The little shop owner thus shared a common fate with other property owners in the city. It was not a zero-sum game, where one benefits only at the expense of others. I’m not suggesting they all lived in harmony, but they had a lot of selfish incentives for altruism.

The leadership class in America holds infrastructure investments in such high regard that the overwhelming benefit from new growth is simply assumed. It’s a foundational belief not open to serious examination.

What should baffle us, however, is how professionals and decision-makers are so possessed by faith in infrastructure spending. Cities with a mind-boggling backlog of unfunded road maintenance routinely go out and build new roads. Places with pipes crumbling and pumps failing from lack of maintenance give incentives to developers to build more pipes

Earlier in this chapter, I described the value of taking small steps in the dark and the dangers of large leaps. There is an important variation on that story that applies to situations where many people are leaping simultaneously.

Any rationally minded person understands that the street in front of your home is not an asset for the community. It can’t be picked up and sold to the neighboring town. It can’t be pledged as collateral against a debt. The street is a liability, plain and simple. In the infinite game of running a city, it represents an eternal commitment to

an abundance of resources destroys the need for adaptation.

What would it mean to break out of the Infrastructure Cult and make capital investments that had a real return on investment? First and foremost, it would require us to spend public money on infrastructure projects that covered their own costs, not only today but indefinitely into the future.

that’s not how infrastructure works. The generally accepted accounting practices for municipalities counts infrastructure as an asset, not a liability. There is no accounting of the tax base or the revenue from the community’s wealth; it’s simply ignored. With this approach, the more roads a city has, the more pipes in the ground, the more public

Complex, adaptive systems learn through destruction. It’s not survival of the fittest – a phrase often misattributed to Charles Darwin – but rather, survival of the most adaptable. The fittest in one time and place may be at a fatal disadvantage in another. It’s those who can survive in both that have the opportunity to flourish.