What ails the Anglosphere?

I recently encountered a couple excellent articles discussing productivity problems in English-speaking countries. A paper by Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes and Sam Bowman begins by showing how the UK lags far behind France in building things like housing, expressways, subways, high speed rail lines, nuclear power plants, and other forms of infrastructure.

France and Britain are a particularly interesting pair of countries to examine, because they have so many similarities. Both have a population between 65 and 70 million...