So one of my employees goes every year. I have been entertained by videos of this multiple times. I have to say, it kind of interests me. It also makes me think I would be surrounded with 70000 people I wouldn’t wish to associate with.

Has anyone here been to Burning Man?

Anyways, I found this article rather interesting.

---

Original article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0...nobel-economist.html


A Nobel-Winning Economist Goes to Burning Man
Amid the desert orgies, Paul Romer investigates a provocative question: Is this bacchanal a model of urban planning?
Paul Romer, who won the 2018 Nobel prize for economics, argues that the coming century will need more “Burning Man urbanization.”
Alex Welsh for The New York Times
By Emily Badger
BLACK ROCK CITY, Nev. — It was dusk on the opening night of Burning Man, and the makers and misfits were touching up their art projects and orgy dens. Subwoofers oontz-oontzed as topless cyclists draped in glowing LEDs pedaled through the desert. And Paul Romer, a reigning laureate of the Nobel Prize in economics, sat on a second-story porch at the center of it all, marveling at a subtlety of the street grid.
The roads narrowed as they approached small plazas around the impermanent city. How clever, he thought, this way of funneling pedestrians toward gathering places. And most Burners probably didn’t even notice — what with the art projects and orgy dens.
“It’s just like every other city,” Mr. Romer said. “Except in this other way, it’s like no city ever.” White-haired and 63, he was dressed in black gear he’d bought at R.E.I., figuring black was the thing to wear at Burning Man. It was the first time that Mr. Romer, the former chief economist of the World Bank, had attended the annual bacchanal.
A week earlier, there was hardly anything here, in the remote desert of northwest Nevada. Then tens of thousands of people had just shown up, many in the middle of the night. They had formed an instant city, with a road network, and a raucous street life, and a weird make-do architecture.
It was an alluring sight for an economist who has talked of building cities from nothing. And Burning Man has been more and more on Mr. Romer’s mind lately, as world politics have made him gloomier. He is ill at ease behaving like a traditional academic. He’s not particularly interested in publishing papers. He doesn’t want to give speeches cheerleading his field. But he believes winning the Nobel has expanded his possibilities. More people will listen to what he has to say, if he can just decide where he wants to direct our attention.
Maybe it’s here.
Mr. Romer came to the desert imagining himself as an objective outsider: de Tocqueville among the Burners. But Black Rock City started to rub off on him. One morning, a man who called himself Coyote, who was responsible for surveying the city’s streets, took Mr. Romer around. At the far edge of town, they found a roller coaster that looked likelier than most things at Burning Man to harm you. It was designed for one fool at a time, strapped into an oversized car seat that shot down one side of a 31-foot wooden U shape and up the other.
Mr. Romer, surprising himself, walked up to it.
“Should I do this?” he asked Coyote. “If you kill a Nobel Prize winner, it’s on you.”
Then he climbed the stairs to the top of a contraption that had been constructed just days before, in a city with no building codes. Heavy metal was blaring. Mr. Romer was trussed into place. A guy with “PEE HERE” painted on his back took his glasses. And then someone gave him a push.
Dawn in Black Rock Desert, Nev., last month, on the spot where Burning Man would soon be set up.
Alex Welsh for The New York Times
Wild territory for a staid academic
Burning Man, to catch up the uninitiated, takes place for a week in the Nevada desert every August into early September. Thousands of avant-garde revelers come to bend their minds, shed their clothes and incinerate a large wooden effigy. The event is tamer than it used to be, with more Silicon Valley types and fewer anarchists, but it’s still wild territory for a staid academic.
Mr. Romer, who appreciates a bit of shock value, has been showing aerial images of the city in public talks about urban growth for several years. The world, he says, needs more “Burning Man urbanization.”
By 2050, developing-world cities are projected to gain 2.3 billion people. Many of those people will move to makeshift settlements on the edge of existing cities, tripling the urbanized land area in the developing world.
“To be a little grandiose about it, this is a really unique moment in human history,” Mr. Romer told me last year. “We’re likely to decide in this time frame what people are going to live with forever.”
Urbanization in the developed world has largely come to an end; nearly everyone who would move from farmland toward cities already has. This century, the same mass migration will run its course across the rest of the world. And if no one prepares for it — if we leave it to developers to claim one field at a time, or to migrants to make their way with no structure — it will be nearly impossible to superimpose some order later.
It will take vast expense, and sweeping acts of eminent domain, to create arterial roads, bus service, trash routes, public parks, basic connectivity.
