if you build it, they will come

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pages: 86 words: 27,453

Why We Work by Barry Schwartz

Atul Gawande, call centre, deskilling, do well by doing good, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Higgs boson, if you build it, they will come, invisible hand, job satisfaction, meta-analysis, Paradox of Choice, scientific management, Silicon Valley, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System

But in real life, things don’t always work out this way. At least in the social sciences, proposing theories, rather than being beholden to facts, can shape facts in a way that strengthens the theories. You build that path and then force people to walk on it, perhaps by roping off the grass. “If you build it, they will come.” This is the mantra that the main character in the movie Field of Dreams keeps hearing as he turns his farmland into a baseball park in the middle of nowhere. He builds it, and they do come. In this chapter, I will try to show that at least sometimes, when social scientists build theories, the people come.

In this chapter, I will try to show that at least sometimes, when social scientists build theories, the people come. That is, the people are nudged into behaving in ways that support the theories. This chapter, then, is an attempt to resolve a battle between these metaphors. The “watch where they walk, then pave it” metaphor argues that the empirical data shape the theories people develop. The “if you build it, they will come” metaphor argues that theories shape data. I will attempt to defend the second metaphor. The battle here is one that has been going on in more familiar territory for years. Does the market cater to consumer desires or does it create consumer desires? Do the media cater to people’s tastes in news and entertainment or do the media create those tastes?


pages: 340 words: 92,904

Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars by Samuel I. Schwartz

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, car-free, City Beautiful movement, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Enrique Peñalosa, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the wheel, lake wobegon effect, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, longitudinal study, Lyft, Masdar, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, oil shock, parking minimums, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, skinny streets, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, TED Talk, the built environment, the map is not the territory, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, Wall-E, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Boiled down to the basics, induced demand is what happens when the supply of a good increases and more of that supply then gets consumed: when a host puts out more cheese and crackers, her guests eat more cheese and crackers. What this means in road (and bridge, and tunnel) building is not just obvious but as well documented as anything in transportation engineering: “If you build it, they will come.” If you build more lanes on the expressway, more cars and trucks will use it. If you’re lucky, congestion remains as bad as it was before you spent $50 million trying to relieve it; if you’re not, it gets worse. It’s like the Red Queen from the other side of the looking glass, who tells Alice, “Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.

See under Cars Driving licenses, 72–73 Duke University, 95 Duranton, Gilles, 46 East Tremont Neighborhood Association, 34 Ebbets Field, 5, 15, 43, 231, 245 Economic hardship, and Millennials, 70–72 Edison, Thomas, 5 Eisenhower, Dwight David, 15, 19, 103 Elevators, versus stairs, 136 Elumbaugh, Rick, 120 Embarcadero Freeway Revolt, 34–37 Engineering News–Record, 3, 16 Engineers/engineering and construction costs, 39 cost-benefit equations of, faulty premise of, 59 and disappearing traffic phenomenon, 47 and estimated speed and safety, 39–42 and foot traffic study, 144–146 and GI Bill of Rights, 18 and “if you build it, they will come,” 46–48 and Interstate Highways System, 17–19 and multimodal transportation system, 61 and predicting future transportation needs, 60–61 railroad, 17–18 and road-building techniques, 18–19 and safety innovations, 18–19 and smart growth, 61 and wider versus narrower lanes, safety of, 58, 59–60, 60n England, 103, 158, 159 Environmental Defense Fund, 36–37 Environmental Impact Statement, 245–246, 247 Environmental Protection Agency, 37, 44, 51–52 Environmentalism, 36–37, 44, 62, 72, 226 Envision Utah, 192 Escalators, versus stairs, 136 Europe, streetcars in, 44, 103, 176 Exercise, 124 health benefits of, 93–97, 134 See also Cycling; Health; Walking Federal-Aid Highway acts, 15, 16, 17, 18, 36 Federal-Aid Road Act of 1916, 14–15 Federal Highway Administration, 20, 73, 194 Federal Housing Authority, 21 Federal Housing Authority (FHA), 158–159 Federal roads bill, 14–15 FHA.

Petersburg, 124 Taxi service, 75, 199, 200, 203 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 142–143 TEA-21 (Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century), 213–214, 214n Texas A&M’s Transportation Institute study, 104 Todt, Fritz, 15 “Toll Roads and Free Roads,” 16 Tompkins, Tim, 139 TomTom, 210 Traffic and community, connection between, 100–101 congestion, 104, 105–109, 207 and disappearing traffic phenomenon, 47 flow, and walking, 144–146, 145n hours stuck in, 69 and “if you build it, they will come,” 46–48 and level-of service, 41–42 and most dangerous metropolitan areas in America, 124 and per capita traffic delay and per capita GDP, correlation between, 104–105 and refuge islands and raised medians, 124 and speed limits, 123–124 and walkability, 123–125 Traffic calming, 123–124 Transit strike of 1980 (New York City), 153–156 Transit Workers Union, 153 TransitAPP, 195 TransitCenter Who’s on Board report, 84 TransLink (Vancouver), 161–163 TransMilenio (Bogota, Colombia), 222 Transportation alternative forms of, 63 costs, 110–112, 111 (table) See also Transportation equity; Transportation infrastructure; Transportation networks; Transportation policy; Transportation systems Transportation Alternatives, 53 Transportation equity, 211–224, 241 in Atlanta, 218–219 in Bogota, 220–224 in Buffalo, 217–218 in Houston, 220 in New York City, 211–212 and Plessy v.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

CHAPTER 8 INFRASTRUCTURE ALLIANCES Getting Grand Strategy Right Post-Ideological Alliances BOX: Piraeus: China’s European Gateway From Sanctions to Connections Beware Friendship Bridges Oil Is Thicker Than Blood CHAPTER 9 THE NEW IRON AGE Iron Silk Roads Across the Heartland BOX: “Mine-Golia”: Where (Almost) All Roads Lead to China Kublai Khan’s Revenge: The Return of Sino-Siberia Iran: The Silk Road Restored North Korea: An Iron Silk Road Through the Hermit Kingdom The Supply Chain Strikes Back CHAPTER 10 HOPSCOTCH ACROSS THE OCEANS An Empire of Enclaves “Mobile Sovereignty” Sovereigns of the Sea Escaping the “Malacca Trap” The Maritime Silk Road Atlantic Cities The Capital of the Arctic PART FOUR: FROM NATIONS TO NODES CHAPTER 11 IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME Dubai: Home to the World First Port of Call BOX: Lagos: Africa’s Global City CHAPTER 12 GETTING ON THE MAP Pop-Up Cities From Exclave to Enclave China’s Supersize SEZs Master Planning for Megacities City Building as State Building Leapfrogging to Hybrid Governance CHAPTER 13 SUPPLY CHAINS AS SALVATION Who Runs the Supply Chain?

*10 Soviet infrastructure had so crumbled in the Arctic region that food from Africa was sometimes delivered on nuclear submarines, with sacks of potatoes instead of missiles in the tubes. *11 The combination of Syria’s perennial droughts and civil war prompted the very first withdrawal of seeds from the vault in 2015. CHAPTER 11 IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME DUBAI: HOME TO THE WORLD The world’s most visited city, the most diverse city, the city that never sleeps…New York, of course. London, for sure. Paris, once upon a time. Soon, however—and for quite some time after—that city will be Dubai. Sitting at the crossroads of West and East, North and South, Dubai is brashly claiming the title of “center of the world.”

