Comment by datsci_est_2015

Comment by datsci_est_2015 2 days ago

Ah my bad. But also, if we’re comparing buildout of infrastructure to the construction of the American Railroad system, especially in the context of lawbreaking and general immoral and unethical behavior…

Point kind of proven, yeah? One more argument for the “return to the gilded age” debates.

Edit: you’re speaking kind of authoritatively on the subject though. Care to share some figures? The AI bubble is definitely measured in trillions in 2026 USD. Was the railroad buildout trillions of dollars?

hobs 2 days ago

Depends on when you stop calculating, and how you exactly value the work

By 1900 the united states had 215 thousand miles of railroads https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-histor...

Depend on you value land mileage and work this could easily be north of 1T modern dollars.

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datsci_est_2015 2 days ago

Land value underneath railroad tracks is an interesting subject. Most land value is reasonably calculated by width * length, and maybe some airspace rights. And that makes sense to our human brains, because we can look at a parcel of land and acknowledge it might be worth $10^x for some x given inflation.
But railroads kind of fail with this because you might have a landowner who prices the edge of their parcel at $1,000,000,000,000 because they know you need that exact piece of land for your railroad, and if the railroad is super long you might run into 10 of these maniacs.
Meanwhile the vast majority of your line might be worth less than any adjacent farmland, square foot by square foot, especially if it’s rocky or unstable etc.
Having a continuous line of land for many miles also has its own intrinsic value, much more than owning any particular segment (especially as it allows you to build a railroad hah).
Anyway, suffice to say, I don’t think “land value underneath railroads from the 18th century” is something that’s easily estimated.

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tmp10423288442 2 days ago

As a percentage of GDP investments in the railroad buildout in the US was comparable or slightly higher than AI-related investments. But they are on the same order of magnitude, which says a lot about the scale of AI.

> AI infrastructure has risen by $400 billion since 2022. A notable chunk of this spending has been focused on information processing equipment, which spiked at a 39% annualized rate in the first half of 2025. Harvard economist Jason Furman commented that investment in information processing equipment & software is equivalent to only 4% of US GDP, but was responsible for 92% of GDP growth in the first half of 2025. If you exclude these categories, the US economy grew at only a 0.1% annual rate in the first half.

https://www.cadtm.org/The-AI-bubble-and-the-US-economy?utm_s...

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