That prospect agitates Mr. Romer, because the power of cities to lift people out of poverty dissipates when cities don’t work. To economists, cities are labor markets. And labor markets can’t function when there are no roads leading workers out of their favelas, or when would-be inventors never meet because they live in gridlock.
Mr. Romer’s answer is to do with this moment what Burning Man does every summer: Stake out the street grid; separate public from private space; and leave room for what’s to come. Then let the free market take over. No market mechanism can ever create the road network that connects everyone. The government must do that first.
The history of the Manhattan street grid, drawn in 1811 over all the land from Houston Street to 155th, offers similar lessons. But Mr. Romer fears that Manhattan sounds like a chauvinistically American example. And so when skeptics say that it will be too hard to plan for large new waves of urbanization, he says this instead: “Look at Burning Man! They grow to 70,000 people in one week.”
And then 70,000 people go home, and they do it all over again the next year. The planning requires no major expense, he argues. He’s not talking about laying sewer lines, or even paving the roads. Just draw the street grid on the open desert.
When he first proposed this to me — Burning Man as template for the next urban century — I asked if he had ever, well, been to Burning Man.
He had not. And so we made two trips there in August: first to see the city surveyed, then a few weeks later to camp in it. He would see firsthand if his provocative argument held up.
At Burning Man, order underlies the chaos. Streets are exactly 40 feet wide; plazas steer people into common spaces; the 430 fire extinguishers around town each have their own QR code.
Alex Welsh for The New York Times
Mr. Romer’s logic is connected in a roundabout way to the work that won him the Nobel. Macroeconomists used to think about the world by tallying up quantifiable stuff: capital, labor, natural resources. They weren’t sure how to account for ideas. But Mr. Romer, in a seminal 1990 paper, showed that ideas were central to progress. His model of economic growth incorporating them enabled economists to ask entirely new questions about the modern “knowledge economy”: Where do ideas come from? How do they spread? Why are cities such hotbeds for creating them?
By the late aughts, Mr. Romer was sure that cities were the urgent subject of the 21st century. He had a new idea: “charter cities” that would be built in the developing world but governed by nations with more advanced economies and more rules protecting, say, property rights and independent judges. He was picturing British-era Hong Kong, replicated 50 times over.
Some developing-world politicians were intrigued. Critics cried neocolonialism. Libertarians largely misread Mr. Romer’s intentions: They saw new territory where capitalists could shrug off government rules. To Mr. Romer, the idea was about seeding the right government rules.
The proposal forced Mr. Romer to learn the mechanics of cities. He persuaded N.Y.U. to create a new institute devoted to them, and two planning experts gave him an education. Shlomo Angel taught him the foundation of good street grids. Alain Bertaud gave him a framework: Urban planners design too much, while economists cede too much to the market. The answer lies in between — in drawing the street grid on the desert.
“The beauty of the mind of Paul is that he sees patterns where we don’t see them, because he sees patterns across examples which have nothing to do with each other,” Mr. Bertaud said.
Mr. Romer looked at the Manhattan street grid, the imagined charter city, Black Rock City. He was doing this even in his short tenure at the World Bank, where he worked from 2016 to early 2018. He took the job quietly hoping to persuade the institution to back a new city. (It did not.)
In all of this, Mr. Romer has been creeping further from the economists toward the urban planners. By the time he got to Burning Man in August, he was thinking of himself as a University of Chicago-trained economist, once indoctrinated in the almighty free market, now in open revolt against his roots.
‘Anarchy doesn’t scale!’
Burning Man is an even better model for Mr. Romer’s purposes than he knew. The event began in 1986 as a rejection of rules: There was no central authority, no prohibitions, no assigned camping spots.
In the early years on the Black Rock Desert, after the event outgrew Baker Beach in San Francisco, people brought fireworks and guns. They raced through the desert night with headlights off. They fired hunting rifles from moving vehicles at vacant cars.
“A lot of people — and I was one of them — thought that Burning Man was about this crazy feeling you could have, being with really creative people that are all anarchists, and there is no order, and it’s just amazing what can come out of that,” said Harley K. Dubois, who attended those early years. “And what came out of that was some people getting hurt.”
The 1996 plan for Black Rock City.
Burning Man Foundation
This year’s plan.
Burning Man Foundation