From five-star hotels on Sheikh Zayed Road itself to seedy motels in Deira, the law of supply and demand clearly outweighs Islamic edicts against adultery or prostitution. There is no doubt that many Arabs go to Dubai to forget that they live in Muslim countries. — IF EVER A CITY embodied the phrase “If you build it, they will come,” it is Dubai, the fastest-growing city in the world. Its population tripled from 1968 to 1975, doubled from 1989 to 2009, and will double again to an estimated 4.5 million people by 2020. Americans who’ve run out of luck on Wall Street, Europeans seeking lower taxes, Africans fleeing poverty and tyranny, Indians, Russians, and Iranians with suitcases of money, Filipino hotel workers, and Chinese enterprise owners all coalesce in what has become the capital of the rest of the world.


pages: 221 words: 68,880

Bikenomics: How Bicycling Can Save the Economy (Bicycle) by Elly Blue

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active transport: walking or cycling, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autism spectrum disorder, big-box store, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, business cycle, car-free, congestion pricing, Donald Shoup, food desert, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, job automation, Loma Prieta earthquake, medical residency, oil shale / tar sands, parking minimums, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, ride hailing / ride sharing, science of happiness, the built environment, Tragedy of the Commons, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

What’s more, the same error appears in many official measures of traffic congestion—they forget to take into account that when people are able to drive faster, they choose to drive farther. New users flock to new roads, and everyone who already drove there now feels free to use it even more. In a nutshell: If you build it, they will come. The most responsible path in most cases is simply to not build new roads. But the forces advocating for that option are usually not as well-funded or connected as their adversaries. Nobody wants a road construction or widening project in their own back yard, so they tend to be built in the backyards of the people with the least political clout—low-income communities where rates of car ownership are lowest, and for whom a major road serves more as a dividing wall than a way to get anywhere.

“Bike Stations” or “Bike Hubs” at transit centers or in office districts charge bike commuters a small monthly fee for the use of showers, secure bike parking, and a bike shop and repair station. Whimsical bike racks designed by artists (David Byrne created a series for New York) are embraced by commercial districts for their distinctive style. Churches and schools are installing bike racks on an “if you build it, they will come” basis, and it’s working. Bicycle parking all over the country is stepping out from next to the dumpster behind the restaurant and taking its proud place right next to the front door. And the economy is reaping the benefits. Bicycle parking brings all of the same benefits as car parking and has others as well.


pages: 317 words: 79,633

Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees by Thor Hanson

airport security, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, Columbine, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, if you build it, they will come, Nelson Mandela, new economy, out of africa, wikimedia commons

He held it up, and I immediately recognized the gorgeous opalescent stripes of my favorite bee. But it was hard to reconcile a species that I had glimpsed and collected only once, and had always considered rare, with the thrumming multitudes around us. Mark’s bee beds, and those of his alfalfa-growing neighbors, embodied the cultural meme “If you build it, they will come.” Covering a total of more than 300 acres (120 hectares), those scattered beds provided prime habitat to an estimated 18 million to 25 million nesting females, not to mention at least that many males looking for mates. With the exception of commercial honeybees, it all added up to the largest population of pollinators ever measured, a buzzing metropolis known among bee researchers as the Eighth Wonder of the World.

During the peak of nest construction, females make as many as eighty round-trip flights to freshwater sources every day (Brooks 1983). 11 pretty much anywhere: Collapsible insect nets can also be tucked out of sight quickly, a handy trait in places where collecting might not be welcomed. Entomologists have been known to call them “National Park Specials.” 12 “If you build it, they will come”: This common expression is a slight misquote from the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, which featured an I‌owa farmer constructing a baseball diamond in his cornfield after hearing a voice that whispered, “If you build it, he will come.” 13 untripped and unfertilized: The honeybee habit of robbing nectar from alfalfa flowers sets the stage for even higher levels of thievery.


pages: 328 words: 77,877

API Marketplace Engineering: Design, Build, and Run a Platform for External Developers by Rennay Dorasamy

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, business logic, business process, butterfly effect, continuous integration, DevOps, digital divide, disintermediation, fault tolerance, if you build it, they will come, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Kubernetes, Lyft, market fragmentation, microservices, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, optical character recognition, platform as a service, pull request, ride hailing / ride sharing, speech recognition, the payments system, transaction costs, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, web application

Figure 3-1-1Non-technical overview of Twilio’s Message API Figure 3-1-2Simple, easy to relate to use-cases Figure 3-1-3Benefits of the service expressed without any technical jargon In the following sections, we review the key areas to be considered when building the “Business Portal” of your API Marketplace. Attract Although you can use a “Field of Dreams” strategy of “If you build it, they will come” – it may be more effective to actively market the Platform. Posts on social media, launch events, articles, and interviews on Technology, Entrepreneurship, and Startup websites will help draw potential users in. The key message on your main page, possibly the first thing a user sees, is your “elevator pitch” – how can our API Marketplace help your organization?

An API product approved by backend teams, Legal and Compliance, and delivered by the Technical team with little end user value will stay on the shelf waiting for its best before date to expire. We unfortunately have API products in our Marketplace which fall into this category. While building the API, it can become easy to stumble into the trap of “if you build it, they will come.” An early warning sign is difficulty in finding an actual use-case that an API would support. Step into a third-party consumer’s shoes and critically evaluate how it would help you achieve a specific outcome. If you have trouble with this task, chances are that the third party will too.


pages: 383 words: 81,118

Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms by David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee

Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Andy Rubin, big-box store, business process, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disruptive innovation, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Lyft, M-Pesa, market friction, market microstructure, Max Levchin, mobile money, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy

As a result, YouTube couldn’t be sure how much value it would provide by facilitating video sharing, since video sharing had been effectively impossible. It turned out that people really wanted to share videos when they could, and that YouTube eliminated a significant friction. As we’ve noted before, in our experience, the biggest mistake platform entrepreneurs make is to embrace the “if you build it, they will come” fallacy. No, they won’t, unless the platform solves a big problem for participants and unless the entrepreneur cracks the chicken-and-egg problem. Without a significant friction to address, no matter how great a platform’s technology, there is no case for investing. Does the platform design reduce this friction, balance the interests of participants on all sides, and do it better than other entrants?

