Newgeography.com - Economic, demographic, and political commentary about places

Goodbye and Hello from New Geography

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 15:18:28 -0500

Dear Readers:

After 17 years we are closing New Geography.com.

You'll now find Joel Kotkin's articles on his new Substack page, jkotkin.substack.com, which will also feature articles from past NG contributors.

We owe much to those who kept the site together over the years, including Alex Lotz, Alicia Kurimska, Zina Klapper, Rhonda Howard, among others. And of course we owe most to you, our readers, who have followed us over the past 17 years.

We will see you on Substack!

With our best wishes for the new year,
Joel Kotkin, Mark Schill and Delore Zimmerman

Destroying Countrysides to Save Earth from a Climate Non-crisis

Paul Driessen — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 17:35:17 -0500

Energy analyst Robert Bryce maintains a database showing that, as of November 2025, local communities have rejected or restricted 595 wind, 475 solar and (more recently) 72 large-scale battery projects.

Many don’t want the installations blanketing wildlife habitats, scenic vistas, croplands or their backyard viewsheds; especially when the unreliable electricity is exported to faraway, power-hungry, virtue-signaling cities; and particularly when they are expected to help pay for installations and transmission lines that serve another state: North Dakota ratepayers to help Minneapolis, for example.

Other locals worry about health risks posed by light flicker, low-frequency noise and infrasound.

Many people also get riled up over the real costs of “green” energy – the total actual costs … versus deliberately lowballed costs that advocates emphasize.

This opposition is not only an American phenomenon. French and other European towns are also raising concerns, as are others around the world.

A recurrent sales pitch is that wind and solar power costs are declining and are now lower than coal, gas or nuclear electricity, ensuring lower prices for consumers. The claims leave out important but studiously unmentioned costs – economic, environmental and human.

“Save with renewable energy” promotions typically look only at initial costs associated with installing wind turbines and solar panels – which often come from China and are manufactured with cheap labor, using materials extracted with child labor, in mines and facilities with minimal or no workplace safety or environmental safeguards, with every phase fueled by oil, natural gas or coal.

Promoters also ignore sneaky subsidies paid via taxes and hidden charges on electric bills. They ignore payments to companies for not producing electricity when they must shut down because of high winds or when generation exceeds supply or grid capacity.

They don’t mention the costs of constructing, maintaining and operating duplicative backup systems: coal- or gas-fired power plants that must operate full-time at low throttle and go full-bore whenever wind and sunshine are inadequate. Or the mining and pollution involved in manufacturing all these technologies.

Grid-scale backup batteries cost tens of billions of dollars and carry significant fire and toxic emission risks, as with the 300-megawatt battery inferno at Moss Landing, California.

Offshore oceanic wind turbines must be replaced frequently, due to salt spray and storms. Hailstorms can destroy entire solar panel installations. The trillions of dollars keep adding up.

Read the rest of this piece at Townhall.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate change and human rights. Special thanks to researcher T.H. Platt, author of The Dark Side of Hunger Mountain, for assisting with this article.

Oregon DOT via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Strangely Familiar: Peter Mitchell and the Civic World We Forgot How to See

Samuel J Abrams — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Discovered by chance at a photo book fair, Peter Mitchell’s photographs of Leeds capture a civic world that assumed legibility, continuity, and shared meaning - before cities became abstract, branded, and hollowed out.

The cover of Peter Mitchell’s Strangely Familiar tells you almost everything you need to know - if you know how to look.

A tiny newsagent’s shop stands alone on muddy ground on the outskirts of Leeds. The sign reads, READ THE NEWS OF THE WORLD. BEST FOR NEWS & SPORT. The proprietors, Mr. and Mrs. Hudson, stand in the doorway, neither smiling nor performing. To the right, a Methodist church rises in brick solidity, its cross fixed firmly in place. Between them: churned earth, pause, uncertainty. Something has been removed. Something has not yet replaced it.

Nothing in the photograph is sentimental. Nothing is ironic. Nothing is explained.

The image assumes that you understand what you are seeing - or that you are capable of learning how.

That assumption is Peter Mitchell’s great gift. And Strangely Familiar is built around it.

I did not go looking for Peter Mitchell. I stumbled onto him at a photo book fair, amid tables crowded with contemporary photography that often leans hard on provocation, cleverness, or spectacle. Mitchell’s book sat quietly, modestly, almost shyly. But once opened, it refused to let go.
This is not a plea to freeze cities in amber or to romanticize decline; it is a reminder that change need not erase legibility.

What I encountered was not nostalgia, nor documentary moralizing, nor aestheticized decay. It was something rarer and more demanding: a record of ordinary civic life before it was abstracted, optimized, or erased. A world that assumed its own legibility.

Mitchell was born in Doncaster in 1943 and trained at the London College of Printing in the 1960s. He began photographing Leeds in the early 1970s and stayed with the city for decades - not as a tourist, not as a provocateur, but as a witness. His work was among the first serious uses of color in British documentary photography at a time when galleries still treated color as commercial, unserious, or disposable.

Mitchell understood something institutions did not: color is not decoration; it is evidence. The everyday world, rendered faithfully, carries meaning precisely because it is ordinary.

That conviction runs through Strangely Familiar. Shopfronts declare their purpose plainly: S. Tunick & Son, Stationers. East End Tool Stores, Est’d 1896. Robinson’s Famous Fisheries. Typography matters. Windows matter. The buildings assume permanence. They expect memory to accumulate.

People, too, stand differently in Mitchell’s photographs. They are not “subjects.” They are participants. Mrs. Collins and Mrs. Clayton stand in front of their fish shop without performance. The building’s meaning depends on their presence; their presence depends on the building. Work and person remain legible together.

Even when Mitchell photographs decline or demolition, the images do not plead or accuse. A red telephone box stands marooned amid the flattened remains of Quarry Hill Flats. The drama is not loss alone, but the disappearance of civic grammar - the cues that once told people where they were and what was expected of them.

Mitchell understands this explicitly. In his accompanying texts, he writes about walking through “new canyons of glittering emptiness,” places that promise progress while erasing meaning. Bulldozers do not merely remove buildings; they sever the chain of recognition between people and place.

Modern cities are intensely visible but rarely legible. Buildings announce brands rather than functions. Storefronts rotate. Churches become condos. Public space is curated, programmed, optimized. Where Mitchell shows shops that announce their purpose, today we more often encounter blank facades wrapped in branding that tells us nothing about who is inside or why they are there.

What Mitchell photographs aligns, quietly but unmistakably, with a tradition of urban thought that took legibility and lived experience seriously. Cities work when streets communicate purpose and responsibility - when people can read who belongs where and why. A humane city is one whose paths, edges, landmarks, and districts form a mental map that ordinary citizens can hold in their heads. The danger of modern planning is not change itself but abstraction: efficiency replacing meaning, scale replacing intimacy, management replacing recognition. Mitchell’s Leeds is a visual record of what that earlier wisdom described in words—a city whose everyday architecture, signage, and social rituals made sense without instruction. His photographs do not illustrate theory; they confirm it.

In an era when cities increasingly treat space as content, experience, or investment rather than as a shared moral environment, Mitchell’s photographs remind us what is lost when places stop expecting to be understood.

One caption near the end of the book captures his sensibility perfectly. A postcard shows a ghost train stranded on Woodhouse Moor while its generator is repaired. The ride of death must “take a nap until the power gets fixed.” Mitchell borrows a lyric from a pop song: “I’ve been riding on the ghost train… I don’t know where I’m going but I’ll always tell you where I am.” There is humor here, but also steadiness. Life pauses. It resumes. Place can still be named.

This is what gives Strangely Familiar its quiet authority. Mitchell is not photographing an aesthetic. He is documenting a structure of civic attentiveness - a way of seeing that assumed continuity, coherence, and mutual recognition in everyday life.

The cover image makes this plain. The small newsagent and the Methodist church do not compete. Neither overwhelms the other. Both simply are. Different institutions, different purposes, sharing the same ground. Today, such coexistence feels almost implausible.

Mitchell’s Leeds operates on a different principle. Seeing is acknowledgment. Architecture speaks before it is interpreted. Ordinary places expect to be known. People stand in front of their work not to advertise themselves but to acknowledge responsibility.

This is not nostalgia. It is orientation.

Mitchell does not claim the past was perfect. He insists it was coherent. Places knew what they were for. Signs told the truth. Belonging was built into the visual order of everyday life - not curated, not branded, not performed.

That is why Strangely Familiar feels so bracing when encountered unexpectedly. It does not shout. It does not instruct. It simply says: This was here. This mattered. You can see it if you look.
The renewed attention to Mitchell’s work - through Strangely Familiar and the careful reproduction of his prints - is not a backward-looking revival. It is a reminder that cities once trusted ordinary people to read their surroundings, to understand where they were, and to locate themselves within a shared landscape of meaning. When places speak clearly, citizens do not need constant explanation; they learn the city by moving through it.

I closed the book with gratitude and unease. Gratitude for encountering a photographer who saw so clearly. Unease because his clarity throws our present condition into relief.

We live among images that demand attention but offer little recognition. Mitchell shows us a world that did the opposite - one in which streets, buildings, and faces formed a comprehensible whole, and where seeing was itself a civic act.

Strangely familiar indeed - not because it flatters memory, but because it reminds us that cities once made sense. And once you look with Peter Mitchell’s eyes, the ordinary world begins to speak again - and you are no longer free to pretend that its silence is inevitable.

______________

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

The Problem with Energy Blinders

Randal OToole — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 11:42:56 -0500

Blinders are used to keep horses focused on the road ahead and not get distracted by people or other things on either side of them. Too many people who work on energy and greenhouse gases put on similar blinders that lead them to ignore many other social problems and goals.

A case in point is a recent study that found that people all over the world travel for about 1.3 hours, plus or minus 0.2 hours, per day. While this is just a confirmation of Marchetti’s constant, the point of the new paper was that “significant decreases in future energy consumption can only be achieved by reducing the average energy used per hour of human travel.”

In other words, people don’t substitute energy for time: if they use a slower but more energy efficient form of travel, they won’t travel more hours (thereby using more energy) to make up for the slower speed. The paper presents this as some kind of revelation: saving energy means forcing people to use more energy-efficient forms of travel. As a practical matter, this means emphasizing walking and cycling.

The problem is that such a policy ignores numerous other important social goals. Want to maximize productivity to keep the nation competitive with other parts of the world? Increasing the average speed of travel is a key component of national productivity.

Want to reduce income inequality? Increasing the average speed of travel among low-income people will give them access to more and better jobs. That necessarily means increasing auto ownership. The University of Minnesota’s Accessibility Observatory has found that the average resident of one of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas can reach almost three times as many jobs in a 20-minute auto drive as a 60-minute bike or transit ride, and more than three times as many jobs in a 10-minute auto drive as a 60-minute walk.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

Bicycles may be the most energy-efficient mode of travel, but that doesn’t mean they are always the best mode. Photo by Carlton Reid, under CC 2.0 License.

What Urbanism Lost When DEI Was Defeated, Part 2

Pete Saunders — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Last Monday I wrote a piece that lamented the state of policy movement on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in America. Here’s my followup to that.

First, here’s a quick summary of that article. Over the last ten years or so, DEI saw a rise in national coverage and discourse nationally that peaked in 2020, in the aftermath of the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests during the Covid pandemic. DEI gradually received more negative connotations starting around 2022, as it came to be associated with what’s now termed “woke” ideology. I saw that as backtracking on progress being made to improve cities since the start of the 21 century, because urbanism became associated with DEI/wokism. I also noted how the “woke” backlash was reflected in the Google Trends mentions of Harvard economics professor Raj Chetty, whose research on economic mobility in America peaked and declined similarly, and even my own Corner Side Yard readership.

I concluded the article with this:

“(The) BLM and woke/DEI (movements) became an albatross around the neck of urbanism. The rising YIMBY movement, with its focus on housing affordability, took hold of urbanism, and allowed urbanists to toss aside the other, more intractable and deeply imbedded aspects of our society, like segregation, economic inequality and economic immobility.

How these became linked is understandable; how these became separated deserves exploration.”

How did urbanism become connected with DEI and the “woke” phenomenon? Is it realistic to address matters of segregation, economic inequality and economic mobility get addressed in an economic fashion, and not a moral fashion?

The Urbanism/DEI framing

Here’s the “how” part.

Starting as early as the 1960s in some cities, more Americans began showing deeper interest in cities. Early advocates like Jane Jacobs touted the virtues of cities and increasingly saw them as places of value. By the 1990s–early 2000s, many urbanists, planners and scholars saw a shift in the American economy – more knowledge and technology-driven, less manufacturing-driven – that fit well with what was happening in cities. They recognized that the rising knowledge and technology-driven economy and their own interests were connected and increasing numbers of people were looking to remake places that fit the new mold. That meant urbanists were targeting the policies that created America’s contemporary suburban development landscape and handicapped the dominant urban model that preceded it.

We can all agree what urbanists at the time were responding to: postwar suburban sprawl; increasing auto dependency; urban renewal and highway construction that destroyed many urban neighborhoods; environmental degradation.

Racial segregation and concentrated poverty were considered as part of the same mix of challenges. However, they were mostly viewed in an even deeper social context than the other challenges, framing them as societal issues, not necessarily economic ones.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Pete Saunders is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on urbanism and public policy. Pete has been the editor/publisher of the Corner Side Yard, an urbanist blog, since 2012. Pete is also an urban affairs contributor to Forbes Magazine's online platform. Pete's writings have been published widely in traditional and internet media outlets, including the feature article in the December 2018 issue of Planning Magazine. Pete has more than twenty years' experience in planning, economic development, and community development, with stops in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He lives in Chicago.

Photo: graph by Rhonda Howard, under CC 4.0 License.

Why Are Zoomers Embracing Extremist Ideas?

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Conservatives have rightly denounced the extremist tendency among young progressives, but there’s a similar problem now evident on the Right. A new Manhattan Institute study of Generation-Z Republicans confirms this problem, with some embracing conspiracy theories, including antisemitic ones, that were once the domain of the conservative lunatic fringe.

The think tank put together a group of 20 young conservatives, mostly supporters of Trump. What it found was a group “marked by desensitization”. They viewed politics as a form of entertainment, more like a video game. To them, Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, despite their promotion of antisemitic conspiracy theories, are not excluded from conservatism; even where their views are disavowed, they are treated as legitimate fixtures of the movement.

The roots of these disturbing shifts likely lie in the impact of social media and a startling lack of historical knowledge. The Survey Center on American Life confirms that young adults have become increasingly distant from their families and from one another. Instead, they tend to experience the world through the prism of social-media self-expression. As one recent report notes, they are far more focused on themselves than previous generations.

According to academic Jean Twenge, the online world brings “instant communication and unrivaled convenience” but also leaves young people “more isolated from each other” and more polarised, creating “a mental health crisis among teens and young adults”. The new ideal is to optimise the self; interactions with other people, particularly those with different views, are increasingly rare.

For the politically engaged, on both Right and Left, politics increasingly functions as another mode of self-expression. Among women this tendency skews Leftward, while among men it skews Right. For conservatives, this means grappling with an emerging, largely youthful constituency which is prone to conspiracy thinking and increasingly willing to adopt views that include Holocaust denial and open antisemitism.

Some may argue that these troubling trends are merely transitory. After all, many who embraced the far Left during the Vietnam War later became patriotic citizens, and some even turned into Reaganites. Yet much of this shift was tied to young people eventually assuming adult responsibilities: spouses, homes, children. Many in the new generation either reject these paths or see them as unattainable. Unable to establish stable adult lives, they may cultivate a politics that is unanchored, alienated, and potentially violent.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: screenshot from America First/YouTube channel.

America's Great Migration

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

‘For many states that were once great have now become small; and those that were great in my time were small formerly. Knowing therefore that human prosperity never continues in one stay.’ So wrote Herodotus in his Histories, in the fifth century BC. He reminds us that world history is not a morality tale between the ‘powerful’ and their victims. Rather, societies evolve, grow stronger and overcome weaker ones. People – and, more recently, capital – migrate to places that offer greater opportunities.

This was certainly true in the time of Herodotus. He was born in Greek colonies in what is now Turkey and died in another Greek colony in Italy. The search for better conditions – whether for grazing, farming or, more recently, manufacturing and technology – unravels older orders and paves the way for new ones. As a result, centres of power move. As French historian Fernand Braudel noted, between the 16th and 18th centuries, capitalism shifted from one hub to another – Venice to Antwerp to Amsterdam, and then to London.

With these shifts in power often come shifts in migration patterns. Where droves once headed to Western Europe from the former Soviet bloc, as the old centres stagnate, many may consider returning to the Eastern bloc, and even parts of the once-cursed ‘Club Med’, including Herodotus’s Greece.

Nowhere is this pattern more dynamic than in the United States. Most settlers who flocked there from the old world were motivated by hopes for a better life, not as a quest to impose racial supremacy, as is so often claimed today. Whereas Europe’s density tends to anchor power in London, Paris or Berlin, all of them capitals, the balance of power is constantly shifting in the US, from New England, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, to the mid-Atlantic states, followed by the rapid rise of the upper Midwest, which was then supplanted first by California and the West Coast, and more recently by Texas and the South.

Travel across America and the differences between regions can seem almost like those between nation states. The elite classes – and their chattering-class interlocutors – remain concentrated in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, places that retain much of the world’s ultra-rich. Yet the supremacy of these cities is being undermined by their growing failure to offer working- and middle-class citizens, particularly the young, the prospect of a better life.

Over the past decade, economic and demographic momentum has accelerated towards Texas, Arizona, the Carolinas and Florida – places once dismissed as economically and culturally backward. None of America’s major growth hubs is now located in the north-east or California. The rising cities of today include Dallas-Fort Worth, Raleigh, Houston, Austin, Phoenix, Nashville and Salt Lake City.

This shift has been fuelled by stronger job growth in states such as Idaho, Utah, Texas, the Carolinas and Montana. By contrast, large urban states like New York, California, Illinois and Massachusetts sit near the bottom of the rankings. The same pattern applies to smaller metropolitan areas where job growth has surged, such as Fayetteville, Arkansas; Greenville, North Carolina; Grand Forks, North Dakota; and Ogden, Utah.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Photo: Aerial view of Austin, via Goodfon under CC 4.0 License.

Once Again, Transparency Is Not the Enemy of Academic Freedom

Samuel J Abrams — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Public universities are facing a crisis of confidence. Trust in higher education has fallen sharply over the past decade, driven by rising costs, ideological imbalance, and repeated assurances from campus leaders that Americans should simply ‘trust us’ about what happens in the classroom. Gallup reports that only about four in ten Americans now have high confidence in higher education—a steep decline that helps explain rising demands for transparency. Against that backdrop, the University of North Carolina system’s proposal to require faculty to post syllabi publicly has triggered fierce opposition from some professors; faculty who now insist that transparency itself threatens academic freedom.

They are wrong. And their reaction helps explain why public confidence continues to erode.

The UNC policy is straightforward. Beginning as early as next fall, faculty would be required to upload syllabi to a searchable public database, formalizing what UNC System President Peter Hans described as the principle that ‘public university syllabi should be public records.’ The policy does not dictate course content, ban readings, or impose ideological constraints. It simply makes visible what courses aim to cover, how students are evaluated, and what materials are assigned.

Yet faculty opposition has been swift and intense. Professors quoted in Inside Higher Ed warn that public syllabi could be ‘weaponized,’ chilling inquiry and inviting political harassment. A petition circulated by faculty groups and signed by over 2,000 argues that posting syllabi would ‘invite political actors to attack free inquiry’ and could endanger students and instructors. Others claim the policy undermines faculty governance or intellectual property rights.

These concerns deserve to be heard—but they do not justify the conclusion faculty opponents draw.

Academic freedom exists to protect intellectual inquiry from coercion, not to shield publicly funded instruction from public view. Transparency about course structure and readings is not ideological surveillance. It is basic accountability. Syllabi are not private correspondence. They are formal documents outlining expectations for students who pay tuition and, in public institutions, rely on taxpayer support.

The claim that academic freedom depends on opacity is a category error. Universities already publish course catalogs, learning objectives, degree requirements, and faculty research. Many professors voluntarily post syllabi online. What UNC proposes is consistency, not control.

Nor is this primarily about safety. Faculty opponents frequently cite the possibility of harassment, pointing to past controversies involving public records requests or outside criticism. But harassment is not caused by transparency; it is caused by institutional failure to defend faculty when warranted. The proper response to bad-faith pressure is leadership—not secrecy. Universities must be prepared to stand behind their faculty and explain why rigorous, intellectually diverse instruction serves the public good, rather than hoping that obscurity will protect them from scrutiny.

Read the rest of this piece at AEI.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: Carmen Murray via Pixabay.

Carney Faces Up to the Reality of Trudeau's Climate Fantasies

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Sometimes policy change is necessitated by reality. The welcome new entente cordiale between Ottawa and Alberta, fast tracking new energy developments, marks a pleasant example.

This is all the more remarkable since Prime Minister Mark Carney, was once a leading voice against fossil fuels; as head of the Bank of England, he led the charge for banks to bankroll the much-ballyhooed transition to renewables. Yet a decade later, he appears to have shifted from a “net-zero” crusader to seeking to become “an energy superpower.”

What changed? This corresponds to the global weakening of climate hysteria. As Matt Ridley noted recently in the Spectator, extreme claims of an imminent collapse of humanity, so promoted by the likes of Greta Thunberg and groups like Extinction Rebellion, have lost their credibility on everything from sea-level rise to imminent mass starvation. To be sure, some media — like the New York Times or John Stewart’s “The Daily Show” — are still predicting massive dislocation in the near future, with Manhattan poised to be soon engulfed by rising waters. But this seems little more than an anti-Trump laugh line.

Nothing better illustrates the climatistas’ decline than the largely ignored COP 30 climate conference in Brazil, which attracted few world leaders. The rejection comes from a growing realization that solar and wind cannot power growing economies, something now widely accepted outside academia, mainstream media, and the NGO complex. As Axios recently reported, Democratic congresspeople have all but abandoned talk about “the Green New Deal,” even amidst their never-ending denunciations of all things Trump.

The shift gained more credibility when the magazine Nature recently retracted a 2024 study predicting economic collapse due to climate change. Reality has started to bite, even in my home state of California, a bastion of climate hysteria. Governor Gavin Newsom, an avid supporter of net zero, earlier this year basically  fell on his knees before Big Oil in April, when two companies announced they were shutting their Californian oil refineries as a result of oppressive green regulations. He also kept the state’s last nuclear plant going.

As they shy away from climate catastrophism, resurgent progressives in the U.S. focus rightly on issues like cost of living, medical care, and jobs. They realize very few working class voters — now up for grabs in the next election — actually prioritize climate policy; in a recent Monmouth poll, just one percent of working-class (non-college) voters identify climate change as the biggest concern facing their families. Recent U.S. polling reveals that belief in predominately manmade climate change is now at 45 per cent, according to Pew, and enthusiasm for spending money on climate initiatives has plummeted.

Perhaps even more surprising, politicians in deep-green Europe are beginning to recognize that green obsessions undermine their own industries.  Net-zero policies, notes a recent OECD study, have doubled the rate of job losses in high-carbon jobs, which traditionally paid higher salaries to mostly male, non-college educated workers than the retail, tourism and other low-end service jobs that replaced them. Virtually all the places with the highest energy costs are those with the strictest renewable policies  —  Germany, California, and the U.K. Overall, British, Italian and Germany industrial users pay roughly twice more for electricity than the U.S. or Canada.

So, here’s the reality: oil and gas remain the dominant source of energy, with even coal, a dirtier fuel than natural gas, making a comeback. Despite billions spent by governments — taxpayers — to subsidize renewables, global hydrocarbon use, notes energy expert Robert Bryce, is not only thirty times larger than wind and solar combined, but is also growing faster. In the last decade, the world added 9,000 terawatt-hours per year of energy consumption from wind and solar but 13,000 from fossil fuels.

Adding to the power grid is increasingly important with the rise of artificial intelligence. This appears to be leading to greater fondness among oligarchs and investors faced with a desperate need for reliable, affordable energy, which solar and wind are not. Now, some embrace nuclear power, long verboten among the green activists they so generously funded.

This shift away from tough climate policies will shape global politics for the next decade or more. Countries with ample fossil fuels like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Norway, and Qatar will become richer and more influential. Other, more troubled oil producers, like Russia, Iran and Venezuela are able to survive, in the face of awful governance, only because they still have their share of “black gold.” The developing world, notably Africa and India, will either develop their own resources, or import huge quantities.

In this still fossil-fuel dominated world, Canada will have great cards to play and now may even be willing to play them. These are also Canada’s biggest exports; it is the world’s fourth largest crude exporter. Like the United States, the world’s leading energy producer, Canada’s influence will be tied to its natural resources.

Canada’s embrace of energy production also constitutes a way to work against fossil-fuel-funded malefactors like Iran, Qatar, Venezuela, and Russia. It is also a way to counter China, which emits more GHGs responsible for more than 30 per cent of global carbon emissions as of 2024, twice the American share.

China, which lacks huge oil or gas resources, has seized on Western climate policies as a way to penetrate markets for solar panels and electric vehicles. This leads to praise from some greens, but the Middle Kingdom is not exactly abandoning fossil fuels; indeed, its EV and panel industries rest on power generated by its over 3,000 coal-power plants, which accounted for  64.4 per cent of global emissions in 2023.

In an ideal world, energy growth would be a common agenda in North America, faced with challenges from Russia, the Middle East and China. But Donald Trump’s misplaced idea of national interest makes such cooperation difficult for now. So, Canada will need to find other markets for crude and other commodities, precisely what proposed West Coast LNG and pipelines would address. Asia is a boom market for fossil fuels, and Canada could enrich itself hugely through this trade.

This is the moment for Canada to assert its economic power and tell us Yankees that you can play the “great game” of power politics, too. Carney’s shift also provides an opportunity — after a decade of disappointment — to get the country back on track and reassert itself as one of the world’s great liberal democracies.

This piece first appeared at National Post.

Photo: Premier Smith and Prime Minister Carney sign a memorandum of understanding that opens the way to construct a new oil pipeline, via X.

Why the Great Wave Still Commands the Modern Imagination

Samuel J Abrams — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

In November 2025, a version of Katsushika Hokusai’s Under the Great Wave off Kanagawa sold at Sotheby’s Hong Kong for HK$21.7 million — the highest price ever paid for the iconic print. The figure drew predictable attention, but price alone cannot explain the hold this image continues to exert. Japanese woodblock prints are plentiful and often extraordinary. The ukiyo-e tradition produced a vast world of beauty — landscapes, city scenes, actors, courtesans, and seascapes rendered with remarkable discipline and grace. Yet among this abundance, The Great Wave stands apart. It is no longer merely a famous artwork. It has become one of the defining images through which modern people interpret instability, scale, and the feeling of living beneath forces larger than themselves.

What distinguishes this work is not just craftsmanship, rarity, or fame. It is its precision in capturing a psychological reality that feels unmistakably contemporary.
Three narrow fishing boats move across churning water as a vast wave rises overhead, its crest frozen in the instant before collapse. The men do not battle the sea; they brace for it. In the distance, small and unwavering, Mount Fuji remains still, its quiet geometry anchoring the entire scene. The moment is tense but not theatrical. There is danger without exaggeration, energy without chaos. The composition is both dramatic and disciplined.

That restraint is essential. The image does not shout; it measures. It does not glorify struggle; it renders it with clarity.

The modern world increasingly feels like a version of this seascape. Economic volatility, technological acceleration, civic uncertainty, environmental strain, and cultural fragmentation have produced a quiet sense of exposure. Many people move through systems they cannot fully understand and forces they cannot meaningfully control. We experience motion without mastery, pressure without clear authorship. Hokusai gave visual form to that sensation long before it had a name.

The wave is not simply water. It is disruption itself — impersonal, relentless, indifferent. The boats are not merely fishermen; they are ordinary people and communities navigating conditions that demand endurance rather than heroism. And Mount Fuji, distant yet immovable, represents something increasingly scarce: steadiness. A fixed point in a world defined by churn.

What makes The Great Wave singular is its refusal to romanticize control. It offers no fantasy of dominance over nature. There is no triumph here, no promise of conquest. Instead, it presents humility as wisdom. It suggests that survival depends less on bravado than on proportion, awareness, and disciplined posture in the face of overwhelming force.

Many Japanese prints celebrate pleasure, seasonal change, or the fleeting beauty of everyday life. Many are visually stunning. But this one engages something more enduring: the strain of existing inside immense systems that neither indulge nor destroy us outright. It reveals what it means to persist under pressure without illusion.

There is also something unmistakably modern in the viewer’s position. We do not hover above the scene, safely detached. We are placed inside it. Our eye travels along the boats, feels the looming presence of the wave, and rests briefly on the distant calm of Fuji. That immersive perspective mirrors contemporary life, where individuals are no longer buffered by distance or hierarchy but drawn directly into economic, social, and environmental turbulence.

Yet for all its immediacy, the image insists on coherence. The wave is wild, but not formless. The threat is immense, but intelligible. Everything remains legible, held within careful design. Even at the brink, there is structure. That, too, feels instructive: motion need not dissolve into disorder, and danger need not become collapse.

The record-setting sale only sharpens the irony. An image that so powerfully illustrates modesty, vulnerability, and proportion now circulates as a high-value luxury object. But despite its absorption into the marketplace of prestige and spectacle, it refuses decoration. It still unsettles. It still instructs. Its meaning has not thinned with repetition; it has deepened.

Most images become ornamental. A few become fashionable. Almost none retain explanatory power. The Great Wave does. It continues to clarify rather than soothe, to remind rather than distract.

Japanese prints may be many and magnificent. But this one occupies a different category. It has become a visual shorthand for what it feels like to live within vast, impersonal forces and still attempt to keep one’s bearings. Its power lies not in affirming modern confidence, but in tempering it — insisting, quietly and with precision, that balance matters, that limits exist, and that steadiness remains vital even when the sea rises.

In an age addicted to speed, scale, and spectacle, The Great Wave offers something increasingly rare: proportion. It does not promise safety, but it does offer clarity. And in doing so, it reminds us that survival — personal, civic, and cultural — depends not on domination, but on the disciplined ability to face what we cannot command and remain upright anyway.

That is why, nearly two centuries later, this image still commands the modern imagination — not because it flatters our sense of power, but because it quietly tells us the truth.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: Art Institute of Chicago, under CC 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

What Urbanism Lost When Wokism Was Defeated, Part 1

Pete Saunders — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

This is going to seem like navel-gazing for a moment, but ultimately the point emerges. Please bear with me.

