I would glance at my local grocery store, shopping malls, cars, empty cemeteries, and inflight wifi.
First off, most manufactured things are incredibly cheaper now, due to real, complex behind-the-scenes advances.
We have a global supply chain that largely removes the constraints on geoghraphic locality for foods and manufactured goods.
That's paired with an almost-always-online wireless mobile internet, (that works up to 7 miles up in the sky!) that is absolutely amazing and darn inexpensive.
Our cars are much better at not killing us.
Many more diseases are treatalbe, and injuries curable.
Finally, why subtract screens? Modern screens are great.
Apollo software is pretty simple, relatively speaking. It was a hard, but small problem compared to what we expect from modern tech like a car or airplane. Modern software is far more reliable than Apollo. The difference is that 99.9% correct-uptime is terrible for modern vehicle software, but was great for Apollo.
Now factor in the cost paid by laborers and their families in the form of low wages and hgh risk of detah and dismemberment, and see how cheap FTR was.
You can always get something cheap if someone else pays
Compare feeding and clothing the world now to 200 years ago. We get much more done at a much lower consumer price tag.
And of course CHSR is far more complicated -- travelling through dense, developed urban areas at much higher speeds.
Is it really any surprise that after the easier projects are all done, the remaining projects are harder?
This is exactly the problem free market capitalism attempts to solve. To put it oversimply, you have a choice:
* "command&control model" the risk is born by the client, paying cost+15% for everything where they oversee all the work. Low trust, lots of bureaucratic overhead, but if the are competent enough, they can get the project done.
* "free market" model: risk the is born by the vendor -- payment upon successful delivery -- very high profit margin if the project suceeds, but $0 pay if the project fails or is even just second best.
One trick is, even in the "free market" model, you have nested command&control inside vendors, with the same problems that the original client had. You can go "free market" all the way down, but you are still stuck with all the human risks -- people can cheat, be accidentally incompetent, or lose everything just for being second best at project A when they could have been the best at project B.
> Somehow we got to the moon.
The moon isn't hard to reach, it's just not worth the price. If you allocate another $250B like last time, and it will get done -- either publicly command&control NASA, or by paying SpaceX.
We spend collectively about $100B/yr on the Internet, and it's super complex and huge and works amazingly well (works well technically -- how people you hate choose to use it is a human social problem)