“I think I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage, and wisdom is supposed to consist not in seeing further than other people, but in not seeing so far.”—John Stuart Mill, from the debate speech “Perfectability,” May 2nd, 1828. It was recently quoted with admiration by Bill Gates in his “debate” with rational optimist Matt Ridley.

In case you missed it, the early word on Aerotropolis is in, and it’s glowing with praise:

“Thanks to the manifold effects of modern aviation, earth and sky are merging in our world faster and more thoroughly than most people know. But you won’t be most people after reading Aerotropolis. Throw out your old atlas. The new version is here.” – Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Air.

“Very few people realize how profoundly air transport is changing our cities, our economies, our social systems, and our systems of governance. If you want to be way ahead of the curve in understanding one of the most important drivers of change for the 21st century, read this book.” - Paul Romer, Senior Fellow Stanford Insitute for Economic Policy Research; founder of Charter Cities.

“Aerotropolis redraws the world map, using air routes to trace the new connections and competition between mega-regions that will shape the geography of the Great Reset. This lively, thought-provoking book is must reading for anyone interested in how and where we will live and work in a truly global era.” - Richard Florida, director of the Martin Prosperity Institute, University of Toronto and author of The Great Reset.

“A fascinating window into the complex emergent urban future. This book is an extremely sophisticated, often devastatingly witty and ironic, interpretation of what is possible over the next two decades. It is not science fiction. It is science and technology in action. The authors have one foot firmly planted in the possible and foreseeable.” – Saskia Sassen, Professor, Columbia University, author of Territory, Authority, Rights.

“A wheels-up, clear-eyed, as-it-happens dispatch of the world being remapped by our just-in-time, frequent-flying, what-time-is-this-place society.  An essential guide to the 21st century.” – Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us).

“Aerotropolis presents a radical, futuristic vision of a world where we build our cities around airports rather than the reverse. This book ties together urbanism, global economics, international relations, sociology, and insights from adventures in places that aren’t even on the map yet to present a plausible new paradigm for understanding how we relate to the skies. Perhaps the most compelling book on globalization in years.” - Parag Khanna, Senior Fellow, New America Foundation, and author of How to Run the World.

“Aerotropolis comprehensively explains the enormous effects modern aviation has on cities and countries around the world. It is a unique resource.” - Frederick W. Smith, chairman and CEO, FedEx Corporation.

“The closest thing to a real-world vision to rival that of [H. G.] Wells… a mind-expanding ride that reminds us, once again, that humanity needs no apocalypse to reinvent itself and its surroundings.” - Thomas P.M. Barnett, author of Great Powers: America and the World After Bush.

“Fascinating… their case studies of failures, successes and known unknowns are music to a logistician’s ears: Why, for instance, should so much air traffic now pass through the Persian Gulf? Because the emirates are blank slates for the experiment, and, as one Abu Dhabi–based technologist says, “because we can fly nineteen hours nonstop now, we’re able to reach any city in the world from here.” The brave new world is on the way, and it’s coming in by air.” - Kirkus Reviews.

“The inevitability of an airborne future rests on economic but also human imperatives… But our increasing dependence on air travel is real enough, and this is an eye-opening picture of that trend.” - Publishers Weekly.

Interesting news from Memphis today— Dunavant Enterprises Inc., which sold off its cotton-trading operations earlier this year, has decided to refocus its attention on (you guessed it, assuming you know Memphis) logistics. Dunavant Enterprises was founded by the legendary William B. “Billy” Dunavant, dubbed “the Michael Jordan of cotton” by his peers. Years before Paul Tudor Jones made his first billion swapping commodities, Dunavant had built his small family business into an empire trading cotton. He was the first to trade cotton futures and the first of his kind to abandon “Cotton Row” along the waterfront for the area around the airport. His company’s decision to stop growing, making or trading goods to focus on transporting them instead is the story of 20th century Memphis in a nutshell. Before he retired in 2005, Dunavant pulled off on last big score, the second-largest single cotton trade in history. It was for $225 million, and the client was in China. That tells you all you need to know about where the cotton business ultimately went.