Remember Raj Chetty? Of course you do. He is the professor of economics at Harvard University who rose to fame in the 2010s articulating his research on economic equity and mobility in America. This paragraph on his Wikipedia page sums up his work well:

“Chetty’s contribution to economic mobility started with his 2014 paper, “Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States.” In this paper, Chetty discussed the effects of geography on economic mobility. He used information from deidentified federal income tax records, which gave him records from 1996 to 2012. The research’s main focus was on intergenerational mobility in the United States as a whole. Chetty used the parent’s income between the years of 1996-2000 when the participants were between the ages of 15–20. Chetty concluded that 5 significant variables strongly correlated with intergenerational mobility. Those variables are residential segregation, income inequality, school quality, social capital, and family structure. The authors concluded that intergenerational mobility is primarily a local problem. Meaning that place-based policies are better fitting for each city. This allows for each city to be able to make a plan and policy that will best help the people in that city that is affected by the constrictions of intergenerational mobility.”

I’m not an economist, but an urbanist who wants to make cities into better places. My non-academic perspective has led me to a position very similar to Chetty. My takeaway from Chetty’s work has always been that the five variables he highlights are the critical missing pieces in the revitalization of the cities I care for most in this country, the cities of the Rust Belt, Great Lakes, and broader Midwest. I don’t know what his views are on this, but I’ve always believed these kinds of findings would result in greater attention being given to these issues, and better policies to improve cities.

Chetty was a hot commodity in the 2010s. In 2019, Chetty was a keynote speaker at a Cleveland Fed conference called “Connecting People and Places to Opportunity.” I presented a session at the same conference on segregation and declining economic mobility in Chicago’s south suburbs. I remember his presentation. I thought it was great, and I thought the five variables he highlighted were going to move into the forefront of urbanism discourse.

I started the Corner Side Yard on the Blogger platform in 2012. Running that blog was a lot of fun. I think I was able to produce some pretty good urbanism insights from a Black and Rust Belt perspective. I think it was especially useful in providing a countering view to the prevailing perspectives around cities in the 2010s.

However, it only recently dawned on me how closely linked my blog’s success was tied to the popularity of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the later, broader woke movement (or DEI if you like; I was never a fan of the misappropriation of the Black slang term “woke” anyway).

The first real surge in traffic with the first iteration of the blog happened in 2013, coinciding with the Trayvon Martin shooting by George Zimmerman. I first wrote about that sad event shortly after it occurred in 2012, but reposted this post a year later, after Zimmerman’s acquittal. From that point on the blog took off, reaching a peak in the summer of 2015. Afterwards the blog slipped some before reaching a lower peak in 2017. Then there was a steady decline from 2017 until 2019, and another lower peak in 2020, immediately following the murder of George Floyd.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: protests against police brutality in 2016, courtesy The Corner Side Yard.

Equal but Separate

Joel Kotkin and Samuel J. Abrams — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Even as many scholars and pundits deny the differences between the sexes and vastly expand the concept of gender, society is increasingly dividing along these clear and simple lines.

Mountains of data and broad-based studies show that men and women increasingly inhabit separate psychological, relational, and civic universes that interpret adulthood, authority, intimacy, and obligation in profoundly different ways.

The most visible sign of this cleaving of the sexes is the steady decline of marriage and childbearing. The share of U.S. adults ages 25–54 without partners rose from 29% in 1990 to 38% in 2019. In 2021, one-quarter of U.S. 40-year-olds had never married. Even as fertility rates continue to fall, the percentage of children born out of wedlock and living with one parent has risen.

This physical separation is mirrored in our politics, where the gender divide is now a prime determinant of party affiliation – especially among the young. The fierce tribal divide in America is not merely a clash of Democrats and Republicans, but also a contest between the very different visions and priorities of women and men. The growing antagonism between the parties increasingly reflects the distance between the sexes.

Once the central cooperative engine of civilizational continuity, the relationship between men and women is increasingly seen as a zone of tension, risk, negotiation, and withdrawal.

Some of this is due to the battle women have had to fight for greater freedom in the last 60 years, which, of course, has had many positive effects. It has not just expanded women’s opportunities in education and the workplace. It has also allowed women to imprint their values on a patriarchal culture that was long ruled by men – but this time increasingly for their own benefit.

As much as “women’s liberation,” as it was originally known, has been shaped by modern ideas about gender and selfhood, it has also given greater expression to enduring differences between the sexes. It is generally understood that men tend to be more aggressive, competitive, and individualistic, while women tend to place more value on cooperation, compassion, and safety. Various studies – especially those in egalitarian-minded societies of Scandinavia – suggest that the movement toward gender equality has allowed differences to flourish. As Swedish researcher Agneta Herlitz observed: “Some sex differences in personality, negative emotions and certain cognitive functions are greater in countries with a higher standard of living.”

A RealClearInvestigations analysis of this ongoing transformation suggests growing challenges not only for the United States but also for many Western and Asian nations, where this cleaving of the sexes is occurring. It’s undermining the traditional basis for stable families and communities and will have enormous implications for future demography, politics, and social stability.

Read the rest of this piece at Real Clear Investigations.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Photo: Tim Mossholder

Gavin Newsom Sticks It To California Ratepayers

Robert Bryce — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 18:52:13 -0500

The Ivanpah concentrated-solar project has been an environmental and economic disaster.

Launched in 2014, the $2.2 billion solar facility located 230 miles northeast of Los Angeles, was designed to produce 392 megawatts of electricity by focusing sunlight on 459-foot-high towers. At the ribbon-cutting ceremony, then-Secretary of Energy Ernie Moniz claimed the sprawling project, which covers nearly six square miles of the Mojave Desert, was a “shining example” of America’s leadership in solar energy.

But Ivanpah was a flop. It never generated more than 75% of its planned electricity output. It relies heavily on natural gas to ensure its complex generators operate properly. The juice it produces is absurdly expensive. And it has been a disaster for wildlife. Some 6,000 birds are being killed every year while flying between the mirrors and the towers. The project also required relocating endangered desert tortoises. Even the goofballs at the Sierra Club, an outfit that has never met a solar, wind, or battery project it couldn’t slobber over, have called Ivanpah a “financial boondoggle and environmental disaster.”

In January, Pacific Gas & Electric, California’s largest utility, announced it was terminating power purchase agreements it signed 15 years ago and the plant, which is operated, and partially owned by Houston-based NRG, would be shuttered and dismantled. Those contracts were expected to run through 2039. Ending the contracts, PG&E said, “will save customers money.” But last week, the California Public Utility Commission rejected the proposed shutdown and ordered the plant to stay open. Why? Shelving the project would threaten the state’s efforts to achieve its renewable energy targets. The agency also said that the transmission and distribution infrastructure that ratepayers have already paid for would be “stranded.”

What a load of crap. As one insider told me, the California Independent System Operator recently issued a forecast which showed the state will have to rely even more on imported electricity in the coming years. With the state’s goal of achieving 100% zero-carbon electricity by 2045 in jeopardy, this insider told me, the state “can’t afford to let go of any renewables no matter how uneconomic...Important to keep up appearances no matter what it costs.”

Read the rest of this piece at: Robert Bryce Substack.

Robert Bryce is a Texas-based author, journalist, film producer, and podcaster. His articles have appeared in a myriad of publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, Time, Austin Chronicle, and Sydney Morning Herald.

Photo:California Energy Commission, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

New York is Becoming the Next London, Home Only to Immigrants and the Super-rich

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

The election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York – alongside the victory of similarly hard-Left candidates in other mayoral races – has left some predicting that urban America will inevitably fall into a “doom loop” of decline, with an exodus of the super-rich leaving cities in the control of a resentful lower class. Yet in reality, the socialist takeover will prove no great win for the working class. If anything, it leaves the haute bourgeoisie even more the masters of places like Gotham than before.

Contrary to many predictions, surging sales of luxury apartments indicate that New York will remain home to the ultra-rich – those with more than $50m (£37m) in assets. In fact, the evidence of the past few years is that, even as the overall population of the city has declined, the number of the super-rich has been growing. Rents, outside those under control, have continued to rise. Even if a few of the ultra-rich leave, New York is likely to remain comfortably the most popular city for the group, ahead of rivals such as Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and London.

With their massive fortunes, these rich folk, 21,000 in New York alone, are also reshaping the urban landscape. Increasingly, global cities like New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, and Miami are functioning less as centres of economic activity for the masses, and more as showcases for luxury brands such as LVMH, which continue to invest heavily in such markets. Even once powerful business landmarks like the Rockefeller Centre are actively reinventing themselves as destinations for recreation, tourism, and the arts.

Mamdani’s election also does not appear to have stopped developers and speculators from looking to transform former office buildings – places of employment – into yet more luxurious apartments. This reflects long-established national patterns. New US office construction has plummeted since the 1990s, while the number of residential high-rises has continued to surge.

This transition makes sense given that office vacancies, largely due to persistently high levels of remote work, remain elevated. Although less pathetic than many downtowns, New York offices are far emptier than they used to be, with midtown office occupancy at around 65 to 70 per cent of pre-pandemic levels. The rise of artificial intelligence is likely to make things worse.

Today, New York, once the world’s unchallenged financial capital, is shifting into an “amenity city” with a priority for building casinos and other tourist-oriented development. Despite the much ballyhooed construction of JP Morgan’s new tower in midtown Manhattan, finance jobs have declined as a proportion of total city employment, with jobs headed more to places like Dallas and Miami.

These shifts will change the world of many native New Yorkers. They are also likely to be exacerbated by the election of Mamdani. Working class and middle class families are already leaving cities. Socialist policies, which almost guarantee poor-performing schools and lax law enforcement, impact the hoi polloi far more than the elite bourgeois or young single professionals.

Some may think that Mamdani’s policies will turn the world’s capitalist capital into a First World version of Havana. But given the US federal system, Mamdani can’t expropriate fortunes by edict from Gracie Mansion, however he might like to do so. Instead, his biggest victims are likely to be among the lower social orders, not least the mostly minority owners of bodegas and small businesses. His rent control freeze, notes the perceptive analyst Nicole Gelinas, is likely to hit hardest small property owners, who own 30 to 50 per cent of all rent control units but may not be able to handle Mamdani’s proposed freezes.

Worse yet, Mamdani and his socialist cadre do not seem concerned about improving working class communities by creating better jobs; the emphasis is almost totally on free goodies, not people being empowered to improve themselves. As the analyst Martin Gurri has suggested, unlike past socialists, whether in Stalin’s Russia or among Sweden’s social democrats, today’s variety regards economic growth with “remarkable indifference”, a tough stance in an economy where good jobs are already headed elsewhere.

Despite all this, New York will not turn into the next Third World hellscape. It is more likely to end up like London. Under Labour, that city has become more global but can hardly seem British anymore, with many recent immigrants apparently reluctant to integrate into society. It also hosts post-national financial and cultural elites who often seem to mock the sensibilities of the British population.

In other words, London today seems less like the capital of the UK, and more like a refuge for people and capital from the rest of the world. Tourists drive much of the economy, including wealthy free spenders from distant locales.

This seems like the likely road for New York. Rather than following its commercial focus, a legacy stretching back to Dutch times, New York’s economy will become oriented to serving the rich, their offspring and tourists. In the new order, the city becomes what the University of Chicago’s Terry Nichols Clark has described as an “entertainment machine ”. The tourism industry also serves the new configuration by becoming a key employer of a largely poor, often immigrant, workforce.

Lost in the process is the notion of the city as an engine of upward mobility. The true mission of great cities, noted the late Jane Jacobs, “is transforming many poor people into middle class people... Cities don’t lure a middle class. They create it.”

Great cities with history and culture, like New York and London, may remain alluring for the young, the wealthy and for those immigrants who have yet to adapt to their adopted country. But with the road to opportunity blocked by their own policies, the socialists may end up leaving their cities ever more bourgeois, albeit under a red flag.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Photo: Mamdani for NYC, social media.

Chicago Has A Dual Housing Market? What About Four Housing Markets?

Pete Saunders — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

You know, prior to the Covid pandemic, there was a lot more discussion in the urbanist sphere about economic inequality and a lack of economic mobility in cities, and their influence on the rising unaffordability of the American housing market. After the pandemic, that kind of discussion dissipated and morphed into something much broader – affordability, and later, abundance – that didn’t carry the same race and class associations typically given to inequality and mobility concerns.

That’s fine for people seeking to broaden support for policy action on affordability. However, it doesn’t touch on the entirety of the affordability problem.

Last week, Crains Chicago Business reporter Dennis Rodkin wrote about metro Chicago’s two-tiered real estate market – one that’s booming for the wealthiest Chicagoans, and one that’s flat for virtually everyone else. Here’s a quote from the paywalled article:

“In the uppermost echelon of home prices, sales took only until early November to pass the record number of homes sold in a full year. And one sale among them, a Winnetka estate that sold for $31.25 million, was the highest-priced sale of an existing home ever in the Chicago metro area (other homes have been built new for more). Meanwhile, in the market for homes at all prices, the number of sales is running only slightly higher than even with 2024, a year that ended with the fewest homes sold since 2011.”

In Rodkin’s interview with Jena Radnay, an agent with @properties Christie’s International Real Estate on Chicago’s North Shore, Radnay said, “(North Shore buyers may be) doing well with their business, sold their companies and cashed out, gotten massive promotions,” invested well or inherited wealth, she says, “and they’re happy to pay what it takes for real estate up here where they know it’s a good investment.”

Rodkin also spoke with Anthony Simpkins, president and CEO of Neighborhood Housing Services. The Chicago nonprofit focuses on financing homeownership in low- to moderate-income neighborhoods, but Simpkins’ perspective on the housing market takes in the middle class as well. Simpkins’ take? “It’s no secret that housing has gotten too expensive for almost everyone.”

Rodkin’s basis for Chicago’s dual housing market comes from his comparison of home price growth with median income growth in the Chicago metro area, between 2014 and 2024. Rodkin’s analysis compared home price growth and median income growth over two periods, 2014-19 and 2019-24. The map below shows areas where home price growth exceeds median income growth (shades of red), and areas where home price growth is surpassed by median income growth (shades of blue):

Rodkin sums up his position in this quote below:

For the past year and a half, Chicago-area home prices have been rising faster than the national average and faster than in nearly every major US city, accelerating the local affordability crunch right alongside interest rates that have remained relatively high.

Rising prices and mortgage interest rates that are twice what they were a few years ago take a one-two punch at affordability, and uncertainty about future financial well-being amid mass layoffs and the creeping hegemony of AI makes the hit feel even harder. “As the cost of housing has gone up dramatically,” Simpkins says, “people are feeling more challenged with being able to keep good-paying employment.”

Honestly, I think Rodkin is making a valid point with his framing of the Chicago housing market. From a pure residential real estate sense, there appears to be a clear worsening of housing affordability, with wealthy buyers getting what they want and others struggling.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Chicago housing for sale, courtesy The Corner Side Yard.

South Africa: Still the World’s Most Race-Regulated Country?

Hügo Krüger — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

As South Africa hosts the G20 Summit in Johannesburg on 22-23 November 2025, the event has been overshadowed by two high-profile disputes over race policy.

First, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a full boycott by U.S. officials, declaring on Truth Social that holding the G20 in South Africa was “a total disgrace” because of alleged government-sponsored discrimination against Afrikaners, including claims of killings and land confiscations.

Second, and directly tied to the same debate, the Afrikaner trade union Solidarity in November 2025 erected more than 30 digital billboards and banners along key G20 routes proclaiming South Africa “the most race-regulated country in the world”.

Johannesburg authorities removed most of them within hours, citing lack of permits. Solidarity immediately obtained an urgent interim interdict from the High Court, replaced the boards, and—in protest—escalated by erecting over 50 additional banners across Gauteng highways and airport approaches. Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi publicly welcomed the initial removals as a defeat of “racism” and labelled Solidarity members “racists” on X, while the union accused him of censorship and incitement. Meanwhile, the South African Presidency dismissed the campaign as the work of a “tiny right-wing minority” intent on embarrassing the nation.

With regards to race laws, South Africa currently has 142 pieces of national legislation that explicitly or implicitly make race a legal criterion for rights, benefits, obligations or penalties. This is more than existed at the height of apartheid (123 in 1980), according to the Institute of Race Relations’ continuously updated Index of Race Law, last revised on 11 June 2025. Of the 142, 116 have been enacted since 1994.

The list includes major framework laws such as the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act (2003), the Employment Equity Act (1998), the Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act (2000) and recent amendments to sector charters (mining, water services, electricity, etc.) that impose minimum Black ownership or management percentages as licensing conditions.

A significant portion of the 142 statutes are, however, outdated or partially obsolete. At least 26 pre-1994 laws still on the statute book contain racial references that have never been repealed or amended (for example, old group-areas extensions, certain pension-fund racial clauses, and remnants of the Population Registration Act repeal process that left stray provisions intact). Critics of the IRR index therefore argue that the “142” figure is inflated because it mixes active transformative legislation with dormant apartheid-era relics.

Read the rest of this piece at Hügo's Newsletter.

Hügo Krüger is a South African born Structural/Nuclear Engineer, writer and YouTube podcaster, commentating on topics relating to Energy and Geopolitical Matters, Hügo is married to an Iranian born Mathematician and Artist; the couple resides in Paris.

Photo: courtesy Hügo's Newsletter.

California Job Cuts Will Hurt Gavin Newsom’s White House Run

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 19:28:14 -0500

California Governor Gavin Newsom loves to describe his state as “an economic powerhouse”. Yet he’s far more reluctant to acknowledge its dramatically worsening employment picture. According to new outplacement figures, Golden State employers announced over 170,000 job cuts this year, up 14% from last year. More than 75,000 of these cuts were made in the all-important tech sector.

No other state outside Washington DC has been cutting so many jobs, and California now suffers from America’s highest unemployment rate at 5.5%. But this is nothing new. The state has been haemorrhaging jobs in fields such as manufacturing, construction and business services since Joe Biden’s presidency.

Michael Bernick, who previously served as the director of California’s labour department, has pointed to the state’s “Upstairs, Downstairs economy”, in which a wealthy college-educated class relies on service economy workers. California manages to be at once the state with the most billionaires and the nation’s poverty capital. Its teenage unemployment rate tops 21%, just short of twice the national average; for those under the age of 30, it ranks second nationally behind Mississippi.

This shortage of jobs, particularly high-quality ones, has steadily built into a crisis in recent years as politicians look away. Affordability, particularly for housing, is a big issue but California is also by far the worst state at creating jobs which pay above average, losing 1.6 million such roles in the last decade. In the past year, the only jobs created in California were in government-financed healthcare and government itself.

Tech is supposedly California’s strong point, yet even here things are murky. While venture-financed AI startups descend on the Bay Area, the overall picture is one of tech job losses. This year, according to the LA Times, thousands of workers at the likes of Amazon, Meta, Paramount and Warner Bros have been laid off. Worse still, many tech jobs are headed elsewhere. Texas is leading the charge, followed by Florida, as Southern states including Tennessee and Georgia make significant gains.

One factor here is that California’s nationally high energy prices are undermining its AI industry. Firms such as Nvidia and Samsung are now looking to establish data centres in locations with lower prices, so that they’ll be better placed to develop advanced chips and processors. For instance, the University of Texas at Austin is planning a substantial new quantum computing centre, while energy-rich states such as Pennsylvania are now seeking AI growth as a way to reanimate traditional industrial sectors.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo: Felton Davis, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

How California is Failing Its Latino Population

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Few states so self-righteously proclaim their commitment to helping minorities like California does. Gov. Gavin Newsom rarely misses an opportunity to assert his solidarity with people of color, proclaiming in 2022 that “our incredible diversity is the foundation for our state’s strength, growth and success — and that confronting inequality is not just a moral imperative, but an economic one.”

Nice words, but on the things that matter — affordable housing, good jobs, and decent education — the current California regime has been a disaster for minorities. In a new study I did with attorney Jennifer Hernandez, released by the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute, we found that in most critical areas, African Americans and Latinos do worse here in California than in most of the country.

To be sure, some minorities have benefited from such programs as diversity, equity and inclusion to get into elite colleges and universities. But this has not stopped the rise of the state’s poverty rate, which increased to 18.9% in 2023, well above 11.0% in 2021, according to new Census data. Latinos, with a poverty rate of 16.9%, remained disproportionately poor. Some 13.6% of African Americans, 11.5% of Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders and 10.2% of white Californians lived in poverty.

These awful results reflect state policies — particularly around climate change — that hurt job growth and wages and yet are embraced by Newsom and the Legislature. For his part, Newsom still sees climate as a useful wedge issue with Democratic primary voters, as he demonstrated by making an appearance at the recent climate summit in Brazil, which most leaders of the top carbon-emitting nations skipped.

Yet his climate obsessions have had some awful results for the poorest Californians. Recently, the California Air Resources Board, the primary executor of California’s climate policies, projected that these policies will result in significant income declines for individuals earning less than $100,000 a year, while boosting incomes for those above this threshold.

At the same time, the state has created the continental U.S.’ highest electricity rates, which disproportionately fall on low-income consumers in part because others have shifted to solar. Those companies that use a lot of electricity, including tech firms, increasingly move outside the state. Manufacturing has lost one-third of its jobs in California since 1990, one reason few new electric vehicle plants, semiconductor and other new industrial facilities locate in California. This matters particularly to Latinos, who represent the vast majority of Californians in “carbon economy” jobs from production workers to material handling and truck driving — all industries in the crosshairs of state climate policy.

Despite green claims that renewables will lower prices, California’s electricity rates have surged 80% since 2008, compared with 28% nationwide. The impact of high energy prices on households is direct — particularly in the less temperate, overwhelmingly Latino interior. For poorer California, mostly Latino, energy costs take up 4% of the household budget, compared with barely 1% for better-off Californians.

As vast wealth has been generated by the tech sector and real estate, 85% of all new jobs in California have been in the low-paid service sector. California is the single worst state at creating jobs that pay above average; the state hemorrhaged 1.6 million above-average-paying jobs in the past decade, more than twice as many as any other state.

Particularly for Latinos and other minorities, California is losing its economic advantages. Indeed, according to our new report, the average Latino wage earner here earns roughly $10,000 a year less than their counterparts in less regulated places such as Texas. They also fare better in many Midwestern and Plains states such as Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska.

At the same time, the state’s climate-driven housing regulations make it harder to build affordable single-family homes, mostly on the periphery of urban areas. Policies favoring small urban units may be fine with a 25-year-old single tech worker in San Francisco or Manhattan Beach but are not likely to please the more family-oriented Latino population. Our survey found that the vast majority of Latinos prefer single-family homes, and most are seeking the same basic things as most people — that is, safety, good schools and closeness to jobs. (Interestingly, the notion of living near other Latinos, or people they agree with politically, was ranked as a low priority.)

Yet wanting a house and getting one are two different things. African Americans and Latinos in California do far worse in homeownership than their counterparts do in the rest of the country, including in heavily Latino Arizona, Texas and Florida. Overall, 59.2% of Hispanic households in Texas, for example, own their own homes, while only 45.9% of California’s Hispanic households do.

Perhaps the biggest failure has been education. In California, for example, Latino students account for more than 56% of all public-school students, but only 36% met standards for English language and just 22.7% for math. California Latino students perform worse than their counterparts in Florida and Texas; in fourth-grade reading, the state ranks behind longtime laggard Mississippi. Overall, California Latinos rank among the bottom 10 states in higher educational degree attainment in the nation.

Clearly California is failing its minorities, including Latinos, now the state’s largest ethnic group — expected to constitute more than half the state’s population by 2030.

Yet many of the state’s young Latinos will enter the labor market in a poor position because of our dysfunctional schools. Many may already be unemployable; the state recently suffered the nation’s highest rate of unemployment, particularly for teenagers and Generation Z, or people under 30.

Only by changing directions, and looking for ways to boost Latino economic prospects and those of other minorities, can we align our boastful multicultural rhetoric with reality.

This piece first appeared at: Los Angeles Times.

Photo: Don Barrett, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Martin Parr Saw Who We Really Are

Samuel J Abrams — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

The news of Martin Parr’s passing feels like a quiet rupture in the cultural record. Parr was not simply a photographer. He was a documentarian of civic life in its most unguarded, democratic, and unselfconscious forms. His lens captured modernity not through abstractions or theories, but through the granular details of how people move through everyday spaces; details most of us overlook, though they reveal who we are more honestly than any political slogan or census table.

Parr’s world was not the realm of monumental architecture or carefully manicured urbanism. His was the realm of beaches, food courts, supermarkets, small high streets, half-faded seaside towns, and the awkward social choreography of leisure. These places - often dismissed as banal or vulgar by cultural elites - were, for Parr, civic landscapes. They were the stages on which people negotiated class, aspiration, identity, and belonging. And he treated them with a seriousness that contemporary social analysis often reserves only for institutions. That alone made his work radical.

His breakthrough series, The Last Resort (1983–85), remains one of the clearest articulations of his worldview. Shot in New Brighton, it documented working-class families vacationing in a declining seaside town during an era of economic upheaval. What gives the series its power is not its critique but its honesty. The trash-strewn beaches, sunburned children clutching melting ice creams, and parents asleep in plastic chairs are not staged, not idealized, and not mocked. They are simply visible - as they were, as they lived, as they coped. In an era obsessed with “representation,” Parr represented ordinary people by refusing to turn them into symbols. He allowed them to occupy the center of the frame.

His camera understood, long before social media made it inescapable, that consumer life is a language. His 1990s project Signs of the Times, which explored domestic décor trends and the earnest, sometimes touching, sometimes absurd ways people construct self-identity inside their homes, reads today like an early ethnography of aspirational culture. The floral sofas, plastic-laminated dining tables, and proudly displayed tchotchkes signal the same anxieties and yearnings that now play out algorithmically on Instagram and Pinterest. Parr understood that taste is never neutral; it is a form of self-expression shaped by class, exposure, and the emotional economies of late capitalism.

Even before that, his early black-and-white documentary work from the 1970s - nonconformist chapel communities, declining rural villages, small-town rituals - captured a Britain on the cusp of social transformation. The scenes feel intimate and already fading: congregations thinning, traditions eroding, a sense of place stretching thinner each year. That early attentiveness to social texture deepened into the saturated flash aesthetic that made Parr famous. But the core remained: a desire to record how people inhabit spaces, how spaces shape them in return, and how modernity rearranges both.

What distinguishes Parr’s work, especially to anyone who studies civic life, is that it refuses both nostalgia and contempt. Many cultural observers treat consumer spaces and mass leisure with either hand-wringing or disdain. Parr took a different path. He documented these spaces with anthropological fidelity, without sentimentality, without moralizing, and without surrendering to cynicism. His images of crowded beaches with their sprawling towels, patterned swimsuits, folding chairs, squinting faces do not mock their subjects. They reveal public life in one of its few remaining egalitarian environments. A beach is one of the last places where class, age, and background spill into each other, however imperfectly. Parr noticed these collisions and treated them as central rather than marginal to modern civic experience.

Color was essential to his argument. At a time when “serious” photography still clung to black-and-white aesthetics, Parr insisted that modern life was too bright, too saturated, too garish to be rendered in monochrome. His palette captured not just the surface of consumer culture but its psychological atmosphere. The neon signs, fluorescent supermarket aisles, cheap souvenirs, vivid plastic toys; these were the textures of everyday aspiration. He did not hide or soften them. He made viewers confront the world as it actually was, not as they preferred it to be.

This is why Parr’s work matters so deeply now. The world he photographed is evaporating. High streets struggle, independent shops shutter, seaside towns are hollowed out, and informal public life is increasingly displaced by screens. The rituals he captured - families picnicking on unfashionable promenades, couples wandering through shabby arcades, children making their own unstructured fun - are giving way to curated leisure, algorithmically filtered entertainment, and a civic sphere where spontaneity feels like a relic.

Parr’s photographs are not simply nostalgic artifacts; they are records of a social ecosystem that once sustained a sense of common life. In his images, you see the friction and humor of people encountering difference casually, without mediation. You see informal norms negotiated without institutional intervention. You see the everyday indignities and everyday pleasures that formed the connective tissue of community life - messy, fragmented, ordinary, but shared.

Critically, Parr’s photography also documents the geography of inequality without preaching. In The Last Resort, the decaying seaside amusements reflect economic strain without turning the families enjoying them into props. In Signs of the Times, interior décor reveals aspiration and insecurity without indicting the people who embraced it. Across his global projects - from tourism culture in Europe and Asia to food rituals in the United States - he mapped how consumer culture shapes social expectations while leaving room for agency, humor, and tenderness.

For those of us who write about civic culture, community, and the changing built environment, Parr’s archive is invaluable. It is visual sociology of the highest order; not for its technical mastery but for its insight into how people live. His images show that civic life does not reside solely in institutions or grand projects. It resides in the mundane negotiations of public space, in the quiet dramas of leisure, in the informal social codes that govern queues, beaches, parks, and discount stores. These are the places where people encounter one another as citizens, not abstractions.

Parr’s death comes at a moment when the very idea of unmediated public togetherness feels fragile. His work reminds us of what we risk losing: uncurated spaces, unselfconscious rituals, the kind of public intimacy that emerges when we are not performing for a digital audience. He captured the ordinary before it became endangered.

In the end, Martin Parr’s legacy is not only artistic. It is civic. He showed us that everyday life - messy, colorful, contradictory - is worth understanding. He restored visibility to people often ignored in cultural narratives. He taught us that the vernacular spaces of modern life are not trivial but foundational. And he insisted that to see society clearly, we must look directly at how ordinary people actually live, not how we imagine they do. That clarity is a gift, and we are fortunate he left so much of it behind.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: Mirabella via Wikimedia, under CC BY-SA 3.0.

What the Deaths of Frank Gehry and Robert A.M. Stern Tell Us About American Cities

Samuel J Abrams — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Two titans of American architecture — Frank Gehry and Robert A.M. Stern — have passed within days of each other. Gehry died at 96 in Santa Monica, Stern at 86 in Manhattan. Their departures close a defining chapter in American design, but they also open an opportunity to reconsider what we expect from our cities, our institutions, and the built environments that shape civic life.

Their careers unfolded in completely different registers. Gehry was the disrupter: the Toronto-born, Los Angeles-forged rebel who discovered emotional electricity in chain-link fences, corrugated metal, sun-bleached stucco, and the digital tools that eventually allowed him to twist steel into improbable billows. Stern was the historian and builder of context: a Brooklyn kid who fell in love with New York's limestone behemoths and marble-clad entryways, and who spent half a century arguing that tradition could be renewed rather than discarded. Yet despite their differences of temperament and technique, they shared an unusual seriousness about architecture's civic purpose. Both believed that buildings could elevate ordinary life, strengthen our sense of belonging, and make cities more humane.

