Moving forward or staying in the safe zone

Especially when Trump decided to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement, the US seems to stay conservative and want to maintain its advantages and strengths in the coal industry. The US President Trump in many occasions promised to the coal workers that he would bring back jobs for the coal workers. However, from the entire world economy or technology development, there is a trend that sustainable renewable energy is going to replace the traditional fossil fuel. Such circumstance also happens in many other sectors when those who stand at advantageous positions have higher opportunities costs to adopt to new technologies as they need to abandon its existing advantages and bear the risk of not gaining advantages in new sectors.

The ones with existing advantages and strengths do not always have advantages over other small opponents, as they are too big to be flexible and adopt new technologies or strategies. This problem is even more obvious in the infrastructure building. In many developed countries, they have relatively poorer infrastructure. In the US, the New York City’s underground system is relatively poor and is not the first choice for many citizens in the city. Though in London the underground system is the first choice for many people, the room of the trains is tiny and there is no network (though recent years the stations have public wifi hotspots).

However, in some countries which recently develop including Japan and Singapore, the infrastructure is much more modern, Even Germany could be counted as such country, as its old infrastructure had been largely destroyed during the second world war, its current infrastructure was built after the second world war. For those developed countries with complete transport and other infrastructural systems for long time, they are struggling to make decisions on whether or not they should upgrade their current systems, as the costs are incredibly high and there is some risk that the current available systems may need another upgrade after they adopt the new system. In addition, many of these countries have large expenditures on other fields, including education, national defence, welfare system and etc. Furthermore, upgrading infrastructure have long term and moderate impacts; however, there are some fields that can immediate and crucial impacts, the electoral political system makes politicians prefer those immediate policies rather than long term policies. Therefore, the decision of upgrading infrastructural systems is hardly made by the politicians in these developed countries.