The neglect of infrastructure while we fawn over new gadgets reveals much about where our priorities are going wrong, says Peter Knight

It was a late-summer’s night somewhere in New Jersey and a train was coming. The Amtrak train was being tested at speeds New Jersey had never seen before. So fast that the local train spotters had set up an automated video camera to capture the nocturnal excitement.

Around the same time, Apple was preparing to launch the iPhone 5. The media was in a feeding frenzy and important macro-economic questions were being asked. How big would the screen be? Would the case come in rainbow colours? Would Siri, the voice of the iPhone 4S, be able to tell better jokes?

JP Morgan Chase, one of the world’s biggest banks, reckoned the iPhone 5 could add half a percentage point to the United States’ annualised GDP growth. Although the gadgets were manufactured in China, the money was made in the US from people who were happy to pay a premium for the device. In a struggling economy where consumers had been saving instead of spending, that was good news.

These two events neatly demonstrate the topsy-turvy priorities of modern America, where small, foreign-made gadgets mean so much more than the crumbling domestic infrastructure of a once great economy.

The train was being tested by Amtrak to see if the rails could withstand its red-hot speed. The cameras were primed and ready. National Public Radio was preparing to play the sound of the speeding train on air the next morning. The excitement was palpable.

Would this fast Amtrak hit the speed of the average French TGV (200mph), the Spanish AVE (210 mph), or the Shanghai Maglev (268 mph)? Nowhere near.

The speeding Amtrak train was hoping to reach 165mph, 5mph above the expected operating speed and about the velocity of a commuting Belgian.

The good news is the train reached its target, the rails withstood the heat and the sound on NPR was a wonderful squeaky woooooeeesh! Except not a lot of people cared – even the train spotters stayed in bed, relying on their automated videos to capture the moment.

Economy boosters

The Apple anoraks were much tougher. They started pitching their tents outside Apple stores to begin the traditional long wait to be among the first to fondle the new gadget. They were preparing to save the economy by boosting consumer spending, although they were probably simply diverting their spending from other GDP-boosting activities.

Forbes went as far as to speculate that some brand loyalists would have foregone food and starved themselves to save money. No one took a fat-calliper to the tent cities to find emaciated Apple fanatics, but given the frenzy over the gadget it would not be beyond the realms of imagination.

The moral of these events reflects on the trinity of corporate, government and personal responsibilities.

US corporations, on the whole, are fulfilling their main responsibility, which is to devise and produce goods and services that sell well, and in this way make money for their investors.

Apple is proving to be the stellar example and has also impressed on human rights with its reporting on factory conditions in China. But there are plenty of other examples of responsible practice in less glamorous fields. Whether the corporations are doing their duty by paying enough taxes is another matter, and too diverting to get into here.

Government, both federal and state, has been woefully irresponsible in fulfilling its responsibilities – providing the infrastructure on which business can thrive and consumers can consume. America is literally falling apart and the cancerous political climate of the past four years has only boosted the speed of dilapidation.

Amtrak, the government-controlled passenger train system, is but one example of neglect and decline. The same applies to the country’s bridges, roads, sewers, water systems and digital highways. Don’t even think of trying to fully utilise your slightly elongated iPhone 5 in a rural America because the mobile signal is faint or non-existent. As is access to high-speed internet.

And the consumer? Well, we have been woefully irresponsible by failing to put sufficient pressure on the bickering politicians to sort out their differences and get on with fulfilling their responsibilities. We are as pathetic as the US train spotters – much preferring to fiddle with our ubiquitous smart phones in bed rather than demand a sustainable woooooeeesh from our politicians.

Peter Knight is president of Context America.