A Soundbite from Sterling

In this year's yearly interview with The WELL, Sterling issues this pronouncement:

I'm inclined to think the model [for local urban resilience in the face of nation-level leadership incompetence] is Italy. Italy has had calamitous Bush-levels of national incompetence during almost its entire 150-year national existence.

So in order to be successful and happy in the face of the kind of collapse that the US may be faced with in the coming years, it has to become more like Italy.

(Aside: one of the problems with this idea is that the USA is geographically much more spread out, and population-wise much less dense, than that boot in the Med is. So the City-State of Boston might work, but Idaho and Wyoming would have two choices: retain a 'state'-like identity and continue to benefit from governmental services (like policing, banking, insurance, and defense) or become homesteaders-with-Internet.)