I mention all of this because it’s impossible to tell the story of Memphis (and FedEx) without telling the story of Billy Dunavant, which is why I began the second chapter of Aerotropolis with a visit to the Memphis Cotton Museum, with a cameo from Dunavant himself:

The trading floor of the Memphis Cotton Exchange sits at the corner of South Front Street and Union Avenue, overlooking the bank of the Mississippi River and the docks that once lined it. Plantation owners and their salesmen guided skiffs up and down the delta to those piers before dragging their bales across the road to the base of the exchange. There, beneath its vaulted windows, traders broke pieces off the soft piles and twisted them into ropes called snakes. They would hold these up to sunlight, judging the cotton’s color, quality, and seediness on the spot. “Spot trading” was their métier, buying bales already picked and packed, unlike their counterparts at the Chicago or New Orleans exchanges, who traded in futures– essentially contracts to deliver a later harvest at a set price.

Front Street was both the geographic and the spiritual center of Memphis’s cotton trade, and the center of the world’s until the 1970s– a strip of ware houses, dry- goods stores, barbecue joints, and diners populated by traders, bankers, Teamsters, and hangers- on all swapping gossip with discarded snakes underfoot. The exchange’s dues- paying members, fearing they had drifted too far from the street in their headquarters just a few blocks inland, decided in 1922 to move the trading floor back onto “Cotton Row,” into the base of an Art Deco tower built to house it.

Today, the Memphis Cotton Exchange is the Memphis Cotton Museum, the trading floor frozen in time and reconstituted as an average day in 1939. On the spring afternoon of my visit not too long ago, the exchange was empty of traders and visitors alike. Under brass ceiling fans and above the glass display cases was the original Big Board– a chalkboard fifty feet long and ten feet high, spanning an entire wall and rising to the ceiling. Chalkers, usually young men with deft hands, stalked back and forth along an elevated walkway, continually rewriting prices sent over the ticker from New York and Liverpool to the Western Union offi ce below. When exchange members spotted an opening for arbitrage or an untenable position, they strode to one of the four phone booths lining the far wall.

Mounted in each booth today is a small screen displaying a lineup of talking heads reciting the history of King Cotton in Memphis. One of them is a Southern gentleman well past retirement age named William B. “Billy” Dunavant, dubbed “the Michael Jordan of cotton” by his peers. “We used to consume eleven million bales of cotton each year,” he says through a molasses- thick drawl. “Now it’s six million. China used to consume fifteen million bales a year. Now it’s forty million.”

Dunavant liquidated his own firm’s physical position on Front Street in the early 1970s, moving to one of the broad, squat ware houses that had already begun sprouting like toadstools along the access roads just east of Memphis International Airport. He dismissed the rivals he left behind as “a bunch of old men gossiping,” A few members stayed in the exchange tower for sentimental reasons. Many others followed Dunavant’s trail to East Memphis, where the airport, highways, and rail yards had given birth to an entire forest of white, multistory ware houses adorned with the stubs of truck- loading docks instead of Art Deco flourishes. These were the spawn of a twenty- seven- year- old former marine pilot named Fred Smith, who moved home from Little Rock with his new company in tow, Federal Express.

“I rather expect the eco-ayatollahs to take a dim view of all my travels lately. But, hey, the planes were going to leave whether I was on them or not. And I was glad to see a far-off corner of the world that many civilians will never get to. So bugger off.”

- James Howard Kunstler, who spent the holiday in Perth, Australia—“the city comfortably most far removed from any other major population center on Earth.” This is a man who has spent the last ten years predicting the global airline industry would be dead within the next five years. At least he’s enjoying it while it lasts.

Today is “Cyber Monday,” one of the busiest online shopping days of the year (although surprisingly not #1, for reasons I’ll explain below). In honor of the dubious “holiday,” Esquire tells of the story of the National Trade Federation executives who created it from whole cloth:

And so, in the summer of 2005, in the nondescript offices of a nondescript trade organization: a name. Blue Monday? Not enough cheer. Green Monday? Too hippie. Black Monday? Too confusing. “Cyber Monday,” then, would be a simple new holiday, a necessary one, to meet the demands of a WiFi-enabled gifting populus – but also something complex, less marketing myth than evolutionary consumerism, more Wikipedia than Hallmark.

Five years later, the NRF and its Website, Shop.org, expects 106 million Americans to shop today, including more than half of all office workers in America. Nine out of ten e-tailers are offering Cyber Monday deals.

