We dash through the countryside at high speed, swinging round hedges and tripping over potholes. My increasingly sweaty palms lubricate the phone in my hand like I’m gripping a bar of soap. I ask him what model of car we’re in. “You don’t know an [Audi] S3?” he asks with gleeful confusion, turning his gaze to me, and away from the road that throws itself at the neon headlights. “No, I can’t even drive,” I admit. “You can’t drive!?” His confusion is warranted. Why wouldn’t I drive? The honest answer is that I started to learn, left home for university, and never sat behind the wheel again. Among the Lime-bike riding metropolitan set, not having a license would barely register as unusual; it would be virtuous even: one less dangerous car polluting the road. But where I am right now, outside the Tube map, in the suburbs and shires, cars are an essential part of life. I place my hand flatly against the roof as he crushes the accelerator.

We’re hurtling down a dual carriageway toward my first ever car meet. Mostly operated by organized groups, car meets are conceptually lawful but can devolve into unlawful or illegal activities like speeding, stunts, and antisocial behavior. Events like this often occur at night in public spaces like retail parks, public roads and car parks — but can venture into the inner city where the attendant dangers of injury and death increase.

In June 2025, teenager Lewis Samuels was sentenced to five years in a young offender institution and a nine-year driving ban for causing the death of 23-year-old Connor Richards and injuring 11 others at a car meet in Lincolnshire. Samuels lost control of his vehicle and plowed into a crowd of attendees. He was 17 at the time and had only passed his driving test 11 weeks earlier. The case was not an outlier. In Hampshire, police dealt with more than 200 offenses linked to unlawful car meets in just over a year. In Northern Ireland — home to what enthusiasts routinely refer to as an “unhinged” car modification scene — there were twice the number of road deaths in the first four months of 2026 than in the equivalent period in 2025. In a House of Commons debate last year, MP Julia Buckley highlighted how drivers under 24 make up 6% of total license holders but represent 18% of all car drivers killed and seriously injured. This is, overwhelmingly, a young person’s game.

In recent years, various UK police forces have attempted to deter attendees from meets, issuing dispersal orders and written warnings, seizing vehicles and making arrests. In December 2024, the RAC conducted a freedom of information request to all 45 UK territorial police forces. The 13 that responded reported around 500 unauthorized gatherings taking place across the UK up to mid-October the year before. But given this is primarily a working class male hobby that relies on furtive behavior, it is not easy to track. The subculture only tends to penetrate mainstream consciousness via anxious Neighborhood Watch committees, a stray reel from boy racer Instagram landing in your feed, or a tragic local news headline about a teenager killed while speeding.

And yet car meets have existed as long as cars themselves. One of the earliest known examples took place in London in 1900. Organized by the Automobile Club of Great Britain, the “Concours d’Elegance” (“Competition of elegance”) was an opportunity for individuals to exhibit their vehicles and form a community. In post-war America, car meets became mainstream, partly as a result of Second World War veterans with newfound skills as mechanics customizing muscle cars. In the Sixties, The Beach Boys soundtracked hot rod culture: their 1963 hit “Shut Down” is peppered with motoring jargon and tells the story of a drag race between a Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray and a Dodge Dart.

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Britain, meanwhile, developed its own distinct culture. The first known use of the term “boy racer” appeared in The Times in 1968 — the label is commonly reserved for young men who drive in an aggressive manner. Jeremy Clarkson, who has spent much of his career hymning this era of “proper cars”, recalled the rituals of his own youth in the same publication: “One day I fitted the engine with a chromed sports air filter and convinced my friends that it added another 100 horsepower. They would talk about their cars and then the sun would come up and we’d all drive home.” But these were the glory days of the internal combustion engine: pre-Congestion Charge, pre-ULEZ, pre-20mph speed limits, when cars were comprehensible, parking places plentiful and seatbelts optional. Britain now has many, many more vehicles on its roads than it ever has — but they are hemmed in, frowned upon, everywhere and yet on the margins. Nevertheless, one thing remains constant: young men want to push the limits of engineering while sharing the experience with likeminded enthusiasts. In other words, they’re keen to show off.

