A report, High Speed Fail, has been published today by the Adam Smith Institute has come out against HS2.
Telegraph article here.
Financial Times article here (needs subscription).
According to the Institute’s Head of Research, Sam Bowman:
“The case for High Speed 2 is based on wildly unrealistic projections. It will probably end up making a loss, and will mean a lot more borrowing for the government in the mean time.
“There are no significant benefits to HS2: it will cost a lot of money and achieve virtually nothing.
“The HS2 project has itself become a runaway freight train. If the government is serious about getting tough on wasteful spending, it will hit the brakes on HS2.”
You can download the report from their website and see a longer article on their blog about the report here.
In A Beautiful Mind, the John Nash character claims that Adam Smith’s theory that “in competition individual ambition serves the common good” is incomplete and “the best result will come from everybody in the group doing what is for himself AND the group”. This is part of what is known as game theory, specifically the theory of Nash Equilibrium – which in no way would include HS2.