Articles
Long-form pieces worth returning to — not news, not summaries. Saved because they clarified something I was already thinking about.
The statistic that stayed with me: the world needs $3.7 trillion in infrastructure investment annually through 2035 to keep pace with growth, but is currently spending $2.5 trillion. That gap is not just a policy problem — it's the defining investment opportunity of the next two decades. Reading this alongside engineering literature makes clear that the constraint is rarely technical. It's financial structuring and political will.
The tension between incentive regulation and cost-of-service regulation is one I keep coming back to. Incentive regulation is elegant in theory — let the utility keep efficiency gains as profit — but it assumes the regulator can write a complete contract, which they never can. The Economist lays out this tension clearly without pretending there's a clean answer. Most infrastructure problems are like this: the engineering is the easy part.