See also pricing of matchmakers, 12–14 network effects and, 22–27 on pricing, 15 Economist, 203–204 ecosystems, 36, 100–119 assessment of potential for, 151, 154 control in, 104–105, 106 creating healthy, 102–104 definition of, 103 mobile phone, 110–119 number of platform sides and, 109–110 edge providers, 42, 45–46 Edison, Thomas, 204 eHarmony, 203 e-mail Alibaba, 60 employee recruitment, 124 EMV terminals, 160–161 expectations, shaping, 80–81 externalities balancing, 128–129 behavioral, 136–140 definition of, 22, 136 network effects and, 22–23 participation and, 136–137 stock exchanges and, 139–142 Facebook, 28 advertising, 48 governance of, 135–138, 140, 146–148 number of platform sides in, 109 fairs, Renaissance, 200 FarmersOnly.com, 125 Farmville, 109 feedback effects, 57–58 financial services, 164, 167–181 Financial Times, 32 First Data Corporation, 157 first-mover advantages, 23–24, 27–28 fleet cards, 85–89, 90–92, 98–99 Foshan Plastic Sheets, 55–56 foundation multisided platforms, 40 Fox Searchlight Pictures, 27 fragmentation, 115–116 fraud, 138, 145–148 frictions, 7–20, 36, 55–68 Alibaba and, 59–63 assessment of, 151, 152–153 in B2B exchanges, 65–67 mobile phone industry, 112–119 OpenTable and, 7–8, 9–14 in procurement, 67–68 in retail, 61–63 Friendster, 28, 145–148 front-running, 139 Gates, Bill, 9, 151 global matchmakers, 39–40 go broad/go shallow strategy, 159 Goldman Sachs, 65 Google, 8 advertising, 48 Android operating system, 47–48, 101–102, 110–119 Chrome, 42 ecosystem for, 110–113 governance of, 144–145 Maps, 116 market cap of, 40 Ngrams, 24 pricing at, 93 Search, 127 shopping and, 185–186 Video, 82 YouTube bought by, 76 governance systems, 37, 135–148 behavioral externalities and, 136–140 enforcement of, 143–145 grabbing all the eyeballs, 21–37 growth zone, 77–78 Hangzhou Telecom, 58 Hastings, Reed, 191 HD-DVD platform, 26–27 Hengii Bearing Factory, 59 Hoist magazine, 124–125 HourlyNerd, 105 HTML, 42 Hurley, Chad, 69–70. See also YouTube “if you build it, they will come” fallacy, 152 ignition, 35–37, 68, 69–83 Apple Pay and, 159–164 assessment for, 151, 153 coordination problem and, 70–73 driving traffic and, 73–76 economic model for, 76–78 failure in, 82–83 modification of strategies for, 151, 154–155 at M-PESA, 174–178 at OpenTable, 11–12 pricing and, 82 strategies for, 78–82, 151, 154–155, 159–160 warning signs of failure in, 155–156 implosion zone, 77 infrastructure, 55–56 innovation creative destruction and, 49–51 in money movement systems, 166–181 in retail, 186–188 inputs, 15–16 Instacart, 12, 30 instant messaging, 61, 201 interactions, facilitating, 126–127 International TrustPass, 60–61 Internet, 19–20, 41–42 the Cloud and, 44–45 Internet content providers, 42 Internet service providers (ISPs), 45–47 fixed, 45 mobile, 45–46 Intuit, 18 iPhone, 100 Apple Pay, 149–150, 156–164 ecosystem for, 110 quality control and, 139 iPod, 113 ISPs.


pages: 321 words: 85,267

Suburban Nation by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, American ideology, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, car-free, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, congestion pricing, desegregation, edge city, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, operational security, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

THE PHYSICAL CREATION OF SOCIETY 1 “Parking Lot Pique,” A26. 2 Jonathan Franzen, “First City,” 91. 3 Jonathan Rose, “Violence, Materialism, and Ritual,” 145. 4 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning, 129. 5 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 129. 5. THE AMERICAN TRANSPORTATION MESS 1 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 183. 2 Donald D.T. Chen, “If You Build It, They Will Come,” 4. 3 Ibid., 6. 4 Stanley Hart and Alvin Spivak, The Elephant in the Bedroom, 122. 5 Jane Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation, 129. 6 Hart and Spivak, The Elephant in the Bedroom, 111; James Howard Kunstler, Home from Nowhere, 67, 99. 7 Hart and Spivak, The Elephant in the Bedroom, 166. 6.

City of Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Traffic/Trip Generation Study. Report by White Mountain Survey Company, December 1991. ————. Traditional Neighborhood Development Street Design Guidelines: A Recommended Practice of the Institute of Transportation Engineers. Washington, D.C.: Institute of Transportation Engineers, 1999. Chen, Donald D.T. “If You Build It, They Will Come … Why We Can’t Build Ourselves Out of Congestion.” Surface Transportation Policy Project Progress VII.2 (March 1998): 1, 4. Chira, Susan. “Is Smaller Better? Educators Now Say Yes for High School.” The New York Times, July 14, 1993: A1, B8. Collins, George, and Christiane Crasemann Collins.


pages: 342 words: 86,256

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time by Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, active transport: walking or cycling, benefit corporation, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion charging, congestion pricing, David Brooks, Donald Shoup, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Enrique Peñalosa, food miles, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, parking minimums, peak oil, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, skinny streets, smart cities, starchitect, Stewart Brand, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Walkable Communities Inc., 1999. walkable.org/assets/downloads/roaddiets.pdf. Burke, Mia. “Joyride: Pedaling Toward a Healthier Planet.” planetizen.com, February 28, 2011. “Call for Narrower Streets Rejected by Fire Code Officials.” New Urban News. bettercities.net, December 1, 2009. Chen, Donald. “If You Build It, They Will Come … Why We Can’t Build Ourselves Out of Congestion.” Surface Transportation Policy Project Progress VII: 2 (March 1998): 1, 4. Children’s Safety Network. “Promoting Bicycle Safety for Children,” 2. childrenssafetynetwork.org, 2011. Clendaniel, Morgan. “Zipcar’s Impact on How People Use Cars Is Enormous.” fastcompany.com, July 19, 2011.

The largest corporation is, of course, Walmart, whose entire business model is based on cheap driving and trucking. ●Good news: upon further deliberation, the city skipped the study and added back the parking, without incident. ●“Does Widening Roads Cause Congestion?” Excerpted from Donald Chen, “If You Build It, They Will Come.” A 2010 study by Gilles Duranton and Matthew Turner at the University of Toronto concludes that “increased provision of interstate highways and major urban roads is unlikely to relieve congestion on these roads” (“The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: Evidence from U.S. Cities,” 2616).


pages: 293 words: 90,714

Copenhagenize: The Definitive Guide to Global Bicycle Urbanism by Mikael Colville-Andersen

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, business cycle, car-free, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Enrique Peñalosa, functional fixedness, gamification, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, megaproject, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, self-driving car, sharing economy, smart cities, starchitect, transcontinental railway, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

If a motorist is sitting at a red light with five cars in front of them and 100 cyclists at the red light on the cycle track next to them, they can see it. “If those five schmucks were on bikes, I’d be the first car at the red light …” It’s rarely “me” with motorists, it’s “them”—but they get it. In short, if you build it, they will come. Time and time again. MYTH 9: WE HAVE SPRAWL! Many North American cities are, indeed, sprawled far and wide, thanks to several decades of flawed planning (although figuring out that it was flawed took a while), but I often get people commenting on the fact that American cities are way too big to ride in, compared to European cities.

There is a centuries-old saying in Russian that everyone knows: “There are only two problems in Russia: fools and roads.” Copenhagenize Design Company and the City of Almetyevsk just might have finally solved the latter. It is a wild ride that continues into 2017 and beyond. Quite possibly the most exciting urban design project in the world at the moment. If you build it, they will come. In the most unlikely places. And in Almetyevsk, they are coming by bike. The existing bicycle superhighway routes in Greater Copenhagen (orange) and the proposed routes (black). The Greater Copenhagen network superimposed on a map of Paris. THE BICYCLE DESERVES A SUPERHIGHWAY Many cities are expanding on their growing urban network for bikes by developing infrastructure that leads farther out.


