Stowe Boyd

Certainly, a lot of writing about globalization takes economic development to be the ultimate good. Traditional structures and interests in society are regarded as mere impediments, with no useful function. Human activities are to be organized around the goal of “innovation”. Good things happen for simple, clear, catchy reasons. There are rules that explain why life proceeds on the course it does. In this kind of writing, which often emanates from business schools and economics departments and is aimed at an audience of people who are on business trips, one often finds easily digestible, anecdotalized theoretical and historical sweep and the exemplary stories of successful entrepreneurs blended with anecdotes about the author’s own life.
[…]

Globalization, for all its velocity and power and relentless mutation, will not simply proceed unimpeded, either. Many people are unwilling to participate in a social compact based on perpetual motion. Masters of the new economy, social visionaries, and tongue-studded app developers figure large in the imagination of urban theoriets these days, but most people are looking for something pretty mundane: a neighborhood, a patch of ground, a measure of peace and security, a family, status, dignity. In twentieth century America, some people found those in tightly packed neighborhoods. Far more found them in the suburbs. They tended their gardens, washed their cars, took their children to Little League games, went to PTA meetings and to religious services. It’s one thing to create a vast metropolis. It’s another to create a society, with distinctive order and a set of embedded bargains regarding who gets how much of what. Twenty-first-century cities haven’t figure out that part.

- Nicholas Lemann, Get Out Of Town

Well, at least not yet.

(via underpaidgenius)