About 45 minutes’ drive south of Reno, Nevada — 8,200 feet above sea level — can be found the towns of Gold Hill, Silver City and Virginia City. The towns formed the epicentre of the mid-19th Century gold rush that led in due course to the taming of the West. Spending a few days in gold rush territory last week set me thinking about gold rushes, booms, and what Nevada history suggests is the inevitable conclusion to boom, which is bust.

Parallels between the Nevada gold rush and what is happening in Bermuda today would be inexact in a variety of ways. For one thing, Bermuda is still booming. For another, Nevada was essentially unpopulated when the rush began, whereas Bermuda has an indigenous population whose involvement in the boom is, variously, as leaders, participants and observers.

The scale of the two booms is utterly different, both physically and conceptually. Nevada’s boom took place in the widest of wide-open spaces. One afternoon, a little further up the mountain than Gold Hill, where I was lodged, it was possible to look in any direction and see an almost entirely unpopulated landmass much, much bigger than Bermuda. The scale of the Nevada rush, though much smaller in absolute dollar terms than Bermuda’s, helped lead to the creation of the world’s most powerful nation. Bermuda’s rush, by contrast, has created only the world’s richest nation.

The greatest difference, though, is in attitude. This part of Nevada remains pioneer country. It is one of the last bastions of the bracing sense of real freedom in the northern hemisphere. Casinos are ubiquitous and one may smoke in them. You may buy a gun, or several guns, cheaply and quickly. There are legal brothels near the foot of the mountain. Not for nothing was this known as the Wild West.

Bermuda is inarguably a more restrained place. Its boom is genteel, compared to what went on in Nevada. (Full disclosure: my grandfather’s brother made his way to California during the gold rush days and was shot and killed in a bar fight in 1927.)

The freedom metaphor was heavily underlined for me on the last day of my visit, when I saw a pack of wild horses running free on the other side of the mountain. (In the movie of my life, this moment might mirror the one where Helen Mirren spies the stag in the film “The Queen”.) Bermuda, by contrast, has feral chickens with a death sentence over their head.

What Bermuda and Nevada have in common is more interesting. Both have experienced periods of frenetic, almost uncontrolled growth, when the realisation hit that here was a way to make big money faster than usual circumstances would permit.

In “The World Rushed In”, J.S. Holliday wrote of a typical would-be gold rush miner: “He talks to his wife and says: “look, if I go to California for one year or even less than that — I can come home with 10,000 dollars. I can pay off the mortgage, I can get out from under your father, I can stop this miserable job that I have. We can send the children to school. We will have what we want. We will have all the promise of North America. Not over a lifetime but over a few months.’”

One hundred and fifty years later, it wouldn’t take much updating to imagine that conversation happening today. Change the miner to an insurance executive, make it three years not one, and add a couple of zeros to the dollar amount. If you work in the business community in Bermuda, you will know couples pursuing the modern version of their gold rush predecessors’ dream.

The chief lesson for Bermuda in Nevada’s demise must be its lack of sustainability. Curiously enough, when the economy of this part of Nevada failed, business people turned to tourism. Virginia City now survives largely as a living tribute to what once was, inevitably schlockified by the peculiar American way of commerce, which is to squeeze every possible penny out of the product, regardless of the wear and tear on the property on which this prosperity is based. Bermuda would never do that.

Bermuda’s job, and more precisely Dr. Brown’s, is to find ways to manage the growth monster. Too much, too fast is not a sustainable business model for a country any more than it would be for a company. Because, to use a highly technical economic term, what goes up must come down. Growth tends to attract greed, which increases the speed of growth, when a reduction in speed is the only prudent course.

As others have pointed out, Bermuda’s economy may be overheating. Certainly, reported growth of 9.1 percent in 2005 is too much, too fast, according to economic theory. We were taught, with numerous examples, that anything above 2.5 percent growth per annum would cause trouble, although I suspect they teach something nearer 3.5 percent today.

Certainly, if the Bermuda economy is not managed as it has been for decades now by both political parties, the fallout won’t be good. Perhaps more than ever in recent times, Bermuda needs a “man of action” at the helm, which may prove the adage: comes the time, comes the man. All this particular man has to do is to make the right decisions.

The right men and the wrong men came and went in Nevada, and their inability to contain the growth monster was their downfall. What remains in the region I roamed around last week is the external detritus of defunct mines, a rich history, the odd fully functional relic such as the Gold Hill Hotel, Nevada’s oldest (established 1859), and a panoramic, almost Biblical, emptiness.