Read it.

Every now and then, a Supreme Court justice or Supreme Court justice wannabee writes a history of the Supreme Court. With a few variations, they are all the same. In the interest of saving Balkinization readers time and money, I present the following condensed version of those histories.

Chapter Four. The Taney Court was pretty good, except Dred Scott. Everything is wrong about Dred Scott, including the penmanship.

Chapter 8. Once we know why Brown was rightly decided, we also know why my votes on abortion, gay marriage, guns, the commerce clause and the most valuable player in the NFL are also right.

Read it.

Should California incur the costs and delays of economic impact studies?

California should, because political decisions matter and too many California politicians don’t believe it. I’ve had a State Legislator, sitting in her office in the Capital, tell me in essence that decisions made in this building won’t impact California’s economy.

This illustrates the chief rationale for limited government. The skills necessary to win and keep political office in the modern world bear absolutely no relation to the skills needed to run the modern Nosy Parker government, and so the more scope that this government-by-amateurs has, the worse its performance will be.

Freeberg has a way with words.

A normal person says…I want to do this, but the consequences are not acceptable. Or it’ll piss somebody off. Usually, when I say that, it has something to do with throwing a heavy object at my teevee. You probably have your own examples to offer.

I think Barack Obama has that same pecking-order going on in His head with pros and cons of doing things. Except in His Holy Dome, “what I want to do” is the eight hundred pound gorilla. Nothing…nothing…emerges victorious after going up against it. It trumps all. Barack wants to do it.

Read it.

You’ve got a great new app that uses the iPhone 4 hi-res camera to check the state of my cooking pasta and tell me exactly how much longer to cook it for optimum flavor. Your new Web 2.0 collaborative messaging app will enable an unprecedented level of office productivity in a cloud-hosted distributed web-scale architecture. You are thrilled to tell me about the next leap forward in social dynamics and how your app is an enabler for the next level of financial integration with social media which will future-proof antiquated institutions from disruptive technologies. Guess what? I don’t give a fuck.

We used to send men to the moon. We once figured out how to split the atom and release vast quantities of energy in the process. We invented a novel device called the transistor. We discovered penicillin. We developed vaccines that have saved the lives of about half of all children born in the last century. We’ve mapped the human genome. We gave everyone in democratic countries the right to vote regardless of skin color and ended apartheid. The Soviet Union is no more.

But you want me to get excited about your little piece-of-shit app like it’s the next greatest thing since the Magna Carta. Well sorry to bust your bubble ego boy, but it’s not. In fact, more likely than not its useless and annoying. Even if you’re successful, what have you done? Created the next facebook? Another colossal fucking waste of human energy whose main purpose seems to be to get people to spend their hard earned money on virtual farm buildings?

And that says about all that needs to be said on the subject.

Read it.

Taleb explained his simple metric for judging whose economic opinions are worth his time: “Did someone predict the crisis before it happened? … If the answer is no, I don’t want to hear what the person says. If the person saw the crisis coming, then I want to hear what they have to say.”

“You have a million people on this planet who call themselves economists,” Taleb said. “How many people understood the risks of the system [before the crisis]? … Paul Krugman was not one of them.”

Read it.

What comedian doesn’t make jokes about his (or her) ex? (Brett Butler comes immediately to mind.)

And yet … what person wants to be held up to ridicule in public for years on end?

Read it.

In the early 1800s, nearly 25 per cent of all females in the United Kingdom were called Mary. If you add to these many Marys the crushing numbers of Elizabeths, Sarahs, Janes and variform Anns (Nancys, Nans and Hannahs), you would have the Christian names of something close to 80 per cent of the female population. There was a similar pattern with Johns. About one fifth of all males in the UK between 1800 and 1850 were christened John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William.

Ah, those were the good old days. No Courtney or Britney, no Tyrone or Latonya, no Brooke or Travis. No Mohammed or Fatimah, either.

Bryan Caplan does a little analysis.

At this point, it’s tempting to dismiss Keynesianism as a dogmatic cult.  But in fact, there are key issues where their self-confidence is well-deserved.  The only problem: They’re too scared to admit why.  So let me answer for them: The source of Keynesian confidence is not “empirics,” but introspection.