I remember seeing Gehry's earliest plans for the Guggenheim Bilbao when I was a teenager in New York. I didn't yet know the theoretical vocabulary — I wasn't thinking about deconstructivism or parametric curves — but the image stopped me. The museum's titanium looked like it was alive. It didn't sit on the riverbank; it unfurled onto it. The forms seemed to be moving even as the building stood still. Until then, buildings had been objects. Bilbao was an event. It showed me for the first time that architecture could make you feel something unexpected and, frankly, joyful — and that public space could carry that emotional charge.

For Bilbao, Gehry took a dying industrial waterfront — a landscape of rust, soot, and shuttered factories — and turned it into the global shorthand for urban renaissance. The so-called "Bilbao effect" was often mocked by critics as a faddish, simplistic formula, but the underlying lesson was more profound: cities can be revived not only through infrastructure and zoning, but through beauty, risk, and ambition. Whether one loves or hates Gehry's sculptural exuberance, he proved that a single building, properly conceived, can shift a city's trajectory. In the decades since, many cities have learned the wrong lessons, erecting loud buildings that imitate the surface spectacle without the deeper logic. Still, Gehry's achievement remains singular. His work insisted that cities owe citizens not merely functionality but delight — an underrated civic virtue.

Stern worked from the opposite direction. He believed deeply in continuity, in the idea that cities accrue character over time and that good architecture participates in that long story rather than bulldozing it. Long before he became famous for 15 Central Park West, he spent decades designing unflashy but dignified dormitories, libraries, museums, and civic buildings that understood their settings. He believed that architects had a duty to engage context, not ignore it.

Stern's 15 Central Park West — two limestone towers, one modestly scaled on the park and the other taller and set back, joined by a copper-domed rotunda and a civilized motor court — was a rebuke to the anonymous glass towers that had overtaken Manhattan. Critics noted that the building seemed to belong to an older era of New York civic confidence. Buyers flocked because it felt familiar yet new, rooted yet polished. It was Stern's breakthrough, but its real significance was that it restored respect for the prewar vocabulary that had made New York legible in the first place. Where Gehry reimagined the future of form, Stern reasserted the value of memory.

Stern's civic projects — the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge — all followed the same quiet principle: people deserve buildings that treat them as participants in a story. His work argued that tradition is not nostalgia but a democratic inheritance. For Stern, the past was not an anchor holding the city back; it was a set of tools for creating places people would actually love.

It is tempting to reduce Stern and Gehry to opposing poles in a culture war: classicism versus deconstruction, hand drawing versus computer modeling, limestone versus titanium. But that framing floats above the more meaningful truth. Both were reacting against the same problem: the thinness of modernism when abstract ideology overrides human need. Stern criticized the modernist tendency to produce "self-important objects" with no relationship to their surroundings. Gehry recoiled from the antiseptic perfection of high modernism — the polished pavilions that he felt were "effete" and incompatible with the messy vitality of real life. Both men, in their own ways, rejected purity. Both cared about people first.

Their shared conviction — that architecture is a civic art, not an academic exercise — matters now more than ever. We are living through a period of deep institutional fragility. Students arrive on campuses anxious and lonely. Cities, especially legacy metros, are grappling with empty office towers, transit strains, unaffordable housing, and weakened civic confidence. Too many new buildings are interchangeable glass commodities, equally at home in Seoul, Austin, or Midtown Manhattan. Too many public spaces look like corporate lobbies: frictionless, placeless, and forgettable.

Gehry and Stern provide a counterpoint. They remind us that buildings teach. A well-designed campus signals order, purpose, and seriousness. A museum that welcomes people with beauty rather than intimidation suggests that civic life is meant to be shared, not siloed. A neighborhood that respects its past invites trust and affection. A city that takes risks on public art, unusual forms, and emotional resonance gives residents reasons to care.

Both architects also demonstrated that taste is not trivial. When a city builds well, it dignifies the people who live in it. When it builds poorly, it signals indifference — or worse, contempt. This is especially evident in the fabric of American suburbs and small cities, where too many civic buildings are designed like budget hotels and too many commercial centers are anonymous boxes surrounded by parking lagoons. Gehry and Stern would have disagreed about the right materials or forms for these places, but they would have agreed that the task is honorable, that residents deserve something better than the purely expedient.

Their deaths also invite a reflection on the American habit of oscillating between opposites: between nostalgia and novelty, between aesthetic puritanism and architectural spectacle. Stern and Gehry suggest a more mature direction. Continuity and reinvention need not be enemies. A city can honor its historical grain while still experimenting with new shapes, materials, and technologies. A community can build traditional civic buildings without sliding into pastiche, and can build expressive modern structures without turning them into billboards for developers. The question is not old versus new, but whether the result strengthens the civic realm.

When I think back to seeing the Bilbao plans as a teenager, what struck me wasn't the novelty but the possibility. When I think now of Stern's work — the way 15 Central Park West fits Manhattan's skyline without disappearing into it — I think about the power of restraint. Cities need both impulses. They need imagination and memory, ambition and modesty, the courage to shock and the wisdom to calm.

That balance is painfully rare in contemporary planning debates. Our arguments about zoning, density, and housing often reduce buildings to units, envelopes, and FAR calculations. These are essential elements of policy, but they are not the whole story. A city that builds only for efficiency will eventually erode its own identity. A city that builds only for spectacle will eventually exhaust itself. Gehry and Stern, each through decades of work, showed that civic architecture is most powerful when it is clear about its purpose: to make the shared world feel worth belonging to.

Their deaths are reminders, not just losses. They urge us to demand more of our public spaces, our institutions, and our cities. They ask us to look up — literally — and to let architecture rekindle our sense of possibility. America has no shortage of challenges, but we have also inherited a remarkable toolkit: the imagination of Gehry, the discipline of Stern, and a tradition of building that once took citizenship seriously.
The question now is whether we still have the will to use it.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: Frank Gehry, by Forgemind Archipedia via Flickr: Flickr, under CC 2.0 License; Robert A.M. Stern, by the Historic Districts Council, via Wikimedia, under CC BY-SA 4.0.

$1.8 Trillion for Nothing

Randal OToole — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Congress sporadically handed out transit capital funds in the 1970s and 1980s, but in 1991 it made it systematic with creation of the transit capital investment grants program, also known as New Starts. Since then, federal, state, and local taxpayers have spent more than half a trillion dollars on transit capital improvements. Transit agencies have also spent nearly $1.2 trillion on transit operations, only $355 billion of which was covered by passenger fares.

These numbers are from the National Transit Database Historic Time Series, the 2024 edition of which the Federal Transit Administration released last week along with the 2024 annual transit database that was featured here yesterday. While the above figures are in nominal dollars, after adjusting for inflation to 2024 dollars using GDP deflators, taxpayers have spent more than $1.8 trillion subsidizing transit since 1991.

What have we gotten for this excessively generous subsidy? In 1991, the average urban resident rode transit more than 40 times a year. Transit ridership grew between 1991 and 2014, but so did urban populations, so trips per resident increased to just 42. Ridership fell after 2014 and by 2019 the average urban resident took only 36 transit trips per year. As of 2024, it was around 27 trips per year.

This does not seem like a great return on a $1.8 trillion investment.

Transit has not relieved congestion. It hasn’t reduced greenhouse gas emissions. It hasn’t helped many low-income people, the vast majority of whom have their own cars and don’t use transit. All this $1.8 trillion has done is enrich a few special interest groups.

The historic time series consists of five different spreadsheets. The first two, tables TS1.1 and TS1.2, focus on how much transit funding comes federal, state, or local sources. More interesting is table TS2.1, which lists operating expenses, fares, route miles, revenue miles, revenue hours, riders, and passenger-miles, all broken down by both transit agencies and modes for each agency. Table TS2.2 is the same but broken down only by transit agencies, not by modes. Table TS3.1 has capital expenses broken down by agency and mode while table TS3.2 inventories assets by agency and mode. I use mainly 2.1 and 3.1.

Previous issues have included most data back to 1991, though capital costs began in 1992 and fares in 2002. For some reason, this year the FTA began many of the time series in 2015, so I turned to the 2023 time series to get earlier years.

The American Public Transportation Association’s Public Transit Fact Book includes capital costs and fares for the years that are missing from the historical time series. Though APTA’s data aren’t broken down by mode, they add to the continuous series of national data.

Transit advocates talk endlessly about the advantages of transit over driving. Americans are paying for it but they aren’t using it.

This piece first appeared at The Antiplanner.

Photo: chart courtesy The Antiplanner.

Climate Censorship and Integrity at COP30 and Beyond

Paul Driessen — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

The Roman god Janus had two faces: for comings and goings, beginnings and endings, the interim between war and peace, and transitions both tangible and abstract.

Climate Cultists might hail him for presiding over the demise of fossil fuels and the advent of wind, solar and battery power; or of an idyllic past, tumultuous present, and calamitous future if we don’t make that transition.

Most of us might herald Janus as looking back on decades of fantasy and fanaticism over manmade climate crises and magical “renewable” energy – and forward to an era of realism about natural climate change and reliable, affordable energy as the foundation of civilization and living standards.

p>Of course, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, this is not the end of that fanaticism. It may not even be the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning of global economic suicide.

For Climate Cultists, the thirtieth Conference of Parties (COP30) ended in dismay and disarray. Every mention of eliminating fossil fuels to reach temperature targets was stricken from the global outcome document. Demands that rich nations pay trillions of dollars to mitigate or stop climate change were replaced with calls for funding “adaptation” and “loss and damage” compensation.

Worse, those new funding demands include no concrete mechanisms for raising and distributing funds, no enforcement mechanisms to compel countries to contribute, and no countries actually willing to provide more than a pittance.

Perhaps worst for COP Climate Cultists is the latest global energy number. Even after decades of gaslighting about greenhouse gas emissions, rising seas, worsening weather and the “inevitable” energy transition, 86% of the world’s energy is still oil, natural gas and coal.

It may indeed be the end of the beginning of global economic suicide. Happy tidings for all.

But COP30 also highlighted another Janus, the two faces of climate censorship: an incessant stream of climate alarmism and renewable energy fantasy – and continuous efforts to silence voices of realism about both illusions. The UN, academia, search engines, activists, news media and others are guilty.

Read the rest of this piece at TownHall.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books, reports and articles on energy, environmental, climate and human rights issues.

Photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen via Wikimedia, under CC 3.0 License.

Slouching Towards Gavin Newsom

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

More through historical accident than anything else, Gavin Newsom has emerged as the de facto leader of the Democratic resistance. His dubious attempt to redistrict California along partisan lines won at the ballot box last month. It was a gamble – an open and explicit attempt at gerrymandering – which voters have rewarded. He is conspicuously modeling his image on Bill Clinton’s and Slick Willie is returning the compliment by letting insiders know that he is hugely impressed by Newsom’s talents.

Newsom is also audaciously recasting himself as a working-class hero. He has said he spent his childhood “hustling” and that he “raised himself.” That rather downplays his rise as a protégé of the Getty family, which employed his father as its lawyer. In 1991, a young Newsom was photographed with the Getty children as part of a newspaper story titled “The Children of the Rich.” It’s unlikely that the San Francisco elite, who have financed his ruse, are fooled; nor is anyone else for that matter. Yet the act goes on, without a hint of shame.

In November, his former chief of staff was indicted for wire fraud and falsifying tax returns, using fake contracts to deduct the cost of luxury handbags and private jet travel. Dana Williamson’s defense team say federal investigators had sought her cooperation with an as-yet undisclosed investigation into Newsom himself. His team denies any knowledge of such an investigation – an increasingly common occurrence in the one-party state.

Whatever the truth of the Williamson case, Newsom’s record as Governor alone ought to be fatal. California has led the globe in culture and technology for more than a century. If the state were a country, it would be the fourth-largest economy in the world, as Newsom endlessly brags. But look under the hood and California has become a disaster for most workers.

This economic regime is, as former director of the California labor department Michael Bernick puts it, an “upstairs, downstairs” autocracy. Newsom’s state has a phenomenally wealthy class above a large, low-wage underbelly. Of course he rarely discusses the other California; the state has the highest proportion of those living in poverty, tepid job growth and the country’s highest rates of unemployment.

Among teenagers the unemployment rate tops 21 percent, just short of twice the national average. For Gen Z, unemployment ranks second, just ahead of Mississippi. California is the single worst state at creating jobs that pay above average; it hemorrhaged 1.6 million above-average-paying jobs in the past decade, more than twice as many as any other state. In the past year, the only new jobs created in California were in government-financed healthcare and government itself.

Yet the Governor likes to bask in California’s glow. He inherited an economy that is home to five of the top ten companies in the world. No other region on the planet comes close. The presence of these firms, and their capital gains, along with a highly inflated property market, do much to propel the state’s GDP. That’s partly why he now dominates the race to be the presidential candidate for 2028, as his long-time rival Kamala Harris fades towards well-deserved obscurity.

The notion of an enlightened California coming to rescue the nation from Trump also plays well with large sections of Silicon Valley. Despite the tech world’s flirtation with MAGA, loyalties remain decisively on the side of the Democrats. The Republicans haven’t won a statewide race in almost two decades. Partly that’s down to demographics. Young workers are fleeing. Left behind is a rapidly aging population, many rich from real-estate investments, a large coterie of affluent professionals, state-dependent individuals and, most importantly, public-sector workers, whose unions funded Newsom’s successful redistricting drive. Leading Democratic pollster Paul Mitchell told me that, thanks to these demographic changes, the GOP’s chances of recapturing the Governor’s Mansion would be “a one in every 200 years event.”

Newsom’s agenda is shaped largely by public-employee unions and tech-financed green lobbies. But these same policies have devastated the state’s blue-collar economy. Once a major oil producer, the state now suffers the nation’s highest energy prices and is utterly dependent on foreign imports from South America and Saudi Arabia. California’s regulations have added to the erosion of industrial jobs. Since 1990, one-third of manufacturing jobs – 1.3 million positions – have disappeared. Newsom likes to present himself as a member of the hustling classes and yet, in truth, he has destroyed them, encouraged by the established wealth of unions and tech oligarchs. It’s a story that makes much more sense when you learn of his early years.

Over the past two decades, four million net domestic migrants have left California – that’s the population of San Francisco, Anaheim and San Diego combined. In the past decade, the four leading destinations for young people were all in the South – Nashville, Austin, San Antonio and Dallas-Fort Worth. Austin’s growth in educated-millennial migration was almost three times that of New York and twice that of San Francisco. This has only accelerated under Newsom.

Some suggest that California’s tech sector will make up for this decline in jobs. But companies, too, are leaving. Along with energy firms such as Chevron and Occidental, the recent exodus includes Tesla, SpaceX, McKesson, Jacobs Engineering and Oracle. The big winner is California’s arch-rival, Texas. Hollywood is also suffering a major loss of jobs to other states and countries. Tech employment is heading downward, with more than half of all national tech job losses occurring in the Golden State. Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee and South Carolina are projected to enjoy the biggest growth in tech over the next decade.

Optimists point to artificial intelligence as a new source of growth, but California’s high energy prices make that unlikely. The soaring need for affordable electricity is leading firms such as Nvidia and Samsung to locate centers which fabricate advanced chips and processors in areas with lower prices for electricity. This includes Texas, where a new quantum-computing center is being planned, and energy-rich states such as Pennsylvania, which is seeking AI growth as a way to reanimate its industrial sector.

To be sure, many AI firms began life in San Francisco. But they are unlikely to create more tech jobs. City economist Ted Egan suggests that layoffs from other companies, largely due to AI replacing workers, have wiped out gains from the new tech. AI will, if anything, accelerate the rewards to the investor class, a handful of entrepreneurs and well-compensated “genius” programmers. What seems to be happening is that a few highly paid executives and developers stay on their campuses, while computing power shifts to places where energy is cheaper. California is becoming the oligarch’s state, led by the oligarch-in-chief.

Nothing drives the mass departure from America’s most blessed state more than affordability. This of one of issues that excites both the “abundance” advocates and the increasingly socialist-oriented YIMBY movement. Newsom, who bought a new $9 million house last year, claims to be taking bold steps to improve the state’s housing market. But he has overseen laughably poor results. Many Californians will never own a home or find an affordable rental. Despite hundreds of “pro-housing” initiatives, the state’s housing crisis is getting worse. California consistently lags in the construction not just of single-family homes but multifamily homes as well, while the state dominates the list of the nation’s most expensive ZIP codes.

Home prices in coastal California are nearly 400 percent above the national average, and statewide the median cost of a home is 2.5 times higher than in the rest of the country. Not surprisingly, California has the second-lowest home-ownership rate in the nation, 56 percent (New York’s is lowest, at 54 percent). Nor have Newsom’s policies helped renters. The average cost of a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles is just shy of $3,000 a month, according to apartments.com, about $1,000 more than the national average.

Housing is just one of the many Newsom policies that may not play so well in the vast center of America, where single-family homes are the norm and prices are far lower. Certainly, his long-standing assault on fossil fuels will win over few workers in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, the Dakotas and Pennsylvania, the epicenters of the US’s enormous energy production. Laid-off factory hands in Michigan may not welcome an agenda that includes the wiping out of profitable gasoline-fueled cars. Progressive mantras that play well in California may prove Newsom’s undoing in a 2028 presidential run.

But it would be foolish to underestimate Newsom. Burdened by dyslexia, he has compensated with extreme discipline and hard work. Never an object of adulation, like his predecessor Ronald Reagan, or of respect like the more cerebral former California governor Jerry Brown, his career trajectory has evolved carefully, along very pragmatic lines, even while Newsom embraces progressive bromides. “He is trying to be the anti-Trump,” notes long-time Democratic consultant Dave Gershwin, “but if he needs to cut ties with the left, he’ll do it.” There is little sign of that yet in his cultural stances, such as his preference for transgender over parental rights or his embrace of climate-change religion, which still resonate with his state’s progressive-dominated media.

An ability to shift from ideology to practicality has been a hallmark of Newsom’s career. Expect a move right on these questions in the coming months. As mayor of San Francisco, he often sided with business interests against the local radical left. As lieutenant governor under Brown, he resorted to visiting Texas in search of a more viable economic model. Just this year he displayed his skill at shifting with the winds by trying to reach out to conservatives such as the late Charlie Kirk when it seemed MAGA was on the rise.

When necessary, Newsom is willing to jettison progressive demands. He vetoed a bill that would have legalized “shooting alleys” – so-called safe drug-injection sites. He worked to keep the state’s last nuclear and natural-gas plants in operation to prevent politically unpalatable blackouts. To do otherwise would have been madness: these plants account for half of California’s electricity. Newsom is many things, but mad is not one of them. Facing a dismal fiscal reality, he has been forced to fend off proposals from Sacramento progressives that included a 32-hour work week, raising the state’s income tax – already the nation’s highest – and adding new payroll taxes for universal healthcare.

To balance practicality with ideology, Newsom uses his media skills – ultra-friendly Politico claims he has “won the internet” – to assert himself. The donor class, which has always liked him, now sees him as the best option at a time when a majority of under-40s embrace socialism. Particularly threatening to Palo Alto is a survey that found that a majority of under-40s now favor restricting incomes, with a large portion seeking limits of less than $1 million annually.

GOP opponents say that Newsom is the “tier one” to fear in 2028. “He’s really smart,” according to California’s Republican national committeeman Shawn Steel, “besides having great hair.” Even the American Conservative proclaimed him “the big winner” of the 2025 elections, thanks to his gerrymandering initiative.

Of course, Newsom’s record of failure for working people could provide fodder for a challenger from the left, and in November 2028 from the GOP. But right now, anti-Trumpism overwhelms serious progressive critiques of Newsom’s record. He is no great statesman. But, with his media savvy and good looks, he could well play one on TV, and that may be more than enough against either his party’s socialists or the remnants of a disintegrating MAGA.

This piece first appeared at: The Spectator.

Photo: Press Office of CA Governor Newsom

Ruth Asawa's Civic Imagination

Samuel J Abrams — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

On the sixth floor of the Museum of Modern Art, Ruth Asawa's wire sculptures hang like breaths made visible, loops of brass and light suspended between earth and heaven, quiet reminders that beauty can still be a civic language. They sway almost imperceptibly as visitors move through the gallery, casting shadows that ripple across the white walls. The effect is serene and public all at once: a choreography of discipline, patience, and grace. Each loop of wire is hand-woven, continuous and unbroken. Step closer and you see the human labor inside the geometry - evidence of time and attention in a culture allergic to both.

Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective, jointly organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gathers more than 300 works spanning five decades of artistic production. The exhibition is far more than a historical survey; it is a civic revelation. In a moment when contemporary art often trades in irony, provocation, or despair, Asawa's work stands as a counter-tradition of constructive joy. Her art is not rebellion but repair. It embodies the conviction that beauty, education, and community are inseparable threads in the democratic fabric.

Formation and Discipline

Asawa's life story is as American as it is extraordinary. Born in 1926 to Japanese-American farmers in Norwalk, California, she was sixteen when her family was forced into internment camps during World War II. Her father was arrested by the FBI in February 1942; the rest of the family was first held at Santa Anita racetrack, then sent to Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas. The experience could have produced bitterness. Instead, she found order and solace in pattern and repetition. In the camp she began to draw; after the war she enrolled at the legendary Black Mountain College, where she studied under Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller.

Albers taught design as moral formation. "Art is revelation instead of information," he believed - a philosophy that to see clearly was to live rightly, that perception itself was a civic virtue. Asawa absorbed that ethic completely. She would later write, "An artist is not special. An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special." That conviction shaped her life and teaching. For Asawa, art was education, and education was the moral architecture of democracy.

The lessons of Black Mountain followed her west. What she learned in Albers's classroom - discipline, patience, respect for material - she transformed into an art that united craft and contemplation. Her San Francisco home doubled as studio and classroom; children threaded wire beside her while neighborhood students dropped in to learn. The line between life and art, between family and form, simply dissolved.

The Geometry of Community

Her signature looped-wire sculptures - those floating volumes of air and light - grew from a basket-weaving technique she learned in Mexico in 1947, during a summer trip while studying at Black Mountain College. Using ordinary materials - galvanized steel, brass, copper - she built intricate lattices that feel at once mathematical and maternal. Each loop encloses and releases space, creating inside and outside simultaneously. "I'm not so interested in the expression of something," she once said. "I'm more interested in what the material can do."

Standing beneath these forms at MoMA, one senses a rare harmony between intellect and humility. They are rigorous yet tender, abstract yet profoundly human. Their calm precision offers an antidote to the noise of the age. Where much contemporary art insists on confrontation or spectacle, Asawa's insists on coherence. She understood that art's highest purpose is not to shock but to order, not to dazzle but to dignify.

Some critics mistake Asawa's serenity for retreat, her discipline for decorum. Yet in her patience there is protest: a quiet refusal of cynicism, haste, and the hollow virtue of outrage. Each loop of wire is an act of faith that connection still matters, that emptiness can hold form.

From Studio to City

That ethic carried beyond the studio. After settling in San Francisco, Asawa turned her attention outward - to fountains, plazas, and public schools. Her Andrea Fountain (1968) at Ghirardelli Square, with its entwined mermaids and sea forms, invites children to play and touch. Her San Francisco Fountain (1973) near Union Square, covered in hundreds of cast-bronze reliefs depicting the city's neighborhoods and workers, transforms the everyday into civic monument.

In contrast to the forbidding monumentalism of mid-century public art, Asawa's civic works are intimate and participatory. They do not impose; they invite. Where Richard Serra's Tilted Arc divided Manhattan, Asawa's fountains bind communities together. Her art exemplifies what might be called a civic modernism of belonging; an art that joins beauty to stewardship.

MoMA's retrospective restores this dimension. Models, sketches, and archival photographs of her public commissions line the galleries, revealing an artist who saw no hierarchy between fine art and civic architecture. For Asawa, the city itself was a canvas of relation and, powerfully, a place where form could teach virtue.

Education as Civic Renewal

Of all her legacies, education may be the most enduring and this was featured potently in the retrospective. During the 1970s and '80s, as arts programs were disappearing from public schools, Asawa became a tireless advocate for creative education as civic necessity. She organized community workshops, wrote curricula, and lobbied the San Francisco Board of Education to establish a public arts high school. Her decade-long effort culminated in the founding of the San Francisco School of the Arts in 1982 - now renamed the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts.

She believed that learning to see was the beginning of learning to care. In an era when politics increasingly substitutes for pedagogy, her conviction that creativity undergirds citizenship feels newly urgent. A society that neglects the arts, she understood, erodes the habits of attention and patience that self-government requires.

At a time when art and music programs are again the first casualties of budget cuts, Asawa's legacy reminds policymakers that aesthetic formation is civic formation - that to teach beauty is to teach democracy.

Against Spectacle

The exhibition also offers a quiet rebuke to the art world's current obsessions. Where so much contemporary work aims for shock, Asawa sought equilibrium. Her practice rejects the assumption that seriousness demands despair. She built beauty, not irony.

Her fountains were not luxury goods for collectors but instruments of civic play. Her wire forms were not slogans or identity statements but expressions of shared discipline. The retrospective's curators, Cara Manes and Janet Bishop, wisely resist framing her as a rediscovered "outsider." Instead, they present her as a peer of Albers, Calder, and Eva Hesse - an artist who expanded modernism's vocabulary by rooting abstraction in the everyday.

Her legacy forces a question: what if public institutions embraced her ethos? What if beauty and stewardship, not branding and outrage, guided our cultural life? That MoMA, the most visible museum of modern art, now devotes its sixth floor to her work is itself an act of civic correction; a recognition that rigor and gentleness are not opposites but allies.

Transcendence in the Everyday

The quieter rooms of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective reveal the artist at rest. Watercolors of wilted poppies, contour drawings of her children, geometric studies in ink - all bear the same meditative rhythm as her wire sculptures. There is something almost liturgical in their repetition, as if each line were a small prayer for coherence.

The show's through-line is unity: between sculpture and sketch, between home and public space, between the hand that loops wire and the city that receives its pattern. "Art is doing. Art deals directly with life," she said. Those words capture the civic heart of her vision—an understanding that attention itself is a form of creation.

A Civic Vision for Our Time

Asawa's worldview was never narrowly aesthetic. It was civic, even constitutional. She believed that the virtues of making - patience, discipline, care - are the same virtues that sustain a democracy. Her life offers a model of citizenship rooted in creation rather than consumption.

That insight speaks directly to the crises of our own moment. Polarization has replaced participation; distraction has replaced devotion. Yet Asawa's example reminds us that civic trust is built the same way a sculpture is: one loop at a time, each joined to the next. When students learn to draw, weave, or fold, they are also learning how to see one another

The Republic of Beauty

In the film that concludes the exhibition, Asawa leads a classroom of children in a paper-folding exercise. Their faces brighten as flat sheets rise into complex geometries. "You can make something beautiful out of almost anything," she tells them in the film. It could be her epitaph or a creed for public life.

For Asawa, beauty was not ornament but ethic: the visible sign of care, the trace of faith that the world can still hold form. Her retrospective is more than an art event. It is a moral reminder that beauty is a public duty.

Standing in MoMA's final gallery, as the wire forms shimmer and sway, one senses not nostalgia but instruction. The work teaches us how to look, how to care, how to build. It suggests that beauty, like democracy, is not a finished product but a practice - looped, patient, participatory, and unbroken.

In the fragile republic of art and citizenship alike, Ruth Asawa remains our most luminous teacher - showing that to make something beautiful is to believe, however quietly, that the world can still be made whole.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: Alexandra Courtis, via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.

An Anti-woke Counter-revolution is Sweeping Through the Media

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

The purchase of Paramount and CBS by David Ellison – scion of Larry Ellison, the world’s third-richest man, with a $250 billion tech fortune – marks a shift away from one-party domination of the media and culture. It follows Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, now X, and the Trumpian capture of Washington DC’s Kennedy Center.

Long a cakewalk for progressives, the culture war is edging towards high noon. For the first time in decades, the left faces competitors who read from different scripts and come from different perspectives.

Naturally, progressives are not happy. Robert Reich, a leading left-wing economist, denounces – rightly – the ability of the ultra-rich to buy media outlets and push an agenda. Yet he and others had no such qualms when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, when Salesforce’s Marc Benioff snapped up the moribund Time magazine, when Laurene Powell Jobs took over the Atlantic, or when another well-endowed heir purchased the New Republic from Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.

Perhaps most unsettled are those who profited from decades of one-party cultural rule, stretching from Hollywood and Silicon Valley to Manhattan. Bari Weiss’s pledge to ‘blow up’ CBS – Paramount has announced plans to lay off 2,000 workers in Hollywood and New York – alarms the likes of Katie Couric, the onetime CBS star, nominally because it undermines ‘independent journalism’. Progressives will certainly attack CBS for moving away from promoting climate hysteria, which no longer enjoys its own special desk. Worse still for the left, conservative voices – such as the ubiquitous Mormon Wives, glamorous mothers and reality-TV stars who stand in sharp contrast to the over-the-top Kardashians – are gaining traction on television.

Why is this happening now? The re-election of Trump, the ultimate anti-wokist, has emboldened some oligarchs to enter what was once the exclusive domain of the left. But political power alone does not explain the shift. Trump’s influence will fade, after all. Demographics and customer preferences matter more.

Mainstream media have become disconnected from at least half their audience. Overall public confidence in the press is near a historic low: barely a third express trust, half the share that did so in 1978. This is not just an American phenomenon – the travails of the once-respected BBC in the UK make that clear.

The gulf between the media and audiences widened after the George Floyd riots, when major media companies – in print, film, radio and online – doubled down on an ever more overt progressivism. They downplayed far-left violence and embraced a mission not of informing or entertaining, but of ideological propagation.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo: IMDB/House of David

New Report: The Rise of Latino America

Joel Kotkin and Jennifer Hernandez — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Executive Summary

In The Rise of Latino America, we argue that Latinos, who are projected to become America’s largest ethnic group, are a dynamic force shaping the nation’s demographic, economic, and cultural future. Far from being a marginalized group defined by oppression, Latinos are integral to America’s story. They drive economic growth, cultural evolution, and workforce vitality. Challenges, however, including poverty, educational disparities, and restrictive policies, threaten their upward mobility. Policymakers who wish to harness Latino potential to ensure national prosperity and resilience should adopt policies that prioritize affordability, safety, and economic opportunity over ideological constraints.

We urge policymakers to reject ideologically driven policies that hinder Latino progress, such as restrictive land use, costly climate mandates, and reduced personal mobility. Embracing policies that align with Latino aspirations rooted in work, family, and opportunity will not only empower this vital population but also strengthen America’s economic and demographic future in a competitive global landscape.

Introduction

Migration has shaped America’s history. The earliest migrants, the ancestors of the American Indians, arrived from far east Asia. Migration from the British Isles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was voluntary but thousands of enslaved people also arrived here from Africa at the same time. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw waves of Germans, Italians, Russians, East Asians, Indians, and Jews.