In 1996, a man on a motorcycle playing chicken with a large vehicle was killed. Then a rave set up two miles north of the main camp got out of hand. Three people inside tents were run over and seriously injured.
The Bureau of Land Management kicked the event off public land. Longtime participants split over whether a more organized Burning Man could be Burning Man at all.
Today, the event’s six “founders” are the people who reconstituted Burning Man after 1996, including Ms. Dubois. The anarchists drifted away. And the founders created a street grid, an early version of what would become a semicircular city with all arterial roads converging on a giant, flammable male figure in the center.
They “invented a sense of superordinate civic order — so there would be rules, and structure, and streets, and orienting spaces, and situations where people would feel a common purpose together; where people could become real to one another,” Larry Harvey, one of the founders, recounted in an oral history before his death last year.
“It had gone beyond a bit of pranksterism in the desert,” he said. “We had made a city, and no one wanted to take responsibility for it.”
To Mr. Romer, this was a teachable moment. “Anarchy doesn’t scale!” he said.
Most of the structure that has been added since feels invisible to the people who come: the streets that are surveyed to be exactly 40 feet wide, the plazas that steer people together without crowding them, the 430 fire extinguishers around town, each tracked by its own QR code.
The goal now, one planner explained to Mr. Romer, is to make Black Rock City just safe enough that people can joke about dying without actually dying.
The office where all the signs are made for Black Rock City.
Alex Welsh for The New York Times
A view outside the Burning Man staff quarters.
Alex Welsh for The New York Times
“It’s a metaphor for my sense of economics,” Mr. Romer said. “I picture an economist showing up at Burning Man and saying: ‘Oh, look! This is the miracle of the invisible hand. All of this stuff happens by self-interest, and it just magically appears.’ And there’s this huge amount of planning that actually is what’s required beneath it to make the order emerge.”
On this point, the economist and the Burners kept converging: Freedom requires some structure, creativity some constraints. But it was becoming clear there was more to the structure and constraints at Burning Man than Mr. Romer imagined. As he learned that, he inched even further toward the urban planners.
After 1996, the founders also began putting up a fence around the city, a pentagon with perfectly straight sightlines. Nominally, it is a “trash fence,” catching debris before it blows into the desert. But it also defines the edge of the city, so that it is possible to stand at the boundary line and stare out into an open desert uncluttered by tents or plywood art. The fence is an urban growth boundary. It is as much about keeping out interlopers as keeping people in.
‘It’s the market which is the danger, not the city’
The Black Rock Desert is one of the flattest places on earth. The land demands that you drag race. It is the perfect setting to shoot off rockets. The desert then returns any mischief right back, playing tricks on people who come.
Three weeks before Burning Man began, Mr. Romer and I drove 100 miles north from Reno to the tiny nearby town of Gerlach, then 15 more miles north onto the parched mud of the playa, arriving, at last, at precisely the spot in the middle of nowhere where the man statue would stand.
Over the city’s center point, Coyote had set up a theodolite, a surveying instrument he used to locate 6,000 small red flags that marked the city’s street grid. The flags made their own mirage of disorder in every direction. But if you caught them at just the right angle, future streets came into view.
Paul Romer surveying the land that would become Black Rock City.
Alex Welsh for The New York Times
It had taken a crew of about 20 people, sleeping under the stars, a week to survey the city. “I wake up in the middle of the night, and I’m staring into the Milky Way, and I realize that it’s moved — oh wait, I’m the one who moved,” Coyote said. “Some people come out here just for the survey.”
When I had first explained this spring that I wanted to come out to the desert with a famous economist to see the parts of Burning Man people take for granted, no one was surprised. Two years ago, word of one of Mr. Romer’s talks at the World Bank mentioning Black Rock City had found its way to people here. They were equally curious about him.
Mr. Romer’s nerdy interest delighted everyone. He recited details of their city plan, photographed their traffic cones and accepted one of their wooden street pegs as if it were an honorary degree.
“I think they have some experience in doing this that’s maybe unique in the world,” he said the next day at dawn. He was watching a crew raise the trash fence, their pile drivers ringing like cowbells across the desert.
A fence crew working at dawn to set up the boundary for the city.
Mr. Romer was beginning to incorporate these characters into his thinking. What they do here is a model for any place with few resources but just enough volunteers to survey new neighborhoods on the urban periphery. But on a grander scale, if he ever persuades someone to build a new city, maybe the people to call are at Burning Man.