One of the things that our legal system fights continually, and not always successfully, is the concept that seems plausible (and sometimes even compelling) but for which there is no actual evidence. ‘But he couldn’t possibly have been able to do that, therefore he didn’t do it.’ Economists most times don’t even fight notions that they consider intuitively obvious but for which there aren’t any supporting facts — and for which sometimes the facts point entirely the other way.

Erik Erickson observes a columnist in the wild.

You see, I was sitting across from you on the Acela Express last week from New York to Washington. We all saw and all heard you berate the Amtrak worker for not picking up your trash quickly enough. We all heard you complain that you were trapped in your seat because, heaven forbid, you had your tray table down and couldn’t be bothered to move your laptop to get up.

Read it.

Is there a ballpoint pen in your pocket?  How fast is it?
What do you mean, you don’t know? You didn’t ask the salesman?

There is indeed a maximum speed at which the little ball in the pen can roll and still leave a satisfactory trace of ink upon the page.  Would you pay extra for a faster model?  If not, why not?  What would you do if someone were to sell you a costly yet noticeably slow pen?

Read it.

In one of his essays a couple of years ago, El Inglés coined the phrase “deranged altruism” to describe the apparently suicidal policies practiced by virtually all Western nations. Our countries have deliberately imported millions of inassimilable foreigners, many (or most) of whom are either criminal, or indolent, or both. The new residents are showered with uncountable billions of euros, pounds, kroner, francs, and dollars — an investment which can never possibly pay for itself, no matter how many generations we wait.

A close cultural cousin to deranged altruism is an impulse that might be labeled “toxic tolerance”. This is the imperative never to offend anyone, no matter how evil, duplicitous, or exploitative they might be. We are brought up to be nice at all costs, so that the impulse to be accommodating and generous to those who do not deserve it — even when it is patently dangerous to do so — is acted upon with almost no conscious deliberation. Muslims, with their long tradition of scripturally-prescribed dishonesty, are especially adept at manipulating and exploiting our toxic tolerance.

Tyler Cowen is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Ross Douthat considers the hoary question of which current practices we will someday condemn, linking also to Appiah, who raised it, and Will Wilkinson.  Prisons, factory farming, immigration barriers, and abortion are among the nominations.  I would suggest an alternate query, namely which practices currently considered to be outrageous will make a moral comeback in the court of public opinion?  Torture and loss of privacy — in some of its forms at least — already seem to be on the rise, at least in terms of their acceptability in the United States.

Read it.

Read it.

The 1968 Tet Offensive is remembered as a surprise attack by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces on symbolic targets in South Vietnam that turned American public opinion against the war and drove President Lyndon Johnson to the bargaining table. It is heralded as the turning point in the Vietnam War that ultimately led to the American withdrawal and victory of the communist forces.

For over forty years the myth of Tet has inspired America’s adversaries as a model for achieving low-cost strategic victories, and has provided American commentators with a shorthand means of conjuring the specter of inevitable U.S. defeat. Whenever terrorists or insurgents lash out in dramatic fashion, regardless of how swiftly they are crushed, the Tet analogy is sure to follow. Whether it was the fighting in Fallujah, scattered Taliban attacks in Kabul, or Wikileaks’ publication of 91,000 classified documents on the Afghan War, the American pundits’ Tet reflex hands the enemy a roadmap to a low-cost route to victory.

Tet provides a ready story line to journalists and terrorists alike; but the problem is that it is not true.

Thomas Sowell:

Using words as vehicles to try to convey your meaning is very different from taking words so literally that the words use you and confuse you.

New York is the city with the oldest and strongest rent-control laws in the nation. San Francisco is second. But if you look at cities with the highest average rents, New York is first and San Francisco is second. Obviously, rent-control laws do not control rent.

If you check out the facts, instead of relying on words, you will discover that “gun control” laws do not control guns, the government’s “stimulus” spending does not stimulate the economy, and that many “compassionate” policies inflict cruel results, such as the destruction of the black family.

Read it.

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

Read it.

Rarely in our history have the rich been so unpopular with the public. Thus, it probably was inevitable that even their good deeds–namely philanthropy–would come under sharp criticism.

Read it.

A fascinating exposition of the ways and means of gerrymandering.