Each group has faced sometimes brutal discrimination from the dominant majority. Many on the left see such racial prejudice as the American experience’s defining characteristic. From this perspective, Latinos are simply the latest group to live under an oppressive regime and whose lands “settlers” stole.

Yet the Latino experience is unique and far more uplifting. Latinos differ from Europeans: notably, they migrated to a country whose territory Anglo immigrants had conquered—in Texas initially and later across the entire Southwest—and taken from them.

But contrary to the narrative of “settler colonialism,” very few of today’s Latino residents can trace themselves to earlier settlers; the vast majority are recent arrivals. Indeed, the Southwest’s entire Mexican population in 1848 was barely 48,000. Yet the dominant academic and progressive narrative remains one of unending oppression and seizure of land. Latinos, writes one leftist writer, have “been forgotten by the nation” and have “nothing but their angers and their hungers.” Like the Anglos who settled areas seized from Mexico, they too want a piece of the pie, someplace safe and prosperous for their families to live and where they can acquire wealth.

At the same time there are some on the political right who fear America’s ongoing Latinization. Some influential right-wing theorists continue to hold the notion that Latinos are intrinsically inferior to whites and Asians. Others fear that the Latinos blend of Catholic and Indio culture makes them less digestible than earlier immigrants.

This report disputes both perspectives, and focuses instead on the progress, as well as the very real challenges Latinos face in America. The rise of Latinos does not constitute a departure from the American story; it is both wrong and dangerous to speak about them as if they were. Latinos, soon to be America’s largest ethnic group, are in a prime position to shape America’s future. Although the bulk are from Mexico, a large contingent comes from the Caribbean, Central and South America.

Read the rest of this report at: Civitas Institute.

Download the full paper

Authors

Jennifer Hernandez has practiced land use and environmental law for more than 30 years, and leads Holland & Knight's West Coast Land Use and Environmental Group. She is a former longtime co-chair of the firm's national Land Use and Government Team. Ms. Hernandez divides her time between the firm's San Francisco and Los Angeles offices.

Researchers

Wendell Cox is a leading proponent of adopting land use and transport policies based on their effectiveness in improving the standard of living and alleviating poverty. He is principal of Demographia (Wendell Cox Consultancy) in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He specializes in urban policy, transport and demographics and is author of Demographia World Urban Areas and co-author of Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey. He is also author of Toward More Prosperous Cities, a framing essay on urban areas, urban planning, urban transport and sustainability.

Marshall Toplansky is an award-winning Innovation Professor of Management Science at the Argyros School of Business and Economics at Chapman University. He is a widely published and award-winning marketing professional and successful entrepreneur. Marshall co-founded KPMG's data & analytics center of excellence and now teaches and consults corporations on their analytics strategies.

Erika Ozuna is a senior consultant at Chapman University’s Center for Demographics and Policy. She currently works on multifamily and senior housing analysis and market studies throughout the country. Ozuna has over ten years of experience in the commercial real estate industry, including experience in all types of senior housing appraisals. Prior to her multifamily housing experience, Erika worked for seven years in the banking and investments fields, has conducted quantitative and qualitative research and analysis for numerous projects and entities, and was a high school teacher. Erika holds a M.P.P. in international relations and economics from Pepperdine University and a B.S. in business administration from the University of Texas RGV.

Photo: report cover and pages from the report, Civitas Institute.

Thankful for "Don't Tread on Me" Conservatives

Aaron M. Renn — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving here in the US, one of our best holidays.

This year I want to express thanks for a group of people who often drive me nuts, the folk libertarian, get-off-my-lawn, don’t-tread-on-me conservatives.

These are the people who form the core of the populist base. They are suspicious of government and institutions. No matter how little money the government spends, it’s always too much. No matter how low the taxes, they are always too high. No matter what the change or initiative, they seem to oppose it.

They are ornery and defiant and generally make it difficult for government and society to get things done. They very often oppose things I’d like to see, which frustrates me to no end.

But they might be the only thing standing between us and the kinds of Orwellian regimes that exist in places like the UK.

As you know, I’m a big fan of the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, and his study of the American upper class and elite. He viewed the old WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) Establishment as necessary to avoid excesses in which society might devolve into a bureaucratic despotism, corporate feudalism, or charismatic Caesarism.

His student and collaborator Howard Schneiderman said of this, “A moral force within the putatively amoral world of politics and power elites, an establishment of leaders drawn from upper‑class families, is the final protector of freedom in modern democratic societies.”

That establishment is long gone. Today, the final bulwark of freedom in American society is that ornery folk libertarian conservative who simply refuses to go along with encroachment on his personal liberty.

Multiple times in the last decade, there was a full-spectrum institutional push to impose top down controls on society that, if successful, would have created a mechanism for essentially ruling the public from beyond democracy.

Read the rest of this piece at Aaron Renn Substack.

Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker and writer on a mission to help America's cities and people thrive and find real success in the 21st century. He focuses on urban, economic development and infrastructure policy in the greater American Midwest. He also regularly contributes to and is cited by national and global media outlets, and his work has appeared in many publications, including the The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Photo: Tony Webster/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 2.0

Universities Have Sold a Whole Generation a Lie

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Some day, Donald Trump may lead America into a golden era of reindustrialisation, or perhaps one last hurrah before China’s domination of materials and manufacturing knocks the US off its number one perch. Yet what if we start to build new factories and ports but no one shows up to work in them?

Trump claims to have dragooned some $12tn in new foreign investment, but even he questions whether we have the bodies, and minds, to fill American jobs. He recently defended H-1B visas for migrants with “special” talents (after first questioning them), alarming some of his more nationalist Maga allies.

H-1B visas are typically used by tech firms, but the row over their future illustrates why America is facing a critical shortage of skilled workers across the board. To some extent, both sides of the debate are right.

As the populist Right points out, H1-B visas have a record of abuse – including a notorious case at Disney, which replaced some of its American IT workers with foreign ones and even effectively required the departing US staff to train their replacements. Roughly three-quarters of Silicon Valley’s jobs were in 2018 estimated to be held by non-citizens. Of course, the oligarchs look at these “technocoolies” not so much as a genius input as a way to save money.

But still, as Vivek Ramaswamy has acidly pointed out, foreign workers are needed because of profound failures in the US education system.

Today, US fourth and eighth graders are performing worse not only than students in East Asia, but also those in the likes of Poland and Sweden. Overall, some 40pc of US public school students fail to meet standards in either maths or English, worse than pre-pandemic. The country was hardly doing spectacularly before then. In maths, the OECD’s 2018 Program for International Student Assessment found the United States was outperformed by 36 countries, not only by China, but also Russia, Italy, France, Finland, Poland, and Canada.

This lack of achievement at the grade school level is felt not only in the elite professions but even in more mundane careers such as truck drivers, machine-tool operators, and welders who can do basic industrial tasks. By 2030, the US could be short about two million industrial workers; the American Welding Society estimates the shortage of skilled welders exceeds 400,000 nationwide.

Even well-paying jobs of this kind have been hard to fill. Ford chief executive Jim Farley notes that the carmaker has 5,000 open mechanic jobs that pay $120,000 annually that can’t be filled.

America’s inability to produce a new generation that can do these jobs reflects a deeply-ingrained tendency to ignore practical skills in favour of the supposed Valhalla of a four-year liberal arts education. The problem is not just universities. High schools have removed shop classes – where students are taught basic skills like woodwork – thinking them too declassee and demeaning.

One proposed solution is mass immigration, but Biden’s disastrous open border policy largely attracted migrants from Latin America, who tend to be less skilled than those from east and south Asia, as well as far less educated than earlier waves. Most are likely to remain at the bottom of the employment chain throughout their lives. These newcomers primarily compete with other poor people for living space, jobs, and social services.

In reality, what is needed most is to reclaim our increasingly disengaged native-born workforce; the percentage of prime age men not in the labour force has risen in recent decades. Europe has, if anything, a larger cohort of the young and disengaged; in Britain, parents worry about “generation jobless”.

To address this issue, the education system needs to shift away from consciousness-raising, a favourite of progressive faculty, towards developing productive skills. Many are already ditching traditional academia. From 2010 to 2021, US undergraduate enrollment has dropped from 18.1 million to about 15.4 million. Over the past decade, more than 500 US private colleges have closed, three times the rate of the previous decade.

In contrast, the number attending vocational schools was up 16pc in 2023 to the highest level since 2018. This marks a major shift in attitudes. A recent Gates Foundation study suggested decreasing interest among those under 30 in four-year college degrees and greater interest in trade schools. This appears to be particularly true among working class families. Americans have more faith in two-year colleges, where over 40pc of all undergraduates are enrolled, than in four-year schools.

For many young people, a shift towards tactile skills is well-advised. The digitisation of the economy has weakened the status of many professions, including code-writers. Even among those who manage to finish university, more than 40pc of recent graduates aged 22 to 27 are underemployed, meaning that they’re working in jobs that don’t require their degree, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports.

Moreover, the supposed “jobs of the future” are already in danger of evaporating. The automation of information, computer scientist Kai -Fu Lee suggests, will end up wiping out the “coders”. Lee, a venture capitalist and author of AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future, predicts, “a lot of employees are going to feel like turkeys waiting for Thanksgiving”.

This means that the future may be less about analytical skills than actually fixing and building things. “It’s the end of the white-collar knowledge work,” virtual reality pioneer Rony Abovitz, now the founder of AI startup Sun and Thunder, told me. Instead, he predicts that the future will be shaped more by “the rise of this sophisticated, technically capable blue-collar worker”.

If Trump, like many Democrats, is seeking a resurgent America, the critical challenge will lie not in financial manipulation, computer games, or supervising AI as it analyses everything in minute details. The future is in developing and nurturing the skilled hands needed to resist and surpass the United States’ competitors.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Photo: Telegraph

California Gov. Newsom is Oblivious That Electricity Came About After Oil

Ronald Stein — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 16:01:39 -0500

The State of California sent a large delegation to the Conference of the Parties (COP) in Belém, Brazil, including California Governor Gavin Newsom and top officials from the California Natural Resources Agency, Department of Food and Agriculture, Air Resources Board, Public Utilities Commission, and Governor’s Office of Tribal Affairs.

Interestingly, the leaders of the world’s most-polluting countries – China, India, and Russia decided to skip this year’s COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil.

Newsom told the LA Times that he “absolutely” sees California as a proxy for the U.S. at the COP30 conference, the leading global venue for countries to strengthen their commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.

Newsom remains unaware that the demand by humanity for more than 6,000 products and transportation fuels is the only reason for using crude oil! To stop climate change, Newsom wants to stop the world! Ceasing the use of products and transportation fuels is the only known way to rid the world of crude oil usage.

The global population has surged from 1 to over 8 billion in less than 200 years. This growth has been supported by the dramatic increase in the number of products and transportation fuels made from oil, and food production made possible by synthetic fertilizers, all of which did not exist before the 1800s, just a few hundred years ago.

He remains oblivious to the fact that wind turbines and solar panels can only generate electricity, but cannot make any products for the 8 billion on this planet. Without a replacement for oil, he wants the world to go back to the 1800s by reducing the world’s product usage, which translates to promoting the reduction in the number and size of hospitals, airports, and military forces around the world.

With the world’s population projected to grow beyond 9.5 billion by 2050, rather than focusing on wind and solar to generate electricity, Newsom should be inspiring humanity to review and control its materialistic demands toward a viable future for all humans, animals, and plant life on this planet.

Newsom has no clue that a replacement for crude oil has yet to be identified to maintain the supply chain of all the products and various transportation fuels demanded by the world’s 40,000 planes, 100,000 ships, 1.4 million automobiles, and hundreds of millions of commercial vehicles in operation worldwide.

Newsom cannot comprehend that the one thing that’s going to kill billions on this planet is running out of crude oil before we’ve identified its replacement to support the supply chain of products and transportation fuels demanded by humanity. Even the grease he uses to comb his slick hair is made from crude oil.

The 70,000 attendees at the COP30 in Brazil, including Newsom and his entourage, are oblivious that electricity came after oil, as all electrical generation methods from hydro, coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, and solar are all built with the products, components, and equipment that are made from oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil.

Without Crude Oil, there can be no electricity

In addition, electricity can charge an iPhone, but neither wind turbines nor solar panels can make an iPhone; thus, everything that needs electricity consists of products that are also made from oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil.

Without Crude Oil, there will be nothing that needs electricity.

The world extracts from Mother Earth over 100 million barrels of oil per day, while the United States consumes around 20 million barrels daily. That oil is not being replenished, and those poorer developing countries want to be “like us”, thus worldwide extraction rates may increase to meet the demands of humanity for all 8 billion now on this planet.

Obviously, Newsom and world leaders are all in favor of ridding the world of crude oil usage, but we have yet to identify a clone or replacement to oil that will support our materialistic needs for all the products and transportation fuels that allowed the world to populate from 1 to 8 billion in less than 200 years.

Thus, without crude oil or its replacement, to support the supply chain of products made from oil, Newsom wants the world to go back to the pre-1800s, when the world did not have all those products and transportation fuels.

Read the rest of this piece at America Out Loud.

Ronald Stein is an engineer, senior policy advisor on energy literacy for the Heartland Institute and CFACT, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book "Clean Energy Exploitations."

Photo: courtesy America Out Loud.

Taro Moberly and the Moral Geography of Seeing

Samuel J Abrams — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 18:51:46 -0500

Kyoto is one of the most photographed cities in the world, and perhaps one of the most misunderstood. Most images of it feel decorative; tourist postcards masquerading as art, emptied of the quiet pulse that makes the city human. Taro Moberly’s Kyoto Dreaming breaks from that tradition. His work restores to the city its weight, its patience, its moral texture. His camera listens. Each frame insists that to see a place well is not an act of aesthetic consumption but of citizenship: an effort to attend, to notice, to dwell.

Moberly introduces his book not with self-assertion but with gratitude. Born to a Japanese mother and an American father, he grew up in California with Kyoto present in memory and story but distant in experience. He writes of visiting as a child - the grandeur and vastness of Kyoto Station, the floorboards of Nijo Castle, the toy-train shop on the top floor of Daimaru. In 2015 he moved there, returning to the place his mother was raised and his grandparents had called home. The move was not simply geographic; it was formative. “I discovered so much about the unique and fascinating culture of my adopted homeland,” he writes. “Kyoto has changed how I see the world and helped me become the person I am today.” When he returned to California in 2023, he carried the city inside him. “Within myself,” he concludes, “I still see Kyoto as a major part of my identity.” The book is less a record of that period than a testament to what the city taught him: that meaning and belonging are earned through attention.

The opening photographs tell the story. Two figures sit on the steps of a temple, dwarfed by the roof’s massive eaves. They are enveloped in silence. The composition honors scale without losing intimacy; we are made to feel the proportion between person and place. Moberly’s power lies in this restraint. His images are not declarations but invitations; to linger, to feel the density of the ordinary. In a time when nearly every image demands to be consumed instantly, his work asks us to slow down. His palette is subdued, his tones favoring twilight and rain. The light is not dramatic but devotional. Kyoto, in his hands, becomes less an object than a conversation: between architecture and weather, between time and memory, between the photographer and the city that made him.

To walk through the book is to sense the rhythm of a life lived attentively. We move from courtyards and alleys to the quiet ritual of commuting; umbrellas passing under red lights, taxis idling on wet streets, a parent guiding a child along a stone path lined with cherry blossoms. The repetition of these scenes accumulates into a moral vision. Moberly does not aestheticize civility; he observes it. His Kyoto is not the idealized city of postcards but the functioning city of mutual awareness, where strangers share space without spectacle. In this sense, his art offers something civic. The sociologist Richard Sennett described cities in his The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities essentially as theaters of encounter, sustained by the way strangers learn to look at one another. Moberly’s photographs record that encounter in real time. Every image reveals the choreography of coexistence: the small courtesies that hold urban life together. Pedestrians pause, cars yield, umbrellas tilt just enough to avoid collision. It is a social order built on perception.

The book’s stillness is deliberate. In an age of acceleration, stillness itself becomes a statement. Moberly resists the compulsion to dramatize. His camera does not chase decisive moments; it waits for coherence to reveal itself. This patience is a moral stance. It rebukes the attention economy that governs both photography and public life. Where the digital image thrives on speed and self-display, Moberly’s work restores scale and humility. The figures he captures are not subjects to be possessed but neighbors to be regarded. The act of seeing becomes relational, not extractive. The city, through his lens, is an organism of shared restraint.

Light is his great ally. In Moberly’s Kyoto, illumination functions like character: by turns tender, elusive, and instructive. Dawn glows faintly on tiled roofs; dusk turns wet streets into mirrors; neon reflections shimmer across taxi windows. He refuses the oversaturated brightness of commercial travel photography. His colors breathe within limits, his blues deepening toward memory rather than spectacle. In that restraint lies reverence. He allows light to emerge as revelation; to arrive, as grace does, without force. The viewer can feel the hours spent waiting for the right balance between luminosity and shadow, as if patience itself were a kind of prayer.

The formal discipline of the images echoes the discipline of the city. Kyoto’s architecture has long embodied order without rigidity - geometry in the service of grace - and Moberly composes with the same ethos. Lines of roofs and alleyways guide the eye gently; depth is earned through perspective, not manipulation. One image of wooden facades glistening after rain captures the principle perfectly: symmetry balanced by warmth, precision softened by use. He understands that restraint is not absence but articulation, that beauty often arises when ambition gives way to attention. In his visual grammar, order is not a constraint but a form of respect.

What makes Kyoto Dreaming resonate, though, is its humanity. The photographs breathe with companionship: a couple in conversation, a worker in the rain, a child discovering spring. The scenes are neither anonymous nor sentimental. They affirm continuity in an age obsessed with rupture. The red jacket of a child beneath pale blossoms becomes a symbol of renewal, the small assertion of color in a world rendered gray by haste. Moberly’s empathy is architectural, he gives his subjects room to exist within the frame. The result is intimacy without intrusion. He treats each life as belonging to the larger composition of the city, an act of recognition that carries its own civic weight.

As the book unfolds, its emotional key deepens from observation to gratitude. The late-night cityscapes - headlights diffused in rain, reflections stretching across wet crosswalks - feel like meditations on endurance. Kyoto, far from a timeless relic, appears here as a living organism: mortal, changing, resilient. Moberly captures that fragility with affection rather than melancholy. His attention dignifies transience. He shows how the fleeting can still feel eternal when looked at with care. That sensibility, inherited from the city’s own traditions, becomes the moral spine of the book: to see clearly is to care; to care is to remain human.

Moberly’s return to California closes the narrative but not the connection. “The city, the culture, and the people of Kyoto have left a profound impact,” he writes. “I will be forever grateful for the lessons and character taught to me by what now feels like my second home.” Gratitude is a rare word in contemporary art, but it fits him. He has made gratitude into a method, an aesthetic and a moral discipline. His photographs do not demand recognition; they offer it. In a culture addicted to novelty, this is a radical act. He reminds us that reverence is not nostalgia. It is attention sustained across time.

What emerges from Kyoto Dreaming is a philosophy of looking that transcends place. Moberly demonstrates that belonging begins with perception - that the ethics of seeing and the ethics of citizenship are inseparable. Cities depend on this kind of vision: on people who notice, who yield, who understand that public life survives through small acts of regard. His photographs are, in that sense, civic instruction. They teach us how to inhabit our own streets: how to look again at the surfaces we hurry past, how to find coherence in the weather of daily life.

The book could easily have been another exercise in aestheticized travel, but Moberly refuses that path. His work carries no slogans, no filters of irony or self-display. It asks us instead to practice the ancient discipline of looking until we actually see. In doing so, he joins a lineage that stretches from Saul Leiter’s New York to Masahisa Fukase’s Japan: photographers who understood that light, patience, and moral attention are ways of honoring the world.

In the end, Kyoto Dreaming is less a photobook than a form of civic meditation. It restores the bond between perception and gratitude. It reminds us that beauty is not found in the exceptional but in the continuous; in streets walked daily, rituals repeated, faces glimpsed in passing. The health of any culture depends on its ability to see in this way. When we lose that capacity, we lose not only art but sympathy, not only beauty but belonging.

Taro Moberly’s achievement is to make seeing itself feel like an act of care. Through his lens, Kyoto becomes more than a city; it becomes a teacher. It reveals how civilization survives: not through grand gestures or perfect design, but through the quiet labor of attention - one person, one street, one beam of light at a time.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: Kyoto Dreaming book cover, via Taro Moberly's Instagram.

Gary, Indiana and Urban Existentialism, Part 2

Pete Saunders — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Planners know that architecture is a profession closely aligned with urban planning. Many architects might tell you that planning is a subset of architecture. Whether true or not, architects have had a lot of influence in the development of the planning profession.

One architect who fits that mold is Louis Sullivan. I don’t think he ever identified with being a planner, but his influence on urban design, by being one of the first designers of the modern skyscraper and a key leader in the formation of the Chicago School and Prairie School of architecture, which also influenced planning, links Sullivan to planning.

Sullivan was also famous for a quote that fits planning as well as architecture: “form follows function”. Sullivan made that statement when thinking about his architectural designs. However, he just as easily could have said the same about cities. In other words, how cities look depends on what they do.

The industrial cities in the Rust Belt took on the form they did because of the function they had. Many of them cared far less about how they looked or performed as cities and cared more about how they could house the factories that employed workers, the homes they lived in, and their commercial needs.

Gary, IN is a great example of this. When U.S. Steel employed more than 30,000 workers and nearly 200,000 people lived in Gary, few people put lots of thought into the city’s form; it served the function of an industrial city. Over the last half of the 20^th century, however, that function collapsed, leaving behind a city that was ill-prepared for the next step. As I wrote in Part 1 about the Notre Dame School of Architecture’s efforts to rebuild and revitalize Gary’s downtown, I liked the premise of relying on “mom-and-pop developer capital” and “patience and persistence” to establish a new urban form. But trying to establish a new form (or even an updated form) is not possible without knowing the function. That’s why I think Notre Dame’s School of Architecture in Gary is admirable, but flawed.

Gary’s existential moment

Gary must determine its new function first and establish the form that allows it to flourish. But how does it do that?

Let’s use the city typology from the Encie study I referenced in Part 1 as a starting point. Of the nine city typologies the report identified, the researchers are most gloomy on the prospects of industrial cities in highly-developed economies. We know now that manufacturing is no longer the kind of economic function that can support cities in the way they used to. That doesn’t mean it’s not financially viable anymore, it means it doesn’t fulfill the needs of people living in developed economies. Using the Encie study as an example, the researchers note that future prospects for existing industrial cities are dim in developed economies, but strong in developing or emerging economies. Let’s suppose the industrial city model is gone and never coming back into American cities.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Indiana Dunes National Park — near the city of Gary, via Picryl in Public Domain.

Gary, Indiana and Urban Existentialism, Part 1

Pete Saunders — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

I recently saw a good story about Gary, Indiana on the CityLab website. The article highlights work being done by the University of Notre Dame’s School of Architecture through its Housing and Community Regeneration Initiative.

The HCR’s work in Gary noted that the city had been hurt by numerous one-off projects (Genesis Convention Center, museums, minor league stadiums, casinos) that created little spinoff impact. A quote explaining the HCR’s approach:

“They’re promoting traditional city-building as part of a wider critique. In too many cities, they say, corporate developers have sought a quick return on shoddy, suburbanized projects that were racially and economically segregated as well as unsustainable. Where this process has failed — like Gary — might hold the key to reclaiming a better way of creating urban community.”

I would agree that cities like Gary need to get back to city-building. But there are two big steps cities like Gary need to achieve before getting back into city-building. It must establish an economic future. But more importantly, cities like Gary need to establish a new reason for being.

Cities begin with a reason for being there

There are many cities that came into existence because of a certain quality that distinguished it from other locations. New York City, for example, was founded by the Dutch to serve as a port and trading center that had access to hinterlands via the Hudson River. The port, and the expertise gained from becoming a trading center, made the city a great location for global trade and finance very early on, and continues to this day. Chicago started as a fur trading post, but its location next to an easily transversed mid-continent watershed divide (between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds) made it a critical transportation link for the middle of a rapidly growing nation. The waterway connection soon grew into an extensive railroad network centered on Chicago, giving it easy access to food produced in the agricultural Midwest for national and global distribution.

In the best cases, cities pivot from one existential function to another, just as New York and Chicago did. Older cities like New York and Chicago aren’t alone in this. Orlando built on its Disney World tourism foundation to expand its role in film, television and entertainment industries, even giving it a foothold into the industrial and high-tech sectors. Legalized gambling made Las Vegas a tourist destination, and eventually into a prime convention destination that fuels its hospitality industry.

But cities founded on manufacturing, like Gary, have really struggled to find the next reason for being. There’s been tons of research on why this is the case. I came across a report written five years ago that explains cities’ reasons for their existence – and continued relevance.

Read Part 2 here.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Paul Sableman, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Tom Steyer Would Drag California Further Left on Climate

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

After over a decade of mismanagement and misdirection under governors Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown, Californians now can double down by electing the latest aspiring Gubernatorial candidate: billionaire Tom Steyer.

Steyer, who made much of his money investing in such things as fossil fuels, including coal, is now preaching to the masses as a converted environmental zealot. He has remained a hardline defender of the state’s climate regulatory regime, a stance more central to his candidacy than even Gavin Newsom or his prospective rivals.

Given the impact of such policies on California, a potential Steyer Governorship and the continuation of dogmatic climate policy is exactly what the state does not need. For well over a decade, the state’s politicians have indulged in a misguided drive to lead the world’s response to climate change, with catastrophic effects.

But there’s no bucking this trend, and Steyer may soon lead the charge. The unfortunate Kamala Harris has bowed out, and former Representative Katie Porter — an Elizabeth Warren acolyte — has undermined her candidacy with televised outbursts and nasty testimony from former employees and her ex-husband.

California’s lower-income and minority households are already suffering from the consequences of the ruling elite’s green obsessions. The California Air Resources Board, for example, has produced evidence that the 2022 Scoping Plan for Achieving Carbon Neutrality policy was likely to hurt the income of those earning less than $100,000 annually while raising the income of those above this level.

It’s no surprise then that California is now moving below the national average of both income and job growth and even further behind rivals like Texas, Utah and Washington. When you add this to the fact that regulations aimed at stopping suburban development have helped push the median cost of a home to 2.5 higher than the rest of the country, the detrimental impact that climate policies have had becomes clear. This has been particularly tough on Latinos, California’s largest ethnic group — with some even labelling these policies “the green Jim Crow”. For Latinos, California ranks near the bottom in terms of homeownership, business ownership and real adjusted incomes — roughly $10,000 less than in Texas.

For his part Governor Newsom, in his bid for national power, has realised the weakness of these policies. He has shown some signs of adjusting his reality, pushing back against Steyer and the powerful green lobby by allowing the once massive oil industry to remain and keeping the last nuclear and natural gas plants, which together account for more than half the state’s electricity.

Given his quasi-religious commitment to Net Zero, Steyer is unlikely to follow Newsom in taking these moderate steps, or let his Democratic opponents suggest any changes. And it’s not like the GOP hopefuls — former David Cameron Advisor Steve Hilton or Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco — will prove to be effective opposition. Republicans have not won a state-wide race in almost two decades.

Intensifying the push to Net Zero is the last thing working-class Californians need. But with his money, entrenched lobbyists and a compliant media, Steyer looks hard to stop. Even if he doesn’t win, he could still shape the race, forcing candidates to cleave ever more to the Left on the environment. The Golden State deserves better.

This piece first appeared at: UnHerd.

Photo: Phil Roeder via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

The Spectre of Communism Haunts the West — Mamdani is Only the Beginning

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

The surprisingly easy election of the Marxist Zohran Mamdani represents a critical turning point, not only for my hometown of New York, but for all the West. Mamdani’s election as mayor represents the prospect of a rising socialist mindset, particularly among the young.

This shift is fairly universal, particularly in big cities. Virtually all the leading U.S. and European cities are ruled by progressives, in Europe, like New York, often as an odd alliance of Islamists, greens and leftists. Socialists, Islamists and Greens dominated such major European cities as Amsterdam, Paris, and Barcelona. Toronto, once ruled by moderate conservatives, has also turned to the progressive left.

Neither ethnicity nor class are the keys to this transition, but age. Mamdani’s election epitomizes these trends; he won an astounding 70 per cent of the vote among New Yorkers under 40, while losing badly among older folks and those who grew up, or lived long in Gotham.

Many on the reinvigorated left see Mamdani’s cost of living emphasis as a promising strategy for progressives often on the wrong side of many cultural issues. In the primary, Mamdani lost many predominately Black and Latino areas like the Bronx, Brownsville and Rosedale, all who favoured Andrew Cuomo, as did traditional ethnic working class areas in places like Canarsie in south Brooklyn.

But younger people, even those making decent incomes, catapulted a totally inexperienced, pro-Hamas, self-proclaimed Marxist to run the world capital of capitalism. Cost of living was the key, as New Yorkers pay the highest proportion of their income; it has by far the lowest percentage of homeowners in the country, half the national average.

Lack of affordable housing is now widely common in English speaking countries. Ireland which just elected a far-left Marxist as president, is among the worst. In the U.S., housing affordability stands at the lowest level ever recorded while one in three Americans now spend over 30 per cent of their income on mortgage payments or rent. In the U.S., homeownership for people under 35 has fallen fairly steadily for decades and is now half that of people over 45. A similar erosion in homeownership is clear in Britain and Australia.

Canada, home to two of the world’s most unaffordable cities, Toronto and Vancouver, is in a similar fix. According to a 2024 Scotiabank poll, home ownership declined for Canadians between the ages 18 and 34 to 26 per cent today from 47 per cent just a few years earlier, in 2021. Renters are also not well off as two in five renter households in Canada spend 30 per cent or more of income on rent and utilities.

Read the rest of this piece at: Yahoo News.

Authors

Photo: Bingjiefu He via Wikimedia, under CC 4.0 License.

Knowledge Intensive Balkan Regions

Nima Sanandaji — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

The Balkan region has impressive potential for knowledge intensive jobs in Europe. While Albania is far behind, there is a strong growth of knowledge intensive jobs. Serbia and North Macedonia have strong growth and even further potential for growth due to relatively high expert density. Croatia and Slovenia already overperform in brain business jobs relative to their expert density, and the Zagreb capital region is amongst the top-10 most knowledge intensive regions in all of Europe.

In Albania, 1.7 percent of the working age adults are employed in brain business jobs during 2025. This is a term for employment in knowledge-intensive firms in tech, information and communications technology, advanced services, and creative professions. While the lowest rate in all Europe, the share of knowledge intensive workers has increased significantly from 1.4 percent the year before. A significant growth of knowledge intensive jobs is occurring in Albania, signifying catch-up. Albania has particular relative strengths in telecommunications, where 4 300 are employed. The country has also recently developed a relatively strong IT services sector, with 2 900 employees.