That’s on top of the eye-popping numbers posted over the weekend; according to The New York Times” “About 33.6 percent of weekend shoppers bought online, which, according to the federation’s study, is the highest percentage ever.” Online sales on Thanksgiving rose 33 percent over a year earlier, while Black Friday sales were up 15.9 percent according to IBM. Meanwhile, ComScore said online retail had already increased 13 percent in the first 26 days of November versus a year ago, to $11.64 billion. After several years of plateauing growth, it appears e-commerce is back and bigger than ever.

Anyone who started their holiday shopping early on Thursday should have given thanks not for Amazon’s patent on one-click shopping, but for FedEx, UPS and the immense hubs they’ve constructed in Memphis and Louisville, respectively (along with Indianapolis, Newark, Oakland, Ft. Worth, and Greensboro, not to mention Paris, Shanghai and Guangzhou) to process the tens of millions of packages those purchases represent. And those hubs, in turn, have attracted the country’s biggest e-tailers to set up gigantic distribution centers in their footprint, whether it’s Technicolor (which handles half the DVDs sold in America from its Memphis warehouse) or Amazon or Zappos (which runs a single, million-sq. ft. hangar south of Louisville). These are the cities shipping and handling built—what you get when you have to pump billions of dollars worth of online purchases through real, physical space—and they are the real miracles of e-commerce, not one-click.

How can I be sure? Because even as the Esquire story concludes that Cyber Monday might someday triumph over Black Friday as the biggest shopping day of the year, it acknowledges that Cyber Monday is not even the busiest online shopping day of the year. The crescendo of the holiday online shopping season is typically the Monday or Tuesday before Christmas—the cutoff for guaranteed shipping in time for the holiday. From Chapter 2 of Aerotropolis:

Speed has put the squeeze on retailers. E-commerce didn’t exist in 1995, but the first wave of e-tailers collectively racked up $7 billion in sales four years later. It was $155 billion in 2009, and it may top $250 billion a few years from now. An entire galaxy of one- click shopping has been summoned into existence, with Amazon poised to become the next generation Walmart in the eyes of Wall Street. A recent study by four economists at the University of Chicago found that Amazon and e-commerce have crushed small and midsize booksellers (along with travel agents and auto dealerships) as prices fell and bigger, more effi cient retailers got even bigger.

Two billion boxes land on our doorsteps each year, three- fourths of which have been sent either overnight or second- day air. E-commerce (and why call it that? Isn’t it just “commerce” by now?) at present accounts for 7 percent of all retail spending. Half of all Americans are online shoppers, spending an average of $1,006 per year. Jeff Bezos’s original prediction that it would eventually account for 15 percent of a multitrillion- dollar industry is well within reach.

What the Internet added to the retail equation wasn’t long tails and thoughtful comparison shopping, but the acceleration of impulse. Our increasing comfort with our digital selves– composed of Google searches, Facebook friends, YouTube clips, and tweets– awoke a belief in us that physical atoms should always move at the same light speed as our digital bits. The real breakthrough was our collective acclimation to this new degree of speed. Having settled into the fast lane, slowing down for even a second is viscerally painful, no matter what our speedometer actually says. As counterintuitive as it sounds, the best thing that ever happened to overnight mail was being made halfway obsolescent by e-mail. Our desperate struggle to accelerate everything else to the same velocity has only made us more dependent on its fastest physical analogue. And so our impulse purchases are increasingly accompanied by the equally impulsive selection of next- day air for just a few dollars more. And if our impulse was wrong we return the item on the seller’s dime.

The aerotropoli around Memphis and Louisville were created by those dollars. These are the cities “shipping and handling” built. In the business, those dollars are referred to as “value added,” an accounting term describing the money to be made from touching goods and improving them at the right time in the right place. Memphis and Louisville are where, in the United States at least, goods are tenderly massaged. These are cities made of hubs, one for each industry, or maybe more.

(Originally published in Advertising Age, November 29th, 2010.)

NEW YORK (AdAge.com)—“What does it take to fly?” Donald Sutherland intones over lush black-and-white images of Boeing 747s, jet engines, captains and crew in the first TV spot of Wieden & Kennedy’s campaign for Delta Air Lines. It takes headwinds, apparently.

“The thing you push against is the thing that lifts you up,” the actor continues. “So every challenge, really, is a chance to show that even in this crazy world of no-liquids, take-your-shoes-off, cost-cutting and route cancellations, someone in this industry still has the passengers’ back.”

