The empire state building was built in 1930 as many others in that period, that period was the peak of the bubble of the great depression, the fed was created in 1913, which printer a lot to finance WWI, then generated a lot of inflation causing the 1929 crash in the stocks and financing a lot of malinvestments. So it seems clear to me that high buildings are an effect of money creation and malinvestment. On the architectutre side, IMO tall buildings are an ugly and unnatural thing. I wonder how society and cities would have evolved in a sound money environment, probably big cities like NY would have the tallest building something like 4-6 floor and would have a much smaller population, because people would simply move to smaller towns and cities as a natural trend, what do you think?