Americans spent an incredible amount of money to destroy generations of wealth, buildings of such magnificence that we could not recreate them today if we desired to.

It’s largely how Japan has funded its acclaimed high-speed rail system. Buy the land around the station at pre-development prices. Build the high-speed rail, which makes the land far more valuable. Sell the land at the new price and use the profits from the sale to pay for the rail line. This is great public policy, although the lobbyist for the

Modern development, where the public sector leads and everything is built to a finished state, is a bad party. When someone buys that new house on the cul-de-sac, they don’t want more development around them. To the contrary; new development merely means more traffic, more people using the park, more taxes.

If that seems a little too authoritarian, understand that this is how most of the United States was originally built. Only, it wasn’t government; it was trading monopolies and railroad companies. For the latter, the railroad would acquire land for a town where they intended to put a train stop. As they developed the rail line, they would sell the

by the end of World War II, it was very clear to a victorious nation what needed to happen if we wanted to keep from sliding back into economic depression: We all needed to copy the success of Detroit. That is what we did.

The public officials and professional staff in Job City might be happy to have so much employment but, without the tax base from the housing, they are not going to have much revenue to pay their bills.

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.

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.

Our modern development pattern – a continental-scale social experiment – was established during a period of unprecedented abundance after World War II. We were not only the sole economic superpower that wasn’t devastated by war; the biggest players in the world were indebted to us. We held the global reserve currency, we had the greatest amount of