Nevada's fertile valley.(analyzing Las Vegas)

In 1972, architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown wrote a book called Learning From Las Vegas, which celebrated the gambling capital's architecture. Designers and builders, the authors insisted, should respond to the tastes and desires of "common" folks, as the architects of Las Vegas bad.

Learning from Las Vegas created a scandal. In a typical commentary from a cultural journal, the Ohio Review described the book as "dangerous," and warned that it "inverts the ideas that many have based their professional lives upon. It threatens those things that we use to distinguish the difference between us, the cultured, and them, the vulgar."

Flash forward 33 years. America's professional classes--especially economists, journalists, and politicians--have even more to learn from Las Vegas. I go there three or four times a year, and I suggest that the mandarins of Washington and New York should take similar pilgrimages to learn how the world really works.

Judging by the number of people rushing to live in it, Las Vegas is one of the most successful cities in the world. By far America's fastest-growing metropolitan area, its population rose from 273,000 in 1970 to 1,700,000 today. The city also attracted 37 million visitors last year--about the same as New York City.

Las Vegas has become the most exciting and gorgeous urban artifact of the past few decades. It has the best restaurants (practically every great chef now has an outpost, most recently Daniel Boulud), most dramatic hotels, most creative nightclubs, and grand shopping. Of course, it also has gambling.

But it's not just the gambling. Dave Kirvin, one of Vegas's top PR executives, points out that the big casino-hotels now collect the majority of their revenues from "non-gaming activities"--rooms, dinners, drinks, shows. Many other places have now adopted gambling, but none have approached the success of Las Vegas.

Las Vegas is a land of superlatives. Along with big names like Jerry Seinfeld and Elton John, it is also home to the most popular singer in Taiwan and Hong Kong (Jay Chou). Las Vegas has the scariest thrill ride on the globe (you hang 900 feet over The Strip from the top of the tallest building west of the Mississippi), the most elaborate fountains (at the Bellagio), and four separate Cirque ...