The New York Times recently ran a surprising (for them) article highlighting the success of the privately owned Brightline passenger railroad on the east coast of Florida. The Times contrasts the private success of Brightline with the public failures of Amtrak and California’s mostly undone proposed bullet train. Amtrak ran an operating deficit of over $700 million in 2024. The long-planned, barely-begun, pared-back California bullet train is now estimated to require over $100 billion to reach completion.
Maybe Brightline succeeds because the private sector allows entrepreneurs to use what Deirdre McCloskey calls trade-tested innovation to pursue their projects.
The private sector allows innovative dynamism.
The New York Times article is:
(Note: the online version of the article was updated April 18, 2025, and has the title “What’s So Hard About Building Trains?”)
McCloskey discusses trade-tested innovation in:
McCloskey, Deirdre N. Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital, Transformed the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2016.
I discuss innovative dynamism in:
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.