On infrastructure: Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett (because why not?)

 Let's take a break from the crushing doom that continues to press down upon us with most of the daily news.  Hmmm... how shall we do this?  I need some Pratchett... and a Pratchett connection.  This'll be a stretch.  Well, there's that infrastructure bill that keeps stalling out.  Ah!  Let's do Raising Steam!  Sure, why not?

OK, so here's the deal, for those who either don't know, or have forgotten.  Most of Terry Pratchett's books take place on Discworld, which is a flat world that rests on the backs of four really, really big elephants, who are standing on the back of an even bigger turtle.  What's beneath the turtle?  Don't ask.  Discworld is a conglomeration of whatever the hell Pratchett wanted to throw onto it, but the best stories usually took place in the city of Ankh-Morpork.  Raising Steam gives you a lot of the best characters, but alas, it is not really among the best books.  Still, we're doing Pratchett today so that I can mess around and ramble about infrastructure while talking about a flat world resting on the backs of four giant elephants on the back of a giant turtle.

Anyway, Raising Steam is about the introduction of steam engine trains into a mainly pre-industrialized world.  Steam engines had been invented, in a way, by theorists long ago, but nobody really used them.  A boiler blows up, and people get hurt, and these aren't exactly cautious, careful scientists, for the most part.  There are your mad scientists, but they hurt people whether or not they are trying, so caution ain't exactly a thing.  Then a country bumpkin, who is also a mathematical and engineering genius named Dick Simnel solves literally every problem in the invention of a steam engine train, and fuckin' builds one himself, from scratch.  With just a few local helpers from his small town.  With Pratchett and Discworld, you have to suspend your disbelief right atop that turtle.  Anyway, engine invented.  What now?

So the thing is, even with that train invented, it doesn't do anything without tracks.  That's... infrastructure.  Who's gonna build it?  It isn't just about building more trains.  It's about the tracks, the stations, and a fuckload of support.  But once that is built, there are economic benefits.  For everyone.

This is where Ankh-Morpork comes in.  Ankh-Morpork is ruled by "The Patrician," Havelock Vetinari, who is basically a badass, Machiavellian ruler.  He's awesome (but less so in this one).  His "get shit done" guy is the character introduced in Going Postal, and Making Money-- Moist Von Lipwig (pronounced "Lipvig," because that's the name you need to pronounce differently).  Moist was a con man who was on death row until Vetinari saved him, and dragooned him into running first the Post Office (to compete with a new, fangled communication system), and then the bank.  Vetinari sees what's going on with the train, and needs Moist to manage it.  But that's just management.  The real thing is...

Money.  Investment.  This is where Piss Harry comes in.  Piss Harry is a businessman who got very rich doing, well, waste disposal.  He wants a more respectable business.  So, he's the money man here.  He puts down the money for tracks, stations, etc., with Moist as the government overseer to get the infrastructure built.

That way, there's infrastructure, and then goods can move.  Yay for economics!

OK, so that's the important stuff.  Honestly, Moist is less fun in this book than in Going Postal and Making Money, as is Vetinari, Sam Vimes shows up, but he is way cooler when he's just a drunk in the City Watch in the earlier books, and then there's a bunch of annoying stuff about the dwarves.  Basically, they're a combination of Al Qaeda and rednecks.  They blow up some communications towers, in clear reference to 9/11, because there is a faction of isolationist, ultra-traditionalist, uber-conservative dwarves who don't like all this new multiculturalism stuff, and there's some gender stuff, which Pratchett wrote before gender became the biggest, hottest topic that Hot Topic could sell to the kids.

Economics are way more interesting, am I right, kids?

So let's talk about economics.  "Externalities."  Markets are awesome!  Communism is the stupidest thing ever, Marx was a bloodthirsty, idiotic lunatic, and capitalism is awesome!  Voluntary transactions are positive sum.  By that, I mean that if I buy an ergonomic keyboard from a store, I'm happier with the ergonomic keyboard, the store is happier with my money, and so at the end of the transaction, there is more utility in the world because of an economic transaction than if that economic transaction had not happened.  Go to school and learn to read, Alexandria!

But here's the thing.  Some economic transactions affect people who are not involved.

Suppose they charged for vaccines.  I'd pay.  Fuck yeah, I'd pay.  Why?  I'm not a moron.  And here's what would happen.  Because I pay for the vaccine, I'm happier with all 'dem little mRNA thingies floating around in my caffeine stream making me not get sick or die of COVID, whoever jabs me is happier with my money, and we're both happier, yay capitalism!  But you know what?  Everyone who interacts with me is happier too, because I'm less likely to spread COVID to them.  Now granted, that ain't a whole lot of people, hermit that I am, since mostly I just want to curl up in a quiet place with my books and my cozy mug like the dainty, little thing I am, but I still have to interact with some people.

