And yet, we do it- all the mighty of the earth want to get high:

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torri_di_Bologna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziggurat

There's a line in the Quran that the apocalypse is near when the sons of shepherds compete in building towers that try to reach the sky. A lot of Muslims allude in particular to the current crop of oil rich sheikhs (who are technically born from nomadic shepherding people) vying to build the world's tallest towers.

Except man has been trying to do that since time immemorial :D.

Interesting. I don't share their apocalyptic views, but I'll agree that misallocation of scarce resources often portends economic disaster.

You have confused a hadith (not from the Quran) Sunan Ibn Majah Vol. 1, Book 1, Hadith 63 with verses from the Quran (28:38 and 40:36–37). Anybody can make a mistake. Let us try to verify as everybody will have to support with basis on what we stated, on the Day of Judgement (17:36). Even if everything remotely Islamic is removed from consideration, the things to ponder upon are indeed all the links above viz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziggurat and https://mises.org/online-book/skyscraper-curse-and-how-austr... against this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel hmmm... food for thought on how ambition and pride can make us chase sub-optimal solutions (make us blind in other words).

Isn't it just a case of building higher and higher until there's an economic downturn. The record skyscrapers for many years will be the last ones built during the upturn.

If we see skyscrapers as an end, yes.

If they are a mean to an end it would be smart to compare them with other means.

I assume the skyscrapers are very useful, but on the other hand, the cyclical nature of building is probably extremely inefficient, so not sure about the profitability.

Sometimes governments can work against the cycle. Like build warships when drydocks don't have commercial orders and so on. I don't know if any companies or funds are big enough to do this.

The record breaking ones are often vanity projects first and built with profitability in mind second.

They're so big they are hard to fill; their architecture and floor plans are built with potential tenants as an afterthought; and because they are built at high cost, their mortgages demand premium rents that may be out of line with the general office market.

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You build a vanity skyscraper against the cycle at your own peril. The downfall of Sears is sometimes correlated with the opening of the Sears Tower in the '70s.