North Macedonia performs somewhat better, with 4.7 percent of the adults employed in highly knowledge intensive jobs. This region is also catching up significantly, with share of adults in brain business jobs climbing from 4.1 percent a year ago. There is strong opportunity for further growth, as North Macedonia underperforms in terms of share of brain business jobs amongst the adults, and the share of adults who are engineers and scientists. There is a talent pool with competitive wages, to fill in more knowledge-intensive jobs, in North Macedonia. North Macedonia has particular relative strengths in IT services, where 3 050 are employed. The country has also recently developed a relatively strong pharmaceutical sector, with 2 650 employees.

In Serbia, 5.4 percent of the adults work in brain business jobs, up from 5.2 the year before. This means that Serbia is nearly as knowledge intensive as Spain and Italy, just lagging behind due to low share of adults employed in design and other creative professions. With integration in European service trade, and focus on competitive taxation and regulation, Serbia has significant potential for growth. The country has a relatively high share of adults who are engineers and scientists. In relation to the share of knowledge intensive jobs Serbia has a surplus of experts, which signals potential for further growth.

Higher up in the knowledge intensive jobs ladder is Croatia, where 7.0 percent of adults work in brain business jobs. This is a major increase from 6.6 percent the year before. The level has risen from 3.7 percent in 2014, nearly doubling since. Croatia overperforms in share of adults in brain business jobs, as related to share of adults who are engineers and scientists. This indicates that taxation and business policy, and more trade integration within Europe, allows Croatia to overperform in relation to its expert density, while Serbia and North Macedonia underperform and have massive opportunity to catch-up.

Croatia has particular relative strengths in telecommunications, where 10 550 are employed. The country has recently developed a relatively strong engineering & architecture sector, with 33 300 employees. In the Zagreb region as many as 18.9 percent of the adults are employed in brain business jobs, this is the 8th highest share in a regional comparison, with all European regions that data exists for. The Jadranska Hrvatska region also has a relatively high share, 4.9 percent.

The star of the region is Slovenia, where fully 9.2 percent of the adults work in brain business jobs. This is a significant improvement from 8.6 percent the year before. The level has grown from 5.4 percent in 2014. Thanks to this strong growth, Slovenia currently has the eight-highest share of brain business jobs in Europe. Much like Croatia, Slovenia overperforms in share of adults in brain business jobs, compared to share of adults who are engineers and scientists.

Attractive taxation and business policy allow for more jobs than expert density alone would predict. Slovenia has particular relative strengths in pharmaceuticals, where 12 300 are employed. The country has also recently developed a relatively strong research & development sector, with 4 950 employees. In the Ljubljana capital region, fully 11.8 percent of adults are employed in brain business jobs. This is significantly higher than 6.7 percent in the Vzhodna Slovenija region.

There is significant opportunities for growth of brain business jobs in the Balkan region. Slovenia and Croatia have strong performance, while Serbia and North Macedonia have strong growth and due to high expert density continued growth potential. Albania lags the rest of Europe, but is growing steadily with knowledge intensive jobs. The capital region of Zagreb in particular is interesting, since it is amongst the top-10 European regions with highest share of knowledge intensive jobs. This region illustrates how expert density and competitive policy with lower taxes can promote knowledge intensive jobs growth, also the Balkan region can today reach the top of the European knowledge leader.

The Balkans should not be underestimated, much like the Baltic region to the north of Europe, this group of smaller countries can with continued institutional competition, transform into vibrant growing knowledge economies of Europe. While the larger European nations stagnate with high taxes and rigid government control, it is the smaller ones that through institutional competition outpace in growth and welfare.

Author: Nima Sanandaji, Director European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform.

Lead image: Central square of the city of Zabreb, Croatia, by Miroslav Vajdić, under CC 2.0 License.

California's Billionaire Tax Could Bring Down Gavin Newsom

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Gavin Newsom’s run for the White House is going from bad to worse. Last week, his former chief of staff was arrested for allegedly siphoning off campaign funds for personal use, raising questions about the California Governor’s control of his inner circle. Now a bigger challenge looms: a rising socialist tide.

After Zohran Mamdani’s sweep to the New York mayoralty and a similarly high-profile win for Katie Wilson in Seattle, California progressives are eyeing a new billionaire tax initiative — a policy Newsom is staunchly against. The union-backed legislation would see the state’s richest residents hit with a one-time, 5% tax on the net worth of individuals — including everything from investments to property value, and even other assets like jewellery and paintings — worth over $1 billion. The revenue would go into a special fund with 90% reserved for healthcare spending and 10% for the state’s ailing K-12 education system.

Newsom likes to claim that California is “the envy of the world” when it comes to social justice. In reality, the state suffers from the highest poverty rate in the country and maintains the highest unemployment, which is particularly acute among young people under 30. To top it off, the level of inequality is greater than Mexico and closer to countries such as Guatemala and Honduras: hardly the envy of the Americas, let alone the world.

In the past, Newsom sought to stifle debate about the dire condition of the state by building what The Nation called an ideal “blue welfare state” — a model of government based on European democracies that prioritises welfare. But economic and budget conditions suggest the state is running out of money and cannot continue handing out ever bigger subsidies to poorer residents. California spends more of its budget on welfare than almost any other state, twice as much as arch-rival Texas.

Even larger infrastructure projects are facing problems. Many state transit agencies and hospitals have huge deficits and are seeking for more state aid, while the troubled “bullet train” is also short of financing. To make matters worse, it could take upwards of $100 billion more to address the state’s consistently awful homelessness situation. In the long run, some have noted that California and Newsom face a tsunami of payments with trillions of dollars in pension debt set to rear its head. It’s therefore no surprise that, despite the tech boom, California places 42nd in fiscal health among the American states.

But will a levy on billionaires fix the situation? Although the wealth tax could help to address the budget deficit, it could also ramp up the departure of the wealthy residents — the top 1% of taxpayers pay more than 40% of California’s personal income. California, like New York and New Jersey, has suffered a drain of wealthy taxpayers already, losing over $300 billion in tax revenues over the past decade. This is mainly to the benefit of other — usually red — states.

Newsom, then, finds himself in a bind. The California Governor must look to keep his historical support base while simultaneously making himself the self-appointed leader of the Resistance. His stance against the wealth tax will not be popular with progressives, but massive income redistribution resonates with many voters in the home base of some of America’s wealthiest citizens.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Disneyland at 70: A Civic Vision Worth Remembering

Samuel J Abrams — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 15:28:22 -0500

Disneyland’s founding vision 70 years ago was civic, not commercial—a place where design made family belonging feel natural. That lesson endures: We need public spaces that offer what the park once promised, without the price of admission.

It was not clear, then, that Disneyland would become one of America’s most influential cultural exports. Yet beneath the spectacle lay a civic idea: that design could cultivate virtue; that well-ordered spaces could bring people together and remind families what shared life feels like.

Disney was building a civic experiment. He wanted an alternative to tawdry amusement parks and sprawling, car-dominated landscapes replacing traditional main streets. Postwar America was fragmenting—its public life increasingly confined to highways, strip malls, and centerless subdivisions. What Disney envisioned was “a family park where parents and children could have fun together.” Every design decision—benches positioned for conversation, paths curved for discovery, rides built for multiple generations—served that end.

Disneyland was not simply entertainment. It was an argument about public life. The park’s 1955 opening reflected a lingering faith in design as moral pedagogy. Disney’s Main Street, U.S.A., modeled on his Missouri childhood, evoked small-town civic order: walkable, legible, and sociable. The park was designed to slow people down—to favor shared rhythms over private gratification. Even the trash cans were positioned to make tidiness feel effortless—reflecting a conviction that form shapes behavior, and behavior shapes culture.

That conviction has largely vanished. The physical America we inhabit today is optimized for throughput and consumption rather than connection. Mixed-use “town centers” that claim to restore walkability are typically commercial anchors—privatized spaces that mimic civic life while excluding much of it. Suburbs promise comfort but produce isolation. Our digital spaces reward attention extraction over community. The result: We are wealthier and more connected than ever, yet our families and neighborhoods are increasingly fragmented.

Disney understood that space instructs. The way people move through a place teaches habits of civility or alienation. Every sightline in Disneyland terminates in something comprehensible and human-scaled. Queues encourage conversation. Shade, seating, and cleanliness communicate that guests are expected to care for one another and for the place itself.

Compare that to civic spaces today. Parks are often afterthoughts or fit-in. Developers cater to singles and transients, not to parents with strollers or grandparents seeking a bench. Cities celebrate vibrancy while neglecting the quiet infrastructures that make public life possible.

This neglect reflects a deeper misunderstanding about human flourishing. We’ve accepted a false choice between efficiency and community, between progress and place-making. Yet Disney’s experiment demonstrated that these need not be opposites. The park’s success lay in recognizing that people hunger for spaces that acknowledge their full humanity; not just as consumers or commuters, but as parents teaching children, as neighbors sharing stories, as citizens practicing the small courtesies that accumulate into civic virtue.

Read the rest of this piece at: AEI.org.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: Occhietto, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

This is How MAGA Falls

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

As in his first term, Donald Trump now presides over a visibly sinking ship as his approval ratings slide. MAGA, a movement built around the personality of one man, never amounted to a coherent political force or even a workable coalition. Claims that Trump and his lieutenants won a mandate in 2024 and then ‘saved’ the country were always delusional. After all, his margin was thin, as was that of his party in Congress.

Three forces are killing MAGA, perhaps even pushing the US in a distinctly socialist direction. The first are the internal divisions, which are growing ever-more pronounced and will only intensify as an aging Trump becomes an ever-lamer duck, particularly if Democrats romp to victory again in the 2026 midterms.

The second, arguably more serious, weakness lies in the loss of the Latino vote – a growing political force in many states. Many Latinos shifted to Trump in 2024, but the brutality of the ICE crackdown, reported with typical zeal by his media foes, has eroded his appeal, as seen in results from New York, New Jersey and Virginia.

The third, and most fatal, factor is the economy, whose troubles may have begun under Biden but now belong to Trump. Pressured by investors and accelerated by the rise of artificial intelligence, the US has produced an economy in which major companies, particularly in tech, are shedding workers even as they post record profits. It’s not a good look, especially given that under Trump the 10 richest Americans grew richer by an astounding $700 billion.

The ideological divide within MAGA has grown increasingly harsh. Trump is not, at heart, a professional politician. Rather, he is a blend of New York developer and carnival barker. His uneasy alliance with ‘tech bros’, Wall Street insiders and fervent right-wing nativists was never stable. It was held together mostly by Trump himself – and by the awfulness of the Democrats.

Sadly, this faction could define MAGA after Trump. Its likely vehicle is Trump’s heir apparent, JD Vance. I spent time with the vice-president before his Trumpist conversion and he once seemed genuinely sensitive to the struggles of the poor, having come from that world himself. Now he seems unwilling to denounce far-right anti-Semites and, despite being married to a Hindu, appears intent on morphing MAGA into a white Christian nationalist movement.

As a political strategy, this approach has limited prospects, given the demographic decline of the white population. Until recently, MAGA gained ground among growing groups – especially Asians and Latinos. Latinos, in particular, represent a vast and expanding electoral force. Since 1970, they’ve risen from five per cent to roughly 20 per cent of the US population. Between 2010 and 2023, they accounted for 56.3 per cent of total population growth. The Census Bureau projects they’ll expand by another 31 million between 2025 and 2060.

In 2024, Trump won an unprecedented share for a Republican of this critical bloc. Many Latinos favoured his early measures to secure the border and expel criminal aliens. But the crackdown on long-settled workers – people who’ve raised families and bought homes – has deeply unsettled even right-leaning Latinos. Few people are unmoved by the sight of families being herded into vans and sent away.

MAGA activists may not realise it, but Latinos are not a marginal community separated from mainstream America. The vast majority speak English – even in multicultural Los Angeles, barely one in five Hispanics from non-immigrant households speaks Spanish at home, while three-fifths of third-generation Latinos speak only English.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

For Most Commuters: Cars the Only Viable Choice

Wendell Cox — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

For some years, the University of Minnesota’s Accessibility Observatory has produced major metropolitan area (labor markets) job access estimates for the average worker, at various trip lengths and modes. The latest estimates (2023) cover 50 of the nation’s major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 million). Major metropolitan areas not in the 2023 data include Hartford, Honolulu, New Orleans, Omaha, Rochester, Tucson and Tulsa.

The data indicate auto access to jobs is far greater by car than by transit. This is shown below at the 30-minute job access level, which is slightly more than the average one-way work trip travel time of 26.8 minutes (about 60% of US workers reached work in 30 minutes), according to the American Community Survey. This does not include people who work at home, whose work trip travel time is zero minutes.). If people who work at home (zero minutes travel time) are included, the average one-way work trip travel time in 2024 was 22.9 minutes

The 30-minute standard is used by many planning agencies, with its historic roots. The 30-minute one-way work trip travel time has been called the Marchetti Constant, described by Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti. Jonathan English, writing in City Lab, provides a compelling history from 800 BCE to today.

Auto Access to Metro Area Jobs

The data indicate by far the best 30-minute access to jobs for the average worker is by car in the 50 major metropolitan areas (Table). The unweighted average 30-minute access for major metropolitan area workers is 54.7% of metropolitan area jobs.

The best auto access is in Salt Lake City and San Francisco, where more than 100% of jobs can be reached by car in 30 minutes. These impressive figures are likely made possible by the virtually continuous urban development in adjacent metropolitan areas, which creates a commuter market larger than is defined by the metropolitan area. For example, fully developed continues from the north Salt Lake City metro area boundary to the Ogden metro area, just north of downtown Salt Lake City. In San Francisco, the continuous urbanization spreads to San Jose on both sides of San Francisco Bay.

The least 30-minute job access for autos was in metro New York (14.86%), leading Chicago (22.70%), Atlanta (23.20%), Miami (25.81%) and Los Angeles (25.86%).

Auto Access Compared to Transit: On average automobile commuters can access 58.3 times (5,830%) as many jobs in 30 minutes than by transit in the major metropolitan areas. The five leading major metros in Auto-Transit 30-minute access are Detroit (210.2), Raleigh (160.6), Dallas-Fort Worth (150.1), Birmingham (144,1) and Riverside-San Bernardino (142.4). The major metro with the least 30-minute auto-transit job access is New York (auto access 7.8 times that of transit). This means that throughout the metro area, transit 30-minute job access is 1.3% that of cars. San Francisco (12.6), Boston (18.6), Chicago (22.0), Philadelphia (22.7) and Washington (23.9) round out the major metros with the least 30-minute auto job access compared to transit.

Transit Access to Metro Area Jobs

As noted above, the average transit commuter can reach 0.94% (less than one percent) of the metro area jobs in 30-minutes. The best transit access is in metro San Francisco, where the average commuter can reach 2.98% of the jobs in 30-minutes. In Milwaukee the average commuter can reach 2.66% of the jobs in 30-minutes by transit, followed by Salt Lake City (2.10%), San Jose (1.93%) and New York (1.90%). However, the job access is skewed higher in San Francisco, Salt Lake City and San Jose by virtue of adjacent metro areas that increase the number of jobs that can be reached in 30 minutes.

The least transit 30-minute access was in Riverside-San Bernardino (0.19%), ahead of Atlanta (0.23%), Dallas-Fort Worth (0.24%), Detroit (0.25%) and St. Louis (0.38%).

Bicycle Access to Metro Area Jobs

As noted above, the average bicycle commuter (low stress traffic, as opposed to medium stress) can reach 1.74% of the metro area jobs in 30-minutes. Perhaps surprisingly, this is nearly double the 30-minute access by transit. The best bicycle access is in metro Salt Lake City, where the average commuter can reach 4.43% of the jobs in 30-minutes. In Milwaukee the average commuter can reach 3.81% of the jobs in 30-minutes by transit, followed by Fresno (3.75%), San Francisco (3.67%) and San Jose (3.65%).

The least 30-minute bicycle access was in Atlanta (0.41%), ahead of Dallas-Fort Worth (0.47%), Riverside-San Bernardino (0.48%), Houston (0.51%) and Miami (0.84%).

This low-stress analysis indicates that all of the 5o major metros with the exception of New York have greater 30-minute job access than transit. Even in New York, the low-stress bicycle access(1.85%) is nearly as great as that of New York (1.90). Bicycles at medium stress have better 30-minute access in all 50 markets.

Overall, the average 30-minute auto access to jobs is 31.4 times that of bicycles (low-stress).

Walking Access to Metro Area Jobs

Among the modes included in the University of Minnesota analysis, the least 30-minute job access is by walking (0.29%).

Metro San Francisco has the best 30-minute job access by walking (0.70%), followed by Salt Lake City (0.63%), San Jose (0.60%), Fresno (0.57%) and Buffalo (0.53%). The least 30-minute walking job access was in Atlanta (0.08%), followed closely by Dallas-Fort Worth (0.09%), Riverside-San Bernardino (0.10%), Houston (0.10%) and Detroit (0.11%).

Overall, the average 30-minute auto access to jobs is 189.4 times that of walking.

Rejecting the Unavailable

The media and transit advocates often suggest that people are rejecting transit and commuting by car instead. The plain truth is that for the overwhelming majority of commuters, transit is simply not a viable alternative, due to its miniscule access relative to cars. The last thing that should be concluded from that transit should be expanded. Transit ridership is already concentrated in its best markets, principally to the nation’s largest job centers. Just six cities (municipalities, not metropolitan areas), New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco and Washington account for 60% of transit commute destinations in the US, in comparison with their less than six percent of jobs. Any material increase in transit service is likely to cost much more per passenger. Meanwhile, even the automobile has its limits, as the huge increase in working from home has indicated. Our increasingly digitizing economy could substitute for physical travel in the future.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a Senior Fellow with Unleash Prosperity in Washington and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985), which was a predecessor agency to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro). Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Photo credit: Ted Eytan Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Table back to reference

30-MINUTE JOB ACCESS BY MODE: 50 MAJOR METROS: 2023
	JOBS ACCESSIBLE IN 30-MINUTES: 2023				CAR JOB ACCESS OVER TRANSIT
Market (Metropolitan Area)	CAR	TRANSIT	BIKE	WALK	CAR JOB ACCESS OVER TRANSIT
Atlanta	23.20%	0.23%	0.41%	0.08%	100.6
Austin	59.96%	0.92%	1.96%	0.33%	65.4
Baltimore	52.72%	1.21%	1.82%	0.29%	43.7
Birmingham	57.76%	0.40%	1.28%	0.24%	144.1
Boston	28.38%	1.53%	2.32%	0.42%	18.6
Buffalo	79.07%	1.68%	2.96%	0.53%	47.1
Charlotte	38.10%	0.45%	0.94%	0.18%	84.6
Chicago	22.70%	1.03%	1.18%	0.24%	22.0
Cincinnati	55.99%	0.58%	1.14%	0.19%	96.4
Cleveland	62.49%	0.77%	1.35%	0.22%	81.5
Columbus	71.75%	0.94%	1.74%	0.27%	76.0
Dallas-Fort Worth	36.63%	0.24%	0.47%	0.09%	150.1
Denver	67.02%	1.26%	2.72%	0.41%	53.1
Detroit	53.27%	0.25%	0.86%	0.11%	210.2
Fresno	70.24%	1.45%	3.75%	0.57%	48.6
Grand Rapids	69.40%	1.40%	2.63%	0.38%	49.7
Houston	29.80%	0.39%	0.51%	0.10%	76.2
Indianapolis	62.25%	0.61%	1.38%	0.22%	101.9
Jacksonville	53.79%	0.40%	0.88%	0.20%	133.7
Kansas City	67.70%	0.50%	1.52%	0.22%	135.2
Las Vegas	89.42%	0.77%	1.90%	0.29%	116.1
Los Angeles	25.86%	0.58%	0.89%	0.15%	44.8
Louisville	73.24%	0.93%	2.24%	0.28%	78.6
Memphis	81.40%	0.79%	1.78%	0.31%	103.4
Miami	25.81%	0.52%	0.84%	0.18%	50.1
Milwaukee	86.56%	2.66%	3.81%	0.52%	32.6
Minneapolis	58.01%	0.81%	1.77%	0.21%	71.7
Nashville	37.15%	0.64%	1.35%	0.23%	58.5
New York	14.86%	1.90%	1.85%	0.33%	7.8
Oklahoma City	72.45%	0.65%	2.27%	0.31%	111.8
Orlando	55.22%	0.39%	0.85%	0.17%	139.9
Philadelphia	26.07%	1.15%	1.27%	0.22%	22.7
Phoenix	48.36%	0.46%	1.10%	0.14%	105.9
Pittsburgh	31.68%	0.88%	1.20%	0.20%	36.0
Portland	55.34%	1.55%	2.79%	0.41%	35.6
Providence	51.21%	1.15%	1.71%	0.40%	44.5
Raleigh	89.62%	0.56%	1.65%	0.28%	160.6
Richmond	72.49%	1.07%	2.33%	0.38%	68.0
Riverside-San Bernardino	26.52%	0.19%	0.48%	0.10%	142.4
Sacramento	60.13%	0.79%	1.94%	0.32%	76.1
Salt Lake City	127.42%	2.10%	4.43%	0.63%	60.8
San Antonio	59.98%	0.60%	1.14%	0.18%	99.2
San Diego	51.37%	0.64%	1.20%	0.26%	80.5
San Francisco	36.70%	2.98%	3.67%	0.70%	12.3
San Jose	110.73%	1.93%	3.65%	0.60%	57.3
Seattle	38.57%	1.56%	2.54%	0.49%	24.7
St. Louis	52.16%	0.38%	0.95%	0.16%	136.8
Tampa-St. Petersburg	39.25%	0.48%	1.03%	0.18%	82.3
Virginia Beach	49.48%	0.47%	1.09%	0.24%	104.4
Washington	27.50%	1.15%	1.56%	0.27%	23.9
Average (unweighted)	54.74%	0.94%	1.74%	0.29%	58.3
Derived from University of Minnesota data

The Rise of Latino America

Joel Kotkin and Jennifer Hernandez — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

In a recent focus group we held with 11 U.S. and foreign-born Latinos in Riverside, California, most of the participants expressed grave concerns about the breakup of hard-working and law-abiding families in what one participant called ICE’s “war” against Latinos. And yet, when asked if they were optimistic about the future, all 11 enthusiastically said “yes.”

Their responses reflected the broader patterns of progress and severe challenges we uncovered in an analysis of national data and on-the-ground reporting for our new report, “The Rise Of Latino America.” Even as President Trump reduces immigration flows, the country’s demographic and economic fate will be shaped increasingly by people with ties to Mexico, Central, and South America, who became the nation’s largest minority group in 2019. The key findings of our report, published by the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas, include:

Demographic Surge: Latinos have grown from 5% of the U.S. population in 1970 to 20% in 2023, accounting for 56.3% of population growth from 2010 to 2023. By 2060, they will drive nearly all net population growth.
Economic Powerhouse: The U.S. Latino G.D.P. reached $3.7 trillion in 2022, the world’s fifth-largest, growing at 4.6% annually and outpacing the national average. States like Texas and Florida see significant Latino economic contributions.
Geographic Dispersion: Latino populations are spreading beyond the Southwest to the Midwest, Southeast, and smaller metros like Pittsburgh and Nashville, reflecting economic opportunity-seeking migration.
Optimism Amid Challenges: Despite poverty rates (e.g., 29.6% for illegal Latino immigrants in California) and educational gaps, 75% of Latinos remain optimistic about achieving their “dream home” and the American Dream. They also value hard work (94% cite it as key to success).
Educational Progress and Gaps: Latino college enrollment has surged 372% since 1990, but only 16% earn bachelor’s degrees compared to 43% of whites, with lags in high-demand fields like technology.
Entrepreneurial Growth: Latino-owned businesses, especially in construction and food services, are the fastest-growing, employing 2.9 million workers with $620 billion in sales in 2019.
Policy Barriers: High-cost housing policies, climate-driven regulations, and anti-car mandates in states like California increase living costs and limit job access, disproportionately harming Latinos.
Policy Recommendations: We advocate for affordable single-family housing, lower regulatory barriers, sensible energy policies, and accessible transportation to support Latino priorities like homeownership, safety, and economic mobility.

Embracing policies that align with Latino aspirations rooted in work, family, and opportunity will not only empower this vital population but also strengthen America’s economic and demographic future in a competitive global environment.

The fate of Latinos will only grow more important to the American story as their impact is felt throughout the country. Until fairly recently, Latino influence was felt primarily in the Southwest, with those from the Caribbean concentrating in cities like New York, Chicago, and Miami. Today, the fastest-growing Latino populations are now in the country’s interior, from the mid-South to the Great Lakes, where hard work makes homeownership affordable in communities without the usual public disorder and underperforming public schools that are common in those governed by progressives and their allies.

Read the rest of this piece at: Real Clear Investigations.

Download the full paper

Authors

Photo: courtesy Civitas Institute.

Chicago's Unbalanced Growth — And What It Teaches Us

Pete Saunders — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

A report came out from Crains Chicago Business (paywalled) that spoke to the uneven nature of development in Chicago. Ed Finkel, writer of the Crains article, noted that from January 1, 2023 to September 24, 2025, the City of Chicago Plan Commission approved 131 planned development projects representing 27,200 new dwelling units and $22.5 billion in investments. One Chicago neighborhood, the Near West Side, accounted for 36 of the 131 projects over that period – more than a quarter of all projects. Crains also noted that the Englewood neighborhood, on the South Side, saw only six planned development projects, producing a total of 98 new units. Englewood is a community in dire need of new investment of all types – housing, commercial development, infrastructure, even services. But the investment disparities are becoming too large to overlook.

In fact, I don’t have records of Chicago Plan Commission PUD approvals since 2023, but my gut tells me that perhaps Crains is overstating the amount of new development in Englewood, one of many South Side neighborhoods. Crains may be inadvertently including projects in adjacent neighborhoods like Auburn-Gresham, Chatham, Back of the Yards, Grand Crossing, and Washington Park. My experience in Chicago over the last 35 years in planning in Chicago is that there’s consistently been about 4-5 times more development taking place in Chicago’s favored north lakefront and its adjacent neighborhoods when compared to the South and West Side combined. The extent of development disparity in Chicago has been that wide, for that long.

For their part, former Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot and current mayor Brandon Johnson have done quite a bit to steer new development to the city’s oft-neglected neighborhoods. As mayor, Lightfoot created the Invest South/West program in 2019, designed to reverse historical disinvestment in ten communities on the South and West sides. A $750 million investment in the program by the City was used to leverage an additional $2.3 billion in additional investment, through corporate and philanthropic support. Mayor Johnson dropped the previous name but continued the programmatic effort; in June the mayor celebrated the opening of the Aspire Center for Workforce Innovation, located in a formerly closed elementary school on the West Side. The $40 million project got almost half of its funding from city and state sources. Crains also notes the recent industrial and commercial development taking place in the Pullman neighborhood on the Far South Side.

Unfortunately, you could take all the investment in the South and West sides, representing about half of the city’s population and more than half of its physical footprint, and it would pale in comparison to what’s happening now, on the Near West Side, all by itself.

How does that change?

Neighborhood vitality is hard to maintain without economic opportunity

Finkel points out that five characteristics of neighborhood vitality make developers and investors want to develop in certain areas. He suggests that five vitality factors – existing population density, economic opportunity, access to services, quality public spaces and high levels of social cohesion – played a role in making the turnaround happen in other neighborhoods. And it’s clear that many South and West side neighborhoods took significant hits to their neighborhood vitality as the manufacturing jobs they depended on disappeared. Rapidly declining population reduces economic opportunity and social cohesion. Services begin to suffer; quality public spaces don’t get the investment they need. That causes more people to leave and deepen the downward spiral.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Ajay Suresh, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

California was an 'Earthly Paradise' for Jews. Is it Still?

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

California, described by one observer in the late 19th century as “the Jews’ earthly paradise” for the economic and social promise it held, seems to have become newly hostile to Jewish people in recent years. More than any other place on Earth, Jews have shaped much of California’s progress, from Levi Strauss and the founders of the entertainment industry to numerous other leaders in culture, science, real estate and finance.

The current assault expresses itself in politics, in schools from elementaries to universities, on the streets, in literary circles and in anti-Zionist graffiti.

Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the UC Berkeley Law School (and my fellow contributing writer in the L.A. Times opinion section), expressed two years ago that “nothing has prepared me for the antisemitism I see on college campuses now.” The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and Jewish Americans for Fairness have filed a lawsuit against Berkeley, alleging “longstanding, unchecked” antisemitism.

This is not just a local issue. California’s population of 1.2 million Jews is roughly three times the size of each of the three largest Jewish diaspora communities outside the U.S. — in France, England and Canada. Los Angeles itself is the world’s third-largest Jewish city. Demographer Ira Sheskin noted recently that unlike New York City, which has lost roughly half its Jewish population since 1950, California’s Jewish populace has continued to grow, albeit more slowly in recent years.

Despite their relative demographic vitality, many California Jews feel increasingly isolated. Even in Hollywood, the Writers Guild, long a bastion of fashionable progressivism, suddenly decided to be neutral rather than making a statement on the Israel-Hamas war. Some leading figures, like Maha Dakhil, co-head of motion pictures at CAA, accused Israel of “genocide,” and others now refuse to work with Israeli film companies. Two thousand actors signed a statement outlining Israel’s “war crimes” with no mention of Hamas’ atrocities.

The political fallout has been considerable, and may become more so. Most California Jews are Democrats, according to the Pat Brown Institute; 20-30% tilt to the GOP. But the anti-Israel caucus, both here and nationally, is almost entirely made up of Democratic progressives. In a show of power, these activists even succeeded in disrupting California’s 2023 state Democratic Party convention. Many are justifiably uncomfortable with the GOP, citing the influence of antisemitism from the likes of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, and some critics of Israel have found the Democratic Party too cozy with Jerusalem and its supporters, but generally the Republicans, including MAGA young people, are clearly more philosemitic than the Democrats.

At a local level, politics in many cities have sent a message to the Jews of California. Anti-Israel resolutions have passed in Oakland, Stanton, Burbank and Richmond, where the progressive-controlled City Council accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid.” Oakland called for an immediate ceasefire without mentioning Hamas’ atrocities. Demonstrators there even suggested that Israel murdered its own people as a pretext to attack Gaza.

And California’s youth are being groomed to hate Israel with hostile curriculums, setting up a whole new generation of antisemitism in the future and in the meantime putting Jewish teachers at risk. San Francisco has experienced anti-Israel walkouts in 10 high schools, organized by an advocacy group with access to student addresses.

