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Well-crafted and -enforced regulations are intended to align corporate behavior with the interests of humans, but the last half century or so of privatized power, water, and telecommunications, in the U.S. and elsewhere has made clear that they are simply no match for the corrosive incentives of profit. So rather than using regulations as an arm's-length tool of corporate over-sight, essential infrastructural systems should be funded and managed as community-owned systems. If they can only be made profitable through the exploitation of consumers, then they should instead be treated as what they are, an investment in the public good. If they're only profitable because the costs of environmental, social, and other harms are externalized rather than considered and addressed, including those resulting from insufficient maintenance, then those "profits" need to go toward mitigating those harms instead of to shareholders. For all the manifold ways that public infrastructure has fallen short in the past two centuries, there is at least a trajectory toward incorporating these broader ideals. Only community-led networks, whether publicly owned or non-profit cooperatives, even have the potential to incorporate broad-based accountability, long-term thinking, and an ethos of meeting needs. And if it's possible to have a well-functioning utility provider that serves all residents equitably, that's embedded in a healthy enveronment, and still turns a profit? All the more reason for it to be public.

— How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra (Page 260)

The issues with infrastructure-for-profit become even more profound it we look toward what it will take to have functioning infrastructural systems for the next century or so. To begin with, no corporation has any interest in the well-being of our descendants twenty or fifty or a hundred years from now, even as potential customers, because the profit motive is fundamentally incompatible with long-term thinking. Investor-owned companies have no interest in creating nonmonetary benefits or positive externalities, other than incidentally, and they are incentivized to ignore negative externalities.except when legally required to address them. Profit-seeking is at odds with maintenance and reliability in the present, and it'll be incompatible with resilience and sustainability in the future.

— How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra (Page 259)

With a strictly economic viewpoint, leaving anything on the table today - any resources unextracted - is a lost opportunity. To capitalism, sustainability always looks like underutilization.

— How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra (Page 257)

...we know that making a personal decision, like deciding to leave the car at home or replace the gas furnace in our house with a heat pump, doesn't necessarily help anyone else make the sane decision, and because these are collective systems, our individual contribution is minuscule. Many of us have come to the disheartening conclusion that, no matter how great our individual sacrifice of time, money, or energy, no matter how much we radically change our own lives and homes in order to reduce our personal emissions, we can't move the needle alone.

— How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra (Page 191)

The group that controls the social norms around building infrastructural systems is very likely to be the to be the group with the power to make the decision about what systems get built and where, about who benefits from them, and who bears the costs. Dinorwig is striking for the care that was taken to mitigate its negative impact. It's a sharp contrast to the impact of the New York Power Authority plant at Niagara Falls, where the construction had already been approved and begun before the Supreme Court decided the case. Robert Moses expected to win the legal challenges over Tuscarora Nation land. He had good reason to: across the U.S. and Canada, dams and reservoirs for hydroelectricity had displaced Indigenous communities before and would continue to do so after Niagara. The cultural history and norms of those peoples were considered secondary because norms are set and decisions are made by those who hold the power to do so. In this light, intra- structural systems can be seen, above all, as physical manifestations of the same kinds of cooperation that led to the Great Enrichment. They are networks that enable an exponential growth of wealth, power, and agency, made possible by energy use and resource extraction. Seeing them this way leads to obvious questions: Wealth, power, and agency for whom? Energy and resources from where?

— How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra (Page 126)

Economic growth cannot sensibly be treated as an end in itself. Development has to be more concerned with enhancing the lives we lead and the freedoms we enjoy. Expanding the freedoms that we have reason to value not only makes our lives richer and more unfettered, but also allows us to be fuller social persons, exercising our own volitions and interacting with-and influencing-the world in which we live.

— How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra (Page 116)

It costs the U.S. government about a billion dollars a year to maintain GPS satellites and systems. In 2016, Greg Milner estimated the direct value of the global GPS market to be around $30 billion, having tripled from five years earlier. But when Milner asked for an estimate of the dollar value of the entire GPS market-the chips that are in receivers, the products and services built on top of it-an industry expert declined to answer, saying only that it was in the trillions, "meaningless for anyone but a scholar." As a scholar, I can say it does carry meaning for me, not as data but as a signal, a flashing yellow lightif the dollar estimates seem laughably, incomprehensibly high, it means that using money as a metric is, if not precisely wrong, at least desperately incomplete. Weather forecasting or satellite mapping, as services that cost a lot to provide but which then have very low incremental costs to access and use, are close to being true public goods even in the pure economic sense, since they're nearly nonrivalrous. The more they're used, the more valuable they are, in ways that go far beyond the where we are or what transportation are an even economic value of the industries built on this data. Like the industry expert, true value of these systems is literally incalculable, but it's because they enable systems and behaviors that wouldn't be possible without them, and they help us to protect the irreplaceable. Collective infra- structural systems, especially public utilities, are giant masses of positive externalities.

— How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra (Page 112)