(2004-01-05) Las Vegas

Arnold Kling updates Tom Wolfe on Las Vegas. Tom Wolfe's view that Las Vegas embodies a populist idea of glamour remains accurate... However, even for those who share an academic's disdain for Las Vegas, I think that the affluence that it represents is a good thing... Wolfe argued that newfound wealth invariably finds its way to ostentatious expression, to the despair of incumbent elites. In the past forty years, the spreading of wealth has increased, both within American society and beyond our borders. Reflecting this economic progress, Las Vegas is an order of magnitude more ostentatious today than it was when Wolfe composed his essay. Moreover, new forms of wealthy excess have emerged in other cities and other countries.

But James Howard Kunstler didn't agree (2002). I've heard it touted often as the American city of the future, the prototype habitat for a society in which the old boundaries between work, leisure, entertainment, information, production, service, and acquisition dissolve, and a new exciting, colorful, pleasure-laden human meta-existence finds material expression in any wishful form the imagination might conjure out of an ever-mutating blend of history, fantasy, electrosilicon alchemy and unfettered desire. If Las Vegas truly is our city of the future, then we might as well all cut our own throats tomorrow... Las Vegas evolved as a crude extrapolation of several elements of American culture: the defiance of nature, abnormally cheap land, vast empty space for expansion, and the belief that it is possible to get something for nothing - these elements all presenting themselves there in the most extreme form.