The craving for massive live events is ruining our cities | Simon Jenkins

In the digital age, there's big money to be made in large gatherings. But the Olympics will show the flaws of circus economics

The stakes are too low. The Olympic Games were originally held so that young men could prepare for war. Now young men are recalled from war to prepare for the Olympic Games. It is the politics of the nation state gone mad. The commercialism, the heavy-handed security, the ostentatious plutocracy and phoney patriotism of the modern Olympics are out of all proportion to...