Designing Web APIs: Building APIs That Developers Love by Brenda Jin, Saurabh Sahni, Amir Shevat

active measures, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Big Tech, blockchain, business logic, business process, cognitive load, continuous integration, create, read, update, delete, exponential backoff, Google Hangouts, if you build it, they will come, Lyft, machine readable, MITM: man-in-the-middle, premature optimization, pull request, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software as a service, the market place, uber lyft, web application, WebSocket

In Chapter 8, we tell you all about building a developer ecosystem so that when the time comes to take your API to the next level, you’ll have lots of developers waiting to get those new additions. 142 | Chapter 7: Managing Change CHAPTER 8 Building a Developer Ecosystem Strategy Building a scalable, well-designed API is a great start, but if you want developers to use the API, you need to do much more than just release it. “If you build it, they will come” is a common misconcep‐ tion, as evidenced by the many companies that release APIs but do not understand why developers are not rushing to use them. The profession of building a developer and partner ecosystem is called developer relations. Let’s define what an ecosystem is in the context of a developer platform or an API.


pages: 226 words: 52,069

Bacon: A Love Story: A Salty Survey of Everybody's Favorite Meat by Heather Lauer

British Empire, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, if you build it, they will come, index card, Ronald Reagan

The Scotts always had hogs that they slaughtered to make hams and bacon for their family, but gradually a few people from town asked if they could buy hams from them. So eventually they cleaned up an outbuilding to use for producing their hams, and operated their business from the space for about ten years. Thus proving that if you build it, they will come. The Scotts’ ham business became increasingly popular and after a while some of their customers started asking for bacon. “We had built a building by then because the USDA won’t let you do it in a chicken coop, so to speak!” says June. (So picky, those USDA inspectors.) The Scotts looked at their building and thought it wouldn’t take much room to put twenty-five sides of bacon in there.


pages: 232 words: 63,846

Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares

Airbnb, content marketing, Firefox, Hacker News, if you build it, they will come, jimmy wales, Justin.tv, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Salesforce, side project, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, software as a service, TechCrunch disrupt, the long tail, the payments system, Uber for X, Virgin Galactic, web application, working poor, Y Combinator

The biggest mistake startups make when trying to get traction is failing to pursue traction in parallel with product development. Many entrepreneurs think that if you build a killer product, your customers will beat a path to your door. This line of thinking is a fallacy: that the best use of your time is always improving your product. In other words, “if you build it, they will come” is wrong. You are much more likely to develop a good distribution strategy with a good traction development methodology (like Bullseye) the same way you are much more likely to develop a good product with a good product development methodology (like Lean). Both help address major risks that face early-stage companies: market risk (that you can reach customers in a sustainable way) and product risk (that customers want what you’re building).


pages: 221 words: 61,146

The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets by Alan Boss

Albert Einstein, Dava Sobel, diversified portfolio, full employment, Gregor Mendel, if you build it, they will come, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Pluto: dwarf planet, Silicon Valley, space junk, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

Perhaps Fermi’s Paradox was discussed in class that summer, perhaps not, but Fermi and Wetherill were physicists who evolved into two of the world’s first astrobiologists—scientists who seek to understand the genesis, evolution, and prevalence of life in the universe. This book has not addressed the question of how microscopic life originates on habitable planets, much less the intelligent life of Fermi’s Paradox, but has instead taken the position that “if you build it, they will come.” That is, if habitable worlds are common, what is to prevent their hosting the evolution of some sort of primitive life forms over their billions of years of existence? Not every planet needs to witness the evolution of Homo sapiens for life to be considered a universal trait; methanogenic bacteria would do quite nicely, provided that they are capable of generating enough methane to serve as a biomarker for some future space telescope.


pages: 205 words: 61,903

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte’s much lauded One Laptop Per Child project expected to deliver 150 million $100 laptops to children in developing countries by the end of 2007. It didn’t go as planned. Many countries weren’t sure how they would use computers in their classrooms, particularly when their teachers were not digitally literate themselves. They didn’t accept Negroponte’s if-you-build-it-they-will-come premise that all kids of all cultures are born hackers who can just figure out an easy interface for themselves. By 2009, only a few hundred thousand had been shipped . African critics complained that issues such as HIV and malnutrition were impacting people and education more than a lack of technology.


pages: 232 words: 71,024

The Decline and Fall of IBM: End of an American Icon? by Robert X. Cringely

AltaVista, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, business process, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, commoditize, compound rate of return, corporate raider, financial engineering, full employment, Great Leap Forward, if you build it, they will come, immigration reform, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, managed futures, Paul Graham, platform as a service, race to the bottom, remote working, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software as a service, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, TED Talk, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, work culture

It may be easier and cheaper for companies to build their own Big Data databases in their own data centers. The right path will be decided by the Return on Investment (ROI). Doing ROI analysis from the customer and market point of view is not something IBM does well, or at all. IBM rarely starts a business from the customer’s perspective. IBM is more of a “If you build it, they will come—and pay any price” type of company. But will they come? Nobody knows. THE ANALYTICS SOLUTION: For IBM’s Analytics business to be successful it must carefully balance price with real quantifiable benefits. For the customer, this service must be a good return on investment. IBM has always been very good at telling its customers how good something will be, but promises only work for a short time.


pages: 233 words: 67,596

Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning by Thomas H. Davenport, Jeanne G. Harris

always be closing, Apollo 13, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, commoditize, data acquisition, digital map, en.wikipedia.org, fulfillment center, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, if you build it, they will come, intangible asset, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knapsack problem, late fees, linear programming, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Netflix Prize, new economy, performance metric, personalized medicine, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, recommendation engine, RFID, search inside the book, shareholder value, six sigma, statistical model, supply-chain management, text mining, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, traveling salesman, yield management

Taking an analytical approach to investment decisions, requiring accountability, and monitoring outcomes will help reinforce the analytical culture and maximize investments where they are likely to have the greatest impact. A common error is to assume that merely having analytical technology is sufficient to transform an organization. The Field of Dreams approach—“If you build it, they will come”—usually disappoints. If you build a data warehouse or a full-blown analytical technical infrastructure without developing the other analytical attributes, the warehouse will just sit there. Avoiding the Potholes Since every organization is different, we won’t attempt to provide detailed instructions to navigate around all the potential hazards encountered along the road map.


pages: 265 words: 74,941

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Richard Florida

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, deskilling, edge city, Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford paid five dollars a day, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, McMansion, megaproject, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, young professional, Zipcar

Now these investments come mostly in other countries around the globe, from China to Spain and many places in between. Just as civilization sprang up along natural conduits such as rivers, bays, and valleys, towns sprang into existence along the streetcar and rail lines and highways as they were built. The high-speed rail lines will enable the fill-in I described, but they need to be in place first. If you build it, they will come. That may be an older, slightly hackneyed phrase that’s often used to deride new investment, but in the case of infrastructure it holds more than a grain of truth. In some ways, infrastructure is analogous to government support for basic research in medicine or the sciences. Such investments, which are either too large or too risky for private companies to undertake, offer a significant social rate of return that can drive future invention, productivity, and growth.


pages: 248 words: 72,174

The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future by Chris Guillebeau

Airbnb, big-box store, clean water, digital nomad, do what you love, fixed income, follow your passion, if you build it, they will come, index card, informal economy, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, late fees, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, price anchoring, Ralph Waldo Emerson, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, web application