Translation: You hate to fly, and it shows. After mid-decade brushes with bankruptcy, U.S. carriers are back in the black, packing them in and jacking up prices while slashing what’s left of the perks and replacing them with fees. One casualty of all the cost-cutting and mergers is ad spending—especially on TV—while the remaining holdouts hammer the fact that their bags, at least, fly free. So it’s odd to see a legacy carrier attempt to build a brand again.

“We wanted to start with the truth, and by acknowledging it, earn people’s trust,” said Ben Hughes, a co-creative director for the campaign, which features the tagline “Keep climbing.” But will passengers believe it? Or have they been too conditioned by packed planes, fees on top of fees, surly flight attendants and, now, the TSA’s “scope-and-grope” procedures, to think Delta and its competitors are all broken and all the same?

Last week marked the start of the annual holiday travel rush, with an estimated 24 million Americans taking to the skies over Thanksgiving, a 3.5% increase over last year. It’s been a banner year for airline profits despite the sluggish economy, following a period of consolidation in which Delta-Northwest, United-Continental, and Southwest-AirTran all merged. The survivors have since called a truce on ruinous fare wars, leading to the fuller planes, higher prices and ancillary fees adopted by most U.S. carriers that have become a fixation of both industry executives and passengers. U.S. Airways CEO Doug Parker boasted this month that a la carte pricing annually delivers $400 million to $500 million in pure profit. “If we didn’t have it, we’d be right back where we were before,” he said, “barely breaking even or worse.”

At the other end of the spectrum, Southwest Airlines made “Bags Fly Free” the focal point of $159.5 million in TV spending last year, according to Kantar Media—a figure nearly equal to the combined ad budgets of Delta, United, American and Continental.

Have the airlines really become so commoditized that paying $25 for a checked bag means all the difference? It seems so. Surveys by Forrester Research indicate advertising has an effect on only 16% of travelers making purchasing decisions. Their primary considerations include price, on-time statistics, airports served and nonstop flights.

“If you have no brand image,” said Forrester travel-industry analyst Henry Harteveldt, “you’re just one generic airline competing against another.”

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(Originally published at FastCompany.com on November 1st, 2010.)

The future belongs to crowds. That’s the lesson in a sentence from Expo 2010, which concluded in Shanghai on Sunday after six months, a record-breaking 73 million visitors, and 30,000 newborns saddled with the unfortunate name of “Shibo” (Chinese for “Expo”). Estimates for the cost of the World’s Fair—the largest and most expensive in history—run as high $58 billion, depending on how Shanghai’s infrastructure upgrades are accounted for.

Visiting the Expo could be a grueling experience. Roughly the size of Central Park, the fairground could accommodate 600,000 people. But daily attendance peaked in late October at 1 million, creating a park both vast and massively overcrowded. Locals warning visitors “If you don’t go you’ll regret it; if you do you’ll regret it twice as much,” were specifically warning of the epic lines, which in the Expo’s final days took anywhere from five to 11 hours to get through at the most popular pavilions. (At one point Turkey sparked a minor incident by accusing Saudi Arabia and Germany of padding their waits for prestige.)

Chinese officials guaranteed they would shatter the record set by Osaka in 1970 by giving away millions of free tickets and subsidizing numerous tours. For many visitors, the most popular souvenir wasn’t some tchotchke featuring the Expo’s ubiquitous blue mascot, Haibao, but the folding plastic stools hawked outside the gates.

The Expo’s stated theme was “Better City, Better Life,” and organizers boasted it was the first World’s Fair devoted to the contemplation of cities. Its finale Sunday included a “Shanghai Declaration” signed by all participants advocating for greener, more sustainable, and more equitable ones. “We have come to realize that people’s understanding and pursuit of a better life are both the foundations and the engines of urban development,” the official English translation stated. “We are also convinced that it is necessary to re-examine the relationship between people, cities and our planet. We agree that, in tackling the challenges of urban development, innovation offers solutions and the concept of ‘Cities of Harmony’ embodies our dreams.”

“Cities of Harmony” echoes the “harmonious society” envisioned by Chinese president Hu Jintao as the outcome of his “scientific development” policy established in 2005. As the Expo’s chairman put it, “I think the key is now to solve the problems that have been brought about by development through development. The priority is development.”

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“Greg Lindsay, an aviation writer and co-author of the upcoming book Aerotropolis, which chronicles the intersection of aviation, globalization and cities, is more blunt.

