“for example, when New York decided to build the subway in 1900: 4.7 years later, they opened 23 subway stations, and in 2019 dollars, they spent just over a billion dollars doing so. So 23 stations, just over a billion dollars”

Relative abundances and scarcities define the economic times, I would for example expect that NY 1900 would be abundant of  cheap workforce employable at very flexible terms, which I am sure it is not true today where most people works in services and with much higher protections on the job

The quote was from Patrick Collison, founder of Stripe in a chat with Tyler Cowen and Mark Zuckerberg https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/mark-zuckerberg-interviews-patrick-collison-and-tyler-cowen-on-the-nature-and-causes-of-progress-30de2e2c48f2

My opinion is just general but I think in the right direction. one has to understand what drives development and growth, and today it’s not what it was 120 years ago. In 50 times someone will muse the good old days when Mark could amass 2 billion users in 15 years while now no matter how much money you spend you might expect just 2 o 3 hunderd millions. Oh cruel times, we are so bad compared to the intenret pionners, glossing over the fact that the users will have much more protection from spam and aggressive marketing (yeah, pipedream)

gullible, unprotected users is the relative abundance of our times

link full of tunnels prices https://nypost.com/2018/08/25/why-nyc-is-priciest-city-in-the-world-for-infrastructure-projects/

I said tech people fixation with tunnels, let’s not forget that one day Musk, frustrated with the time it takes to build tunnels today, bought a boring machine and started digging a hole under his company’s parking.

Yes! Tyler Cowen on Subway Cost Desease