The operation is top secret. My driver had received the location for this car meet only an hour earlier. All details are provided last minute to a trusted contact list to limit the possibility of police intervention. As the location — an industrial complex of corrugated warehouses and offices — rises into view, the concentration of surrounding speeding vehicles increases, like pathogens, weaving among the flow of ordinary traffic. We turn off an A-road and form a decelerating convoy that joins the dozens of parked cars that barricade the entrance road to the factory district. “It’s the police versus us,” Ben reminds me with Che Guavaran gusto. After coming to a stop, I pluck my fingernails out of the dashboard and stumble onto the wet tarmac.

The air is misted with tire fumes, pyrotechnic smoke, and Elfbar vapor. A barrage of bangs, whines, and bass-heavy music orchestrates my path as I make my way on foot toward the distant jamboree. Fireworks scream into the air and crimson flares erupt from the crowd as dozens of us approach the clouded specters.

I hit a contingent of black puffer jackets and nudge my way through. Two cars are doing donuts on a small roundabout, their tires burning. People cheer. Passengers hang out of all available windows, whiplashed as if riding a rodeo bull. Then the chaos suddenly ceases. The police arrive, on foot. Clad in high vis, they resemble a row of traffic cones as they amble toward the crowd. The puffer jackets disperse, not with the panic that follows a speakeasy raid but with a purposeful nonchalance. They rustle into their cars and the ephemeral hive disperses into the night to reassemble elsewhere. Ben decides it’s best if we both go home.

Disappointed, I approach a police officer. In principle, he says, they’re “All for” this kind of thing. “If you’re seventeen and like your cars [and] want somewhere to go with likeminded people, then it’s perfect.” But he stresses that there is a safer option: “Static car meets don’t kill people. Street racing, doing donuts, and breaking the speed limit does.”

The static car meets he refers to are a more benign part of the subculture. These consist of people driving to an area, parking their vehicles, and talking to one another. There are no races or stunts. Instead, there is a more diverse crowd of attendees (men and women of all ages) and a continual police presence. According to one of my contacts in the car meet world, such an event happens every Sunday in a car park in the center of Milton Keynes. Unlike other car meets: “No one runs it or organises it, it’s just been a thing for so long to meet on a Sunday at that time that people just attend.”

Another source takes me there the following weekend. The sun hasn’t yet set as we navigate the cardinal grid and roll into a car park outside the Network Rail offices. Dozens of parked cars sputter, whine and pulse. Music blares. Pairs of police officers meander. There’s a carnival atmosphere. Even for a non-enthusiast like me, some vehicles are objectively beautiful: Porsches, Aston Martins, and what I’m informed is a Lamborghini Aventador are in attendance. In the far corner, a cluster of discarded motorcyclists mingle among themselves.

The need for recognition is ubiquitous, exemplified by the custom-made stickers of Instagram handles plastered across car windshields. The cars that attract the most attention are not the most expensive ones but, rather, the ones that have the most modifications. A burgundy Audi A3 is encircled by a mob of outstretched iPhones. A woman in her mid 30s, in a clubbing dress and black heels hangs out of the passenger seat. The ajar door, pock-marked with speakers, produces a bass so monumental it explodes her hair like an electrocuted Looney Tunes character. She poses for the cameras and films herself before being led away by her partner, the car owner.

I chat with a group of women sitting in a crescent of fold-out chairs. Some dandle (ear-plugged) babies; others sip tins of gin. None took their own car and most have partners nearby. I am offered some apple cake by a lady whose facial studs put me in mind of a Chesterfield armchair. After coming alone for four years, she has now made friends on the scene. She would be “just sat at home” if she wasn’t here. “Everything else costs money,” she notes. “I love the cars, I love the modifications and I never feel intimidated.”

Night descends. Lampposts and headlights are illuminated. The music volume rises and the frequency of bangs and revs increases. I meet “Ryan” who is in his mid 20s and works as a Team Leader in a highstreet chain’s warehouse. He drives a premium brand of car which he’s modified with a “lowered suspension, more tire grip and some bolt ons”. He claims his vehicle is worth “over 50k”. “The types of cars people bring have definitely changed,” he says. “It started with what people call boy-racer cars, but now, on finance and if you live at home or have a small rent, you can basically drive what you like.”

He has a point. Around 90% of new cars bought privately in the UK are now reportedly financed using personal contract purchases (PCPs). The model is simple: pay a deposit, make lower monthly payments, and at the end of the contract, you either hand the car back, pay a lump sum to own it, or roll straight into a new deal. Buyers like Ryan don’t use a PCP to reduce their monthly payments; instead they use it to afford something flashier at the same cost. The result is that a young person living at home, pocketing a modest warehouse wage and eating his mum’s food, can pull up to a car meet in something previous generations of enthusiasts could only dream of.