“The good old days never were – they never existed,” Lindsay says. “We imagine the space and what not, but seats weren’t as good. The meals weren’t that great. We had no seatback video. And we were paying thousands of dollars per ticket. These are the things we sort of forget – or never experienced, because we’re too young.”“

That’s USA Today’s Ben Mutzabaugh, quoting me on the subject of the so-called “golden age” of air travel prior to de-regulation, back when Pan Am was still around and air fares were double or triple what they are now. Believe or not, the golden age is now—we have never been more mobile, especially those of us who live across the country (or continents) and are able to commute home for Thanksgiving. Have a great holiday, everyone.

This week marks the start of the annual holiday travel rush, but since I’m taking Amtrak to visit my in-laws in rural Massachusetts for Thanksgiving, I don’t have the scope-and-grope to look forward to until Christmas. (Don’t look at me; I wanted to fly the Shuttle to Logan.) There’s little I can add at this point to the debate about the TSA’s “enhanced” security measures, other than to note that the principle of the thing matters less to me than the execution.

Forced to choose between the lesser or two evils, I will opt out when the time comes, because at least that painfully intimate encounter will only be between the two of us in that moment, rather than saved for an unknown period of time and seen by an unknown number of people (a la the 35,000 stored images discovered in an Orlando courthouse’s scanner this summer, when the official policy stated none were to be saved). FlyerTalk has crowdsourced a master list of which airports and which terminals you can expect to be confronted with the scanners.

And don’t try stripping to your skivvies, either. (I’m talking to you, Jim Lynch.) A man who tried doing that in San Diego was arrested and paraded through the terminals in his underwear, charged with a pair of misdemeanors for not only resisting the process, but also for recording it to ensure TSA couldn’t spin the story in their favor. (After all, this is the same airport where “don’t touch my junk” was coined.)

There are many larger arguments to be made: is the TSA out of control? (Yes, and there are plenty of horror stories to attest to that.) Are we safer with the scanners than we are without them? (Arguably, but that assumes terrorists will try to replicate 9/11 or the pants bomber again, rather than blow a UPS plane out of the sky in an attempt to cripple airborne logistics, and in turn the global economy. If you think I’m kidding about that, wait until you read my book.) At this point, it’s worth asking: is flying even worth it?

The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle has decided it’s not (at least on short-haul flights), preferring to drive, which surprised Tyler Cowen. “In relative terms it is the driving experience which has deteriorated, largely because of traffic congestion,” he wrote. “Imagine what flying would be like if they were not allowed to charge you a proper price for the experience.” (Interestingly, she’s not a big believer in high-speed rail, either.)

One unconfirmable stat I’ve seen making the rounds is that your chances of contracting skin cancer from the backscatter radiation are the same, if not higher than dying in a terrorist incident. That may or may not be the case, but do you know what is more dangerous? Driving. I’ll let Nate Silver take it from here:

In the past, more cumbersome security procedures have had deleterious effects on passenger demand. A study by three professors at Cornell University found, for instance, that when the T.S.A. began to require checked baggage to be screened in late 2002, it reduced overall passenger traffic by about 6 percent. (You can actually see these effects a bit when looking at the air traffic statistics: passenger traffic on U.S.-based airlines dropped by about 6 percent from the fourth quarter of 2002 to the first quarter of 2003 – greater than the usual seasonal variance – even though the economy was recovering and travelers were starting to get over the fear brought on by the Sept. 11 attacks.)

More stringent security procedures, in essence, function as a tax upon air travel, and produce a corresponding deadweight loss. Teleconferences are often a poor substitute for person-to-person interaction, and when people are reluctant to travel, some business deals don’t get done that otherwise would have. Recreational travelers, meanwhile, may skip out on vacations that otherwise would have brought them pleasure and stress-relief (while improving revenues for tourism-dependent economies). The tenuous profits of the airline industry are also affected, of course. Revenue losses from the new bag-checking procedures may have measured in the billions, according to the Cornell study.

Other passengers may substitute car travel for air travel. But this too has its consequences, since car travel is much more dangerous than air travel over all. According to the Cornell study, roughly 130 inconvenienced travelers died every three months as a result of additional traffic fatalities brought on by substituting ground transit for air transit. That’s the equivalent of four fully-loaded Boeing 737s crashing each year. [emphasis mine]

And that’s what drives me crazy about the TSA’s paranoid fantasies: I have a higher risk of death every time I cross the street. Of course, risk analysis is not something Americans are known for being particularly good at, nor is history. Salon’s Patrick Smith (of “Ask the Pilot”) ponders the unthinkable:

Middle Eastern terrorists hijack a U.S. jetliner bound for Italy. A two-week drama ensues in which the plane’s occupants are split into groups and held hostage in secret locations in Lebanon and Syria.

