Food for thought, and occasional light rations, in Richard Florida's The Great Reset

Credit Richard Florida putting forward a satisfying -- and I think mainly sound -- conceptual framework for understanding our current economic woes in The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work.  Florida argues that major economic slumps correspond with major economic 'resets', in which new ways of generating wealth demand -- and ultimately shape -- new organizations of community, workspace and living space -- and new means of transportation that tie the new "spatial fix."  From this perspective, to extrapolate a point that Florida leaves implicit, the bubbles that precede major economic contractions are more symptom than cause -- a kind of giddy last fling at priming the legacy infrastructure that's reached a kind of natural limit.

According to Florida, the two main examples of "reset" in U.S. history are 1)  the urbanization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which developed during and followed the "long depression" of 1873-1896; and 2) suburbanization, for which the way was "literally paved" by the New Deal and postwar infrastructure investments. Florida argues that we are in a third reset now -- an accelerating shift from a manufacturing to a service economy, demanding an "infrastructure fix" centered largely on high-speed rail tying together "megaregions" - clusters of large cities that strengthen their economic links and so pool resources.