Traveling between Chicago and New York on Amtrak gives you a good indication of what a chronic shortage of investment looks like. The train crawls across the northern part of the United States, rarely exceeding sixty miles per hour, before getting stuck behind a freight train. Most of the carriages are empty for much of the journey, those who aren’t terrified of planes prefer to take domestic flights.

Some like to cast the Amtrak as the victim of inefficient state management, but the problem is far deeper than this. The US rail network used to work well — some of the trains traveled faster in the 1970s than they do today — but it has been allowed to deteriorate, like most of America’s public infrastructure. The free market logic that underpins this deterioration extends beyond public investment: the private freight trains have been given priority over the public services, which is what explains the delays.

Looking out the window, we pass one dilapidated cityscape after another. From the outskirts of Chicago, through Cleveland, Ohio, to Buffalo, New York, I pass some of the poorest places in the entire United States. This is the “Rust Belt” — the once mighty industrial center of the US manufacturing sector, now most famous for delivering President Donald Trump to victory on the back of the votes of its poorer, white former Democrats.