Before we left town on that first trip, we visited Will Roger and Crimson Rose, two other Burning Man founders who have a home in Gerlach. In their living room, Mr. Romer sat in a leather armchair opposite Mr. Roger. A lineup of small animal skulls looked over his shoulder from the shelf behind him.
Mr. Roger warned Mr. Romer that he had decided he didn’t like cities. At least, not those in what he called the “default world,” away from Burning Man.
“All the energy and the helter-skelter and lack of connection to the earth, the energy of all those humans compressed into one space implodes on my own spirit, on my own sense of who I am,” Mr. Roger said.
This is a funny thing to say to an economist. Helter-skelter is a decent description of the force from which economists believe ideas emerge. When people live close to one another, rather than close to the land, they hatch plans, they trade services, they discuss terrible ideas until they eventually arrive at good ones.
This is more or less what happens at Burning Man, too. But other cities have become symbols of greed and consumption, Mr. Roger said. And that greed is killing our Earth Mother.
“I think I have some of the same anxieties, but I’m coming to the view that it’s the market which is the danger, not the city,” Mr. Romer said.
“I’m afraid economists have really been serious contributors to this problem. This whole ideology of ‘government is bad, government is the problem’ has I think provided cover for rich people and rich firms to take advantage of things for their selfish benefit.”
He has been trying to figure out how to atone for that. As Mr. Romer’s conversation with Mr. Roger took on the air of a therapy session, I got the impression that he had also come to the desert to work through his angst with economics.
Mr. Roger, sympathetic, poured him his first taste of kombucha.
Survey flags marked a future road in Black Rock City.
Alex Welsh for The New York Times
Levi goes in for a hug
Three weeks after the survey, Mr. Romer and I returned. The dusty streets were now clearly defined as the space between what people had invented: at one intersection, a “passport office” for Burners who wanted to record their adventures around Black Rock City. On another corner, a troupe of fire performers from Canada was camped, and on another a half-dozen drivable pieces of art were parked. There was also a row of 36 portable toilets, and behind that, “Brand-UR-Ass N More,” a camp where it was possible to get both a drink and a faux branding of the Burning Man logo.
While we were standing at the intersection, a man in a great beard and a blond wig approached with a hug. Levi, 35, was part of a camp running a 24-hour bar up the street, and we learned that he had lately been riding motorbikes across Africa but was about to apply to graduate school to study cognitive science.
Levi, who did not know whom he was talking to, mentioned to Mr. Romer that his hero was Daniel Kahneman, the 2002 winner of the Nobel in economic sciences.
“Well, I won the Nobel prize last year,” Mr. Romer said. “So Danny is a fellow laureate.”
Levi’s face lit up, and we then spent the next 45 minutes wandering around the neighborhood talking about economics and human behavior and scarcity. Nearly everything in Black Rock City is effectively free. But you’re supposed to respond with some type of gift to the people around you: a piece of advice, a turn in a hammock, a hot dog.
At Levi’s bar, we were given cups of something cold and orange and alcoholic. Mr. Romer, in a comparable act of generosity, then offered Levi his email address. He would happily write a recommendation for grad school, he said. Levi, floored, went in for another hug.
Theirs was exactly the kind of encounter that a city generates, over and over again, until someone gets into grad school, and someone else finds a job, and someone else begins to earn more than $2 a day.
Dust clouds swept across Black Rock City. Within another week, all of this would be gone.
Emily Badger for The New York Times
In Mr. Romer’s Nobel lecture, he implored people to think of cities, especially in the developing world, as places where people get the benefits of interacting with one another. A global economy built on ideas no longer has to be zero-sum, he argued. Everyone can use ideas at the same time. Someone living in America benefits if someone in India becomes better off and invents a vaccine.
But we have to make the cities viable first, in this moment when it’s still possible to draw what they might become.
“If we take a pass on this,” he warned, “the opportunity will be gone.”
He did not mention Burning Man. But that was before he saw the place in person.
How Burning Man Has Evolved Over Three Decades
Aug. 30, 2018
Emily Badger writes about cities and urban policy for The Upshot from the Washington bureau. She's particularly interested in housing, transportation and inequality — and how they're all connected. She joined The Times in 2016 from The Washington Post.
NEWSLETTER
Sign up for The Upshot Newsletter
Get the best of The Upshot’s news, analysis and graphics about politics, policy and everyday life.

