Your Community Leaders Don't Care

...or your town would be flourishing. Or it might just be that they are doing the wrong things. They might be fighting against gravity. Some trends are so powerful that fighting them is silly. Examples:

- In the U.S., population is shifting from the Northeast to the Southwest.
- Globally, people are moving from the countryside to cities.

So we can try to keep people by spending what remains in the coffers on bribing a company to locate a factory to our town. Or begging for a government grant to fix up the main street and make it cute again. But people are leaving, and those who remain don't want to shop on main street.

So what can communities do?

- They can rely on entrepreneurs to create compelling businesses that overcome the above immutable trends.
- They can make their towns more efficient, or even better, completely reinvent the way they operate: change the traffic direction, shift to congregate in new ways, etc.