BRYAN CAPLAN: Stop Thinking Like A Tourist.

The year is 1997. You visit a lovely rural town in North Dakota. Population: 3000. You take a bunch of pictures with your analog camera to treasure the sweet memories.

Twenty years later, you return. The lovely rural town is now a regional fracking center. Population: 100,000. The charm has vanished beneath a tidal wave of new construction — residential, commercial, and industrial. You take one picture with your smart phone where you shed a tear of sorrow with New Frack City in the background. Your caption: “Progress?”

From a tourist’s point of view, you’re clearly right. Lovely rural towns are much nicer to visit than regional fracking centers. Almost anyone who saw Before-and-After pictures would agree with you: The town’s gotten far worse.

But what’s so great about the tourist’s point of view anyway? Tourism is just one tiny industry in a vast economy. If a billion-dollar fracking industry replaces a ten-million-dollar sight-seeing industry, that’s a $990M gain for mankind, not a “tragedy.” The transformation is clearly good for the 97,000 new residents of the town. It’s good for everyone who consumes the new petroleum products. And while the original inhabitants will probably gripe about all they’ve lost, they’re free to sell at inflated prices and move to one of the many remaining lovely rural towns.

And there’s no moral high ground in wanting to deprive those 97,000 people of a living so you can take pretty pictures. Being anti-growth is selfish.