Last week, I flew down to West Palm Beach, Florida for the Southeastern Association of Law Schools’ (SEALS) annual conference, which was a lot of fun. (Marquette just joined SEALS as an affiliate member.) On the way down, I flew out of Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport in mid-morning, over Atlanta’s outer suburbs.

I was amazed as we flew over miles and miles of half-finished subdivisions, carved haphazardly out of the wooded hills. Some were little more than cleared lots; others had houses in various states of completion, forming tenuous neighborhoods. The geographic impact of the housing bubble will be with us for quite some time.

As we continued to pass over these monuments to irrational exuberance, I was reminded of the closing lines of one of my favorite poems:

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.