Context:
From The Political Economy of the New Left: An Outsider's View (1971), page 39, written after a sabbatical Lindbeck spent observing the American New Left on university campuses. The line is often circulated in a paraphrased form, 'the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city, except for bombing,' as quoted by Sven Rydenfelt in Rent Control: Myths and Realities (1981); this is Lindbeck's original 1971 wording.