(This step may require further effort.) *You can find a review of several different payment options in the online resources at 100startup.com. Alas, like any trend or business model, not every story of independent publishing is a success. Many aspiring publishers operate on an “if you build it, they will come” model. Later in the book, we’ll rename it the “if you build it, they might come” model—sometimes it works, but many times it doesn’t, and there’s no guarantee of instant riches. For every online course that becomes a Mondo Beyondo-size success, many others flounder on with five participants.


pages: 302 words: 73,946

People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams by Jono Bacon

Airbnb, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bounce rate, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, content marketing, Debian, Firefox, gamification, if you build it, they will come, IKEA effect, imposter syndrome, Internet Archive, Jono Bacon, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, lateral thinking, Mark Shuttleworth, Minecraft, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, planetary scale, pull request, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Scaled Composites, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Virgin Galactic, Y Combinator

You can think of this as a lens through which to look at communities and a blueprint in which to approach them. This will give you the foundation of how to predictably build any number of different communities. There is no guaranteed success. I bet you didn’t want to hear that one, right? There simply is no guarantee you will succeed. “If you build it, they will come,” they say. Well, they are wrong. It should be, “If you build it, take a strategic approach, train and integrate your team tightly, carefully review results, modify your approach, and operate on a clear cadence, they will probably come.” Ugh, what a mouthful, but this is how we will approach this work.


China's Superbank by Henry Sanderson, Michael Forsythe

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Carmen Reinhart, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, failed state, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, price mechanism, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, too big to fail, urban renewal, urban sprawl, work culture

That’s more than one-third of the 450 million square feet in Manhattan, a city that took more than three centuries of organic growth to build out its skyline. That includes a 1,930-foot-high tower, taller than the 1,770-foot-high 1 World Trade Center currently under construction in the real Manhattan. Tianjin officials are employing the philosophy of the 1989 movie, Field of Dreams: If you build it, they will come. Tianjin isn’t headquarters to a world-class bank, let alone a leading Chinese bank that could occupy those offices, as Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and J.P. Morgan Chase fill Manhattan buildings. Xu mentions local banks Tianjin Rural Commercial Bank and Bohai Bank—minnows in the world of Chinese banking, let alone global banking—as future tenants.


pages: 360 words: 85,321

The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling by Adam Kucharski

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, call centre, Chance favours the prepared mind, Claude Shannon: information theory, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, diversification, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Flash crash, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, locking in a profit, Louis Pasteur, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, p-value, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, statistical model, The Design of Experiments, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Poker Works, April 11, 2008. http://pokerworks.com/poker-news/2008/04/11/where-are-they-now-jack-straus.html. 140the thirty-first World Series reached its finale: Details come from video of final at: http://www.tjcloutierpoker.net/2000-world-series-of-poker-final-table-chris-ferguson-vs-tj-cloutier/. TJ Cloutier Poker. “2000 World Series of Poker Final Table—Chris Ferguson vs TJ Cloutier.” October 12, 2010. 141“You didn’t think it would be that tough”: Paulle, Mike. “If You Build It They Will Come.” ConJelCo 31, no. 25 (May 14–18, 2000). http://www.conjelco.com/wsop2000/event27.html. 141no poker player had won more than $1 million: Wilkinson, Alec. “What Would Jesus Bet?” The New Yorker, March 30, 2009. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/03/30/what-would-jesus-bet. 141consultant for the California State Lottery: Johnson, Linda.


pages: 302 words: 84,428

Mastering the Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side by Howard Marks

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, Isaac Newton, job automation, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, secular stagnation, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, uptick rule, VA Linux, Y2K, yield curve

There have been numerous recent examples where loose capital markets contributed to booms that were followed by famous collapses: real estate in 1989–92; emerging markets in 1994–98; Long-Term Capital in 1998; the movie exhibition industry in 1999–2000; venture capital funds and telecommunications companies in 2000–01. In each case, lenders and investors provided too much cheap money and the result was over-expansion and dramatic losses. In the movie Fields of Dreams Kevin Costner was told, “If you build it, they will come.” In the financial world, if you offer cheap money, they will borrow, buy and build—often without discipline, and with very negative consequences. The capital cycle contributed tremendously to the tech bubble. Money from venture capital funds caused far too many companies to be created, often with little in terms of business justification or profit prospects.


pages: 290 words: 84,375

China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle by Dinny McMahon

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, business cycle, California gold rush, capital controls, crony capitalism, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, industrial robot, invisible hand, low interest rates, megacity, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, money market fund, mortgage debt, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban planning, working-age population, zero-sum game

It is also an exception to the rule. Pudong was one of China’s very first new districts, but in recent years city building in China has spread to plague proportions. Rather than build incrementally, adding infrastructure if and when it becomes necessary, officials across the country have, herdlike, embraced the if-you-build-it-they-will-come model of urban planning. Ubiquitous as you hit the city limits of towns everywhere, new cities and districts come in all shapes and forms. In Luoyang, an industrial town in Henan Province, the new city—a cluster of large government buildings and office towers topped with the logos of state firms—is built around a lake that draws huge crowds of locals in summer for a laser show performed nightly to a recording of Carmina Burana.


pages: 207 words: 86,639

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture by David Boyle, Andrew Simms

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Crossrail, delayed gratification, deskilling, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, financial deregulation, financial exclusion, financial innovation, full employment, garden city movement, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, light touch regulation, loss aversion, mega-rich, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working-age population

63 9 Tax Justice Network (2005) The Price of Offshore, London. 10 Edgar Cahn (2000) No More Throwaway People: The Co-production Imperative, Essential Books, Washington DC. 11 Robert Skidelsky (1992) John Maynard Keynes Vol 2: The Economist as Saviour, Picador, London. 12 David Boyle (2003) Beyond Yes and No: A Multi-currency Alternative to EMU, New Economics Foundation, London. 13 James Robertson (2002) ‘The euro will prompt further monetary reform’, European Business Review, Vol 14, No 1. 14 Jane Jacobs (1986) Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Random House, New York. 15 Bernard Lietaer (2000) The Future of Money, Random Century, London. 16 Richard Douthwaite (1999) The Ecology of Money, Schumacher Briefings Number 4, Green Books, Totnes. 17 Tom Greco (1985) New Money for Healthy Communities, Greco, Tucson. 18 See, for example, David Boyle (ed) (2002) The Money Changers: Currency Reform from Aristotle to e-cash, Earthscan, London. 19 New York Times (1921) 4 December. 20 Stamp Out Poverty (2005) Submission to the Intergovernmental Working Group, London. 21 Joseph Stiglitz (2002) Globalisation and its Discontents, Norton, New York. 5 Markets: Why has London Traffic Always Travelled at 12mph? If you build it, they will come. Catchphrase in the film Field of Dreams Commercialisation of blood and donor relationships represses the expression of altruism. Richard Titmuss, The Gift Relationship (1970) London in 1900, the centre of empire. The Central Line underground railway is being constructed with picks and shovels.


pages: 347 words: 88,114

The Zero-Waste Lifestyle: Live Well by Throwing Away Less by Amy Korst

airport security, Boeing 747, business climate, carbon footprint, delayed gratification, if you build it, they will come, Mason jar, messenger bag, microplastics / micro fibres, Parkinson's law

She nailed four lengths of wooden picket fencing together to set up a square compost pile in her backyard. At one time, Chris made a compost pile similar to Rose’s, but today he has a much more commercial model. “We don’t turn it a lot,” he says. “We have worms [in the pile], but we didn’t introduce them. If you build it, they will come.” Once your pile is ready to go, you start filling it with food scraps. If you’re brand new to composting, I’d recommend you start off with vegetable and fruit scraps to see how it goes. Eventually you may decide to do as I do and compost all food scraps except for meat (we even compost dairy and egg shells).