quote:

..the coming century will need more “Burning Man urbanization.”

Oh STFU Paul. Take your Nobel and Obama's too and shove them up your ass.

**disclaimer** I skimmed the article, I can take only so much.

Never been to burning man. I do wonder what we would have learned if Walt had built his EPCOT (not the theme park).

I lived near there, for a time. I flew medevac, and we were asked to provide an airplane on standby for medical emergencies. At one point we were looking at adding a dedicated aircraft to handle the event. We didn't, and offered a response to the site, instead, but hoped we didn't get called. The runway is hard on turbines.

I did firefighting in the area, too, and fought fires adjacent to the black rock desert, though not actually at burning man. I ended overflying it quite a bit. One year I had some time off and wanted to go, but the tickets are gone far in advance, and cost the same whether it's a day or a week. Some of our personnel used to go every year.

At another operator, one of our captains took time off every year to set up and run the airport for Burning Man. He didn't think anyone knew, but a nice article about him came out in Air & Space Smithsonian. A nice enough guy, he was rather eccentric. He thought he was a vampire. He was eventually stabbed to death in a bar in Thailand, I believe.

When the "burners" come through Reno each year, they ravage the place. All the stores put up signs advising "no returns," because the burners en masse purchase bicycles and gear, and then try to return it after they're finished. Walmart ends up with mountains of garbage in parking lots, and they bring in construction dumpsters to handle it. The burners are a minor economic boost, but dirty, steal anything not nailed down, do a lot of property damage, and are far more trouble than they're worth.

Some year I might go just to see it, but I won't lose any sleep if I never make it. Used to be that I couldn't get away due fire season. Any more, I just don't want to get that dirty.

I went from 2000-2005 and then a few more times, after. It was fun. It used to be a lot more free-wheeling and adventurous. Lots of Libertarian gun-nuts used to go, back in the late 90's before they banned guns at the event. Google "Drive-by Shooting Gallery" and "Frogbat" to see what I'm talking about.
It was popular with the full-auto crowd, back then.

Now, it's too many of the "herd of independent minds", confirming non-conformists. At least, it was in 2015, when I last attended.
Turnover is high, usually about 50% of attendees are first-timers so it really is a new thing, each year. Next time could be totally different.

Go check it out. Worse things could happen than you having a lousy time with a bunch of naked chicks.

Bruce

At least for me the interesting part was where he mentioned in the next coming decades 2.3 Billion people would be added to the cities. This would cause a mass migration back the country where they would squat and turn productive fields in to copy burning man cities. And once they were there they would be impossible to dislodge....

That's why he wanted to study burning man and his prediction if true would turn the clock back in those area.....

All it tells me is to "keep your hatchet sharpened and your musket charged"

Mr. Romer needs to get together with Hernando de Soto, author of “The Other Path”. De Soto has analyzed in depth the construction of new towns around cities in South America by squatters who, given the opportunity, create streets, sewers, power grids, and public transportation, without any government involvement.
De Soto’s subsequent work has advocated for property rights for people in the third world.

quote:

Originally posted by RNshooter:


Now, it's too many of the "herd of independent minds", confirming non-conformists. At least, it was in 2015, when I last attended.
Turnover is high, usually about 50% of attendees are first-timers so it really is a new thing, each year. Next time could be totally different.

Go check it out. Worse things could happen than you having a lousy time with a bunch of naked chicks.

Bruce

That’s what I’m concerned about. But good point on worse things that a lousy time with a bunch of naked chicks.

A real Burning Man event should consist of a 4-ship of F-15E Strike Eagles plastering the event with Napalm in a low level night attack.

I guess it would be "Burning MEN" instead of Man.

