If you are an American and you are curious about what it would be like to live in a world run entirely by aging hippies, a good place to go is the Whole Foods Market in Cambridge Massachusetts. On the way visiting friends, I stopped into the one in Central Square, which is the heart of MIT. Cambridge is basically a city owned and managed by two elite universities, Harvard and MIT. Lagos to Cambridge is like a guy from Detroit getting dropped into Reykjavik.

That’s the thing about New England and cities like Cambridge in particular. It’s the stunning whiteness. Not wholesome Midwestern white or Scots-Irish white like West Virginia. It is a creepy Potemkin white. Central Square is now populated with fashionable young people sporting well cultivated beards. The older people all have the aging hippie vibe. The near total lack of diversity is what’s unsettling. Cambridge would make the Klan blush.

According to the census, Cambridge is a city of 105,000 people, with 12,000 of them black. Where they stash those black people is a mystery to me. Even in the old days before MIT and Harvard bought the city, it was hard to find a black guy. Central Square was the exception. Drug dealers, pimps and hustlers would hang around the banks of pay phones at night. All of that is gone now and the black people with it, but to where I cannot say. According to the census data, the percentage of blacks dropped by a third in the last twenty years so that may be it.

Today, Central Square looks like every other hipster-ville. There are loads of little retail stores servicing the college community. Housing is stuffed in where space allows. MIT has built infrastructure on just about every block. It’s impossible to know the lines between the city and the school. For all practical purposes, that part of Cambridge is owned and operated by the school. The same is true of Harvard down Mass Ave from MIT. The school has gobbled up every bit of land not gobbled up by school employees.

Whole Foods is another example of why libertarian economics is utter nonsense. If humans were transactional, value seeking machines, they would not be squandering money on sustainably grown fair trade instant coffee, processed by one-legged transgendered midgets. I picked up a jar about the size of a grenade for $10. I also got some organic antibiotic free milk and a tray of cinnamon buns (preservative free). As I picked up my products I listened to two middle-aged homosexual males bicker over what I think was quinoa.

Like Apple, Whole Foods is about signalling. An iPhone is just a more expensive version of every other phone, but you have one to let people know you are the sort of person who has an iPhone. You’re not like everybody else. Something similar is going on with Whole Foods. Everything they sell can be found at a normal grocery store at a fraction of the price. But, regular stores are utilitarian and transactional. The stores are just selling stuff for a profit. Whole Foods is conformational and affirming.

That’s the thing that jumps out to me when I visit college towns like Cambridge, Boulder, New Haven etc. They are cultivated little utopias based on the ideological inclinations of the modern college faculty. Unlike normal-ville, they are very white and very Asian. There’s little in the way of crime or social pathology. There are no poor people. There’s also scads of money flowing in to support these little utopias, most from the taxes of normal people. MIT and Harvard, for example, get billions in research money. The students are all on some sort of federal aid program. Pull away the government crutch and these little hot houses collapse.

That’s why the politics of these places gets so crazy. Most of the people wandering around Cambridge are not worried about their company laying them off if the new product does not sell. The money spigot is never shut off so most of the people attached to these schools can indulge whatever strikes their fancy. These elite academies operate like a cultural and political black hole sucking the rest of the areas politics and culture into the void. Massachusetts is a different sort of Utah and Cambridge is Salt Lake with better bars and looser women.