At the same time, the drive to “globalize the intifada” affects California’s Jewish community directly. It has forced at least one L.A. synagogue to relocate its services; others have been vandalized. The Brentwood home owned by the president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee was attacked in 2023 with smoke bombs and red paint. More recently, two years after the bloody Hamas attack on Israel, supporters of Palestinians disrupted a commemoration at Pomona College, warning that “Zionism is a death cult that must be dealt with accordingly.”

These assaults make Jews more concerned about their safety and perhaps more likely to turn inward in their communities. Far less alluring under these circumstances is the Jewish notion of tikkun olam, or repairing the world. Although it is the driving force in many congregations, particularly Reform synagogues, in troubled times it can be eclipsed by concerns about safety.

This new environment favors the Orthodox, pioneers of a kind of “self-segregation,” notes writer Joseph Epstein in the Wall Street Journal. And because of their higher birth rates and the below-replacement birth rates among non-Orthodox American Jews, the Orthodox could triple their share of the U.S. Jewish population by 2060. This trend plays out in California’s Jewish communities such as L.A.’s Pico-Robertson — epicenter of California orthodoxy.

The resurgence of California Jewry matters more today, given that voters in the traditional center of Jewish life, New York, have been supporting a mayoral candidate who was at least at one time sympathetic to “globalizing the intifada.” Many suspect that the once well-connected Jewish community in New York will likely face indifference, if not open hostility, from City Hall if Zohran Mamdani is elected.

Fortunately, the sun has not yet set on California’s Jews. The Golden State can still remain our “paradise” — true to its past. But this will work only by learning how to protect ourselves and make the case to our gentile neighbors so that we can continue to contribute mightily to the future of our common home.

This piece first appeared at: Los Angeles Times.

Photo credit: Tomás Del Coro via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Is It Good Enough To Be A “Good Enough” City?

Pete Saunders — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

I hope you’re fine with another Chicago-centric indulgence. This one’s not about Operation Midway Blitz (more coming on that very soon), but I think you’ll still find it interesting.

I’ve heard various versions of this complaint about Chicago for years. Chicago’s got sort of a “jack of all trades, master of none” brand among American cities. I think Midwestern culture has something to do with that. The Midwest is known for down-to-earth, pragmatic and polite; we’re not known for calling attention to ourselves. What’s more, the industries does excel in are foundational, “backbone” industries that can offer lots of success but not a lot of glamour – food processing, logistics, air, rail and trucking transportation, commodities futures trading.

Anyway, a few days ago I saw a thread on X/Twitter that grabbed me. Here’s the original tweet:

Chicago’s integral to the American economy, but not in an especially visible way. I think to our advantage many times, and to our disadvantage. It allows us to do very well in grounded industries, as noted by some in the thread.

But I’d agree it works against us as the global economy is pulled along by cutting-edge industries as the OP noted – finance, art and fashion in New York, tech in San Francisco/Silicon Valley, media and entertainment in Los Angeles (I’d add education in Boston, and, as long as we can hold onto the title of the most dominant nation on the planet, Washington, DC for politics). For most of the 20^th century Detroit’s lead over the rest of the world in auto production made it stand out, but that’s certainly changed.

As for Chicago, I think it still leads the way in “backbone industries”, as noted above. Food processing is still a big part of Chicago’s economy; millions of tons of food products from across the Midwest still enter Chicago for processing. They leave here as packaged, frozen or canned goods for your consumption.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Hyde Park Skyline by Eric Allix Rogers, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Mamdani Heralds the Radical American City

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

The greatest threat to the United States is self-created and centered in urban areas. Having survived the pandemic and the 2020 “summer of love”, America’s cities — most critically, New York — are adopting politics that seem designed to make the much-feared “urban doom loop” a reality.

Instead of facing up to their fundamental challenges in liveability and economic viability, the Big Apple and other cities such as Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Chicago are falling for full-spectrum progressives. In Tuesday’s local elections, Zohran Mamdani, a socialist running as a Democrat, handily defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who ran independently after failing to secure the Democratic nomination. Leftist have also scored recent victories in the smaller cities of Oakland, Cincinnati, Syracuse, Albany, and Buffalo.

It’s hard to see how politicians like Mamdani, following the Democratic Socialists’ platform, will abolish capitalism or implement the “social ownership” of all industry in a still profoundly capitalist country. People, at least outside the bluest cities, may not respond well to progressive ideas about taxing “white” areas, one of Mamdani’s proposals, or regarding the very existence of the NYPD as an obstacle to “queer liberation”.

His defenders insist Mamdani has disavowed such views since he aired them in the febrile Covid-and-BLM era. But his statements from back then, which wasn’t that long ago, give every impression of sincerity; Mamdani — unlike, say, his failed opponent Andrew Cuomo — comes across as an ideological true believer if ever there were one.

The bigger problem is that this abrupt Left turn comes as cities are losing their primacy. Today, core cities account for just 15% of the US population, down from a quarter in 1950. Meanwhile, the suburbs and exurbs have seen explosive growth — accounting for 86% of the metropolitan population, up from 13% at the outset of World War II. Suburban and, especially, exurban dominance of metropolitan growth has only accelerated in recent years.

More critical still, cities are losing their once-dominant economic role. In 2019, before the pandemic, office construction was a third of the rate of 1985 and half that of 2000. Even large multinational firms, historically anchored in cities like New York and Chicago, are rethinking their real-estate strategies. According to the Financial Times, many companies are planning to reduce their office footprints by 10% to 20%. A study from the University of Chicago found that as much as a third of the urban workforce could operate remotely.

It is precisely these conditions that have helped create a new urban demography favourable to far-Left city politicians like Mamdani. Between 1970 and 2000, notes the Brookings Institution, middle-income areas in core cities dropped 23%, down from nearly half, while the majority lived in low- or very-low-income areas. Job losses in manufacturing and middle management, notes MIT economist David Autor, were “overwhelmingly concentrated in urban labor markets”.

The Big Apple, for example, has lost some 76,000 middle-income jobs since 2020, while upper-income and low-income jobs have grown. This has paralleled the exodus of middle- and working-class ethnics — Italians, Irish, Jews, African Americans, Puerto Ricans — into the suburbs, particularly those with lower prices. Their departure is a blessing for the professional-class Left that backs Mamdani (while remaining middle- and working-class voters largely continued to back Cuomo to the bitter end).

Burdened with astronomical college debt, these high-education-but-low-wage voters constitute the vanguard of the far Left in many cities. They have largely adopted radical positions hostile to Israel and are seen as threatening to Jews, especially older ones, who once played a dominant role in the city politics.

Onetime rapper and Hollywood nepo baby Mamdani knows well how to appeal to this emergent class. His high-priced proposals for free childcare may seem family-friendly, but many of these voters are unliikely to have children (a majority of Manhattanites are single and have never been married). Socialist campaigners thrive in those places that have far fewer children — gentrified sectors of Queens and Brooklyn, Chicago’s near northside and trendy swaths of west LA. Those who march under the banner of LGBTQ also play an outsized role in these movements. Mamdani, despite his Muslim background and pro-Palestinian bona fides, romped in heavily gay-friendly parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens

What disturbs the young professional class most appears to be high rents; Gotham takes the highest share of income for housing of any US big city. Mamdani’s programs — rent freezes, free buses, eviction restrictions, and the like — are designed to allow urbanites without the means to remain in the city, rather than join those moving to less costly cities to fulfill their dreams.

Some Leftist pundits see this class-based approach as the path to power, and even as the better substitute for the identity-based politics that dominated progressivism beginning a decade ago. High prices mean that coastal metropolises now suffer the lowest adjusted incomes, even as incomes in the less costly middle of the country remain above the national average. The thinking goes that, by running on “affordability” for this educated precariat, Democrats can regain their electoral footing after the thrashing they received in 2024.

Other economic pressures are radicalising the hipsters. They face a job market that is getting tougher — barely half of workers under 30 have full time jobs — even for those with expensive advanced degrees. Their jobs are increasingly threatened by the rise of artificial intelligence, including in finance, business services, and even “creative” professions that historically have clustered in cities.

Cities, of course, can fight back against these trends by developing policies that encourage urban economic growth, something barely mentioned in the DSA and other Leftist forums. Through reasonable taxation, less regulation, and the nurturing of local high-wage industries, from light manufacturing to video production, an early generation of practically minded urbanists helped restore order and growth. Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg in New York, Bob Lanier and Bill White in Houston, Richard Riordan in Los Angeles, Ed Rendell in Philadelphia and Steve Goldsmith in Indianapolis showed how cities can come back.

“High-education-but-low-wage voters constitute the vanguard of the far Left in many cities.”

Today’s urban politics, at least for now, make such a revival unlikely. Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, in office since 2023, was elected by a very Mamdani-like coalition of poor minorities, public employees, and hipster whites. Under Johnson’s steady misrule, schools deteriorate even as he pushes through big raises for teachers and other public employees, leaving the city with an extremely high pension debt.

Even where reformers have triumphed this decade, as in San Francisco and Seattle, radical forces appear to be once again ascendant. Long a favoured destination for college-educated migrants, Seattle during the 2020 riots shut down for weeks and even spawned something of a mini-Havana near its downtown. The city suffers from stubbornly high office-vacancy rates, large numbers of empty stores, and business flight. Crime is down, but hardly back to its pre-2020 levels. The George Floyd Plaza, meant to be some sort of public shrine, remains largely desolate and threatening.

In Portland, another city still reeling from the effects of 2020, socialists are also ascendant, having displaced Republicans as the city’s essential second party, and one with all the momentum. As in Seattle, the local progressives seemed reluctant to police even violence-prone groups like antifa.

Just recently, New York Times veteran Nicholas Kristoff blithely dismissed Trumpian assertions about Portland as a crime-cursed dystopia, suggesting that “hell does not serve Pinot Noir this good”. Of course, not everyone in these cities loves the helmeted kids in black, notably those who have suffered their attacks, including the Seattle police union.

Much the same process appears to be taking place in Minneapolis, which suffered massive disorder during the “summer of love”. There, Mayor Jacob Frey, after eight years, is deeply unpopular and could lose out to his socialist challenger, Omar Fateh. The race was too close to call as of this writing.

Radical realignment is also unfolding in San Francisco, where since 2020, the city had tacked to the center. Once united in opposition to the progressives, the moderates are now increasingly divided. Now the city’s Board of Supervisors may have a DSA majority within a year or two.

President Trump deserves some blame for the socialist tide. He may well have saved the career of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who impressed few during last year’s fires and continues to disappoint, as the city’s performance in rebuilding has been abysmal at best. Its economy may be largely moribund, losing companies at a rapid clip. But Bass’s fervent attacks on ICE agents have helped her galvanize progressive support.

Is this the denouement of great cities? Even under socialist rule, big cities like New York will continue to attract young professionals, globe-trotting elites, and cultural creators, as well as some immigrants. In New York, while the overall population has declined, ultra-wealthy residents, boosted by the stock market, continue to spend lavishly at the city’s often absurdly expensive restaurants. Similarly, tourists continue to flood in, gawking at the bright lights, street characters, and remarkable cultural assets built by earlier generations.

Yet over time, socialist rule may make it impossible for big cities to finance their current costs, much less elaborate schemes for redistribution. Trump and the congressional GOP are unlikely to give much help with mass transit or to fund new city services. And there remain definite limits to what the rich — notably, those who earn and not just inherit their wealth — will absorb in terms of taxes and public humiliation.

It’s hard to see how cities like New York can expand spending without keeping these people. Between 2011 and 2021, New Yorkers with more than $1 million in adjusted gross income averaged 0.7% of all tax filers, but paid 42.4% of municipal personal Income Tax. Between 2018 and 2022, the city lost some $10 billion in revenues just to south Florida. Even Andrew Cuomo vowed to head to the Sunshine State in case he lost, which, he did.

On the other hand, socialist wins could prove a boon for places like Palm Beach, Fla., which have become beacons for people leaving places like New York and Chicago. Dallas is developing a stock exchange to rival Wall Street and is eyeing a Mamdani mayoralty as an ideal marketing device.

Some conservatives might celebrate the radicalisation of cities and salivate at the prospect of hard-Left control of the Democratic Party. But they ignore the underlying forces boosting socialism, notably the cost of living and diminished employment prospects for the young, which could also spread beyond the radical cities. Rather than a boon to conservatives, the rise of the radical city constitutes a loss for the country, and can be reversed only by a rebirth of pragmatic reason.

This piece first appeared at: UnHerd.

Photo: Marco Verch via, Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

The Past Isn't Fixed and Neither Are We: Lessons from Colonial Williamsburg

Samuel J Abrams — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 12:11:32 -0500

During the earliest months of the pandemic, when daily rhythms fell apart and the future felt strangely suspended, I began walking Colonial Williamsburg with my son. Schools were closed. Playgrounds were wrapped in caution tape. So much of childhood had migrated to screens. But Williamsburg’s brick streets and greens remained open. We walked simply to be somewhere shaped at a human scale and outside. The place offered continuity at a time when almost everything else was provisional. Those mornings were not nostalgic. They were steadying.

Williamsburg has always been more than a historical attraction. It is a town rebuilt to demonstrate how a community once functioned—how work, worship, trade, political argument, and daily life fit together. It gives form to the idea that civic life is not just something we think or feel. It is something we do together in shared space.

This point has gained renewed attention. In a recent article in The Atlantic, Clint Smith describes Williamsburg’s ongoing shift away from a narrow, comfortable version of the colonial era and toward a fuller account of the community that existed here: enslaved and free, wealthy and laboring, those with power and those subjected to it. He makes clear that this is not a simple or smooth transition. Williamsburg has always been contested ground—its meaning argued over, revised, defended, and reimagined.

Richard Handler and Eric Gable saw this clearly in their book The New History in an Old Museum. Williamsburg was never a static tribute to the past. It was always a living negotiation among public memory, tourism, scholarship, and national identity. The question was never whether the story would change. The question was how and with what degree of responsibility.

Today, Williamsburg is admirably choosing to lean into complexity. It is not rejecting the founding. It is rejecting simplification. It is choosing honesty over comfort, and seriousness over spectacle.

I saw this one morning outside a carpenter’s shop. An interpreter was portraying an enslaved craftsman, explaining how some skilled laborers could negotiate wages that were partially their own, sometimes allowing them to petition for freedom. A visitor, unsettled, interrupted: “But if he was that talented, why didn’t he just leave?” The interpreter paused—not to correct her, but to answer in full. Leaving meant abandoning one’s family, one’s community, and every relationship that structured daily life. It meant entering a world where capture was likely and legal protection nonexistent. He spoke simply, without theatrics. The group fell silent. For a moment, the past was not symbolic. It was human, difficult, and real.

That is what Williamsburg does at its best. It holds the complexity of the American founding without flattening it into either pride or guilt. The founding was not pure, and it was not fraudulent. It was aspirational and incomplete. The same society that articulated universal natural rights also denied those rights to millions. Acknowledging that fact does not undermine the founding. It clarifies the scale of the promise the nation set in motion.

Williamsburg shows that liberty was never something handed down whole. It was constructed—argued over, negotiated, lived, and sometimes painfully delayed. It was work. And it remains work.

The physical environment of Williamsburg makes this visible in ways no textbook can. The scale of the town slows the pace of thought. Narrow streets require awareness. Greens and benches invite lingering. Buildings face one another, encouraging encounter rather than retreat. Even when workshops are quiet, the arrangement of work-yards and service buildings reflects a world structured by apprenticeship, patience, and interdependence. Taverns and coffee houses hint at how political identity formed around tables, not hashtags.

Williamsburg’s design demonstrates that civic life is embodied. It happens when people must encounter one another in common space. It depends on proximity.

This stands in sharp contrast to much of American life today. Many of us now experience history, politics, and identity primarily through screens. The digital sphere encourages performance rather than deliberation, certainty rather than understanding, reaction rather than reflection. The past becomes something to wield. Citizenship becomes a brand. The public square becomes a stage.

Williamsburg slows that down. It requires presence. It requires patience. It invites the possibility that understanding takes time.

The pandemic revealed how vulnerable our civic habits had already become. When schools, congregations, sports leagues, arts programs, civic organizations, and neighborhood associations paused, people did not just lose activities. They lost the places where shared memory is formed. Without shared memory, trust erodes. Without trust, civic life fractures.

Walking through Williamsburg during that time, I realized that continuity is not something one remembers. It is something one participates in. The place reminded us that earlier generations lived through crises they did not choose, and did not fully understand while they were living them, and still built institutions and communities meant to outlast them. The past is not instructive because it is reassuring. It is instructive because it shows that our challenges are not singular and that renewal is possible.

Williamsburg does not offer answers. It offers perspective. It demonstrates that history is not settled. It continues to press on the present. And it suggests that how we understand the past shapes whether we believe the future can be built in common.

One afternoon during our Covid walks, my son asked me whether people in the eighteenth century knew they were “in history.” I told him that people then were the same as we are now—trying to make decisions without knowing what would last and what would fade. They did not feel like figures in a story. They felt like ordinary people living through uncertainty. And that is true of us. We are not looking back at history. We are inside it.

My son and I continue to visit Williamsburg—not because the place is perfect, and not because the story it tells is finished, but because it treats history as something serious enough to matter to the present. It does not romanticize the past, and it does not weaponize it. It treats the past as an inheritance.

And like any inheritance worth having, it must be cared for, tended to, and carried forward.

The past is not fixed. Neither are we. A free society does not need a flawless origin story. It needs a citizenry willing to learn, to remember, and to continue the work that was left unfinished.

That work belongs to us.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: Colonial Williamsburg by Humberto Moreno, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Zohran Mamdani's Bread and Circuses

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

‘Here our smart clothes are beyond our means, here in Rome. A little bit extra has to be borrowed from someone’s purse. It’s a common fault; here we all live in pretentious poverty. What more can I say? Everything in Rome comes at a price.’
From Satires, by Juvenal.

There was a time in Ancient Rome when many citizens could barely afford to eat, while slaves undercut their chances of work. And the solution from the imperium? The familiar panem et circenses – bread and circuses.

There are echoes of Roman times in a New York mayoral race that ultimately came down to the cost of living. That, in essence, is what New Yorkers (or at least a sizeable minority) voted for on Tuesday – the bread and circuses of Zohran Mamdani.

They may want to hold their breath as their new 34-year-old mayor, who easily beat former governor Andrew Cuomo, tests out his bag of tricks. He promises to halt all rent increases, impose a $30-per-hour minimum wage by 2030, and subsidise bus fares, daycare and even grocery stores. While Roman emperors once handed out bread, Mamdani plans to dispense free rides, babysitters, peanut butter and steak at discount prices.

Mamdani’s programme suggests an attempt to transform the world’s capitalist capital into a First World version of Havana. The biggest casualties won’t be the much-maligned rich but, as analyst Nicole Gelinas suggests, moderately affluent small property owners. They make up 30 to 50 per cent of rent-controlled landlords and some won’t survive a rent freeze. Similarly, mainly immigrant-run bodegas and small grocery stores will struggle against the city-subsidised competition, while bus riders will find themselves increasingly sharing space with the city’s feral youth and plain old crazies.

Of course, much of what Mamdani proposes may never come to pass. The state controls most of his taxation power, and many proposals will face legal challenges. Still, New York’s political shift shouldn’t be minimised. Mamdani may be more of a social-media performer than a policymaker, but his ascent has ramifications not just for New York, but also for the West’s other great cities and the nation at large.

Regardless of how daft his ideas are, Mamdani’s rise reflects a legitimate anxiety about the cost of living, especially housing. New Yorkers spend more of their income on housing than residents of any other major US city, while also paying among the highest taxes. It has the lowest homeownership rate in the country, standing at half the national average. And job growth has increasingly been confined to low-wage employment. Indeed, since 2020, New York has lost 76,000 middle-income jobs.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo: screenshot from PBS YouTube channel.

Zohran Mamdani's Rise is Fueled by Generational Resentment

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

The likely election of Zohran Mamdani as New York City’s next mayor reflects a profound shift in generational politics. As the era of boomer domination finally draws to a close, a new cohort is bringing fresh energy to an already polarised landscape on both right and left – with potentially devastating results.

Diminishing economic prospects for younger workers have played a key role in undermining faith in free-market capitalism, making the case for socialism seem viable again. Cast largely in traditional Marxist terms, many on the reinvigorated left see the ‘cost of living’ focus as a promising strategy for progressives otherwise out of step on cultural issues.

Yet it would be wrong to view Mamdani’s rise as driven primarily by the working class. In the primary, he lost in many predominantly black and Latino areas such as the Bronx, Brownsville and Rosedale, and traditional working-class districts like Canarsie in south Brooklyn, all of which backed his rival, Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani’s support instead came largely from the gentrified zones of Lower Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn, particularly Williamsburg, where a cadre of educated young voters drove record turnouts. A recent New York Times poll shows Mamdani with 73 per cent of the vote among 19- to 29-year-olds, compared with just 32 per cent among voters over 65. Only a massive mobilisation of older New Yorkers, who generally favour Cuomo, threatens his momentum.

Whether he wins or not, Mamdani epitomises a youthful politics defined by the primacy of social media. His followers tend to be less conventionally literate and more prone to political extremes. Their politics – epitomised by the media-savvy Mamdani – is largely performative, based more on emotion than on even remotely practical policy. His candidacy is merely the latest cause célèbre, following a sequence of ‘progressive’ enthusiasms from climate change to transgender rights to the Palestinian cause.

Some young activists also display a disturbing acceptance of political violence. A YouGov poll in September 2025 found that among adults under 30, 19 per cent said political violence could sometimes be justified, compared with 11 per cent of Americans overall. In one survey, nearly 38 per cent of respondents – and more than half of progressives – said the assassination of Donald Trump would be ‘justified’.

In this new political configuration, gender now plays a central role. The existence of a gender gap in politics is nothing new, but, according to recent Gallup surveys, it is now five times larger than in 2000. Indeed, it is especially pronounced among Generation Z where Trump’s approval rate among young men hovers near 45 per cent, compared with just 24 per cent among women.

The left is increasingly dominated by women. Among Americans aged 18 to 29, 52 per cent of women identify as Democrats, compared with 35 per cent of men, while 38 per cent of young men lean Republican – nearly twice the share of young women. A similar divergence has appeared abroad. In South Korea’s 2022 presidential race, 59 per cent of men aged 18 to 29 voted conservative, while women overwhelmingly backed the ‘progressive’ candidate. Across Europe, 21 per cent of young men support right-wing and populist parties compared with 14 per cent of young women.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo credit: Eden, Janine and Jim via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The "Don't Go" Narrative and Its Enduring Impact on Communities

Pete Saunders — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Yesterday I became aware of some fantastic news. Tonika Lewis Johnson, a photographer and community activist in Chicago, was named one of 22 people worldwide awarded the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, often called the “Genius Grant”. Each recipient was awarded $800,000 of no-strings-attached money in recognition of their groundbreaking, innovative and courageous work in a wide range of fields: arts, science, medicine, technology, media, and more.

Tonika won the MacArthur Fellowship because of her work on the Folded Map Project and the book that emerged from it, Don’t Go: Stories of Segregation and How to Disrupt It. As the MacArthur Foundation’s website puts it, “Johnson uses photography, maps, and multimedia storytelling to articulate the vast disparities in conditions, infrastructure, and investment between Chicago’s neighborhoods. At the same time, she creates pathways for residents to begin the process of restitution and repair.”

I find Tonika’s work fascinating because it’s at the heart of why I became an urban planner — to document and address disparities in cities, particularly in Rust Belt cities like Chicago. Her work is reminiscent of the work of artists like Tyree Guyton, whose work in Detroit on the Heidelberg Project seeks to use art as a catalyst for revitalization. It’s also similar to the work of Theaster Gates, like Tonika from Chicago, whose social practice installation artwork challenges our perceptions and encourages the use of art to uplift disinvested communities.

Tonika’s work, however, takes this approach to the personal, individual level. How much should we trust what we think we know about disinvested neighborhoods? What happens to communities that are only viewed in the abstract, and not in their totality? How do individual actions contribute to the disinvestment of communities?

I interviewed Tonika (and her research colleague and activist partner Dr. Maria Krysan of the University of Illinois-Chicago) earlier this year on behalf of Planning Magazine, for an article. The article was published online yesterday. Please click Challenging Perceptions of ‘Don’t Go’ Neighborhoods Can Create Opportunities to read. I’m proud of this work, and even prouder of how people like Tonika demonstrate that strong neighborhoods deserve to be everywhere, for everyone.

This piece first appeared at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Tonika Lewis Johnson. Credit: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

New York's Jews Fear a Mamdani Win

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

For generations, the Harmonie Club has served as a haven for New York’s Jewish elites. Founded in 1852, the club has since 1905 occupied an elegant eight-story building at 4 East 60th Street, a townhouse with lovely painted ceilings and a handsome Victorian facade designed by Stanford White. The names of its most illustrious members — the Bloomingdales, the Guggenheims, Alfred Ochs, founder of the New York Times Company — are intimately connected with the history and character of New York. Whatever persecution Jewish people faced elsewhere in the world, here was a place they could thrive.

Just recently, however, its members have been feeling considerably less secure. Zohran Mamdani — a socialist, a Muslim and a fierce critic of Israel — is the city’s likely next mayor. His emergence is eliciting palpable concern among the club’s members. “We are being erased in our own city,” says Sam Abrams, club member and prominent political scientist. At the Harmonie, as in various less illustrious Jewish institutions, the talk is of rising antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and an increased feeling that the city is turning against its Jewish communities. Elliot Cosgrove, rabbi at the generally liberal Park Avenue synagogue on the Upper East Side, sees Mamdani as a lethal threat. “If there’s a celebration of Israel and 10,000 people show up, will they be safe under Mamdani?”

New York’s Jews have suffered periods of exclusion, as they have elsewhere. Indeed, that’s one reason why the Harmonie was founded in the first place: Jews were largely unwelcome at the immaculately WASPish Union Club. But never before has New York had a mayor who is so apparently anti-Zionist; who has accused Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid”; who has defended the phrase “Globalise the Intifada”; and who has appeared to celebrate terrorists and their supporters. All this in a city that, for most of the 20th century, hosted the largest Jewish community in world history.

Not that New York has always been welcoming to Jews. The first to arrive came in 1654, fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. They were a cause of consternation for Dutch colonial administrator of the time, Peter Stuyvesant, but the refugees had enough connections in Holland to force him into allowing them to stay. The first synagogue rose in 1682. The American Revolution brought full citizenship, while through the 19th century, New York welcomed thousands of largely German-speaking Jews: it’s no accident that the Harmonie was originally called Gesellschaft Harmonie. By the American Civil War, the city was home to 150,000 Jews, yet the largest influx came around 1900, when over two million Jewish migrants, including my own grandparents, arrived from Eastern Europe.

Having travelled the filth and stench of steerage class, these immigrants did much to shape the 20th-century city. It is frankly hard to imagine a successful, prosperous New York without Jews — just as it is hard to imagine New York culture without Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow; George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein; Barbra Streisand and Stephen Sondheim; Stan Lee and Diane Arbus; Woody Allen and Mel Brooks; the Beastie Boys and Lou Reed; Fran Leibovitz and Lena Dunham. Jews are critical players in the philanthropic structures of the city, from the Metropolitan Opera to the Philharmonic to the New York Historical Society near Central Park. They have been prominent among the big donors to the city’s great universities, notably NYU and Columbia.

It was New York’s Jews who, for better or worse, founded Goldman Sachs and the Lehman Brothers, and the modern mafia too. “In New York,” suggests Yeshiva University historian Jeffrey Gurock, “you could feel like the whole world was Jewish.” Even on the streets, the Jewish heritage persists: besides selling falafel and kebabs, the ubiquitous halal vendors also hawk knishes and kosher hot dogs. The essayist Milton Klonsky was only half joking when he called the Big Apple the “Ghetto of Eden”.

But New York’s Jewish character has been waning for decades. In 1950, the city was home to 40% of America’s Jews. Now, it represents well less than 15%. When I was growing up in the late Fifties, New York had some two million Jewish inhabitants; today the population is slightly less than half that. Much of that population headed to the suburbs through the Sixties and Seventies, an era of marked urban decline in New York as elsewhere.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo credit: Jörg Schubert via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The Rise of the Artisan Economy

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 20:18:38 -0400

Developer Shaheen Sadeghi’s vision of an artisanal, small-business-driven economy seems oddly incompatible with his environment. After all, Orange County, Calif., where the 71-year-old Sadeghi has worked for four decades, bristles with mass-produced fabrication. Home to several of the nation’s most successful malls and endless shopping centers, the region has incubated such firms as McDonald’s, Jack in the Box, Cheesecake Factory, Marie Callender’s, Taco Bell, and the epicenter of faux American conformism, Disneyland.

Yet walking around his expanding development, called the Camp, it’s clear Sadeghi has made his vision real. Located on four acres in Costa Mesa — just one mile from the South Coast Plaza — one of the most successful mega-malls in the country — is a collection filled with dozens of independent, small businesses including oddball boutiques, diverse independent restaurants, and even a bar — Cowboy and Poodles — that celebrates southern California’s cowboy heritage, with Western images and artifacts matched with kitschy images of well-groomed dogs.

“Most of retail may be dying,” Sadeghi notes, “the next generation of customers won’t go to the big stores but are seeking out a direct human experience.” Moreover: “The traditional middleman role is obsolete. People may go online to buy necessities but when they go out to shop, they want something real, something that offers the possibility of serendipity.”

Sadeghi, who grew up in Michigan, is the child of Muslim Iranian immigrants. He graduated from Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute and worked in the surf-wear industry — eventually running Huntington Beach–based Quiksilver — for a decade until he came up with his concept of “the anti-mall” in 1993. His LAB company, which stands for “Little American Business,” has some 40 projects spread across the county. For many young residents, including my daughters, the Camp and Anaheim’s Packing House (both LAB developments) replaced the conventional mall as their preferred place to hang.

Sadeghi says he believes that his developments tap an unmet demand for personal, unique experiences and, most of all, human interaction. “The rise of artificial intelligence and virtual reality, a world of robots, suggests we don’t need to interface with people,” he says over lunch at Aba, a crowded and popular Israeli restaurant at the Camp. “But people need more than that. They want that personal experience, the unexpected. Providing that is what excites me.”

The notion of an artisan economy may seem odd in an age dominated by online sales and artificial intelligence. Yet, as Sadeghi points out, this is the opportunity. As we buy routine, depersonalized products online or at a mega retailers such as Target or Costco, there remains a desire for something more human. We seek to connect more closely to the farmer, the maker of products, and to products sourced close to the community.

This counterfactual development can be seen in such things as the rapid growth of flea markets, farmers’ markets, and that ultimate symbol of grassroots free markets, garage sales. The 2000s and 2010s saw the growth of the “buy local” movement and the rapid expansion of farmers’ markets in the U.S. — from fewer than 1,800 in the mid-1990s to more than 8,770 by 2019. Flea markets have also proliferated around the world, growing at 4.5 percent a year. By 2033, U.S. flea market sales are expected to grow from $12.5 billion to almost $17.5 billion. Similar growth is projected in Latin America, Europe, and Asia.

