Marc Andreessen on why cities ended up with $3 million homes, public housing, and no middle class "There's a French geographer who has the best analysis on this, a great book called Twilight of the Elites. If you replant the commanding heights of your economy on knowledge work, you're going to slam basically all economic growth into the cities" "The cities become a magnet for two kinds of people. The highly educated elite who can afford $3 million houses, and then public housing. Who's squeezed out is the entire middle class. If you're a cop or a firefighter and you work in Palo Alto, you can be commuting 3 hours both ways just to have a house and afford a family" "You look at the cities and there's lots of dogs, very few kids. You can't buy a house, you can't have a family. You've ejected the middle out of the cities into the countryside, but you've deindustrialized, so there's no new economic activity happening in the countryside"

Fastest rate of UK economic growth for almost four years at 2.1% YoY and a sprightly 0.7% QoQ to the end of August. Construction still firmly in the doldrums (-1.8% YoY) but services, manufacturing, investment & trade all showing decent Q3 momentum.

The elites of Victorian Britain got up late, drank ceaselessly, worked short hours, partied through the night, and knew nothing about science, technology or engineering. And yet, by their own lights, they were hugely effective. worksinprogress.co/issue/the… The Victorians are often held up as a model against the supposedly soft, feckless, humanities-educated elites of today. But I argue that the genius of their system may have been its drastic weighting towards soft skills, team-building and intra-elite networking: - A Victorian’s gentleman’s office hours typically began about 11am and finished about 5pm, including a multi-course lunch with wine. - Upper-class Victorians drank ceaselessly. Conduct guides recommended four or five glasses of wine at dinner *for married women*. Port was often served in pints. - Party culture was intense and nocturnal. Balls started at about 10pm, peaked after 1am, and continued till dawn. During the social season, bankers, judges and politicians might go to several balls per week. - Elite Victorians learnt almost no STEM at school or university. At least half of class time was given over to ancient languages, often as much as 80 percent. One leading educationalist remarked that it was not worth teaching science to gentlemen because it does not involve ‘continued reasoning’. - Sports and character formation were valued far above transmitting facts. A top headmaster described his school’s priorities as ‘First – character, second – physique, third – intelligence, fourth – manners, fifth – information’. This cannot have made elite Victorians more productive individually, but maybe the dense social and emotional network it created helped them to work as a sort of extended team. Perhaps we should think again about what makes groups of people effective.