Is Burning Man the city of the future?

A version of this story originally appeared in The New York Times. Used with permission. It was dusk on the opening night of Burning Man, and the makers and misfits were touching up their art projects and orgy dens. Subwoofers oontz-oontzed as topless cyclists draped in glowing LEDs pedaled through the desert. And Paul Romer, a reigning laureate of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, sat on a second-story porch at the center of it all, marveling at a subtlety of the street...