Economics

For years, urbanists and pundits have insisted that young Americans are rejecting the suburbs. Supposedly, Millennials and Gen Z crave walkable cities, apartment living, and dense cores filled with transit options and 24-hour vibrancy. The story goes: the white picket fence is passé, the cul-de-sac is dead, and no one under 40 dreams of mowing a lawn.

But the data—like much conventional wisdom these days—tells a different story.  read more »

The recently released book, The Future of Labor, is an anthology that offers an exploration of how artificial intelligence (AI), digitalisation and technological transformation are reshaping the future of work. The first section of Chapter 4 — authored by Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky — is excerpted below.  read more »

People talk today about creating a political movement around the “multi-racial working class.” But this class, and its politics, already exist. The political parties have just not yet found a way to connect with it.

The history of Northwest Indiana, my family’s southern migration from western Kentucky, and my own childhood on the fringe of the nation’s once murder capital, Gary, Indiana tells the story of the evolution of the multi-ethnic working-class, the issues they face, and what matters to them.  read more »

Canada may have severed its feudal ties less violently, but like America, it experienced far less sustained aristocratic domination than either of its two mother countries, France and Great Britain.  read more »

Revolution and disruption rarely stem from the poor and destitute, but from what Alexis de Tocqueville described as “a revolution of rising expectations”.  read more »

Deep tech development is dominated by North America, Europe and Asia, however the competition from Africa is also becoming noticeable. Africa´s growing economies already host some of the world´s leading 500 deep tech companies.  read more »

“A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.” — Aristotle

American cities face an existential choice. They can continue down their current path – adopting policies that work against the interests of local residents – or develop new approaches to make urban life work for the broad majority.  read more »

At first glance, it doesn’t feel like the future will be made in El Segundo. A small city of 17,000, just south of Los Angeles International Airport, it’s the sort of place you glance at from your taxi as it whisks you on from arrivals to somewhere more exciting.  read more »

Los Angeles is reeling once again from urban disturbances, as it did in 1965, 1992 and 2020. After each outbreak the city is widely seen as a hopeless disaster  read more »

Here’s something I think about a lot. I believe in that Shakespearean phrase “what’s past is prologue”, meaning that past events serve as a good indicator of what the future may hold.  read more »