Politics

President Barack Obama‘s “pivot” on jobs this week shows that the president has finally — if belatedly — acknowledged the real misery caused by the Great Recession. However, it does not shed his complicity in the ever deepening employment crisis. Unemployment remains high, exceeding 9% — 16% if you include part-time workers. The percentage of adults in the workforce is bouncing near a 30-year low.  read more »

The recent announcement that California's unemployment again nudged up to 12 percent—second worst in the nation behind its evil twin, Nevada—should have come as a surprise but frankly did not. From the beginning of the recession, the Golden State has been stuck bringing up a humbled nation's rear and seems mired in that less-than-illustrious position.  read more »

More than two years ago (March 2009, to be precise), New Geography published an article I wrote, entitled Whatever Happened to ‘The Vision Thing'?. It began:

When I was in elementary school, I remember reading about the remarkable transformations that the future would bring: Flying cars, manned colonies on the moon, humanoid robotic servants. Almost half a century later, none of these promises of the future – and many, many more – have come to pass. Yet, in many respects, these visions from the future served their purpose in allowing us to imagine a world far more wondrous than the one we were in at the time, to aspire to something greater.  read more »

America is about to enter a presidential campaign that promises to be filled with divisive rhetoric and sharp differences over which direction the nominees want to take the country. This will be the fourth time in American history that the country has been sharply divided over the question of what the size and scope of government should be. Each time the issue was propelled by vast differences in beliefs between generations that caused the country to experience long periods of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD), before ultimately resolving the issue in accord with the ideas and beliefs of a new generation.  read more »

The title raises the obvious question: Does Chicago need saving?

I guess the answer is clear. Aaron Renn published a reviewofthe 2010 census, and for Chicago it was not pretty. Since 2000 the city lost over 200,000 people: nearly 7.5% of its Black residents, and almost 6% on non-Hispanic Whites. Only the Hispanic population grew, but at an anemic 3.4%. Even the metro area writ large isn’t doing all that well, growing by only 3.9% (against the nation’s 10%).  read more »

You don’t have to like Rick Perry or his sometimes scary neo-confederate politics to admire what has been happening in Texas over the past decade. Rather than trashing the state in order to demean its governor, perhaps the mainstream media should be thinking about what the Lone Star’s success story means for the rest of the country.  read more »

Treating urbanisation as some sort of homogeneous movement, a driver of an increasingly interdependent world of shared values, behaviour, and prosperity is to oversimplify.  There may be some common drivers, but urbanisation in the 21st century is likely to be quite different from urbanisation in the 20th century.  Suggesting a universal approaches to governing, managing and planning cities is providing answers without knowing the questions.   read more »

California's high-speed rail project is setting speed records, not on tracks, but rather in cost escalation. Last week, the California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) announced that the Bakersfield to Merced section, part of which will comprise the first part of the system to be built, will cost between $10.0 and $13.9 billion. This is an increase of approximately 40 percent to 100 percent over the previous estimate of $7.1 billion, an estimate itself less than two years old.  read more »

The riots that hit London and other English cities last week have the potential to spread beyond the British Isles. Class rage isn’t unique to England; in fact, it represents part of a growing global class chasm that threatens to undermine capitalism itself.  read more »

Mark Duggan, father of four, was armed with a Bruni BBM semi-automatic pistol when he was shot dead by armed police on 4 August. Despite initial reports Duggan did not fire on the officers from the Trident Police Unit, an armed force dedicated to dealing with “gun related murders within London’s black communities”.  read more »