The shift is reflected as well in surging yard sales. A July survey by Morning Consult found that about half of U.S. consumers said they have shopped secondhand, and a quarter said they sold something secondhand within the previous three months. According to a recent report from online resale shop ThredUp and the retail analytics firm Global Data, the U.S. market for secondhand apparel grew by 14 percent in 2024, its strongest annual growth since 2021, and is expected to hit $74 billion by 2029.

The roots of this shift are both psychological and technological. In a digital age, when direct human contact is increasingly optional, there remains a clear market for originality and serendipity. At a yard sale or farmers’ market, you never quite know what you will find and how much it might cost. “It’s an experience that AI cannot do,” notes Randy Hild, another surf-wear executive whose Redo Market runs flea markets throughout Southern California.

“There’s something even for surfers who like something old,” he suggests. People like to buy the older American-made products featured in Hild’s “redo markets” that sell vintage records, surfboards, and all sorts of memorabilia. Hild runs two shows a year, each one visited by upwards of 15,000 people.

The attraction of artisan firms, which produce their own products, is an alternative often lost in the era of Yelp, online ordering, and “bucket list” consumerism. As the recently retired New York Times food critic Pete Wells notes, even some more elite restaurants — much like the numerous chains that have closed stores, or entirely — have become formulaic and not really interested in cultivating relationships, something that artisanal smaller businesses, without the ability to afford expensive advertising, depend on to find customers. He observes:

It’s not that we don’t want to have relationships with the owners and cooks and baristas in our lives. Tiny pop-up restaurants and micro-bakeries are still riding a wave of popularity that started during the pandemic. A large part of the appeal of these places is the chance to meet the person who baked the croissant or cooked your Vietnamese bun cha.

One can see the market for the (genuinely) personal touch throughout Southern California. These small businesses are located in the ubiquitous strip centers detested by urban planners and new urbanists that are faring far better economically than is often assumed. There you can experience a wide range of choices, from sari shops to thriving Laotian, Cambodian, Vietnamese, and Mexican shops.

Such developments, anchored by small, local businesses, are spread throughout the region, notably in working-class Latino cities, usually occupying deserted big-box or retail spaces. Larger developments tend to be in redundant warehouse spaces, such as Sadeghi’s Camp. Others rise adjacent to supermarkets. For example, the Latino-themed Mercado, located next to the Gonzalez family–owned Northgate market, features more than 20 stalls covering 11,361 square feet and offers a wide diversity of Mexican food from largely independently owned stalls.

It’s ironic that these innovations are taking place in supposedly homogeneous suburbia, even as many cities have become inundated with chain stores. “This is not suburbanization but localization,” suggests Sadeghi. Many suburbanites, he notes, left the big city but did not have their taste buds removed at the same time. “Suburbia is no longer bland,” he notes. “Orange County is local like New York and L.A. are local.”

Wherever it is located, artisanal business appeals to deep-seated public sentiment. Big companies, banks, and media receive low marks from the public, but small business continues to enjoy widespread support across party lines. Self-employment has grown somewhat faster, at least until recently, than regular employment, especially among skilled professionals like plumbers, electricians, and those who work in food service and management. Since 2020, the number of self-employed people has jumped by nearly 2 million. The largest percentage of these new businesses are in retail, but many others are in tech, professional services, and construction, all populated by the new artisanal class.

Europe has not experienced a similar entrepreneurial explosion but has retained much of its traditional artisan economy. Surveys reveal that more than 70 percent of EU citizens consider the origin of food products important, with a significant portion expressing a willingness to pay more for locally sourced goods that they perceive as fresher and more trustworthy.

In America, post-globalism appeals to the progressive left as well as to the MAGA right. It also could become a key source of new employment, particularly in the era of artificial intelligence. Public companies have been slashing white-collar staff since 2022 by more than 3.5 percent a year, with the most precipitous drops in executive and management positions. The once-booming idea of “career” training faces a reality where some CEOs, like Ford’s Jim Farley, now predict that “literally one half of white collar jobs” at major corporations will soon be redundant.

For many young people, artisan skills training offers a more promising alternative. Indeed, one recent survey found that roughly 83 percent of Gen Z feel that learning a skilled trade can be a better pathway to economic security than college — including 90 percent of those who already hold college degrees. By fall 2021, total undergraduate enrollment was 15 percent lower than it was in fall 2010. In contrast, trade schools have grown by 10 percent since 2020. Coders may be systematically culled by artificial intelligence, but there has been steady growth among those who can actually build something — whether as skilled tradespeople or as industrial, chemical, or civil engineers, reflecting a shift among tech investors and CEOs toward the production of goods as opposed to bytes.

Of course, some economic functions, particularly those dependent on low wages, will never likely return to the U.S., but there’s clearly some decline in support for and in the viability of globalist mass production. Some of this can be traced to mercantilism (particularly from China) and ever more stressed supply chains and shipping lanes. These, as analyst Peter Zeihan suggests, are undermining what he calls the globalized order, forcing production back toward the consumers.

New technology, traditionally the bane of small firms, also makes local, small-scale production easier. The spread of affordable digital manufacturing tools — 3D printers, CNC machines, and other artisanal technologies — enables microenterprises to design, produce, and sell locally, reducing reliance on long supply chains. E-commerce platforms like Etsy, Shopify, and Alibaba have democratized access to markets, allowing millions to start businesses with minimal capital and fostering direct competition.

These innovations allow craft entrepreneurs to create a vibrant ecosystem of small-scale production, sometimes using robots, where competition thrives on creativity, quality, and direct connection with consumers rather than just economies of scale. This is next on Sadeghi’s list. Over the past five years — thanks to slow permitting in California — he has been putting together a 100,000-square-foot artisanal center in San Marcos, an exurb of San Diego, with room for 50 vendors.

Sadeghi is excited by the emergence symbolized by the opening of the first MIT Fab Lab in 2002 — which offers tools and skills that once belonged only to large manufacturers. By the late 2010s, more than 1,600 Fab Labs were operating globally, with hundreds in North America. This could provide new life in both the U.S. and Europe, where the embedded artisan tradition — deeply rooted in family businesses, regional craft, and protected appellations — has shown greater resilience than the continent’s large firms in the face of globalizing pressures. Southern Europe (Italy, Spain, and France) maintained dense webs of artisanal food producers and small manufacturing firms. In Italy, artisan businesses accounted for 27 percent of all firms as recently as 2018.

This pattern is even emerging in East Asia, the region that has most benefited from the globalist era. Japan has protected traditional crafts and small producers through a blend of national policy and local initiative. The One Village, One Product movement, which began in Ōita Prefecture in 1979, had by the 2010s spread nationwide and inspired similar efforts in Thailand and China. Taobao villages, clusters of entrepreneurs leveraging Alibaba’s online platform, became a model for rural regeneration, with more than 5,000 such villages by 2020.

In Africa, the drive to artisanal production grows not so much from lifestyle considerations but from the failure of state policy and the resilience of individual agency. In South Africa, the continent’s most advanced economy, these firms have helped provide services, including security, that the central government has failed to deliver. By 2023, some 2.7 million small businesses operated in the country, two-thirds in the informal sector, employing more than 9 million people. Across sub-Saharan Africa, informality is not an exception but the rule: 80 to 90 percent of employment in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and elsewhere is outside the formal economy.

It’s a long way from Africa’s villages or rural Japan to Southern California, but the trend toward the artisan economy continues.

Some urban planners, like San Juan Capistrano’s development services chief, Joel Rojas, realize that whatever their efficiencies, chain-driven development does little to enhance a city’s uniqueness or sense of community. In a world full of duplicate stores, he notes, it is key for a city to project uniqueness of feel and experience.

This is why he has worked hard to allow for the development of the River Street Marketplace, which opened last year. “It’s a community asset, not a mall,” Rojas suggests, as we picnicked in its ample open area, which was crowded with young families. He particularly appreciates the walk’s agrarian look — which includes barnlike structures — as well as its location near an operating farmstead.

The marketplace, developed by Dan Almquist (who owns several other artisan-based centers), features butcher shops, quirky fashion outlets, and ethnic food stands. Located next to the city’s unique Los Rios district, its buildings are purposely reminiscent of Orange County’s agricultural past. It is built around a mission and California’s oldest continually urban area, occupied since Spanish times.

“People come here for an artisan experience, dealing with real things, not spending their time staring at a computer,” notes Almquist, who lives walking distance from the development. This is one way to get away from isolation and enjoy a community feeling. Two-thirds of the stores in his development are either stand-alone or locally based small chains.

The artisan economy will never fully replace the large global system, even as this slowly dissembles into regional or national economies. But arguably its greatest service may be in helping to reshape perceptions of capitalism. Today, our market system is not much-loved globally and even in the U.S., particularly among the young.

The tendency to identify capitalism primarily with numbing commercial sameness and with the antics of the ultrarich and famous does not do it any favors. Small businesses, like those arising in the artisan movement, validate capitalism’s dynamism and sense of opportunity. Indeed, Vladimir Lenin well understood that “small scale commercial production is, every moment of every day, giving birth spontaneously to capitalism and the bourgeoisie. . . . Wherever there is business and freedom of trade, capitalism appears.” Capitalism, he noted, “begins in the village marketplace.”

This is an important message. The return of the owner and the producer to the marketplace breathes life — not just in monetary terms — and essentiality into community and social life. A buffer against both the progressive nanny state and overwhelmingly conformist global capitalism, the rise of the artisan restores the human face of the market system. Capitalism can still perform brilliantly, but it cannot long survive if its essential humanity is stripped away.

This piece first appeared at National Review.

The Catholic Model for a Post-Protestant America

Aaron M. Renn — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 17:40:58 -0400

In my book Life in the Negative World, I noted that unlike minority groups, American white Protestants had not found it necessary to create their own social institutions to sustain their religion and way of life because the mainstream institutions of society were de facto already designed around that.

As America has secularized, and these institutions have become explicitly de-Christianized or otherwise reoriented to other ends, it becomes incumbent on evangelicals to build their own infrastructure.

I suggested that one potential source of inspiration could be early 20th century Catholicism. America was basically an anti-Catholic country prior to World War II. Catholics of that era were also large in number and heterogeneous in origin. This makes them a better fit than looking at more niche minority groups.

I’ve been reading a new book called Crabgrass Catholicism by Stephen M. Koeth, which is about the suburbanization of Catholics in New York. I’ll be writing a full review of the book, but one thing it provides is a picture of what urban Catholic life looked like in early 20th century America. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, as it’s included mostly to provide the backstory to the author’s primary focus, but it can help us get a sense of what that was like.

Koeth writes:

It was European immigration from the 1820s to the 1850s that first made the US Catholic Church a highly urban and ethnic institution. In an era of rapid urbanization Catholic immigrants built American city life by fusing the neighborhood with the ethnic parish which was dominated by its priests and religious sisters, centered on the church and school, and bound together by its communal worship and devotions. At the same time, these immigrants built an entire parallel Catholic world - what John McGreevy has labeled as Catholic “milieu” - of educational, social, and service institutions to rival Protestant and secular peers….More than any other element of this parallel world, it was the parish school that became the “hallmark of American Catholicism.”

Here we see the creation of parallel institutions. These were fused with particular ethnicities. Catholicism was thus one factor that distinguished these communities as ethnic groups. While there were geographic parishes, there were also many “national” parishes designated for particular ethnic groups. Even within a geographic parish, practices might be heavily inflected by particular ethnic practices. For example, the Irish and Italians approached Catholicism very differently. Different ethnic groups might prefer to venerate their own saints. And so on.

The highly ethnicized nature of these Catholic parishes suggests that evangelical groups could not replicate them precisely. White evangelicals aren’t and do not think of themselves as an ethnic group, and despite what you might hear, evangelical churches are rarely monolithically white, even in the suburbs. Urban evangelical churches are often very diverse.

Read the rest of this piece at Aaron Renn Substack.

Photo: Catholic parish school in Long Beach, New York via Wikimedia, under CC 4.0 License.

August Driving Up 2.8% from 2019

Randal OToole — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 20:18:38 -0400

Americans drove 2.8 percent more mores in August 2025 than the same month before the pandemic, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. Apparently, data gathering is just as much an “essential service” in the highway agency as it seems to be in the Federal Transit Administration, which released August transit data earlier this month despite the federal government’s shut-down of non-essential services.

August driving was ahead of 2019 numbers on both urban and rural roads and on all categories of roads tracked by the monthly traffic volume trends: interstates, other arterials, and other roads. Driving exceeded 2019 miles in 30 states, urban driving exceeded 2019 numbers in 31 states, while rural driving exceeded them in 32 states.

Arizona saw the largest increase in driving: 39 percent overall with 26 percent in rural areas and 37 percent in urban areas. (Urban and rural count only driving on arterial roads while totals include driving on collector and local roads.) The next highest was Idaho at 19 percent overall with 21 percent in urban areas and 17 percent rural. Other states with more than a 10 percent increase in driving include Arkansas, Maine, and Texas. The greatest shortfalls were in DC (81%), Delaware (84%), Hawaii (87%), Rhode Island (84%), and West Virginia (89%).

The above chart shows that driving was the first form of transportation to recover from the pandemic, but since then it hasn’t grown as fast as flying or Amtrak. Some analysts think this is because Gen Z — which includes people born between 1997 and 2012 — is driving less than older generations. They may be more likely to work at home, rely on ride-sharing services when they leave home, and associate with friends on-line than in person.

Some of Gen Z’s reluctance to drive is also blamed on the high cost of driving. Previous generations know there are many ways to make driving more affordable, including buying used cars, settling for fewer luxuries, and getting basic rather than more comprehensive insurance. Maybe those techniques don’t work as well as they used to, but I suspect that as Gen Zers age they will increase the amount of driving they do.

This piece first appeared at The Antiplanner.

Photo: chart courtesy The Antiplanner.

Can America Really Afford a Gavin Newsom Presidency?

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 20:18:38 -0400

To the surprise of no one this side of the Sierras, Gavin Newsom is gearing up for a presidential run — a move he’s been rehearsing since succeeding Jerry Brown as California governor in 2019.

Newsom can often come across as a caricature of the opportunistic politician who is more focused on climbing to higher office than tackling California’s problems. By a margin of more than two to one, Californians say he cares more about his political ambitions than about delivering competent governance — a criticism echoed recently by San Jose’s Democratic mayor, Matt Mahan.

Still, it would be a mistake to write off the Governor. He’s quietly leapfrogged the far less fluent Kamala Harris in the polls. While Harris is still flirting with a run, few in the party’s upper ranks seem eager for it. Newsom, meanwhile, remains a darling of Silicon Valley’s oligarchs, many of them wary of Trump’s confrontations with China, and he’s even peeled away some Harris operatives.

As Democratic strategist Dave Gershwin notes, Newsom isn’t just ambitious — he’s methodical. “He is one of the hardest-working politicians I have seen,” Gershwin told me. “He will outwork any other Democratic candidate, and he knows how to adapt to win the propaganda war.”

Such flexibility shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s followed California politics. Newsom has a habit of repositioning himself. As San Francisco’s mayor, he courted business interests; as lieutenant governor, he made pilgrimages to Texas — where so many Californians have fled — praising its economic dynamism. After the Donald Trump’s presidential victory last year, he changed tack once more, extending a hand to conservatives like the late Charlie Kirk.

More recently, in response to his party’s fiercely anti-Trump mood, Newsom once again shifted gears, recasting himself as a self-styled leader of the “Resistance”. He has adopted some of Trump’s own rhetorical tactics, deploying sharp personal insults as if to borrow from the master provocateur himself. His effort to redraw congressional districts, effectively erasing what remains of the California GOP’s presence in Washington, appears likely to succeed, further cementing his standing among Democratic activists.

Newsom’s big challenge lies not in his tactics, but his record. The Governor has presided over California’s fall from economic preeminence. This is evidenced by poor GDP growth, the nation’s highest cost-of-living-adjusted poverty rate, a consistently underperforming public education system, a powerful out-migration trend, record homelessness, low homeownership and ever-increasing inequality.

In response to these harsh realities, Newsom likes to crow about California’s status as the world’s fourth largest economy, which largely reflects the success of a handful of tech companies. Unfortunately, however, the rest of the state is suffering. That is likely why he has fended off progressive proposals, such as a 32-hour work week, raising the state’s income tax, and adding new payroll taxes to pay for universal health care.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Photo: Bureau of Reclamation, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

If "Business as Usual" is So Utterly Broken, Why Do We Still Keep Doing It?

Ross Elliott — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 13:29:26 -0400

“Business as usual is broken” I’ll say to someone. Their head nods in furious agreement. Whether that head belongs to a property industry professional, a government minister, a senior bureaucrat or a tradie doesn’t seem to matter. The realisation that business as usual is broken is now universally accepted by all except the most ardent lovers of regulatory overreach.

The question then becomes, if it is so broken, why do we keep applying business as usual techniques to solve the problem? Why don’t we discard the things we know are not working, especially the things that are working against us, and adopt a different strategy?

The signs of a broken system are everywhere. Our housing market is the most widely reported failing: median prices in capital cities are now 10 times median household incomes – and still rising. That places us as among the most expensive housing markets in the developed world. Sydney – at 14 times incomes – is second place in the world. Not a prize you want. Even Adelaide – yes Adelaide – at 10.9 times incomes, is in the top 10 least affordable cities in the world, relative to incomes. Most Australian capitals are in the top 10 or 15 globally – ahead of cities like greater metro London, Singapore or a host of US cities with bigger economies and populations.

Bringing new supply into a market at a speed which is remotely close to meeting demand is now a task that is beyond us, using business as usual techniques. Our performance could only be described as miserable and – with the exception of national politicians who keep talking targets as if they will somehow magically be delivered – no well informed person seems remotely hopeful that our supply side mechanisms are up to the task. To use the fad phrase, they are “not fit for purpose.”

One proposed ‘solution’ has been a call for more planners to
cope with the increasing complexity of land use regulation and development
assessment. But so far, the rate of growth in complexity is outpacing the
growth of planners. Jonathan O'Brien of Inflection Points wrote an interesting piece relating the number of planners to the delivery of housing stock.

Read the rest of this piece at The Pulse.

Ross Elliott is a leading industry practitioner with over 35 years' experience in property and urban development across a number of industry sectors. He has held senior roles with the Property Council of Australia as Executive Director, National Chief Operating Officer, and National Executive Director of the Residential Development Council. Ross has been a frequent writer and guest speaker on urban development themes both in Australia and the US. In 2018 he published a piece on Australia in a global study of suburban development by the MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism (Cambridge, Mass.) Ross is also founding director of suburban issues think tank Suburban Futures.

Chart: courtesy The Pulse, data source is Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Why Does the World Insanely Ignore Nuclear Power?

Ronald Stein — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 11:46:28 -0400

There is a lot of talk about nuclear power around the world today. However, except for China and, maybe, Russia, there is no action.

Talk means nothing, but action means everything. Perhaps the reason for inaction is the massive waste of government funding for nuclear power promises. Private capital produces many times more production than government funding does. Maybe if the money were left in the hands of the people, some sense of urgency could be realized. Moreover, to secure monopolies for those who own them, massive government roadblocks are placed in the way of any competition that could disrupt the profits from these monopolies.

Such is the case for government-subsidized wind and solar projects over the last two decades. Because of mismanagement and outright corporate theft, the sizzle has come off the idea of just electricity from “renewables.” Once the private industry lost their government subsidies, wind and solar projects started shutting down. Some, of course, are still around, but no utility company will take even a single penny of risk on solar and wind production.

So, when the gravy train of government subsidies stops flowing, the profit centers move on — no gravy, no profits, no production. Then the citizens are left to clean up the mess. What a deal. Citizens pay to make the mess and now citizens pay to clean it up. All while enjoying the benefits of higher electricity costs. Maybe they will get tired of this scam and start to realize that they really need nuclear power.

The answer to safe, continuous, uninterruptible, emissions-free electricity is laying right in front of us. Locked in the nucleus of each uranium atom is a source of energy that is 50,000,000 times that released by burning an atom of coal.

So, all other things being the same, we should use this natural uranium resource instead of just throwing it away. The commercial nuclear industry, so far, has leveraged only 3% of the energy available in nuclear fuel rods. We would not get very far buying an apple and just eating the peel. Yet, that is what we do with our uranium.

It makes a lot of sense to make use of all the uranium since we went to the trouble of mining it and refining it. Your cheap costs for electricity (worldwide) in past years have come at the price of taxes. In the USA, the renewable subsidies over the years stand at $5 trillion (or so). This means that every person has paid $15,000 above their power bill for the luxury of having so-called “renewable” electricity. So, do you really wonder what will happen to your power bill when that subsidies are gone?

Now, we add the further economic pressure of a sharply rising demand (data centers) with a stable or slightly reduced supply of electricity. It appears that we have to cover the cost of wind and solar renewables and the cost of competition for a vanishing resource at the same time.

Read the rest of this piece at America Out Loud.

Authors

Ronald Stein is an engineer, senior policy advisor on energy literacy for the Heartland Institute and CFACT, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book "Clean Energy Exploitations."

Oliver Hemmers has a Doctorate in Physics from the Institute of Radiation and Nuclear Physics at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany. He was a Researcher in Physics, the Executive Director of UNLV’s Harry Reid Center and C- level executive.

Steve Curtis has a Master’s degree in Health Physics from UNLV. He has spent decades studying spent fuel issues in Nevada and worked as a technical field team leader for nuclear search and characterization missions for the Department of Energy. He is currently engaged in education, speaking, and writing in favor of nuclear power returning to the United States, especially from recycling spent nuclear fuel in fast reactors.

Photo: Michael Gattorna via Pexels.

How to Create the New American Middle Class

Pete Saunders — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 20:18:38 -0400

Remember the term “social contract?” It’s a term that’s been slowly gaining stream in recent years, but one that’s always been at the front of my mind, especially when it comes to cities. Simply put, our nation has been operating without a social contract now for decades, and that has a lot to do with our political, social and cultural issues today.

The definition of “social contract” will vary, but it usually means there is an implicit agreement between government and institutions and the public. Government and institutions agree to provide certain policies and services that allow people to prosper, and the people agree to, well, not rebel. Seriously, the people will often agree to sacrifice some individual freedom for state and institutional services.

The prosperity that followed World War II in America represented a unique time in our history, in world history, and led to the establishment of a unique American social contract, especially in economic terms. Essentially, with Europe’s economic powers recovering from the Depression and a devastating war, America took on the role of being the world’s economic and political superpower. America helped rebuild Europe. Yet America also led the world in manufacturing and industrial production when other nations could not. That was at the heart of the social contract that was established.

There were many facets to the post-WWII social contract. The G.I. Bill enabled veterans to establish their post-war lives – go to college, get generous terms for mortgages. Federal support for unions, which would’ve been unheard of in the first half of the 20^th century, was especially strong as America became the world’s manufacturer. A happy and plentiful workforce, employed by booming industrial corporations, were supported by unions that ensured their gains. You could also include interstate highway development and the expansion of suburbia as elements of the social contract of the era.

That began to fray in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. I won’t go into much detail here, but a period that saw political and social upheaval in the U.S., troubling economic issues due to rising energy prices and shortages, rampant inflation and the rise of other nations as they returned to the economic world stage, changed the American calculus.

By the 1980’s a split was becoming evident in the American social class structure. Upper-middle class people, the professional workforce I usually call the “salary class”, got a boost in the changing world. Improving technology heightened their production, and they were able to huge advances in computing technology, finance, medicine and health care, and more. Meanwhile, the lower-middle and middle classes, or what I’ve called the “wage class”, struggled with changes in the automation of manufacturing facilities, as businesses sought to reduce costs and lower prices on goods.

From my perspective, growing up in the 70’s and 80’s in the Midwest, I felt the loss of a social contract, without a new one replacing it.

So here we are today, after a tech boom and bust, a housing bubble that burst, continued economic growth without corresponding wage growth at all levels, and we have a societal dilemma now. Over the years I’ve viewed improving cities as one part of the reimagining of the middle class. I’ve written about this many times over. But now the moment seems to particularly demand it.

I wrote recently about the Economic Innovation Group’s proposed wage subsidy as a way to get our low-wage workforce on a course toward the middle class. But it turns out EIG has far more ideas than just a wage subsidy. They have a larger worker policy program. In EIG’s Agglomerations Substack, they rolled out a seven-point plan designed to strengthen and stabilize all segments of the American workforce.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Ken Mattison, composite of photos from album of People Working, via Flickr, under CC 4.0 License and CC 2.0 License.

Trump or Not, the US is a Vastly Better Partner for Canada Than China

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 20:18:38 -0400

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent cordial sojourn to Washington, and his claim of a close relationship with Dr. Demento, leaves some hope that for a reconciliation between our two countries. This is a necessity for the United States, which needs its closest neighbour as an ally, but even more important for a Canada largely dependent on U.S. markets, tourists, and military power.

This is not an audacious or disrespectful statement. Throughout history smaller nations — in this case in terms of population and economy — have always tried to secure alliances with larger and more powerful ones. Sometimes it makes sense to gain leverage by feinting a possible shift in allegiances, but that does not sweep away strategic logic.

Simply put, Canada, whose economy has been a laggard in recent years, and already feels the impact of tariffs, has limited options about its long-term post-Trump future. Like other nations Canada will be forced to support one of two alliances, one anchored by the U.S. and the other by China, with strong ties to Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

There are some who see a pro-China tilt as the path to Canada’s “independence.” Fortunately, Carney, however daft on some issues, recognizes China’s aspiration in the Arctic to constitute a leading “geopolitical threat” to the country’s prosperity and security. The Canadian military is already acting to monitor aggressive moves by China and its more trigger-happy sidekick, Russia.

In this tussle, Carney may hope that the EU or other countries could help, but in reality, only the U.S. has the wherewithal to resist Chinese encroachment. The binational alliance may be hard to endure under Trump, but ultimately the U.S. is a vastly superior choice. The once ultra green Carney suggesting the Keystone XL pipeline be resurrected demonstrates that we should be fated by geography to progress together.

Canada also may want to consider what to expect in a China-centric world. China’s historic strategy focuses not on establishing colonies but vassal states from which it can draw what it lacks, mainly raw materials, and customers for its increasingly sophisticated industrial machine. This is precisely why China has targeted Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America, keeping them as suppliers of rare metals, copper, and foodstuffs.

In virtually no case does China try to lift up its client states to the status of competitors, as the U.S. did for Japan, Italy, Germany, South Korea, and Taiwan. China knows what it wants. In terms of strategic materials — a major trade issue — China has systematically secured preferential access through long-term partnerships that exclude American or Western competitors.

Read the rest of this piece at: National Post.

Photo: World Economic Forum, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The New York Line: Patience as the New Status Symbol

Samuel J Abrams — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 20:18:38 -0400

In a city that prides itself on speed, New York’s latest trend is all about slowing down. Lines now snake outside the hottest restaurants in Manhattan - Ha’s Snack Bar on Broome Street, Kiki’s on Division, Breakfast by Salt’s Cure in the West Village - filled with diners who could eat anywhere but choose to stand in the rain for hours. The New York Post recently reported that teenagers are crossing state lines for pancakes, professionals are camping outside bistros for pho-inspired soup, and parents from Italy and Connecticut are waiting shoulder to shoulder with their kids just to be part of the scene. In a culture obsessed with convenience, this fixation on delay seems paradoxical. Yet it may reveal something deeper about where post-pandemic urban life, and American social life more broadly, may be heading.

On the surface, this is about status. To wait at the right place signals taste, knowledge, and stamina. As longtime New York food writer Andrea Strong explained, restaurants have become stages for social ranking. The line itself is a badge of belonging. Sociologist Erving Goffman would recognize the performance: the queue has become a form of public theater, where patience stands in for exclusivity and endurance signals cultural capital. The most prestigious thing about dinner is no longer the dish, it is the evidence that you earned it.

But that explanation only goes so far. In a strange way, these lines are restoring something that New York - and much of the country - has lost: a sense of shared experience in real space and time. After years of isolation and digital substitution, people crave friction and proximity. Standing together, waiting together, offers a fleeting reminder that life is not all about algorithmic efficiency. The sidewalk line – like summer blockbuster movies during my teenage years of the 1990s - is now a small civic arena. It has become a space where strangers exchange glances, chat about the menu, and exist for a moment in the same rhythm. It may be performative, but it’s also real, shared, and commonly understood and represents authentic collective experiences.

This is not new to New York. Katz’s Deli has had lines for decades; so have Gray’s Papaya and Di Fara Pizza. What’s changed is the meaning of the wait. In the post-pandemic era, the line has become an act of participation rather than an inconvenience. People now see standing in public as part of the experience, not just the prelude to it. The anticipation itself becomes valuable. As one diner told the Post, “There’s something romantic about being crammed elbow-to-elbow in a tiny space. We spend so much time isolated; being human-to-human is lovely.”

Psychologists note that scarcity plays a role. When reservations vanish in seconds, standing in line restores a sense of agency. Waiting outside a restaurant feels democratic - you earn access through patience, not privilege. It also satisfies a subtle emotional hunger. As psychologist Deborah Vinall told the Post, people associate long waits with exclusivity and specialness, and equate that difficulty with value. It’s easy to sneer at that as consumer vanity, but it’s also an expression of the human desire to belong to something meaningful, however fleeting.

The deeper irony is that these lines emerge in a society built to eliminate them. Technology promises to deliver everything instantly, but that speed has stripped life of texture. The line offers the opposite: inefficiency as intimacy. For a city that once bragged about its impatience, New York is quietly learning to linger again. People are rediscovering the small pleasure of waiting: of earning an experience, of talking with strangers, of inhabiting the city’s rhythms rather than bypassing them.

That, in turn, says something about our civic recovery. When so much of public life has turned antagonistic or virtual, the humble act of waiting - of surrendering time to others - takes on new meaning. There is a thin line between performance and community, and New Yorkers are walking it in real time. What looks like vanity may in fact be a search for connection, an attempt to feel human again in a city that never stops moving.

The critic might call this another symptom of influencer culture, and in part, that’s true. But there’s also an undercurrent of sincerity here; a recognition that the shared moment, even when curated, still matters. Sometimes the new thing turns out to be something very old: standing together, waiting for something worth having. In a city that measures itself in minutes, the rediscovery of patience might be more than a fad. It might be a small sign that even in our hyper-individual, digitized age, people still long for shared presence, for the slow, collective rituals that remind us we are not alone. The meal, when it finally arrives, may be the least important part.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: Juan Monroy, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Housing Reforms are Needed to Stop Stockholm from Stagnation

Peter Zonabend - Per Arwidsson - Nima Sanandaji — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 19:28:38 -0400

New companies face obstacles growing in Stockholm, in part this stagnation is due to the combination of a regulated rental market and too high prices for new housing development. Growing companies find it difficult to expand in urban regions with lack of housing, this adds to Sweden already being at a disadvantage due to relatively high taxes.

