In 1968, Garrett Hardin wrote a paper called "The Tragedy of the Commons" [1]. Many people seem to think this term dates further back to Adam Smith or earlier it does not. Well, this became hugely influential in noeliberalism and was used as the justification for governments to sell off their assets in the 1980s and 1990s in particular, all based on this (flawed) idea that private industry was more efficient. This was the era of public-private "partnerships". What that really means was privatizing the profits and socializing the losses while guaranteeing profits.

Utilities were generally public prior to this. Now we have private equity buying up utilities because the profits are guaranteed [2]. While electricity prices are regulated, capex on infrastructure isn't so they can simply boost profits by "investing" in the network ie creating extra capacity for data centers to be sold electricity at sub-market rates.

Lots of expierments were done and empirical data analyzed on the tragedy of the commons and it never matched the theory. Ultimately, this resulted in Elinor Ostrom winning the 2009 Nobel Price for Economics for disproving it with empirical data. Yet people still quote it.

Look at the list of metro systems sorted by length [4]. They're almost all Chinese. The 4th largest is in Chengdu, which only opened in 2010. In 16 years it's now the 4th largest in the world.

Pretty much any argument you can use about how China is different will have a contradiction by counterexample. Difficult terran? Chongqing. Old cities? Beijing, Shanghai. City too large? Good one.

It's not any single factor that allows for this. It's managed at every single level. For example, China has standardized rolling stock to a handful of variants so you avoid an entire procurement process (and grift). The UK spends billions of pounds to build an otherwise completely unnecessary tunnel under the Chilterns to protect the views of something of the most expensive property in the country [5]. Not in China. Audits of the Second Avenue Subway showed a host of corruption such as so-called "ghost jobs" [6]. Beverly Hills and Santa Monica fought the LA Metro extending into their areas because it might bring in the poors.

[1]: https://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles_pdf/tragedy_of...

[2]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pe-buys-utilities-power-ai-18...

[3]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/artcarden/2019/08/07/elinor-ost...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems

[5]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/19/hs2-tunnels...

[6]: https://secondavenuesagas.com/2018/01/01/inside-times-deep-d...

This is a pretty egregious misreading of both Hardin and Ostrom, where on earth did you get this from?

Hardin did not argue that private industry was more efficient. His paper described that with an unmanaged, private, unregulated open pasture that has no property rights, individuals will exploit it until it collapses. It wasn't used used as justification for privatization, if anything it was the opposite.

Ostrom did not argue that unmanaged resources don't collapse. Instead, she showed with data a third way of organising which was more involved with self-governing, communal rules to manage shared resources without resorting to either a private corporation or government control.

Visited China recently and it's pretty astonishing what can be achieved if you just ignore the whiners, complainers, environmentalists, and local governments. NIMBYs? Get lost. Have unique local culture? Funny but no. There's a special kind of beetle living there? Tough shit. It's ugly? So is your face. Etc. This is how the West built its infrastructure back in the day - nobody consulted NIMBYs or the native Americans on railway construction - but now we're too good for this, and we reap the consequences.

I'm still on team democracy, and we'll see how long it takes before China regresses to the norm of dictatorships. Xi has already broken the term limits. Nothing suggests he won't slowly lose his grip on reality like most dictators. But for now China has its charms.

About rolling out standardized infrastructure in China: One can also see this in their high speed train stations in capitols of provinces. Manny of them look of feel the same with their 28 tracks.

> Yet people still quote it.

It's worse that this: It's being taught to pretty much every student of economics during the first few classes, Ostrom sometimes being quoted as a counterpoint but not always.

>Utilities were generally public prior to this.

Which utilities do you believe were government-funded or government-owned in the West? I will grant you most water supplies. Which other utilities?