“One of my pet peeves actually is that people talk about policy as if, as long as you’ve avoided a hot crisis, things are okay even when they’re obviously not. The pet peeve that affects me personally is the cancellation of the Hudson Rail Tunnel in New York City, and it’s kind of perfect. Essentially, because of political partisanship, we still have the world’s greatest city totally dependent on a tunnel completed in 1910 for all public transit linkage to the west. That doesn’t show up in an abrupt collapse, but those sorts of things show up in a steady degradation of our prospects.”
This is from part of a longer interview of Paul Krugman from Ezra Klein that's well worth reading. And it mirrors my thinking as well. Sometimes analysts act like there are only the two extremes of "everything is awesome" and "the world is ending," when neither are ever true. In energy, climate, infrastructure, and many other areas, there's plenty of room in the middle for situations that look just fine on the surface, but are slowly deteriorating over a time period longer than our attention spans.