Unlike what seems to be the rest of the universe, I have no objection to gerrymandering. Drawing election districts so that a maximum number of like-thinking people are included together seems to me to be one of the most pro-democratic (however much it may be pro-Democratic) things one can do in a political system that, for better or worse, depends on representational elections.

I give no weight to the media hand-wringing about how it makes e.g. Congressional seats ‘less competitive’, since the self-interest of those who would have nothing to write about were there no electoral fistfights ought to be obvious to the most casual observer. If I like Congressman X, then putting me in a district of like-minded people to guarantee that Congressman X will win elections as long as he chooses to run suits me just fine. The point of representative democracy is to make sure that people’s views get represented, and there’s nothing inherent in the nature of geographic propinquity that has any relevance to that.

In fact, I would prefer an electoral system whereby a representative has exactly as much voting weight as the number of voters who have signed up to be represented by him (or her). I vastly prefer it to a system where my ‘representative’ may be someone whose positions I loathe merely because I happen to live in an area that contains more of his supporters than people who think like me. Talk about disfranchisement!

Eric S Raymond asymptotically approaches Christianity without realizing it.

One of the regulars at my Friday gaming group is a Greek Orthodox priest, but an educated and broadminded one with whom I get along surprisingly well considering my general opinion of Christianity. A chance remark he made one night caused me to recite at him the line from the 2010 portion of the Loginataka that goes “The way of the hacker is a posture of mind”, and then when he looked interested the whole four stanzas.

He laughed, and he got it, and then he articulated the reason that I write about being a hacker in this form so well that he made me think about things I hadn’t considered before and probably should have.

Orthodox priests tend to have that effect, yes.

The problem of how to induce valuable mental stances in human beings when explanation is insufficient is not a new one. All religions and mystical schools face it, and all have solved it in broadly similar ways. One way is direct mimesis: you imitate the behavior of an initiate rigorously, hope for the behavior to induce a mental state usefully like the initiate’s, and a surprising percentage of the time this actually works.

Well, duh. Christians call it prayer, and have been doing it for 2000 years.

The priest understood this immediately, even though he’s never written a line of code in his life. His branch of Greek Orthodoxy has a strong mystical tradition, and when I said “the way of the hacker is a posture of mind” his eyes widened.

Well, duh. Christians call it metanoia, and have been striving for it for 2000 years.

Keep on truckin’, ESR. You’ll be saved before you know it.

Read it.

Khanyisile Momoza, 29, was attacked as he harvested valuable perlemoen shells in the waters near Gansbaai in South Africa.

“It jumped out of the water with him and then it took him down.”

It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature.

Steve Sailer has a lot of fun with this one.

Here are some excerpts from Duncan’s speech:

President Obama called on the nation’s governors and state education chiefs “to develop standards and assessments that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity.”

You know your chain is being yanked when you hear that schoolteachers are supposed to teach “21st century skills” like “entrepreneurship.” So, schoolteachers are going to teach kids how to be Steve Jobs?

Look, there are a lot of good things to say about teachers, but, generally speaking, people who strive for union jobs with lifetime tenure and summers off are not the world’s leading role models on entrepreneurship.

Further, whenever you hear teachers talk about how they teach “critical thinking,” you can more or less translate that into “I hate drilling brats on their times tables. It’s so boring.” On the whole, teachers aren’t very good critical thinkers. If they were, Ed School would drive them batty.

Read it.

Measured in terms of median revenues per ex-staffer turned lobbyist, this estimate indicates that the exit of a Senator leads to approximately a $177,000 per year fall in revenues for each affiliated lobbyist….We also find evidence that ex-staffers are more likely to leave the lobbying industry after their connected Senator or Representative exits Congress.

Read it.

Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com is routinely trotted out as an independent expert. He was the sole economist at the August 17 Treasury Conference on the Future of Housing Finance, the Fed’s REO and Vacant Properties conference and has now testified at the September 22^nd Senate Budget Committee hearing on “Assessing the Federal Policy Response to the Economic Crisis”.

Never mind that, based on Zandi’s record, either his analysis is just wrong or his independence is compromised. Everyone seems to like to hear the guy who is saying what people want to hear, even the press appears to prefer “feel good” analysis to considering the accuracy of his record.

