Americans are terrible at building transit infrastructure. They struggle to build basic metro extensions for the New York subway. California is still struggling to build high speed rail. Any infrastructure project is always extraordinarily expensive and slow.
Americans are terrible at urbanism. Their road design is a disaster.
American struggle at manufacturing. Their cars simply aren’t reliable. They are a joke. They struggle to make computer chips. Intel is failing. Both Biden and Trump asked TSMC to come to the US
Yet americans are exceptionally good at software
Why?
Infrastructure is a domestic problem. Software is global.
From what I understand, the US had poor transit infrastructure because of a combination of having most of the population scattered across a few metropolitan areas within a huge territory, problems with funding because transit-related decisions are made at a local instead of federal level, cheap gas (compared to the rest of the world), and lobbying from the automobile industry.
The culture in the US encourages, or at least encouraged, entrepreneurship. It invested heavily in software research and development since the beginning and had access to brilliant minds from around the world to contribute to that, and they had the advantage of early entry to that market.
Software affects the world beyond the US, and it follows that there is more profit to be made there than from investment in transit infrastructure. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong or missing any points.