The Great Filter (explanation for the Fermi Paradox) is real, and we're starting to hit it. Once society hit a certain level of development it had to start cutting corners to ensure continued advancement, and it's working against our advancement now. Soon advancement and corner-cutting-caused failures will balance out, and we'll be in equilibrium, able to make no progress.
What do you mean by development? Technological or political?
It is clear that the railway problem has always been a political problem of corrupt legislators, but the true political problem is basically a bunch of obese Americans who are too busy sitting in front the telly stuffing themselves with popcorn, pizza and beer to get of their arses, call, write and demonstrate outside their congressmen's offices to get they change they need. You know what - they truly NEED those changes.
That is not development. That is moral retrogression.
Political change requires commitment, focus, discipline and persistence, and these are sorely lacking in the American citizen.
Technological development. There's an alternate theory that the rate of technological change requires vastly more regulation over a much wider range of functions, meanwhile the population has vastly increased diluting the level of control that any individual has. That combination of requiring more input while diluting individual input causes apathy.
As an illustrative example, there are ~10x more words in the tax code and regulations today (~10 million) than there were in 1950 (~1 million) and about double the population. As a citizen today, I have to do ~10x as much work to understand the tax code and I have about half as much influence over it (assuming that complexity scales linearly with word count, which I somewhat doubt). Go back to 1900 and there was about 1/4 the people and the tax code was ~0.5% the length it is today.
I'm not surprised that more people are apathetic when it takes an order of magnitude more effort to get half the influence.
