Generation is the thing where you don't even need the government to own the infrastructure. Just don't prevent anyone who wants to from building a power plant and then have the grid buy electricity from whoever supplies it at the lowest price.

It's the transmission and distribution which are the "natural monopoly" -- the government should own the utility poles -- but that's also a thing where there is a non-trivial amount of labor involved for tree trimming and storm damage etc.

Cheapest to the consumer, maybe? What's the actual financial standing of said companies? Plenty of government-owned utilities require lots of propping to cover their losses.

Agreed, and much of that private infrastructure is mismanaged as well.

The point I was making is that public or private management is not a determining factor in the competence of infrastructure management. That is the point from the GP that I was rebutting.

This is common mythology but it's a bit more complicated than that if you look at the data. Student performance is highly correlated with their parent's socio-economic status – a trend going back roughly a century in studies – and our educational system includes a wider range of students differing in both SES and, starting around that same time period, mainstreaming of many disabilities which used to get kids excluded.

That means that when you're making comparisons to either the past or other countries now, you want to compare cohort-matched groups. If your area has a bunch of poor brown kids used to leave school for jobs in the 8th grade and are now going all the way through graduation, that looks like the schools are getting worse even though the school's educational practices haven't changed and the problem you really want to solve is poverty or social mobility. This is especially true for international comparisons if you have things like tests where the population in one country going in is highly selective but broader somewhere else – everyone's acting in good faith but you still have distortion due to sampling bias.

The situation is similar: if a kid with dyslexia, ADHD, etc. in the 1960s would have been pushed out but now they're included, if you're looking at the global average it looks like test scores have gone down but if you look at subgroups of the student population you'll see that the top performers are still doing well and what changed was that another group was added.

At my son's school and some of the schools I went to as a kid, the subgroup breakdowns on stats are really stark: the kids from stable, middle-class or better groups do fine but the children of immigrants who are still working on their English skills struggle – and the lesson I've drawn is that we should have more support available for them outside of regular classes because it's such a powerful amplifier for everything else.

We are all aware that public projects can fail. However, it does not logically follow that because some public projects fail, that all public projects fail, or even that most fail. Nor does it logically follow that because some private projects succeed, that all private projects will succeed.

Your LLM mentions two examples of failed public airports. Counterpoint: ATL is the worlds busiest airport by a few different metrics, and it is publicly owned and managed. So are most (maybe all?) of the rest of the worlds busiest airports. What does that mean?

By analogy: just because a person doubles down on a misinformed take using an LLM's output as evidence, that everything they think and know is false and misinformed by LLMs is not a foregone conclusion. It would be silly for me to think that someone that uses bad arguments once, or the same bad argument repeatedly in an online thread, is always going to be wrong.

You could do us all a service if you used your chatGPT account to learn about the basics of formal logic and sound arguments instead of spamming this thread with the same response from a machine that you asked for a biased output.

OK, that didn't really do a comparison. But here are the examples that are considered better run than corporate infrastructure:

Singapore MRT (Mass Rapid Transit)

Fully government-owned and operated through Temasek holdings. Known worldwide for punctuality, efficiency, affordability, and cleanliness. Consistently outperforms privatized systems like the UK railways in reliability and customer satisfaction.

Paris Métro & RATP (France)

State-owned, with fares subsidized for accessibility. High ridership, integration with buses and trams, and affordable tickets outperform privatized systems in cost to the public.

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (USA)

The largest municipal utility in the U.S. Provides electricity and water at lower rates than surrounding private utilities (like PG&E), and is often more reliable due to public accountability.

Norway’s Energy Sector (Statkraft, state-owned hydropower)

Provides cheap, renewable electricity. Profits flow back to the public treasury instead of shareholders. Norway has among the lowest power costs in Europe.

Germany’s Municipal Waterworks

Almost all publicly owned; provide safe, affordable, and reliable water with strong reinvestment in infrastructure, outperforming privatized systems in the UK (like Thames Water, plagued by leaks and debt).

Singapore Changi Airport

State-owned and consistently ranked as the world’s best airport. Clean, efficient, profitable, and reinvests in expansion. Private-run airports often prioritize concessions and profits over passenger experience.

Dallas–Fort Worth Airport (USA)

A publicly owned joint venture between Dallas and Fort Worth. It is one of the busiest and best-managed airports in the world, consistently profitable and reinvesting in facilities.

ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation)

While not "utilities" per se, ISRO’s infrastructure (satellite launch facilities, tracking networks) is a prime example of state-run infrastructure outperforming expectations at extraordinary low cost.

Has launched satellites at a fraction of the budget of Western private and public space agencies, and even provides launch services internationally.

There are many more such examples. Public ownership tends to work best in natural monopolies (water, power grids, rail systems, airports, healthcare infrastructure), where competition doesn’t function well and the priority is universal service rather than profit.

Erh... if a public service is publically deficit financed (no debts incurred) and not for profit (lower priced) those are two positives, not negatives as your generated answer seems to suggest.

That's my mistaken read of the situation in NL then! I'd edit my comment to point this out but am unable to at this point unfortunately :(

Classic British irony.