How infrastructure works - Deb Chachra
I'm only partway through and this is such a brilliant book. I had to share something in particular even before I've finished.
As background: the book starts by explaining how infrastructure is something that benefits everyone. The example of water supply is used as an example: rich people could theoretically afford to have their own private water supply if they wanted, without having to benefit the poor. But it's actually beneficial to the rich people to spend even more money and build a water supply that benefits everyone. Not just because it makes their own supply perhaps a bit cheaper once it's running, but because having the people surrounding them also supplied with clean water reduces disease, which could then infect the rich people. Even from a purely selfish standpoint, infrastructure that benefits everyone is a good thing, actually.
Then it discusses the intangible benefits of infrastructure. The example here is GPS: yes, GPS is great for navigation and timing. It's difficult to quantify those things in terms of monetary benefit, but it's possible. But there are so many MORE benefits that aren't even counted: the salaries paid to people designing GPS receivers. The economic impact of more companies buying more chips to make the GPS receivers. The ships needed to move those chips around the world. It's nearly impossible to quantify fully.
And that leads on to my favourite bit so far. I'll quote it here:
When a company puts something in the world that someone benefits from without paying for 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 isn'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.
I think that puts it brilliantly. Corporations benefit hugely from the infrastructure that exists in a country, and yet it's just accepted that this is provided, with taxes seen as a cost of business to be avoided where possible with no benefit to the company.