Moral: Just because someone is touted as an ‘expert’, even with impressive credentials, doesn’t mean he knows his ass from a hole in the ground.

Read it.

Until the government gets involved, of course. But life is a constant process of trying to keep ahead of government efforts to screw it up.

Yes, the economy is in atrocious shape. Yes, what’s happening has terrible real-life consequences for millions. But why is it that the worst Chicken Littles are always running for office?

Because they’re after money and power, and the way to money and power is to proclaim loudly that there’s trouble in River City. Duh.

Read it.

Dan Klein and David Hedengren have a piece at Cato on economists signing petitions. One of their basic findings is how little overlap there is between the group of economists who sign anti-freedom petitions and the group who sign pro-freedom petitions.

Perhaps that’s because, despite its devotion to numerical methods, economics isn’t really a science.

Read it.

A highly sophisticated computer worm that has burrowed into industrial systems worldwide over the past year may have been a “search-and-destroy weapon” built to take out Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor, according to news reports published on Tuesday.

The articles from IDG News and The Christian Science Monitor said the Stuxnet worm was programmed to probe the hosts it infected for extremely specific settings. Unless it identified the hardware fingerprint it was looking for in industrial software systems made by Siemens, it remained largely dormant.

It was only after a unique configuration on a Programmable Logic Controller device was detected that Stuxnet took action. Under those circumstances, the worm made changes to a piece of Siemens code called Operational Block 35, which monitors critical factory operations, according to IDG, which cited Eric Byres, CTO of a firm called Byres Security.

Both reports said the sophistication of Stuxnet suggests Israel or some other nation state is behind the worm and both articles cited speculation by Langner that the intended target may have been Iran’s Bushehr reactor, located about 750 miles from Tehran, that is under construction. The project faced reported delays around the same time Stuxnet is believed to have propagated, and the plant is believed to use the Windows-based Siemens software targeted in the attacks, IDG said.

Everybody keeps forgetting that Jews breed for intelligence.

Read it.

Why not? It gives him a lot of bragging rights, and won’t touch his daily life at all.

Read it.

What is particularly striking is that most of the women who have these powerful emotional reactions to their abortion are stunned by them. They were not opposed to abortion; many were actively pro-choice. They were blind-sided by their own reaction. One woman lamented—and thousands of others echo her mystified anguish—“If this was the right decision, why do I feel so terrible?”

Read it.

Common sense seeps into the New York Times. Read it before it is expunged.

Read it.

The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren’t doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there’s no way they’d ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants.

These odd bots don’t really make sense within the normal parameters of the high-frequency trading business. High-frequency traders do employ algorithms to look for patterns in the market and exploit them, but their goal is making winning trades, not simply sending quotes into the financial ether.

Donovan thinks that the odd algorithms are just a way of introducing noise into the works. Other firms have to deal with that noise, but the originating entity can easily filter it out because they know what they did. Perhaps that gives them an advantage of some milliseconds. In the highly competitive and fast HFT world, where even one’s physical proximity to a stock exchange matters, market players could be looking for any advantage.

SkyNet is watching.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

Bastiat said long ago that you can have a society in which the few plunder the many (which is eventually what all societies become), the many plunder the few (which is unstable but obviously popular), everybody plunders everybody (which is what we have developed from the Old Republic), and nobody plunders anybody. The latter was what he favored, and is in theory the goal of the Libertarians, but it is a difficult state to achieve. In part because that’s because we don’t really agree on plunder, and we don’t really agree on what services government ought to provide. I thought of an example of that while on my walk this morning: a young mother was getting her small child into the car. The amount of equipment it takes legally to transport a small child is astonishing. All my children grew up in an era in which seat belts were an option available on a new car for a price, and car seats didn’t exist at all. They survived. Is it freedom or irresponsibility to allow parents to drive children without a federally approved car seat? Is enforcing that restriction a legitimate act of government? I suspect there would be wide disagreement on this even among the Tea Party people.

Read it.

Personally, I am tired of the term “RINO.” Some on the right are quick to label anyone a RINO who disagrees with them, about anything. And yet there are times when the term really does apply.

No shit.

A true Republican in name only is not a politician with a conservative foundation but also a sprinkling of moderate or liberal views on certain issues. John McCain is a good example of that type. A RINO is a politician for whom politics is not a matter of ideology, and the party is only the means to a self-gratifying end. Mike Castle, it appears, may be in that category.

