Are you arguing against me, the essay, or the excerpt? I don't think your rebuttal really hits at the main body of the essay, which is about how competitive pressure can trap groups into miserable situations that no individual wants, but which are stable enough to be hard to break out of. It's not that you can really predict the form of societal institutions, but just that they perhaps aren't shaped by free choice as much as they seem, because of how much the incentive landscape restricts our choices.
I don't think the point is that the exact detailed form of Las Vegas was inevitable, but rather that it exemplifies the collective madness that these forces can produce.
Although perhaps more relevant to this thread would be how a society might, under pressure, lose its traditional siesta and never get it back. He mentions examples like this too.
The essay does continue its fair share of glib side-stepping of areas of social organization that are less deterministic than Alexander likes to suggest, but it also contains some good points and some interesting examples (even if I don't agree with his explanations/projections of all of them).
I don't think the point is that the exact detailed form of Las Vegas was inevitable, but rather that it exemplifies the collective madness that these forces can produce.
Although perhaps more relevant to this thread would be how a society might, under pressure, lose its traditional siesta and never get it back. He mentions examples like this too.