A Tale of Two Nations

Well There's Your Problem Episode 119 - The American Freight Railroad Industry

This (long) podcast points out various issues with the railway industry in America, notably an emphasis on "number go up", getting screwed by a lack of federal funds in the 1950s and 1960s, and tossing market share instead of trying to complete with (subsidized) trucking. A quirk here is that the "number go up" golfs, in that a lower operating ratio is better, regardless of whether the super long trains actually fit the yards, whether the modern system performs better than something devised more than a century ago, how terrible the system is for shippers, buyers, the poor saps trying to crew those trains, trivial things like safety, the public interest, etc. (but, profits!!)

The result has either been a brilliant success or comi-tragic clusterfuck, hence the "two nations" in the title, and a divergence of opinion between those in the shareholder class (wow! much rich!), or not. This can also lead to strange conversations where one side will look at America and see things going great, and another that instead sees something of a wreck. Probably the state of things is somewhere between these two extremes.

One might imagine similarities between a paperclip factory doing that one thing and a manager trying to goose that one metric.