pages: 314 words: 83,631

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum

air freight, cable laying ship, call centre, digital divide, Donald Davies, global village, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, inflight wifi, invisible hand, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, messenger bag, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, packet switching, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, satellite internet, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, undersea cable, urban planning, UUNET, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Like any veteran politician, he was used to nosy journalists—although more than a small town’s share had been through here recently. The Dalles had felt the brunt of the industrial collapse of the Pacific Northwest, and the Internet’s neglect added insult to injury. “We said, ‘That’s not quick enough for us! We’ll do it ourselves,’ ” Young recalled. It was an act of both faith and desperation—the ultimate “if you build it they will come” move. In 2002, the Quality Life Broadband Network, or “Q-Life,” was chartered as an independent utility, with local hospitals and schools as its first customers. Construction began on a seventeen-mile fiber loop around The Dalles, from city hall to a hub at the BPA’s Big Eddy substation, on the outskirts of town.


pages: 327 words: 88,121

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, Broken windows theory, business cycle, call centre, clean water, company town, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Brooks, delayed gratification, different worldview, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, helicopter parent, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, invention of movable type, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Richard Florida, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban decay, urban planning, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

It is self-discipline that allows people to maintain relationships with acquaintances who don’t share their point of view. And so a community that weaves diverse neighbors together without self-control is more likely to disintegrate. This is not a situation where, as in Field of Dreams, “if you build it, [they] will come.”18 Figuring out a way to augment American grit will not magically reconstitute the middle-ring-rich communities of generations past. Nevertheless a grittier America would, at least, make it more likely that we’d each connect with a wider range of neighbors. We’d have greater wherewithal to maintain the dynamism of previous eras.


pages: 304 words: 87,702

The 100 Best Vacations to Enrich Your Life by Pam Grout

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, complexity theory, David Brooks, East Village, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, global village, Golden Gate Park, if you build it, they will come, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, SpaceShipOne, supervolcano, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

Students have ranged in age from 12 to 72, divided equally among men and women, and have traveled from as far away as Scotland, Hawaii, and Japan to take a course. The majority have little or no construction experience. Just so you know, once you have the know-how doesn’t mean you’ll have a house right away…it takes anywere from two to five years to build your new residence, depending on the time and help you have. * * * IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME Critics—notably professional contractors—have scoffed that it’s impossible to teach a novice to build a house in two or three weeks. But Heartwood, and the other schools listed below, have proved them wrong. “America is based on pilgrims coming over here and knocking together log cabins,” says Patrice Hennin, founder of the Shelter Institute.


pages: 307 words: 88,180

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

They were refashioning China’s urban landscape and the world’s richest real-world datascape. But building an alternate internet universe that reaches into every corner of the Chinese economy couldn’t be done without the country’s most important economic actor: the Chinese government. IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME On that front, Guo Hong was ahead of the curve. In the years after his first visit to my office, his dream of an Avenue of the Entrepreneurs had been turned into a plan, and that plan turned into action. Guo chose for his experiment a pedestrian street in Zhongguancun that was home to a mishmash of bookstores, restaurants, and knockoff electronics markets.


pages: 324 words: 89,875

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

That Color’s seasoned execs failed to see this issue coming is shocking. The ghost town problem that brought down Color is hardly unique. Yet Color CEO Nguyen seemed confident that its sophisticated technology alone would “wow” users, even though the company did little external testing and had no discernible launch strategy. This if-you-build-it-they-will-come attitude is surprisingly common, even among experienced tech investors and executives. That’s also why Color couldn’t figure out how to jump-start its network. Technology alone isn’t enough, especially when the platform has little value without the participation of other users. Color isn’t the first platform to fail on these grounds, and it will certainly not be the last.


pages: 338 words: 101,967

Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby

An Inconvenient Truth, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, Burning Man, centre right, COVID-19, disinformation, epigenetics, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, financial engineering, George Floyd, haute couture, if you build it, they will come, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, lockdown, post-work, psychological pricing, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Rawabi is a shiny city on a hill, complete with brand-new buildings made out of white stones cut from a nearby quarry. Many believe that this project is the beginning of the Palestinian people’s pivot toward taking charge of their own future, a future of industry, equality, liberalism, and empowerment. Masri understood a very simple thing: if you build it, they will come. He is not your token Palestinian friend. Rawabi is not your token Palestinian city. They are both what the future of the Palestinian people and the Palestinian state can be. THE CLOSER YOU LOOK, THE MORE COMPLICATED IT GETS To understand the region and the issues facing the Palestinian people, I had to clarify the very different obstacles they are dealing with, dictated by geographic location, history of conflict, political affiliations, and religious agenda.


pages: 343 words: 102,846

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

After the responses he got at the pitch session at SXSWi and recent experiences with app functionality problems in actual bars and restaurants, Ryan laments adopting the future-now strategy popularized in hundreds of books and articles about building and launching start-ups. “We should have tested it,” he tells me. “Everyone thinks if you build it they will come . . .” He’s spent eight months of time and estimates his sweat equity at $15,000 in personal labor done after his day job as part of an innovation team for a health care company. Alas, all that work and energy and investment, and Tappr seems destined for the dustbin before it’s even been fully completed.


pages: 362 words: 108,359

The Accidental Investment Banker: Inside the Decade That Transformed Wall Street by Jonathan A. Knee

AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, Boycotts of Israel, business logic, call centre, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, deal flow, discounted cash flows, fear of failure, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, if you build it, they will come, iterative process, junk bonds, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, proprietary trading, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, technology bubble, young professional, éminence grise

Unlike technology, where a company like Webvan that required significant investment in physical infrastructure (“bricks and clicks” was how such businesses sold themselves) was the exception rather than the rule, the emerging telecom segment was highly capital intensive in nature, soaking up money for laying cable, building cell towers, buying switching equipment and so on. These businesses were largely financed on the Field of Dreams theory—if you build it, they will come. They didn’t come, or at least not fast enough to avoid what were once a multitude of multibillion-dollar public companies from ultimately going bankrupt or being swallowed up for scrap value. Like their Internet counterparts, these businesses never generated earnings, but they sometimes did show positive EBITDA (which, it will be remembered, means “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization”).


pages: 461 words: 106,027

Zero to Sold: How to Start, Run, and Sell a Bootstrapped Business by Arvid Kahl

business logic, business process, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, content marketing, continuous integration, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, domain-specific language, financial independence, functional programming, Google Chrome, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, information retrieval, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kanban, Kubernetes, machine readable, minimum viable product, Network effects, performance metric, post-work, premature optimization, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, software as a service, solopreneur, source of truth, statistical model, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, the long tail, trickle-down economics, value engineering, web application

If you do this for all the choices you will need to make, you'll end up with a very maintainable collection of technologies that will stand the test of time. From Product to Business A Well-Oiled Machine A product is not a business—just yet. That's an important thing to understand, particularly when you're a technical founder. It's the reason the book The E-Myth exists: the entrepreneurial myth is that if you build it, they will come. But they won't unless you put in the effort to create a reliable system to sell the product at a profit continuously: a business. A business is more than a landing page, a product, and a bank account. A business is a complex system of processes. Building a product may come easy to you if you're technically inclined, but turning it into a value-generating machine is a whole different kind of challenge.