What Ryan is driving at is that having a limited income no longer means you must accept a limited speed. He pays over £1,000 a month (over half of his income, working six days a week) paying his car’s finance and upkeep. Despite living at home, he can’t think of anything he’d rather spend his money on. A 2023 survey by the King’s Trust found that two thirds of 18-to-24-year-olds have lowered their career aspirations and expectation for financial security. Half of those surveyed said they weren’t planning beyond the next six months. According to the Office of National Statistics, there are over a million 16-24-year-olds not in education, jobs, or training (NEET).

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What Ryan’s £50K car provides that, say, a one-bedroom flat does not, is a thrill. He regularly races with friends and is “addicted” to the “freedom” that comes with driving fast. I ask him how he feels when people describe his behavior as dangerous and his eyes gloss over. “I’m just being myself,” he says. “I can’t change the fact we find it exciting.”

Stood in the warmth of exhaust fumes and glow of headlights, Ryan regales me with tales of the car community battling the police: driving bans, arrests, daring escapes and close calls. He boasts that “[The police have] been pelted with eggs and flour bombs, had their tires slashed” and shows me a video that appears to show a police officer punching a young man in the face — framed as an unnecessary retaliation. These stories clearly feed back into the culture’s mythos, YouTube-friendly updates of Marlon Brando in The Wild One growling: “Nobody tells me what to do.” In that classic movie, lawbreaking is represented as a tragic symptom of societal failure — but perhaps Ryan is unaware such stories are doomed to end in tragedy.

On the road adjacent to the carpark, a motorbike goads the police by maintaining a wheelie. It’s an invitation to test the boundaries that others predictably accept. The more weathered enthusiasts, however, are not impressed. “It’s so fucked up people start acting like dickheads,” says one. I start talking to “Pete” who is in his 50s and wears wire-framed glasses. He’s been coming to the Sunday meets for over a decade. “It used to be a bunch of fellas, mostly my age, with an actual passion for motoring,” he says. He seems like he’d be more at home at the sort of car meet that involves bunting. He doesn’t seem to realize he is surrounded by hundreds of people just as enthusiastic about motoring as he is. The difference is that, despite their relative generational poverty, car finance schemes have given them access to the sorts of cars it would have once taken half a lifetime to afford.

The atmosphere shifts. “Tyler” tells me the police have “tried clamping down [on this static car meet] for years, tried loads of different enforcements and plans, but nothing works”. Like an oncologist observing a tumor, law enforcement now consign themselves to a policy of watchful waiting. Two patrol cars are parked nearby, there are a dozen police officers on foot, a police van tactically placed near the exit and reflective signs declaring the area subject is to a “public space protection order” — with “car cruising / racing” specifically prohibited.

These orders are one of many tools authorities use to attempt to assert some control. Thames Valley Police Force informs me over email that the difficulty lies in car meets being conceptually legal while the sorts of anti-social behavior they give rise to are not — “and that’s why we monitor them”. The police can issue a Section 59 notice for anti-social or careless driving marking a driver or vehicle for the next 12 months. If they are seen driving recklessly again during that period, the vehicle can be seized and legal action potentially brought against the driver. In North London (a car meet hotspot), Enfield Council secured an interim injunction from the High Court to prohibit car meets across the borough, leading to several fines and suspended sentences. Sussex Police have also developed a dedicated unit called Operation Cruz to monitor car meets. But the question is: does providing boundaried infrastructure provide a safety value — or create an anti-authority culture?

“The police coming does add to the fun,” Ben admits weeks later as we make our way to a different type of car meet far from the watchful waiting of authorities. He says it’s frequently a “bit of a game of cat and mouse”. Often, once the police arrive, more chaos unfolds. As I had seen, police intervention can force the swarm out of the nest and into the open.