I think that’s too generous to McCain.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, makes an obvious analogy explicit.

With separationism not an option this side of some great politico-cultural upheaval, presumably we are stuck with having Muslims among us in quantity.  Is this so bad?  In the approved political liturgy of today’s West, the chanted response here is: “Most Muslims are moderate and law-abiding.”  I suppose that is true, but when was history ever driven by the passive “most”?  Most Russians in 1917 were not Bolsheviks.  Come to think of it, most Arabs in A.D. 622 were not Muslims.

Islam is worse than Communism, because it is longer-established, religion-based, and not as economically suicidal. And we still haven’t beaten Communism, as a look at our own Democrat party and its policies makes plain. We’re in for a Long War, and we’d better get buckled down to it.

Read it.

This is the sort of bullshit that passes for economics these days.

Software ‘licenses’ are transfer payments from users to producers. Every dollar that might have gone to a producer stays with a user instead; there is no ‘loss’. Since the software can be infinitely replicated at trivial cost, any value created by the replication and use of that software is pure rent-seeking by the software creator–we’re not talking widgets, here, where something that took actual physical resources is going to be languishing in idleness (and perhaps get wasted as scrap) if it doesn’t sell.

From a macroeconomic perspective, the result is software in the hands of people who, in many cases, would not have ‘bought’ it because they couldn’t have afforded the economic ‘rent’ being sought. To the extent that the use of that software creates economic activity, it actually increases the overall supply of goods & services; the economy as a whole is larger than it would have been had the software not been ‘pirated’. So it didn’t cost ‘the world’ anything at all; rather, it profited ‘the world’ by the extent of that increase, which would not have taken place had the transfer payment actually occurred.

So whenever you see one of these bullshit industry-sponsored ‘studies’, mentally put the correct ‘ourselves’ in place of the usual ‘the world’ or ‘the industry’, and you’ll see what’s actually happening.

David Friedman thinks not.

Any desire on my part to research this for myself is insufficient to overcome my native indolence, so I’m happy to accept the results of his labors.

Charles Murray is always worth reading.

In 1963, thirty years after the New Deal started, the federal government still played little role in vast swathes of American life, from K-12 education to the way people went about providing goods and services to their fellow citizens. We can argue about which of the subsequent interventions were warranted and which were not, but not about this: The way that presidents and Congresses see their power to intervene in American life in 2010 is profoundly different from the way they saw it in 1963. In 1963, among mainstream Democrats as well as Republicans, it was accepted that an overarching purpose of the American Constitution was to limit the arenas in which government could act. Now, that recognition of that purpose has all but disappeared—in the executive branch, in the Supreme Court, and in Congresses controlled by Republicans as well as by Democrats. Big change, reflected in big government.

Read it.

Read it.

Everyone repeat this 100 times.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Check it out.

This is, of course, all leading up to International Talk Like a Pirate Day, September 19th.

Read it.

Do not be surprised if electric cars do not follow the trajectory of personal computers and mobile phones. Leaving aside the prohibitive prices, the infrastructure needed to support wide-scale use of electric cars is nonexistent. How readily will the requisite millions of batteries be available when manufacturers are quick to unveil new, bold electric car plans but slow to commit to massive battery orders? And how will people in large cities, where 30 to 60 percent of cars are parked curbside, charge their vehicles? Mass construction of charging stations must precede mass ownership of electrics outside of the suburbs, where vehicles could be charged in garages. This is why researchers at IHS Global Insight put the share of pure electrics at just 0.6 percent of world sales in 2020, and why any claim that electric cars will soon take over the market is utterly unrealistic.

Janet Daley at the Telegraph understands America better than most.

Check It Out.

The calligraphy is pretty cool, too.

The Ochlophobist reflects on the current scene.