pages: 518 words: 49,555

Designing Social Interfaces by Christian Crumlish, Erin Malone

A Pattern Language, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, c2.com, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commons-based peer production, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, ghettoisation, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, if you build it, they will come, information security, lolcat, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Network effects, Potemkin village, power law, recommendation engine, RFC: Request For Comment, semantic web, SETI@home, Skype, slashdot, social bookmarking, social graph, social software, social web, source of truth, stealth mode startup, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, Yochai Benkler

Potemkin Village (Anti-Pattern) Users may want separate areas for discussing separate topics, and site creators may have an elaborate vision of a complex arrangement of topic and groups, but instead of creating a complicated empty scaffolding in hopes of enticing community to take root (the “if you build it, they will come” fallacy), start small and compact, and then prepare to grow organically (Figure 15-3). Create one main topic, a pinned (permanently on top) welcome topic, and perhaps a separate help topic, and nothing else. Resist the urge to anticipate the contours of the conversations and groups. Wait until people are begging for a subtopic, then fork the original group.


Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison by The Class Ceiling Why it Pays to be Privileged (2019, Policy Press)

affirmative action, Ascot racecourse, Boris Johnson, Bullingdon Club, classic study, critical race theory, discrete time, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Hyperloop, if you build it, they will come, imposter syndrome, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Martin Parr, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, nudge theory, nudge unit, old-boy network, performance metric, psychological pricing, school choice, Skype, starchitect, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

Stuff that 95 The Class Ceiling you feel is significant and important and changing things … I sound like some twat [laughs]. But that is what is crazy about being an actor – people listen to you, they’ve paid to listen to you, they want to be affected. So yeah, once that really clicked – that if-you-build-it-they-will-come kind of idea – it had huge appeal. Rather than the [typecast] look-at-mein-my-dress-running-around-a-lake-kind-of-thing. It is clear that Molly has found a place in the acting labour market where she can very effectively resist the narrowness of her typecasting. This is undoubtedly the result of much hard work and a writing talent widely recognised by industry peers.


pages: 452 words: 126,310

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility by Robert Zubrin

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, battle of ideas, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological principle, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gravity well, if you build it, they will come, Internet Archive, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, more computing power than Apollo, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Recombinant DNA, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuart Kauffman, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, time dilation, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine

In that case, four hundred thousand units would have to be sold per year. Given a sufficiently desirable and unique product, sales numbers such as these are entirely feasible. SPACE BUSINESS PARKS The idea of the space business park is not to define the business but to create the infrastructure to support any need. If you build it, they will come—or so the theory goes. In other words, you build a large spacecraft with a truss, a power array, attitude control systems, and some pressurized modules, and then you announce that you have space on orbit for rent. Perhaps your first customer might be an orbital research outfit. That would be logical; as we have seen, of all the orbital businesses we have discussed so far, research has the best chance of producing a big profit under near-term technological assumptions.


pages: 456 words: 123,534

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution by Charles R. Morris

air freight, American ideology, British Empire, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, colonial exploitation, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, if you build it, they will come, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, lone genius, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, refrigerator car, Robert Gordon, scientific management, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, undersea cable

The roads offered clear graded routes for stringing telegraph lines, and station managers conveniently doubled as telegraph operators; the benefit for the roads was that the telegraph, for the first time, allowed them to track and manage their far-flung freights and rolling stock. There were other, less obvious symbioses. The western railroads were typically built far ahead of traffic—“If You Build It, They Will Come.” The roads benefited from both state and federal land grants in wide swaths on both sides of their tracks. In order to create future freights, they frequently transferred their land to farmers on highly advantageous terms. Much of the early risk capital came from the British, who regarded American railroad bonds as the equivalent of today’s high-yield paper: defaults were to be expected, but the returns were still attractive.


pages: 510 words: 120,048

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Humbling. There is an interaction between optimism and achievement that seems distinctly American to me, but that might only be because I am an American. Our pop culture is filled with the message that optimism is part of the magical brew of success. Manifest Destiny, motivational speakers, “If you build it, they will come,” the Wizard of Oz giving out his medals. Optimism plays a special role when the beholder is a technologist. It’s a strange business, the way rational technologists can sometimes embrace optimism as if it were a magical intellectual aphrodisiac. We’ve made a secular version of Pascal’s Wager.


pages: 494 words: 132,975

Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics by Nicholas Wapshott

airport security, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, collective bargaining, complexity theory, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, if you build it, they will come, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, means of production, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, public intellectual, pushing on a string, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Yom Kippur War

Kennedy. 24 John Kenneth Galbraith, “General Keynes,” New York Review of Books, November 22, 1983. 25 Harrod, Life of John Maynard Keynes, p. 451. 26 J. M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Macmillan, 1936; facsimile reprinted by Harcourt, Orlando, Fla.), p. 34. 27 Ibid., p. 3. 28 Ibid., p. 16. 29 In the words of the philosophy that underpins the plot of the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come.” 30 Keynes, General Theory (Macmillan, 1936; facsimile reprinted by Harcourt, Orlando, Fla.), p. 19. 31 Ibid., p. 21. 32 Ibid., p. 179. 33 Ibid., p. 211. 34 Ibid., p. 129. 35 Ibid., p. 130. 36 Ibid., p. 379. 37 J. M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, German edition (Duncker & Humblot, Berlin, 1936), preface. 38 Keynes, General Theory (Macmillan, 1936), p. 379. 39 Ibid., p. 380. 40 Interview of Robert Skidelsky, July 18, 2000, for Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/int_robertskidelsky.html. 41 Keynes, General Theory, (Macmillan, 1936), p. 378. 42 Ibid., p. 60. 43 Ibid., p. 80. 44 Ibid., p. 214.


pages: 402 words: 129,876

Bad Pharma: How Medicine Is Broken, and How We Can Fix It by Ben Goldacre

behavioural economics, classic study, data acquisition, framing effect, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income per capita, meta-analysis, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Simon Singh, sugar pill, systematic bias, WikiLeaks

Clinical trial enrollers vs. nonenrollers: The Cardiac Arrhythmia Suppression Trial (CAST) Recruitment and Enrollment Assessment in Clinical Trials (REACT) project. Controlled Clinical Trials. 1996 Feb;17(1):46–59. 8 Sheppard VB, Cox LS, Kanamori MJ, Cañar J, Rodríguez Y, Goodman M, et al. BRIEF REPORT: If You Build It, They Will Come. J Gen Intern Med. 2005 May;20(5):444–7. 9 ACRO – CRO Market [Internet]. [cited 2012 Feb 11]. Available from: http://www.acrohealth.org/cro-market1.html. 10 MacDonald T, Hawkey C, Ford I. Time to treat as independent. BMJ. 2010 Nov 30;341(nov30 2):c6837–c6837. 11 Kassirer J. On the Take: How Medicine’s Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health.


pages: 430 words: 140,405

A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers by Lawrence G. Mcdonald, Patrick Robinson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, diversification, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, hiring and firing, if you build it, they will come, it's over 9,000, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, naked short selling, negative equity, new economy, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, value at risk

