As of November 2013, it was official. New York City had won the title of having the nation’s tallest structure. The heated controversy between New York and Chicago was settled when the Council of Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, based in Chicago, decided that the 408-foot spire sitting atop One World Trade Center could be included in the total height of the building.

In 2014, there should have been a skyscraper alert issued for China. Groundbreaking ceremonies took place on what was expected to be the world’s tallest skyscraper, called Sky City tower. This project was noteworthy not just as an attempt to build a record-breaking skyscraper of 2,749 feet in height, but also because of the remarkably short construction schedule due to the construction company’s prefabricated construction process. Initially, on-site construction was delayed until April 2014. Later, the government cancelled the project due to environmental concerns over nearby wetlands.

The notion that a record-breaking skyscraper can cause economic crises sounds ridiculous, and it is very much absurd. There is no causal relations between skyscraper construction and the skyscraper curse.

If I go there will be trouble
And if I stay there will be double.
So you gotta let me know
Should I stay or should I go?
 — The Clash, Should I Stay or Should I Go

The decision of where to locate your residence is difficult to make. Most of the factors that play a role in your decision-making are basically economic factors. So might this kind of decision-making process be somehow involved in the skyscraper curse? Economist Lucas Engelhardt thought so and wrote an insightful paper about it.

Money makes possible the good things in life: our ability to trade with one another and the ability to form groups to work for beneficial purposes, as well as saving, investing, economic growth, and development. Without some form of money, advanced society would not be possible. However, as we saw in the previous chapters, increases in the supply of money, which mainstream economists now view as indispensable, are really the source of many evils of economic life.

We don’t really know what starts the speculative bubbles.  — Jesse Abraham and Patric Hendershott, “Bubbles in Metropolitan Housing Prices”

Economists understand very little about how technological progress occurs.   —  Alan Greenspan, “Testimony of Chairman Alan Greenspan”

Before we leave the topic of the problems and blessings of roundaboutness of production and the structure of production, it will be very useful to see a natural, concrete example of it in action. It then will become easier to understand the unnatural cases involving malinvestments and the skyscraper curse.

It makes very little difference how new money is injected.  —  Scott Sumner, TheMoneyIllusion

In previous chapters, I described economic growth and development as a process whereby lowering time preferences leads to an accumulation of savings that are invested in more-roundabout production processes, which in turn increase future consumption possibilities, labor productivity, and wages and incomes.

You could probably go back in history and find examples of the skyscraper curse in structures such as the Egyptian pyramids and medieval cathedrals. Here the review is confined to modern buildings, but we will expand our time horizon to examine records prior to and after the original Skyscraper Index (1907–99). We will also reexamine the one record-setting building, the Woolworth Building, that Andrew Lawrence considered a failure of the index because no curse occurred. As a result of this reexamination, the Skyscraper Index appears more reliable than previously thought.