Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

even if Palo Alto itself looked down the long list of its dead children and saw the light, there’s not much anyone can do. The beauty of the design is that the rewards call forth the winners, and the winners create the losers. It’s impersonal: forces, not men. Someone’s going to go to Stanford. Someone’s going to make billions of dollars. Palo Alto exists to find and develop them early, as soon as possible. From there, the railroads build themselves, as the baron Shelgrim said. Even the winners can’t stop the train, even when their own kids are in the way.