A clear stretch of semi-rural road unfurls and Ben quickly seizes the opportunity to speed. The number on the digital dashboard swiftly rises to 160mph and we zoom unencumbered by the materiality of the world. A roundabout confronts us and, like a ship unable to change course, we burst into the maelstrom and rapidly circumnavigate it. Ben reminds me that he “knows where all the [speed] cameras are”. We return to a straight road, and a car materializes directly ahead. Time slows as we hurtle toward its rear and Ben begins to apply the brake. Utterly powerless, my hand slams against the ceiling and I recoil in a futile attempt to gain distance from the seemingly inevitable crash. At the last second the other car swerves away and we fly on unharmed. Ben lets out a nervous laugh: “At this speed your head would detach from your spinal column if we hit something.” His bloodlust fails to reassure me. He’s interrupted by a car driving parallel to us. It matches our (now reduced) speed. The young driver gyrates and cheers after having witnessed the near-miss and gestures for a race. Ben declines on account of my visible terror.

In order to be sent the location for this car meet, Ben had to provide the organizers with two videos filmed at prior events, a requirement he fulfilled. He parks nearby. I am still numb from the near miss, and my distress as I slowly push open the car door counterpoints his exhilaration. Illuminated drones whir overhead, an army of hoods and masks encircle a roundabout. Dozens more spectators are crammed on the central island, marooned as multiple cars kaleidoscopically spin around with no barrier or means to prevent a vehicle from barreling into the crowd. A young driver tells me: “Illegal ones are very safe because they’re highly organized, roads are blocked off and you’ll be called out if you do something dangerous.” When I query the effectiveness of this, he declares: “I’m a good driver, I know I’m not going to crash into anyone.”

This confidence sits uneasily with the reality that people really do get killed at car meets — not to mention the riotous atmosphere. While there is admittedly no alcohol visibly present, men grip firework cannons between their legs and discharge sparks into the already smoke-filled air. I am jostled in a sea of contagious mob-mentality, clandestine thrill and apocalyptic hedonism.

But I have come to believe this subculture is far more nuanced than evidence suggests; as diverse as the areas it inhabits, as multifaceted and difficult to define as it is to police. I met many members who lament the boy-racer stereotype. They see it as a way of keeping working-class culture in its box and resent being forced underground. “If I had somewhere where me and my mates could race our cars for free, I would 100% go,” says “Sam”. Many of the young men I speak to describe a feeling of being constrained by society and unable to get on. The simple act of crowd-sourcing where the speed cameras are provides a semblance of community as well as autonomy amid a system that feels rigged against them.

The car was the democratizing vehicle of the 20th century: a guarantee of social autonomy and freedom. That version of freedom has since been revoked in a Britain, of compounding parking fines, proliferating speed cameras, and city-center congestion charges. The freedom of the open road may be a fallacy — but then so too are the opportunities for these young men to progress, aspire and achieve in life. But it is too convenient, too simplistic to blame social pressures for unlawful car meets. There are questions to be asked of society’s failure to fund third spaces and an economy that hands a generation of lost young men a £50,000 car on finance, but these individuals are not inarticulate victims. They are autonomous adults who choose to endanger themselves and others.

Since my visit to the Sunday meet in Milton Keynes, Thames Valley Police have reportedly launched a crackdown. Nearly 100 vehicles have received their final warning. Attendees and spectators now risk £100 fines. The car meet, needless to say, will move on, burrowing further underground, risking an escalation in casualties and injuries. But the danger isn’t incidental to the appeal — it is the appeal.

***

Note: Some names have been changed. 

There was something special about the sunshine. Not a mere winter’s end, but a quality of light that struck me as out of the ordinary.

It could be just my imagination. These are strange, silent, times and the mind plays tricks. But there is a plausible external cause. Fewer flights mean fewer vapour trails (a.k.a. ‘contrails’) in the sky. These artificial clouds reflect sunlight back into space — thus reducing the amount that teaches the ground. Contrails are thus a big contributor to the phenomenon of ‘global dimming’.

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The effect is big enough to be noticed when it stops — i.e. on the rare occasions when aviation is interrupted. 9/11 was one such instance, another was April 2010, when planes were grounded by an ash cloud from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano. That too made for an exceptionally bright and splendid spring.

Affordable air travel has opened up the world to millions, indeed billions, of people. But it has also made the world a literally duller place. We associate flying with freedom, and yet some of the light has gone from our lives.

*

There’s a lot that we put up with for the sake of speed. According to the World Health Organisation 1.35 million people are killed on the roads every year. A further 20 to 50 million are injured. How’s that for a global pandemic?

