of spiritual, economic, demographic, and cultural factors that converge in the increased propensity to consumption rather than saving on both the personal and State level. This leads to a dearth of capital that could have otherwise been used for aesthetic, technical, scientific, or entrepreneurial projects whose profit or output is not available until far in the future. Rothbard mentions how technology sharing by Western nations is often doomed to failure due to lack of proper capital formation in recepient nations becuase all technological advancement must "flow through" a capital stock. Single mindedly pursuing technological advancement without ensuring sufficient capital formation at the societal level only leads to technological stratification in which the minimal diffusion of technical advancement only benefits those few who have the capital through which it is implemented. This is why a nation like Japan may be less technologically developed in absolute terms than the US but upon visiting everyday life has more diffused technical advancements and greater general competency in its complex systems. The revival of megaprojects can only be done through monarchy IMO, its the only way to simultaneously navigate between the scylla of high time prefrence democracy and charybdis of stagnant bureaucracy. Monarchy is the only system of government that thinks in timeframes long enough to make megaprojects seem viable, its also the only government with the incentives to view its human subjects as assets whose increased value is generated through their greater productive power. In the context of capital formation, the human subject is of greater value the more they save which adds to the aggregate capital stock and extends to possible period of production. The State can have beneficial intervention in the Market by artificially supressing consumption via pigouvan taxes, mandatory savings accounts, limiting of hedonism etc. The most surprising future might be one which our nation has space elevators and O'neill cylinders along side sumptuary laws and Bonfires of the Vanities. This is a rare point of agreement between Trad and Tech Right, that the revival and maintenance of Western Techno-capital progress can only be done by returning to the pre-modern social mores and government forms that gave rise to it. A revived Protestant work ethic harnessed by an absolute monarchy that can take our people to the stars and create wonders that generations will marvel for centuries to come.

referenced by: >>3260

The loss of megaproj

anon_vuci said in #3260 5d ago:

>>3254
Good post. The intellectual and ideological history here needs to be unraveled.

>>3255
Social security and Medicare are the communism part of global race communism. In the past, old people had a surplus of children and died at 70 in poverty. Now, old people don't even contribute the kids but still get a gold-plated pension that lasts until 95. In the meantime they vote for gibs and Third World slave labor to make the pension solvent on paper.

Revolutionary wokes took control of the pursestrings in the 1930s. Read Moldbug.

>>3256
There is a revolutionary shared religion waiting to be deduced from the starry night sky, if only some prophets would think about it rather than write dick pic software.

>>3257
It seems impossible for any kind of sustained civilizational renewal to occur under anything resembling current liberal democracy.

Good post. The intel

anon_lika said in #3264 5d ago:

>>3255

You're treating GRC as something different from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. But the anon you were responding to (>3246) called out the Great Society, so I'm pretty sure he was including those programs in GRC. Granted, those programs aren't race-slanted, so the "R" part of GRC is off-target, but the "C" applies well enough.

We should probably be more precise and neutral, and just say "welfare state programs," but I think the core claim that this was what was substituted for a higher megaproject in the mid 1960's is clear enough.

referenced by: >>3271

You're treating GRC

anon_vuci said in #3271 4d ago:

>>3264
As a matter of historical fact, the communism part came first, then later the race part was added, and then the global part was added.

As a matter of histo

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