Some places in Rhode Island are such obvious ones for consolidating public services that it’s astonishing how rarely people bring them up. Take Aquidneck Island, with three communities. It would be an obvious place to merge fire and police services. It is, after all, a little island.

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We hope that the collapse of the condo economy will help put paid to the terrible (for the local economy) proposal by Patrick Conley, the developer, lawyer and historian (and now, we learn, ingenious art collector) to build a marina/condo/restaurant/entertainment project on the Providence waterfront that would scare away the shipping and industry and their well-paying jobs that the region so desperately needs.

Condos generally don’t create wealth except for the developer. Making, growing, inventing and shipping things does. The Working Waterfront Alliance is absolutely correct: We need to protect and indeed expand industrial and commercial operations on the Providence waterfront.

Meanwhile, we hope some of those capacious old mills in the area that developers have been turning into condos will now instead be turned into bargain-priced manufacturing facilities. Given that Rhode Island’s population has been falling, one wonders why so many condo and other real-estate schemes have been hatched. But then, most real-estate booms end in psychosis and bust.

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We laud an alarmingly timely new book by our occasional contributor Stuart Vyse, a psychology professor at Connecticut College, called Going Broke: Why Americans Can’t Hold On To Their Money (Oxford). It’s a brilliant and even entertaining analysis of American behavioral economics, melding scholarly study, data, personal stories (including the author’s own) and pictures about how otherwise intelligent Americans get allowed themselves to be bamboozled by Madison Avenue, and their own emotional and mental problems, into destroying their own finances.