How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World (Deb Chachra)
As with container ships, modern passenger jets are bigger and can go farther than their predecessors: an Airbus A380 holds 525 passengers and has a range of just over nine thousand miles, which means it can fly nonstop between Hong Kong and New York City. This is made possible by access to energy in the form of fossil fuels. In the case of a fully fueled A380, that means more than 250 metric tons of aviation kerosene, or somewhere north of 80,000 gallons. On a per-person, per-mile basis, though, an Airbus A380 gets better gas mileage than I do on my daily commute in a compact hatchback. A bigger plane with a longer range that carries more passengers can do so more efficiently, and when fuel is a large chunk of operating costs, that can mean more cheaply and more profitably. The cost of passenger travel fell and the global middle class continued to grow, resulting in a roughly fifteenfold increase in the number of air passengers worldwide since 1970, to about 4.5 billion passengers and something like 40 billion commercial flights in 2019.
This is the role that infrastructural systems play in my own life, and how they provide me with agency — they are a means of freeing up my time, energy, and attention. I could probably marshal the skills and resources to build out a home that mostly stands apart from at least some of these systems — off the grid, with its own water supply, a septic system, solar panels, maybe a high-efficiency stove. But then I’d have to operate and maintain these systems, and that means that I would have notably less freedom in my life, not more — in a very real way, it’d just be a higher-tech version of what my female ancestors had to do every day. I also know enough about the systems that serve my home, and the specialized skills of the people who keep them running, to know that nothing I could do myself would ever result in anywhere near the level of quality and reliability that allows me to mostly not think about them. On a day-to-day basis, my personal agency doesn’t come from money per se — it mostly comes from living in a place that’s served by high-quality infrastructural systems. But the bigger point is that access to energy and resources through shared infrastructural systems frees up not just my own life but those of everyone around me.
When a company puts something in the world that someone benefits from without paying for it directly, it’s a “positive externality”. But when corporations and their shareholders benefit from common-pool resources, everything from the natural environment to infrastructural systems built with public money, that’s often just considered to be the natural order of things - it’s what they’re for. There almost is’t a word for it, besides phrases like “public investment for economic development”. But there’s an implicit deal here, which is that at least some of the economic benefits that these systems make possible will be reinvested into these systems to keep them operational. Without corporate taxes that adequately reflect the enormous subsidies that companies receive in the form of public infrastructural systems, public investment in infrastructure becomes a massive transfer of wealth from individual taxpayers to corporations and to their investors and shareholders. This is extractive capitalism, where wealth is extracted from workers, communities, and common-pool resources and the negative impacts and externalities are left unaddressed.