The image is useful, because one of the most irritating aspects of modern finance is that the numbers tend to be so enormous that they can’t really be grasped. Christine Daley was still smiling, for she had long ago sensed that the head honchos at Calpine operated their business along the guidelines laid down by Field of Dreams: if you build it, they will come. And while those guidelines might have been rock solid when it came to ghostly ballplayers in a cornfield, they did not apply to electricity consumption in the twenty-first century. Calpine was building it, but they weren’t coming. As summer drew to a close the Lehman trading floors remained inordinately busy.


pages: 495 words: 154,046

The Rights of the People by David K. Shipler

affirmative action, airport security, computer age, disinformation, facts on the ground, fudge factor, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, mandatory minimum, Mikhail Gorbachev, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, RFID, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, working poor, zero-sum game

“I’m just as upset at the library’s keeping the records as at the government’s keeping the records,” German remarked a month before Christian was served with the NSL. The same could be said about phone companies, Internet providers, and a host of other private entities whose records are exposed to government snooping. “If you keep it, they will come,” said Alan Davidson, senior policy counsel for Google. “Just like in Field of Dreams: If you build it, they will come.” If it’s available, investigators and intelligence agents will want to look at it. So Google, which used to keep all records indefinitely to help evaluate and improve its mammoth search engine, imposed an eighteen-month limit, then shortened it to nine months and may go lower on files linking computer IP addresses to Web-page searches on the Internet.15 The company has debated internally how to weigh the preservation of privacy—from government, commercial, and criminal intruders—against the business’s needs to polish its performance.


Yucatan: Cancun & Cozumel by Bruce Conord, June Conord

Beryl Markham, British Empire, colonial rule, company town, Day of the Dead, feminist movement, if you build it, they will come, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Pepto Bismol, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Yogi Berra

TOURIST INFORMATION: Tourism information in this friendly town is next to the city hall on Calle 40 at the corner of 41. TOWN TOURS: A two-hour bus tour in an open trolley-style bus, La Guagua, departs every Sunday in front of the cathedral at 9 am and 4 pm (US $5). TRANSPORTATION: A whispered voice may have said “If you build it, they will come” to optimistic state government officials who spent big bucks in 2000 building a huge new Chichén Itzá International Airport near Káua (pronounced kawa), about half-way between Valladolid and the ruins. They hope that more tourism will result because charter and scheduled flights from Europe will want to land there instead of Cancún or Mérida.


pages: 511 words: 151,359

The Asian Financial Crisis 1995–98: Birth of the Age of Debt by Russell Napier

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discounted cash flows, diversification, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, short selling, social distancing, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, yield curve

Our best estimate of the current schedule of mega-projects is as follows: the world’s two tallest buildings (the Petronas towers), the world’s longest building (Giga-city), Asia’s biggest hydro-electric dam (Bakun), a new administrative capital (Putrajaya), a new airport, new sports arenas (Commonwealth Games), a new industrial zone with its own capital (the Multi-Media Super Corridor and CyberJaya), the city on stilts (off Johor), the world’s biggest reclamation project (off the north-west coast) and a 22km bridge (Malaysia to Indonesia). You may be sceptical, but remember the success of Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams: “If you build it, they will come.” They did only build some of it, but they did come – it just took a while and too long, in most cases, to create the cash flow to service the debt associated with the investment. Based on my conversations with investors in the first half of 1997, none of these grand plans created particular cause for concern.


pages: 512 words: 165,704

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, cellular automata, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Donald Shoup, endowment effect, extreme commuting, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, hive mind, human-factors engineering, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, Induced demand, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, megacity, Milgram experiment, Nash equilibrium, PalmPilot, power law, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, SimCity, statistical model, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury, ultimatum game, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor

The traffic may rise, as engineers predict, but that in itself may discourage drivers from entering a more difficult traffic stream. Or it may not. Los Angeles currently operates with a freeway system largely built in the 1950s and 1960s. Its engineers never imagined the levels of traffic the city now sees. As John Fisher, head of the city’s DOT, put it, “They say, ‘If you build it, they will come.’ Because we didn’t build it doesn’t mean the people stopped coming. Freeways weren’t built, but the traffic is still coming anyway. There’s more and more traffic. The bottom line is that the L.A. area is going to be a magnet whether we build freeways or not. People are still going to want to come here.”


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

In response, Berdyne built a coalition of farms piece by piece, grid square by square. “Ain’t none of them can sell. I’ve got ’em locked up.” He grinned wolfishly. As I stood to leave, he shot me a last piece of advice, one that seemed especially pertinent considering the airfield of dreams set to be paved through his yard: “ ‘If you build it, they will come.’ It works for baseball, but it doesn’t work for airports.” Illinois farmers knew from experience. Lying several hundred miles southwest of here is Peotone’s abandoned twin. MidAmerica St. Louis Airport opened east of the Mississippi River amid cornfields in 1997 to relieve pressure on the city’s hub—pressure that disappeared when TWA went bankrupt shortly thereafter.


May We Be Forgiven by A. M. Homes

anti-communist, Burning Man, dumpster diving, friendly fire, if you build it, they will come, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, Skype, South China Sea

My family has been here for a very long time. I am all that remains.” “Noble,” I say. He shakes his head. “I am not so noble, I am practical. I don’t want my village to die. There was nothing left, no more reason for anyone to be here except that we have always been here. That is how Nate came to us. ‘If you build it they will come,’” he says, and laughs. “I am quoting from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when Richard Dreyfuss builds a mountain of mashed potatoes.…” The way Sakhile says “potatoes,” pronouncing each syllable like it was a word itself, makes potatoes sound delicious. “I think that’s from Field of Dreams, the baseball movie with Kevin Costner.


pages: 797 words: 227,399

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

Despite the fact that the drone had no buyers, the Blues and General Atomics believed in the technology. The company renamed the Amber drone and began production even though there was no set buyer. In a sense, General Atomics took the Field of Dreams approach to defense contracting that iRobot did with UGVs: “If you build it, they will come.” The CIA soon came shopping and the drones, now called by the more fearsome-sounding “Predator,” saw action in the Balkans. And the rest is robot history. The story of the Blues and General Atomics is a classic story of how an industry upstart can shake up the system. This small-company approach to contracting carries over to other parts of General Atomics.


pages: 941 words: 237,152

USA's Best Trips by Sara Benson

Albert Einstein, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, cotton gin, Day of the Dead, desegregation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, if you build it, they will come, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, McMansion, mega-rich, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, the High Line, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

Bafflingly, well-known modern artist Donald Judd chose a barren local patch to set up his abstract “Boxes” installation. The Chinati Foundation today sprawls over several buildings and exhibits like-minded artists. Through the years Marfa has accumulated a surprising number of artists and galleries. Apparently if you build it, they will come. Pick up a walking map from the chamber of commerce (www.marfacc.com; corner W Lincoln St and N Highland Ave); the main concentration of galleries is on San Antonio St. Dining later on one of the creative meals at Cochineal only seems appropriate. A global gourmet restaurant in the middle of a desert?


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Supply and demand determine commodity prices—though not nearly so directly as we’ve been led to believe—and if someone orders a loaf of bread, you can’t tell the hungry customer to hold on while you build a railroad, a farm, a mill, and a bakery. Capital and capitalists built the lines, under logic much closer to “If you build it they will come” (or even “There’s a sucker born every minute”) than to “Give the people what they want.” As Richard White explains in his book Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of America, many if not all of the railroads were nonsensical from a consumer supply-and-demand perspective.