Note that this death toll does not include the lethal impact of exhaust fumes. The WHO estimates that 4.2 million people die every year from their exposure to all forms of outdoor air pollution. Obviously not all of that is vehicular in origin — though in the West, with our strict controls on other sources, tail pipe emissions are the main problem.

Unlike Covid-19, this is not a plague that spares our children. Furthermore, it is a force entirely under our control. We could, if we wished, make it go away. Obviously, there’d be a price to pay — and, clearly, we’re unwilling to pay it. Indeed, we won’t accept even a fraction of the pain we’re enduring in our fight against the virus .

One has to ask why one set of lives (those that would be lost to the pandemic) are worth tanking the economy for, while the other set (the victims of traffic accidents and air pollution) have to be sacrificed year in, year out.

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Of course, I’m ignoring the issue of tail risk. The road vehicle death toll, while horrific, is broadly predictable — in any one year or decade, the worst case scenario isn’t that different from median expectations. With a pandemic though, outcomes are driven by potentially exponential trends — with potentially ruinous consequences. In a ‘ normal’ year, cars may well kill more people than the virus ends up killing this year. What cars definitely won’t do, however, is push healthcare systems, indeed entire societies, to the point of collapse. We are prepared for the carnage on our roads. We have systems in place to deal with the consequences.

Another key difference is that the bulk of what we’re doing to fight the pandemic is temporary. It’s enormously expensive, of course — but at some point it will stop. In contrast, a commitment to saving the victims of the car would require a permanent change to our way of life. And that we’re not prepared to countenance.

And yet there’s a huge amount we could do to reduce road deaths without giving up cars altogether. For instance, we take it for granted that there will be cars on every residential street, but it never had to be that way. We could have used neighbourhood parking to keep the side streets traffic-free and child-friendly. These days, we could use road pricing everywhere to place hard limits on congestion and fund public transport. We could uphold a right to clean air for every child — but instead we allow idiots to run their engines outside the school gate.

Or take air travel. As an island nation we could have built our airports on the coast so that aircraft descend and ascend over water, not people. We could have balanced the right to see the world against the right to tranquility at home. We could make the aviation industry pay for what it’s doing to the planet — instead we subsidise it.

And it’s not just transport. In every aspect of modern life, we meekly accept the hammer blows of progress. Consider construction, for instance. We’ve never been in a better position to build beautiful, brilliantly designed buildings that stand the test of time. We have machinery and materials that would amaze our ancestors. We also have the necessary knowledge. The sum total of humanity’s architectural achievement is available at the click of a button. We have armies of architects, designers and planners — and ways of drawing upon the experience and insights of local residents. Always and everywhere, development could make places better.

But instead we just make them bigger, blighting our lives with ugliness and dysfunction as a careless byproduct. We can’t even make our modern dystopias interesting anymore, the insults of brutalism replaced by spreadsheet architecture.

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I could go on. In just about any field of economic activity — from agriculture to information technology — it seems that we can’t create without also destroying. Things that aren’t priced by market mechanisms, but which have value nonetheless — from local wildlife to the decentralised flow of information — are lost to us forever.

Is this just the price of progress? We can either have birds tweeting in the trees or shops full of food, but not both. Nature or abundance. Tranquility or mobility. Community or convenience. Localism or variety. That, supposedly, is the choice.

But, of course, it isn’t. As I’ve tried to show above, we can deploy our technologies with care. We can think through the consequences, correct our mistakes, direct our efforts away from danger, choose one path over another. For example, the UK has put decades of effort into making our roads safer. Our fatality rate is significantly lower than in Germany or France, it’s half the Canadian rate and a quarter of America’s. We should be proud.

*

We can design a better world if we want it. So why don’t we do it more often and to a greater extent?

Fundamentally, it’s because it means constraining the most dynamic forces in our economy: speed, energy, extraction, transportation, production, consumption, demolition, construction, automation, immigration, globalisation, finance.

These are destructive forces, but they’re also creative. Try to tame them, and the risk is that we will slow down or even kill the essence of life, which is growth.

The case for growth is a powerful one. Nobody makes it better than the economist Tyler Cowen in his book Stubborn Attachments. While a lot of attention is paid to the GDP growth rate at any particular time, Cowen argues that we overlook the importance of growth as it multiplies over decades and centuries. Seemingly small differences in average growth rates can compound into radically different outcomes several generations down the line.