I was thinking more along the line of A-10 strafing runs.

Yeah, a nice little combination would be nice.

Like that Mexican Lunch combo, some F-15Es, some A10s, anything you like with the red or green sauce.

Ttiwwop

The week of Burning Man was great. All the douche-bags would leave, traffic would actually lighten-up and you could get a seat at a popular restaurant. Now that things are 'back to normal', douche-bags driving around with playa-dust all over their cars shouting it out as a badge of participation. 'Artists' uploading and editing their images and videos pushing them out to the public seeking 'likes'. Bars saturated with 'stories from the playa' nauseating half the patrons.

All a matter of perspective, yes.

quote:

Originally posted by corsair:
'Artists'

Ah, one of my long-time pet peeves. Joseph Campbell once observed that the definition of an artist is anyone who lists themselves in the phone book as an artist. The remark was made facetiously, of course. One may call themselves an artist, but producing works of art is another matter.

I wonder how many of these self-described artists running around half-naked with paint smeared all over their body at a commercialized 'artistic event' have read James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which he speaks of "aesthetic arrest". A work of art, when viewed or heard, should produce this state of arrest- which is that the work of art creates neither desire nor revulsion. You do not wish to possess the artistry, nor does it repel you. Instead, there is a stillness which comes over you. Your experience with the thing is calming. This is an experience at a spiritual level. And IIRC, Campbell stated that a work of art which produces any reaction other than this spiritual calm is, by definition, pornography. For example, all advertising is pornographic, since it is calculated to produce desire.

St. Thomas Aquinas refers to this in Summa Theologica: Integritas (wholeness); Consonantia (proportionality); Claritas (radiance)

These concepts help explain why genuine artists are exceptionally rare. To achieve this balance, one must sense it innately, or be taught it by a skilled mentor, or learn it through a lifetime of struggle.

"Artist" is a moniker one must not apply the themselves. You may paint, sculpt, write, compose music, whatever, but until you can poduce Joyce's aesthetic arrest in others via your efforts, you're just another poser.

Dropping acid in the middle of the desert while observing a gigantic burning effigy (at a scheduled, commercialized event, no less) may make for a memorable weekend, but it doesn't make you an artist.

Desire v. Revulsion

Perfect Thanks, Patrick.

quote:

Originally posted by corsair:
The week of Burning Man was great. All the douche-bags would leave, traffic would actually lighten-up and you could get a seat at a popular restaurant. Now that things are 'back to normal', douche-bags driving around with playa-dust all over their cars shouting it out as a badge of participation. 'Artists' uploading and editing their images and videos pushing them out to the public seeking 'likes'. Bars saturated with 'stories from the playa' nauseating half the patrons.

Sounds similar to where I work. It’s not town full of people though. Just a couple. I’ve heard enough of the “stories from the "plya" to last me a solid while.

I have to admit, I have some weird fascination with the whole event. I almost cannot comprehend how an event of that size works when no money is accepted inside the event. Everything is done as a gift. It just boggles my mind.

quote:

Originally posted by Beancooker:
I have to admit, I have some weird fascination with the whole event. I almost cannot comprehend how an event of that size works when no money is accepted inside the event. Everything is done as a gift. It just boggles my mind.

Burning Man generates tens of millions of dollars each year through their entrance and parking fees There is a Board of Directors and a full time staff. It is a company with a CEO and a President that each make close to a quarter of a million dollars in salary. And out of that tens of millions, they do invest a good chunk of it to their next one.

I remember when it first started at the beach in San Francisco, I knew a couple of guys that swung in that particular circle of punk rock/hippie anarchist wannabes. Survival Research Labs was in that vortex, a "performance art" group of malcontents who admired Bill Ayers and The Weather Underground, and built large mechanical robots and exploding structures as "art installations" (I've seen one of them) with police and fire depts. shutting down the events. These are the type of guys that started Burning Man and it is now big business.

I never went to one, never had a desire to camp in sandstorms and a dirty hot desert, living with tens of thousands of societal "outcasts" for a week. And paying hundreds of dollars for the pleasure.

A giant burning man statue and a burning temple, plus orgies? That seems disturbingly atavistic and pagan.

I guess virgin sacrifices are next?



.

What about the genius who decided that he had to run into the fire?