In May, an analysis posted on the blog Createquity titled "Creative Placemaking Has an Outcomes Problem" asserted that there's scant data showing a causal link between arts and urban prosperity. A month later, the literary magazine Thirty-Two published a first-person essay in which the author cited studies, researchers and his own personal experience as evidence that the premise of the creative-class theory is bunk. (Richard Florida, the urban studies theorist who leads the Creative Class Group, rebutted the essay on his own website, then the author rebutted the rebuttal. Ah, the Internet.) Finally, this week, the literary journal the Baffler took aim at urbanism's fetish for "vibrancy," and called the coolness-will-save-us model a "Ponzi scheme" that needs to be stopped.

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"The “sound” banker, alas! is not one who sees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows so that no one can really blame him." —John Maynard Keynes

In the 12 hapless years of the present millennium, we have looked on as three great bubbles of consensus vanity have inflated and burst, each with consequences more dire than the last.

First there was the “New Economy,” a millennial fever dream predicated on the twin ideas of a people’s stock market and an eternal silicon prosperity; it collapsed eventually under the weight of its own fatuousness.

Second was the war in Iraq, an endeavor whose launch depended for its success on the turpitude of virtually every class of elite in Washington, particularly the tough-minded men of the media; an enterprise that destroyed the country it aimed to save and that helped to bankrupt our nation as well.

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