> Building is hardest and costliest when population density is high, when 'land' (or equivalent resource) is in small parcels, and property rights are strong - but those are exactly the conditions that lots of people love to live in.

I don't think this holds up. Throughout history the greatest examples of "building" in all domains have occurred in these conditions. I don't think the impediments to building are related to scarcity. The author is making this point as well, it doesn't matter where a person is located, a city, a frontier, a farm, or a village, what matters are the attitudes and beliefs of the people in those settings. It's the old adage "where there's a will, there's a way". I think this is a better explanation of why it is so difficult to build in some places _at the moment_ because it also explains why it was not difficult to build in the same places at different times in the past. The question here should be how do we effectively teach people to think this way en masse despite their current circumstances or past training?