Damn.

Anyway, all of those people with whom I must interact are made better off by me paying for that vaccine because I am less likely to spread COVID to them.  That is an externality.  Specifically, a positive externality, which occurs when someone uninvolved in an economic transaction benefits from an economic transaction.  You benefit from me getting vaccinated.

If we made people pay, fewer people would get vaccinated.  Blah-blah, intersection of supply and demand curves, but the point is that the intersection of the supply and demand curves would not reflect the utility of everyone in the US.  So, we subsidize.  The government is just payin' for this.  There are people who would make a choice not to get vaccinated because of the price point rather than batshit conspiracy theories, or just couldn't afford it, and because of the positive externalities, we subsidize.

There are also negative externalities.  A negative externality occurs when an economic transaction hurts someone uninvolved in the transaction.  Like... pollution.  Some jackass modifies his truck for "rolling coal," and the hardware store is happier with the money from the purchase, Microdick with his truck is happier being able to own the libs, and there's your positive sum, but anyone else with these things called "lungs" is hurt, and then there's environmental damage, which is negligible on the small scale, but the point is that there is a negative externality.

OK, so that's a primer on externalities and how they relate to the personal insecurities of those who "roll coal" or otherwise drive trucks when they don't live on a fucking farm.

In Raising Steam, though, you don't really have a modern government.  You have... Havelock.  None of this gets built without Piss Harry's money.  He's the guy who has to plunk down the dough.  Now, he has a ton of it, because Ankh-Morpork is filthy, so he's rich, and really, he wants a name.  A respectable name, and he's basically a mobster anyway, but the process here is about getting the rail built with private money.

And you know...  history...  um...

Yeah.  So the interstate highway system was a federal public works project, built with an understanding of some modern economics, and the economic history of the New Deal, and yadda, yadda, yadda, but the history of rail systems around the world?  Privately built, then around the world, you get nationalization, and a whole messy history, but plenty of infrastructure systems, including rail systems, were built with private money despite having positive externalities.

And of course, that has created complications.

Economically, a good with a positive externality will be underproduced.  That's... why we often subsidize such goods.  In Raising Steam, one of the things Moist had to do was go around the area and try to get land owners to grant permission for the rail to go through their land, which meant financial deals, direct with the rail, with acknowledgement that the rail itself imposed a cost!

Like, noise pollution if nothing else.  They didn't really have a sense of carbon emissions, or anything like that, but those trains are loud.  And a kid could easily get hurt playing around the tracks.  So yeah, the negative externalities had to be managed along with the positive.

All privately.

And it's a mess when the private industry has to try to do this, without something like eminent domain, to say nothing of extraneous plot points (cough cough... dwarves).

So infrastructure.  Building infrastructure, and maintaining it?  Those economic transactions have positive externalities.  So, the promotion of efficient economic outcomes would mean subsidizing them.  Ankh-Morpork didn't work that way.  Efficiency?  Not so much.  It just plodded along.  The thing is, though, there is scarcely an economic transaction that has no externalities of any kind.  Hence, it becomes a question for the political realm, which positive externalities do we subsidize, and which negative externalities do we tax or otherwise penalize?

The approaches range from defining answers around the magnitude of the externalities to the personal bugaboos of the person answering the question, which is, unfortunately, the more common method.  That way, you can do silly things, like redefine the word, "infrastructure," to include literally any spending project you want because the word has positive connotations, so fuck denotation.

Structure!  It's a thing.  Language needs to communicate, and it stops doing that when you change all of the definitions every five minutes.

Anyway, there's a ramble  This is honestly a skippable book, but at least I rambled about Pratchett instead of conspiracy theories and lunacy today.  The Moist books to read are Going Postal and Making Money.  There are a bunch of City Watch books too, but by this point, Sam was less interesting because he was too sober.  Alcohol abuse is a serious thing in the real world, and there are people and places that can help.  Students on campus?  There are resources, and this is a rare moment of me being serious.

But Sam's more interesting when he's drunk and bitter, and living the cliche.  Sorry, but as a reader, Sam Vimes sober is boring.  Don't drink to excess.  Just read about characters like Sam Vimes.  That's way healthier.

Anyway, here's some music.  John Fahey is one of my favorite musicians of all time, any genre, any style, ever.  He basically invented a style of guitar, and I swear that this entire post was not an excuse to play one of his most famous compositions, "The Last Steam Engine Train."  This one was prominently covered by Leo Kottke, but the original studio recording was on Fahey's The Dance Of Death & Other Plantation Favorites (1964), but here's a live performance of it.