While this drama is unfolding, another group of terrorists detonates a bomb in the luggage hold of a 747 over the North Atlantic, killing more than 300 people.

Not long afterward, terrorists kill 19 people and wound more than a hundred others in coordinated attacks at European airport ticket counters.

A few months later, a U.S. airliner is bombed over Greece, killing four passengers.

Five months after that, another U.S. airliner is stormed by heavily armed terrorists at the airport in Karachi, Pakistan, killing at least 20 people and wounding 150 more.

Things are quiet for a while, until two years later when a 747 bound for New York is blown up over Europe killing 270 passengers and crew.

Nine months from then, a French airliner en route to Paris is bombed over Africa, killing 170 people from 17 countries.

And that’s the end of commerical aviation as we know it, right? Except all of it actually happened, between 1985 and 1989.

In the 1980s we did not overreact. We did not stage ill-fated invasions of distant countries. People did not cease traveling and the airline industry did not fall into chaos. We were lazy in enacting better security, perhaps, but as a country our psychological reaction, much to our credit, was calm, measured and not yet self-defeating.

This time, thanks to the wholly unhealthy changes in our national and cultural mind-set, I fear it will be different.

As an airline employee I worry greatly about this. If 2001 was any indication, we are doomed to overreaction that will ground planes and send Americans scurrying into their hidey-holes. Along with many thousands, or even millions, of others, I am liable to find myself once again unemployed. Unemployed not for any good or practical reason, but because we, as a nation, have grown weak and prone to panic.

“The terrorists have won” is a refrain I don’t like using. It’s sensationalist and ignores inherent complexities. But for the moment, I can’t think of a better way of putting it.

I like to call Dubai “the airline with an emirate attached.” It’s possibly the purest example of an aerotropolis—a city of millions that literally would not exist without Emirates Airlines flying them there. Now it seems Dubai’s rulers have come around to the same view. The quotes below are taken from a Financial Times interview with Mohammed al-Shaibani, the man in charge of restructuring Dubai Inc. It’s a curious thing when the growth of your airline is your biggest selling point:

As of today we are riding on something that during the boom we missed. Today Dubai is very attractive, Dubai is cost effective, it makes sense. That’s why there is a 60% growth in company formation because it’s cheaper to do business today in Dubai. The rent is cheaper, the accommodation is available, there’s a lot of options so this is giving people a lot of choices and this is very critical for us. So this is actually a strength that you should maintain by keeping Dubai competitive. During the boom that a little bit slipped our mind where we started focusing on … investment overseas and there was a trend but we left something very valuable behind which is what Dubai is all about. It’s about logistic, re-export, retail business, tourism, services that’s what we’re all about.

The growth of Emirates Airline I think is, what, 24%, which is an overwhelming number by any means today for an airline of the size of Emirates Airline. It has the biggest 777 fleet in the world. There are more turbo 7s in Emirates Air than any other airline, for example. It has the biggest order of 380s in the world, so you’re talking about a company that’s doing really well. Because of the growth of Emirate Airline you find other industries are growing off it. For example, the airport: the airport literally – how can I say it – is fighting … to keep up with the expansion of Emirates Airline, so there’s huge growth in the airport. They’re growing I think another double digits year-to-year and that’s also contributing to the tourism industry and the visitors of Dubai because you have a lot of growth there.

Most of the hotels, yes, maybe the rates have dropped a little bit, especially last year, but the occupancy remained at a very higher number. I mean, you’re talking about… this is again also a surprisingly high number by any standard. A lot of the hotels are averaging about 80% which is very, very high. ..

There are a lot of companies relocating to Dubai in the Free Zone. If I look at DP World, the port business, there’s huge growth.

We also have to look at the facts. It’s one way when you say that Dubai, people are leaving it, in other words people are waiting for the school to leave. We never really thought about this as factual because we know we can measure the population by the consumption of electricity. Electricity is growing at 17% year-to-year. That means you have a growth of population, so nobody is leaving Dubai. The schools are growing at about 20% or so. There are more schools opening up and they all have more business than they can handle. So there is a lot of relocation to Dubai. So when you look at these numbers, it gives you a lot of comfort.