One of the reasons we still have family farms and the Old Country does not is that we prohibit absentee ownership of agricultural land.

It probably helps having freedom from the special clause Veblen mentions: "absentee ownership is safe-guarded by a special clause of the American constitution".

EDIT: v-integration is (don't tell the theoretical CS people; it'd ruin their fun) a practical application of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_subarray_problem (Kadane's is, incidentally, but a few characters of APL)

Riffing on great filters: anytime I see outcomes where tiny is highly likely but the few which are not tiny are huge, I tend to suspect stochastic mechanism. (Körner has a nice chapter somewhere, IIRC "Why are we not all called Smith?")