On Suburban Kings and Academic Revolutions

In today’s issue:

• On a type of power greater than money

• How to keep your eye on the prize (Bourdieu)

• How Cowen and Tabarrok built the most successful independent media brand run by working academics

• Work on your writing in a community of peers every morning this week

A Power Greater Than Money

Back in September, I learned about an Australian man who turned down $50M from a real estate developer. The developer was planning to convert the area into a suburb. Here is the area, before and after the development:

The story made one news cycle, but it’s stuck with me, for it bears witness to a rare and distinct type of power—a type of power that is not abstractly but evidently greater than money. And notice this is not NIMBYism, for he did not prevent anyone from building new houses.

This man is now the visible king of this suburb. He owns something mysterious that money cannot buy, he has publicly proven that his power level is greater than $50M, whereas the power of his neighbors does not exceed the price of their new deracinated homes.

The suburban arriviste wants to play-act as a king of his own little fiefdom, in an artificially conquered and homogenized environment, but he never could have predicted that, upon moving into his new pseudo-castle, he would find himself rather the subject of a superior man.

The arriviste will, of course, scoff and mock his king, calling him a pre-modern brute and worse, but none of the castigations will ever dispel the arriviste’s inner awareness that he lives in the vicinity of a rarer and nobler type of man. He’ll insist otherwise until the end of his life, and yet the proof will stare back at him on every walk of the dog, and every morning coffee at the window.

I hope one day I have an opportunity to reject an extraordinary sum of money for something that I value beyond measure.