I have burned a lot of books in my day. It was a ritual at a former workplace of mine. We burned some old, beat up Qur’ans we didn’t think would ever sell, but, for the sake of fairness of course, we also burned translations of the Bible that we didn’t like and everything that Matthew Fox ever wrote and pretty much every work of pop spirituality that was published in English in the 90s. Burning books is fun, shooting them is funer, and blowing them up is funest. But since becoming Orthodox, a religion which burns holy things which are no longer usable, such as damaged icons, etc., it seems that burning as an act of dissent is not as fun as it used to be. Perhaps they could put a Qur’an into a jar of urine. No, wait, that is what Americans from blue states call art, and Muslims who know that our federal government occasionally pays to have Christian symbols thus treated might then think that Islam has finally made it as an accepted American religion, and I don’t think that is the purpose behind what had been planned for a Florida campfire tomorrow. We live in confusing times.

David Friedman looks at manners.

My objective is to get him to go back to the end of the line, getting me through a little faster, and to do it with a minimum of unpleasantness. By treating his act as a mistake I lower the cost to him of doing what I want, since doing so does not require him to implicitly confess a deliberate violation of local norms. Lowering the cost to him of doing what I want makes him more likely to do it. What my friend regarded as behavior due to courtesy appears to me as a simple application of economics.

Tom Smith puts the boot in.

It’s a perfectly obvious point, but perhaps still worth making.  When the government does not tax some income of a very rich person, that is not a “giveaway”.  That is the government not taking some money that was earned by some rich person.  Some people have a lot of money.  When you take their money from them, it is their money you are taking.  Indeed, this is what thousands of pages of tax law goes to determine:  Is it income?  Is it your income?  If it is neither yours nor income then it won’t be taxed as part of your income tax.  It is the most annoying thing tax people do — referring to income the government does not take from you as something it has given to you.

However little the rich may deserve their wealth, the government deserves it even less.

Eric Raymond spills his guts.

Ah, but then came the deadly disclaimers. “VEGAN GLUTEN-FREE NO GMOs NO TRANS FAT.” and “We support local and fair-trade sources growing certified organic, transitional, and pesticide-free products.” Aaaarrrgggh! Suddenly my lovely potential snack was covered with an evil-smelling miasma of diet-faddery, sanctimony, political correctness, and just plain nonsense. This, I find, is a chronic problem with buying “organic”.

The problem is, every time I buy “organic”, I feel like I’m sending a reinforcement to several different forms of vicious stupidity, beginning with the term “organic” itself. Duh! Actually, all food is “organic”; the term just means “chemistry based on carbon chains”.

Read it.

It could happen.

Joel Kotkin is always worth reading.

According to Columbia University’s Saskia Sassen, megacities will inevitably occupy what Vladimir Lenin called the “commanding heights” of the global economy, though instead of making things they’ll apparently be specializing in high-end “producer services” — advertising, law, accounting, and so forth — for worldwide clients. Other scholars, such as Harvard University’s Edward Glaeser, envision universities helping to power the new “skilled city,” where high wages and social amenities attract enough talent to enable even higher-cost urban meccas to compete.

The only problem is, these predictions may not be accurate. Yes, the percentage of people living in cities is clearly growing. In 1975, Tokyo was the largest city in the world, with over 26 million residents, and there were only two other cities worldwide with more than 10 million residents. By 2025, the U.N. projects that there may be 27 cities of that size. The proportion of the world’s population living in cities, which has already shot up from 14 percent in 1900 to about 50 percent in 2008, could be 70 percent by 2050. But here’s what the boosters don’t tell you: It’s far less clear whether the extreme centralization and concentration advocated by these new urban utopians is inevitable — and it’s not at all clear that it’s desirable.

Perhaps we need to consider another approach. As unfashionable as it might sound, what if we thought less about the benefits of urban density and more about the many possibilities for proliferating more human-scaled urban centers; what if healthy growth turns out to be best achieved through dispersion, not concentration? Instead of overcrowded cities rimmed by hellish new slums, imagine a world filled with vibrant smaller cities, suburbs, and towns: Which do you think is likelier to produce a higher quality of life, a cleaner environment, and a lifestyle conducive to creative thinking?

Dense urban areas are the product of societies with primitive transport and communication systems. People had to be close together in order to work together efficiently. That is growing increasingly untrue the more technology advances. Already we have companies that consist of a handful of people scattered across a continent. Are they going to want to live cheek-by-jowl, or in places where they have some breathing room? The only barrier to geographic dispersal is infrastructure, and with 4G wireless and satellites that is becoming less and less of a problem.