It’s been a while since I looked at one of the major reasons for the pervasive sense of rot about the United States: the low level of investment — investment in real things, that is, not crypto. It’s barely keeping up with the forces of decay. If you’re wondering why nothing works and everything seems to be falling apart, here are some explanations.

First a definition: investment is spending by businesses, governments, and individuals on long-lived physical assets like buildings and machinery. Gross investment is the dollar value of such spending; net investment is what remains after deducting depreciation, aka wear and tear. That’s not an easy process to put a dollar value on, but it’s all we’ve got. And besides, these are numbers the capitalist state produces to understand its economy, so why not take them seriously, even if the bourgeoisie seems unalarmed about them?

Graphed below is the average value of net public and private investment as a percentage of GDP by decade. Civilian public investment means expenditures on long-lived assets like schools and roads but excludes the military. (To anticipate a question I sometimes get: yes, prisons are in there too, but they don’t count for much; almost all the costs of maintaining the carceral state come from day-to-day operations.) Private investment consists of purchases of buildings, equipment, and intellectual property (IP) by businesses. Not shown on this first graph: residential investment, the purchase of housing by individuals, and improvements to that housing.