Accepting a less dynamic, slower economy now would mean that our great, great, great grandchildren will live in a much poorer world than they otherwise would have done. And if you’re wondering why we should care about descendants we’ll never meet, consider how you’d feel about our ancestors if they’d taken the same attitude. If, say, they’d suppressed the industrial revolution as being too disruptive of their way of life, we’d now be living in abject poverty. Never mind the temporary shutdown we’re living through now, the modern economy as we understand it wouldn’t exist at all — nor would it for generations to come.

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Therefore, within his consequentialist moral framework Cowen believes that we have a duty to keep growth going at the maximum sustainable rate. Not being a fool, he realises that economic activities can compromise that sustainability, for instance by messing up the climate. Yet within these basic constraints (and also respect for human rights), the argument is that growth is the greatest of greater goods.

What does such a worldview imply? Certainly that we should accept a little global dimming so that aviation can connect a global economy. As for pollution, then yes, within limits, it’s worth putting up with. Our paleolithic ancestors enjoyed unpolluted air, untainted water, got plenty of exercise, ate organic low carb food … and were all dead by the age of 40. I mean, would you swap with a caveman? As for too little wildlife, would you rather have too much (again, ask the cavemen)?

Further implications are that traffic accidents are a price worth paying for mobility. Lousy architecture is the price we pay for urbanisation — and a rate of development that allows countries like China to lift their people out of rural poverty. Of course, we in the West wouldn’t tolerate Chinese environmental standards, but then that stage in our development is safely in the past.

*

So, then, an overwhelming case for letting the economy rip — decarbonising as we must, but otherwise allowing the forces of growth to find the path of least resistance?

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Here are three reasons why not:

The first is that some components of growth are worth a lot more than others. The most important is technological progress. Over time, it is all that matters to an economy (beyond people, of course, and the availability of natural resources). It can be amplified by other forces — like prudent finance and capable government — but ultimately, growth relies on innovation. Take that away and growth eventually stops — though it can run for a while on fumes (e.g. the debt-fuelled property speculation that is recorded as ‘growth’ in our flawed GDP statistics).

We use the word ‘breakthrough’ to describe instances of scientific or technological progress because discovery is difficult. A growth strategy based on always allowing economic activity to find the path of least resistance is therefore counter-productive. Innovation depends on resources being directed at the right challenges (the paths of fruitful resistance, if you will) and overcoming them. Necessity, not deregulation, is the mother of invention.

Secondly, growth is not the only thing that makes an enormous difference on a generational timescale. We also have to be aware of extremely unlikely but highly consequential risks — Black Swan risks. Any long-run economic calculus of the sort that Tyler Cowen advocates has to take account of the fact that the highly improbable becomes increasingly certain given enough time.

Now, those risks may be external to a high-growth economic model — like nuclear war. Or they may be intrinsic, but adjustable — like averting the dangers of climate change by switching to clean energy sources. But what if the black swan risks arise out of, or are greatly multiplied by, something that is an integral feature of our favoured economic model?

The obvious example, right now, is infectious disease in the context of globalisation. A hyper-connected world may well be the best way to maximise overall economic growth — until, that is, we’re ruined by our exposure to the food safety practices of other nations. It’s all very well bequeathing future generations the legacy of decades or centuries of high growth, but it won’t help them if they’re all dead.

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Finally, we need to ask whether the pro-growth policies that delivered growth in the past are still capable of delivering growth now and in the future. Quite frankly, the record of the neoliberal era isn’t great. Or rather it’s been great for the developing countries — thanks to all that previously invented, off-the-shelf technology waiting to made use of — but not so great for the already developed world.

Western economies have failed to maintain the rapid economic growth and social progress of the three or four decades after the Second World War. We are, to quote the title of another Tyler Cowen book, stuck in a Great Stagnation.

How do we get unstuck? Is it by flogging the dead horse of neoliberalism even harder? More deregulation, more globalisation, more inequality? New roads, airports, skyscrapers: More! More! More! Or, at some point, do we need to stand back and question the fundamentals of what we’re doing?

*

Eric Weinstein likens our efforts to recreate the conditions for rapid growth to a cargo cult. Having experienced a great bounty at one point in our history, we ritualistically go through the motions of this or that pro-growth policy not understanding that it’s not in our power to conjure it up again.

Indeed, the rituals — involving, as they do, great sacrifice — are doing us more harm than good.

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