A study written by Tobias Lundberg, senior partner at McKinsey warns that Sweden is stagnating in growth and prosperity, with 70 percent of the total value of startup companies ending up in other countries.

This is not only because Sweden has high taxes on business and labor, but also because new companies have a hard time expanding in a city that has insufficient housing growth. The need for construction is 20,000 homes per year, in the capital city of Stockholm, but the households of the region can only afford 13,600.

Stockholm can be compared with the Irish capital region of Dublin and the Swiss capital region of Zurich. In Zurich, 13.9 percent of the residents are engineers and researchers, in Dublin the level is clearly lower, 9.2 percent. Stockholm has the second highest level in Europe; 13.1 percent of adults are engineers and researchers.

At the same time, Dublin and Zurich now have just over 50 percent higher prosperity per inhabitant compared to Stockholm, illustrating the need for growth reforms. This is shown by a report about conditions for a growing Stockholm, commissioned by Arwidsro real estate company and produced by ECEPR. In Stockholm, GDP per capita, expressed in the equivalent March 2025 krona exchange rate, is 787,100 kronor. That is how much value creation takes place in the economy per adult inhabitant. The level can be compared with 1,269,050 kronor per capita in Dublin and 1,199,350 in Zurich.

Europe's second most knowledge-intensive capital region has a stagnant housing market, which leads to stagnant growth. The new study calculates the economic value that would be created if reforms lowered the cost of construction, so that a thousand more households could afford to establish themselves in the housing market. In that case, individuals could contribute an additional SEK 2.2 billion ($230 million) in value added to the total gross domestic product in Sweden over the course of their careers. Discounted because future gains are worth less today, the social gain is converted to a present value of SEK 1.2 billion ($130 million). This is the productivity gain created by more housing on the margin in the capital region, on top of which there is also extensive value created through capital formation. If the reforms that are implemented are long-term, there will be a similar growth effect every year.

Three reforms that are needed include lowering of the VAT on housing construction, to the lowest level of 6% that is allowed in Sweden. It is problematic that VAT is even charged at all on the construction of private housing, as renting out property is generally exempt from VAT. Balance targets in the planning process are needed, so that social benefit is also weighed up, not just formalities. Planning processes are currently treated so that they are analyzed for what could be considered reasons to stop the plans, without considering the opportunity cost of not building housing.

The Swedish Real Estate Association has pointed out in an analysis that overall Sweden has the highest moving taxes in the EU, and that reforms such as a phased-down capital gains tax where those who have owned the same home for a long time are eventually exempted from the tax. By lowering the thresholds for mobility, moving chains can make more homes available.

Stockholm needs to be a city where more affordable housing is built, allowing more individuals to join the more productive capital region economy, and more of the growing companies of the region to keep growing at home rather than relocating due to growth obstacles.

Authors
Peter Zonabend is CEO of Arwidsro Fastighets AB.
Per Arwidsson is President of Arwidsro Fastighets AB.
Nima Sanandaji is Director of ECEPR (European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform).

Photo: Stockholm, by Jonatan Svensson Glad via Wikimedia, under CC-BY-SA 4.0 License. Chart: Comparison of real wealth per inhabitant of Stockholm vs. other European capital regions since 2014; courtesy the authors.

The New Manchurian Candidates

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 11:57:51 -0400

Openness to outsiders is a liberal democracy’s greatest strength, but it can also prove a curse. Hostile autocratic powers such as China and Qatar have realised that throwing dollars around Washington, Ottawa, London, Sydney or Brussels can get results. How else do you get a proposed US-sponsored Qatari airbase in Idaho, and even a US commitment to defend the terrorist-sponsoring kingdom? China, for its part, often backs Democratic candidates like New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill, who received $65,000 from a businessman with strong links to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

This may not be the programmed treachery portrayed in the 1962 thriller, The Manchurian Candidate, but foreign interests have gained growing influence across the West. At the same time, much of the far left lives off donations from CCP-allied Shanghai-based billionaire Neville Roy Singham. In 2028 we might see Gavin Newsom – California’s China-friendly governor – as a wannabe satrap at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Most foreign influence-peddlers are not partisans, but opportunists. China, often tied to the left, was recently found using an agent to penetrate Germany’s hard-right AfD. Authoritarian states see weakness in Western societies – particularly among an increasingly out-of-touch political class – as an opening to accentuate divisions within polarised publics. Influence-peddlers butter their bread on both sides, not minding that their fingers might get greasy.

There are, of course, differences in the nature of foreign political donations. Some target the grifters of Trump world. Some ally with the green left. Others seek to leverage ethnic ties with migrant communities.

In his classic transactional manner, Trump’s family members and associates are getting rich off deals with Middle Eastern monarchs. Top administration officials like Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and FBI head Kash Patel have strong connections with Doha. Trump, no stranger to impropriety, has even accepted a gift of a jumbo jet from Qatar, which is to be refitted for use as Air Force One.

At the same time, many prominent GOP figures – including former House speaker John Boehner – have signed up to a lobby firm that pushes for China’s interests. Trump allies on Wall Street also lobby on behalf of China, cashing in on investments that strip America’s productive capacity – even amid the Trumpian trade wars that are supposed to rein China in.

Over the past decade, much of the largesse from abroad has gone to universities – bulwarks of ‘progressive’ politics. Qatar alone accounts for more than a third of all foreign donations to US universities. This is the same nation, lest we forget, that funds Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo: U.S. President Donald Trump with Amir of Qatar Sheikh Tamin bin Hamad Al Thani, via Flickr in Public Domain. Credit: Daniel Torok/White House.

Thoughts on “The Slumless City”

Pete Saunders — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 20:18:38 -0400

Ryan Pucyzki, publisher of the City of Yes Substack newsletter, published an excellent (and timely) article yesterday about New Haven, CT’s attempt to reinvent itself through its use of federal urban renewal funding in the two decades following World War II. It was timely because yesterday I also published an article on the contemporary origins of today’s distressed urban neighborhoods – the “hood” – and note that urban renewal of the 1950’s and 1960’s was a public policy, among many in the 20^th century, that played a huge role in creating the “hood” as we know it today. I think it’s important to link our pieces together and consider how policy often creates unexpected outcomes.

Ryan does a great job of summarizing the midcentury transformation of New Haven, and so many other American cities. Tectonic shifts in global politics and the economy after World War II made the U.S. the premier industrial nation in the world. At the grassroots level in cities like New Haven, city leaders envisioned continued demographic and economic expansion. But the rise of suburbia on the city’s periphery was deemed a threat and caused city leaders to rethink the possibilities of cities like New Haven. In New Haven’s case, the thinking was to replace the old with the new. Provide a new-look city to people, and they’d return.

We can lament the damage that urban renewal wrought on cities like New Haven. Yes, it was fundamentally anti-urban.

But the destruction of New Haven through urban renewal produced two significant outcomes. One, it produced winners – city dwellers who took advantage of urban renewal to relocate in suburbia. Pucyzki’s quote here captures how winners viewed urban renewal:

“(urban renewal) only hastened white flight: middle-class white people left the city at five times the rate of non-white people, ‘who could not afford—and were not welcome in—white suburbs.’ ”

Two, the desire to remake urban environments in a modernist fashion, to compete with expanding suburbia, actually made city living less desirable. New highways slashed through old neighborhoods, destroying viable areas and creating isolated neighborhood pockets. Privately owned low-rise multifamily buildings were razed and replaced with mid-rise and high-rise public housing towers surrounded by wide expanses of greenery. according to Pucyzki:

“Non-white people entered public housing three times as frequently as white people, while displaced white people—more likely to have been homeowners—used their compensation to buy elsewhere. The result was that urban renewal increased segregation, producing the ‘near-total Africanization of public housing.’ ”

Urban renewal was thus an unwitting tool used to create the present-day version of the “hood”.

It’s interesting to look back and consider how people of the time viewed what urban renewal would do for cities. I think urban renewal idealists envisioned a future in which white families would recognize the significant investment being made in their communities and would stick around to reap its benefits. I think they also saw white young professionals would be attracted to contemporary, modernist styles of city living, spurring even more growth. Black families would have expanded and updated housing options, improving living conditions.

The reality, however, is quite different. White families often saw urban renewal as an opportunity to escape the city for suburbia. Black families saw the initial integrationist optimism of urban renewal quickly evaporate. Neighborhoods rapidly destabilized and became more segregated in the process.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Downtown New Haven, CT via Wikimedia under CC 3.0 License.

Why God Came Back

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Nearly 60 years ago, Time magazine, then an important publication, posed a discomfiting question on its cover: “Is God Dead?” Yet today, a spiritual hunger grips America, with roughly two-thirds of religiously unaffiliated Americans still believing in God or a universal spirit, according to Pew. Overall, young people are drawing closer to a higher power, and new research reports that most Gen-Z teens are more interested in learning more about Jesus, often using the internet to find new commitments.

There is even some sign of revival in decidedly secular Europe, with 45% more people being baptized in historically anti-clerical France compared to last year. And, notes The Spectator, there’s a “boom biblique”: a rapid rise in sales of the Bible. More broadly, religious bookstores report a 20% percent increase in purchases since 2024. In Britain, of course, there is the “quiet revival,” with the church-attending share of the population rising to nearly 6 million in 2025, up from 3.7 million in 2018, with much of the energy seen among young men.

In modern sociology, conventional wisdom holds that religious people are generally less curious, less ambitious, and less intelligent than their nonbelieving peers. But this view is out of tune with current realities. On the contrary, a deep dive into the data shows that, over the last 15 years, religiously engaged people have become more likely to be well-educated, while atheists are less so. In the United States, religious groups outperform atheists and agnostics.

Overall, religious enthusiasm is most concentrated among middle-income professionals. An analysis of the 2022-2023 Cooperative Election Study, surveying nearly 85,000 Americans, found a positive correlation between education and weekly religious attendance. The rate of attendance rises from 23% among high school graduates to 30% for those with graduate degrees. This trend is supported by the sociologist Philip Schwadel’s research, which found that each additional year of education increases an American’s likelihood of attending religious services by 15%.

At the same time, the nature of worshippers has changed, and taken on increasingly conservative character. This has much to do with the rise of Gen Z, notes religious commentator Aaron Renn. Today’s young believers have arrived at faith amid a decidedly hostile environment for religion. They have, moreover, embraced political positions on race, immigration, and transgenderism that are vastly different from those held by older liberal Catholics as well as mainline Protestants.

Indeed, progressive ideology has proved catastrophic for houses of worship that embrace it. In 2019, more Protestant churches closed than opened in the United States, as mainstream Protestant denominations lost 5 million members in the past decade. Once dominant mainline Protestant churches now count barely 9% of Americans in their flocks, down from a peak of 50%. Progressive-dominated sects like the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, and the United Church of Christ are experiencing what one analyst described as “a bloodbath,” with membership down at least 30% since the Nineties.

In Canada, the once-dominant Anglicans have lost roughly three-quarters of their worshippers and could go extinct by 2040, according to some church leaders. Even in its ancestral home, the Church of England, fashionably liberal and dismissive of many of the concerns of its congregants about such problems as Islamic militancy or grooming gangs, has been in secular decline and may be surpassed by Islam within a decade. Liberal Catholicism is similarly graying and out of touch.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo: Israel Torres, via Pexels.

Haunted Facades and Fragile Trust: On Michael Vahrenwald’s The People’s Trust

Samuel J Abrams — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 13:07:18 -0400

A few weekends ago, my son and I attended the Institute for Contemporary Photography’s (ICP) annual Photobook Fair in New York City. It was a marvelous event, a gathering of publishers, artists, and enthusiasts who treat the photobook as an art form in its own right. The atmosphere was electric: tables overflowing with new releases, photographers standing by to talk about their projects, and visitors lingering over books with reverence. My son darted between tables, pointing out covers that caught his eye, while I moved more slowly, taking in the range.

Then one book stopped me. On its cover was a familiar but uncanny sight: a stone façade with Corinthian columns, once the face of a bank, now branded with the cheap vinyl banners of a “Famous Brands Fashion Outlet.” The building’s solidity had not disappeared - the columns still stood, the stone was still heavy - but its meaning had changed. Above it, an elevated train track threw the façade into shadow, literally overshadowing its former grandeur.

This was Michael Vahrenwald’s The People’s Trust, a collection of photographs of America’s former banks. The book’s premise is deceptively simple: to show us the architectural shells of financial institutions, many now abandoned, reoccupied, or awkwardly repurposed. Yet the effect is profound. These façades were designed to embody permanence, to project trust in stone. Now they survive their institutions, standing as masks whose promises no longer persuade but whose presence still haunts the street.

The photographs are accompanied by an essay from Wolfgang Scheppe, whose text gives intellectual depth to the images. Where Vahrenwald is calm, frontal, and almost forensic, Scheppe is historical and urgent. He insists that façades are rhetoric. They are not neutral shells, but instruments of persuasion, built to mask fragility, to project stability, to convince depositors that abstract financial systems were as durable as marble columns. Together, text and image reveal façades not simply as ruins but as witnesses: to ambition, collapse, and uneasy transformation.

Façades as Masks

American banks, Scheppe argues, adopted the same strategy. From the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth, banks covered themselves in neoclassical dress. Doric columns, heavy entablatures, and carved pediments did not merely decorate; they persuaded. They made finance visible as stone, masking volatility with marble. To deposit one’s savings was to believe in the mask.

The cover photograph of The People’s Trust captures this perfectly. The mask is still intact, the columns still dignified. But the “Fashion Outlet” banners mock that dignity, and the elevated train above throws the entire edifice into shadow. The building continues to perform, but the play has changed.

The Scenery of Stability

Scheppe calls this architecture the “scenery of stability.” Banks repeated neoclassical formulas because repetition itself created reassurance. A columned façade in a small Midwestern town mirrored one in New York, Baltimore, Boston, or Philadelphia, offering the comfort of familiarity. Stability had to be staged to be believed.

Vahrenwald photographs these façades square-on, stripped of angles and shadows, denying us easy drama. The images are clinical, but this neutrality makes their absurdities visible.
One photograph shows a monumental Art Deco bank entrance, its geometric details still intact. Yet within its vast frame sits a lone ATM kiosk, absurdly small and provisional. Grandeur has shrunk into banality, the performance of permanence reduced to a machine spitting receipts.

Another image depicts a modest neoclassical branch crowned by a neon sign spelling “Latino” in cheerful red and green. The stone façade still strains toward gravitas, but the neon overwrites it with improvisation. The new sign does not erase the old rhetoric of stability; it perches atop it, turning dignity into irony.

Elsewhere, a foggy photograph shows the carved inscription “Dollar Savings Bank” barely legible through mist. Here permanence appears spectral, as though even stone is evaporating.

And in yet another, a pillared façade now advertises a pharmacy. The columns still assert monumentality, but their function has shifted from finance to prescriptions. The scenery of stability has become the scenery of improvisation.

These images are not nostalgic, nor are they ruin porn. They are documents of survival and estrangement. The façades are not gone, but their meanings have migrated.

Absolutism and After

Scheppe presses the argument further. By the mid-twentieth century, façades had become absolutist rhetoric. Banks built monumental structures not simply to reassure but to dominate visually. These were not just neighborhood branches; they were architectural propaganda for finance itself.

Yet this absolutism contained its undoing. As finance globalized, digitized, and became more abstract, façades grew untethered from reality. Trust no longer resided in marble. It resided in algorithms and electronic transfers. Stone, however monumental, could no longer persuade.

Vahrenwald photographs what remains after that break. Façades that once embodied permanence are now abandoned, repurposed, or absurdly rebranded. Their rhetoric lingers, but hollowed. They endure, but their authority is gone.

A Sequence of Images

The power of The People’s Trust lies not just in individual images but in their sequence. Vahrenwald moves us from dignity mocked (the cover, with its “Fashion Outlet” banners), to dignity shrunk (the ATM kiosk swallowed in stone), to dignity overwritten (the neon “Latino” sign), to dignity ghosted (the mist-shrouded Dollar Savings Bank), to dignity repurposed (the pharmacy behind classical columns).

Seen together, the sequence mirrors the erosion of civic trust itself. Stability is not destroyed in a single act; it frays, is mocked, is overwritten, is forgotten, is rebranded. The façades narrate the slow drama of confidence lost.

Civic Stakes

This is where the project transcends art into civic reflection. The façades are not just architecture; they are barometers of trust. When banks were built with stone columns, they declared themselves permanent parts of civic life. They echoed the courthouses, libraries, and post offices of the same era; institutions built to embody continuity.

Today, those institutions are frayed. Confidence in banks, government, media, and even higher education has cratered. Poll after poll shows Americans doubting institutions that once bound communities together. The façades in Vahrenwald’s book become visual allegories for that decline. They remind us that civic trust, like stone, can weather storms but not remain unscarred.

This is why the book resonated so deeply with me at the Photobook Fair, and why it spoke to my son as well. For him, these façades do not automatically command respect. To a younger generation, permanence is suspect. Authority must be earned, not assumed. Walking home, we pointed out façades on nearby buildings, noticing how many bore the scars of changed use. Where I once saw permanence, he saw improvisation. His view was not cynical but realistic: permanence is always provisional.

What Replaces Façades?

The question, of course, is what comes next. If banks once staged trust in stone, what institutions build our scenery of stability today? Do we still construct anything that embodies civic permanence?

Perhaps our equivalents are digital: data centers, server farms, algorithmic systems that process transactions invisibly. But these architectures inspire no confidence; they are hidden, anonymous, placeless. Or perhaps permanence has migrated to other monumental forms: stadiums, luxury condos, corporate headquarters that dominate skylines but embody private wealth rather than public trust.

This is why The People’s Trust matters. It reminds us that we once tried to materialize permanence, however imperfectly, in public architecture. It asks whether we still have the capacity to do so or whether our façades today are nothing more than glass towers and logos, stripped of any civic ambition.

Listening to Stone

The People’s Trust is more than a photobook. It is a dialogue between Vahrenwald’s steady images and Scheppe’s probing essay, a meditation on the rhetoric of permanence and the fragility of trust.

The façades in these pages are not ruins, nor are they unbroken monuments. They linger in between: dignified, absurd, stubborn, haunted. They remind us that institutions may falter, but stone endures, whispering of what once was promised.

That is why the book caught my eye so sharply at ICP, and why it has stayed with me since. The cover image condenses the paradox: columns that endure, signage that mocks, permanence shadowed by circulation. It is both comic and tragic, resilient and absurd.

To notice façades again is to see our civic life differently. To listen to them is to hear the fragile, persistent language of trust; always provisional, always in need of renewal.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: composite of book cover and interior page.

Climate Cult Fantasy and Duplicity Precede COP30

Paul Driessen — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Cheeky claims about causes and solutions for an illusory climate crisis must be challenged

The 30th Conference Of Parties on climate change (COP30) will promote its climate, energy and economic fantasies and demands November 10–21 in Belém, Brazil. Some 70,000 grifter scientists, activists, politicians and journalists (plus observers) will attend.

Despite pre-summit hype and proclamations of hope, the summiteers are nervous.

Increasing evidence demonstrates that claims of a planetary crisis are rooted in meaningless computer models and fearmongering, not in actual science, data or fact.

More voters worldwide are rejecting and rebelling against Net Zero/anti-fossil-fuel policies that have raised energy costs, destroyed jobs and industries, and crushed hopes and living standards.

Even the poorest US state (Mississippi) now boasts a higher GDP per capita than climate-obsessed Britain, where the average household price of electricity is US$0.35 per kilowatt hour (likely to rise to $0.55/kWh by 2027) – compared to a 17.5¢ US average and 13.5¢ in Mississippi.

UK industries now pay the world’s highest electricity prices – 27% more than equally obsessed Germany – and conservative/alternative political parties in both countries are surging in popularity against the entrenched interests that imposed these destructive, job-killing, unsustainable policies.

The United States economy is outpacing Europe’s largely because the Trump Administration has re-embraced abundant, reliable, affordable fuels, petrochemicals and electricity, while Britain, Germany and most of Europe refuse to drill or frack for oil and gas or retreat from their unattainable climate pledges.

Trump agencies have slashed subsidies, favoritism and environmental fast-tracks for wind and solar projects … and clawed back billions of dollars that the Biden Administration had given to “green energy” and “climate justice” groups during its last weeks in office.

President Trump again withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement, may not let US representatives participate in COP30, and is unlikely to allow US taxpayer money to flow into UN slush funds for climate “reparations,” “resilience” or “losses and damages.”

Mr. Trump also excoriated Net Zero policies before the UN General Assembly, calling them a “green scam” concocted by “stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success.” UN member states chastened by the Russia-Ukraine war, growing dependence on Russian gas and Chinese minerals and wind turbines, and their own economic demise were hard-pressed to disagree. Developing countries also paid attention.

Meanwhile, the Net-Zero Banking Alliance – beloved by eco-imperialists for opposing and preventing financing for fossil fuel projects in Africa and around the world – has ceased all operations, following a mass exodus by its US, Canadian, British and Swiss bank members.

“The 2.1 billion humans who suffer in abject energy poverty” and families of “the 16.5 million loved ones” who died from “indoor air pollution during the 5-1/2 years the Alliance was working” can now breathe sighs of relief, said energy realist and human rights campaigner Ryan Zorn.

The EU Parliament agreed to roll back multiple environmentalist mandates and regulations on businesses, in what Politico calls an “emerging rightward rupture that is reshaping European policymaking.”

Read the rest of this piece at Heartland Institute.

Photo: courtesy the author.

The Latest On Metro Areas and Educational Attainment

Pete Saunders — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Back at the beginning of this century, there was a lot of discussion on the rise of the creative or knowledge economy as being at the forefront of future of American economic prosperity. We all heard about how technology made us vastly more productive, and industry sectors across the board took advantage. Of course, the creative or knowledge economy was driven by the coastal metros that had distinct advantages in developing, producing and attracting the talent needed.

Fast forward 25 years. Today, it’s widely accepted that this transformation has taken place. In fact, two things have happened since 2000: 1) the creative economy has expanded beyond its coastal roots to other parts of the country; and 2) the expansion, and the economic disruption it engendered, gave rise to the political and cultural backlash we’ve experienced over the last ten years, with the rise of the MAGA movement and Donald Trump as a political figure.

I’d argue that the changes over the last ten years have taken our attention away from looking at how our knowledge-driven economy is still transforming; we’ve been caught up in nonstop news cycles of head-spinning news and disinformation, pandemic and recovery, and pitched cultural battles. But even as this continues, I think it still matters that we accept the transformation that’s taking place and look at how metro economies continue to restructure themselves to benefit from it.

In other words, we may not have the economy we all want, but we have the economy we have. Let’s take a look at metros that are making meaningful gains at strengthening the economies they have.

With that in mind I did an analysis of changes in educational attainment for the nation’s 55 largest metro areas (those with more than one million residents) between 2020-2023. I grabbed U.S. Census American Community Survey data to see which metros were making strides in developing, producing and attracting the educated talent still needed to succeed in today’s economy. For now I’m simply focusing on the change in the number of people aged 25 or more in metro areas with a bachelor's degree or advanced/professional degree during the 2020-2023 period. I know it’s a short timeframe, but I selected it because I wanted to minimize the impact of the pandemic on the numbers. Also, I considered including changes in metro area GDP or personal income in the analysis, to confirm correlations between educational attainment and economic productivity, but decided to do just one thing at a time.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Jens Schott Knudsen via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Gavin Newsom's American Dystopia

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 20:28:38 -0400

‘President Gavin Newsom met today in Carmel, California with the representatives of the “Ten” – a consortium of giant tech and finance firms who control most of America’s business assets. Facing a challenge from front-running New York senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is pushing for a radical redistribution of wealth and property, Newsom has struck a deal with the oligarchs. He has imposed a universal basic income to head off a mounting populist revolt.

Some have called it a second Magna Carta – an accommodation between state and oligarchy. Others see the outlines of a new feudalism, or a technocratic fascism, rather than anything resembling liberal democracy.’

Implausible? Hardly. At a time when a handful of firms now dominate industries from tech to entertainment and media, and incomes for all but the wealthy are stagnating or falling, ever fewer see the system as working for them. According to Edelman, a strong majority in 22 countries now believe capitalism does more harm than good.

In the US, rising inequality and fear of downward mobility are fuelling support for state expansion and redistribution. Most under-40s favour socialism. Worse for the oligarchs, a majority of young people also favour limiting higher incomes. A new radical politics is incubating in cities like Oakland, Minneapolis, Seattle, Los Angeles and, most obviously, New York – its likely next mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is a self-described ‘democratic socialist’.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) could accelerate this trend, cutting even white-collar and graduate employment while boosting the profits, as well as the market share, of a handful of giant firms. Like Mickey Mouse, as the sorcerer’s apprentice in Fantasia, techies have unleashed forces that threaten many in their own class of educated professionals. Some 82 per cent of millennials believe AI will damage their careers. The displacement could soon reach 30 per cent of the workforce. Skilled professionals in finance, media and the arts could be undercut as AI trains itself on their past work. As one Marxist writer put it, no power on Earth is more fearsome than ‘the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vice of low-paying jobs’.

AI evangelists like McKinsey insist it will enrich society. But such elite enthusiasm for the future is not widely shared. A Wall Street Journal-NORC poll recently found that only 25 per cent of Americans believe they have a good chance of improving their living standards – the lowest proportion since 1987. Almost 70 per cent say the ‘American dream’ – that if you work hard, you can get ahead – no longer holds true. Among Democrats, pessimism is overwhelming, with 90 per cent holding a negative view of the future, almost twice as many as Republicans.

Having foreseen these trends, much of the Silicon Valley elite sees the mass of humanity, some of whom already eschew the value of hard work, as increasingly redundant. As they automate everything – even companionship – the oligarchical elites rarely mention mobility or opportunity. Researcher Gregory Ferenstein, who interviewed 147 digital founders, found little interest in expanding property ownership or entrepreneurship. The preference is for redistribution sufficient for the masses to subsist while the elites luxuriate. At the same time, unions are suppressed by ‘progressive’ firms like Apple and Amazon, and responsibility for workers’ incomes is shifted to the state.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo: Fabrice Florin, via Flickr, under CC 4.0 License.

August Transit Ridership Falls Below 78% of 2019

Randal OToole — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Due to the shutdown of non-essential government services, web sites for the Census Bureau, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, and other statistical agencies all say that postings of new data will be delayed. But someone at the Federal Transit Administration must think that ridership data is an essential service, for they posted August data on Monday. I didn’t notice it until too late for yesterday’s Antiplanner, but here they are.

Note: August driving data will be posted at Antiplanner whenever it becomes available, or at least when I notice it becomes available.

The numbers show that transit carried 77.8 percent as many riders in August 2025 as in the same month in 2019. That’s the lowest since August 2024. Admittedly, transit data for Las Vegas are missing, but that will add only about 0.1 percent to the total. No other major urban area appears to be missing data.

Missing data were a bigger issue in July, when ridership numbers were missing for at least a dozen major urban areas. Those numbers are in the August report and I have updated the chart above to include them, increasing ridership (as a share of 2019) from 76.6 percent to 78.7 percent. To be complete, I updated the chart going back to the beginning of 2024; numbers before that were unchanged.

The chart shows that transit ridership has pretty much leveled off at around 80 percent of pre-pandemic numbers. Not counting February, 2024, which had a leap day (adjusted for in the chart), monthly ridership first reached 80 percent of 2019 numbers in October, 2024, and hasn’t ascended to 81 percent since then. It has declined for the last two months.

Although transit agencies are still providing 94 percent as much service as they did in 2019 (and more than 100 percent as much as in 2024), many agencies are complaining that they’ve run out of federal COVID relief funds and will have to cut service. In fact, this is a self-inflicted problem: instead of using relief funds to maintain their operations, most agencies used them to give employees large pay increases and especially to increase pay in the executive suites.

Yet worries about a fiscal cliff are leading to much hand-wringing on the part of many people who would never themselves ride transit. “A shortfall in federal transportation funding is threatening bus and metro systems across the country,” says PBS. Say what? There is plenty of federal transportation funding. The problem is a shortfall in riders.

Planetizen blames the problem on the theory that, “for labor-intensive industries, operating costs over time will rise faster than inflation.” But transit’s problem is much more severe: transit’s worker productivity (the number of riders carried per worker) has declined dramatically, mainly because agencies have hired new workers even when not justified by increased ridership. Since agencies get most of their funds from taxpayers, not riders, they haven’t been concerned about constraining labor costs.

Bloomberg is at least willing to ask if we should “let public transit die?” But that’s not really the question. The question should be: should we let transit subsidies die, or at least shrink? Rather than seriously consider such a question, Bloomberg simply asserts that there are unacceptable “economic and social costs of cutting service.”

Most of those economic and social costs are simply imaginary. Supposedly, transit uses space more efficiently than cars. Certainly that’s true in the case of subway systems, especially in New York City. Elsewhere, not so much. A bus with six passengers (the average number carried in 2023) occupies as much space as several cars. Besides, space is not in short supply in most American cities unless it has been made so artificially using such tools as urban-growth boundaries.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Photo: chart courtesy The Antiplanner.

The Two Americas

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The late Charlie Kirk may have been best known for his conservative politics, but those politics also resonated with traditional values, religious faith, and family life — one side of a critical divide in our society. Life and value choices, even more than ideology, increasingly define how people vote, what they believe, and where they live.

For years, the United States has been evolving into two different countries. One is dominated by often childless, urban renters, many of them college graduates or poor minorities. This America is concentrated in core cities and college towns.

The other America exists in an almost parallel universe—largely suburban, exurban, small town, and rural — but where family, faith, and children constitute the common threads of everyday life. This America was receptive to Kirk’s traditionalist message.

The first America has become a haven for a significant number of postmodernist progressives who largely reject the customary pillars of society such as religion, marriage, and family. Theirs is not a rebellion of peasants and laborers, as occurred from medieval times and on through the early progressive era, but instead an uprising mostly of the urban professional classes. Rather than the mundane concerns of traditional liberals or “sewer socialists,” the postmodernists focus more on environmental catastrophism, gender identity, and radical racial politics. AEI scholar Sam Abrams and I have been following this political trend for years, but new polling shows that it has intensified, particularly among younger single women.

Though economic pressures might eventually make the postmodernists’ cause a broader movement, today’s radical activists seem to respond more to their own inner cultural angst and troubled psychology. Modern progressivism sells best among people who reject traditional notions about families and gender. Today over 28 percent of all Gen Z women, notes Gallup, identify as LGBTQ — more than twice the rate for millennial women and almost three times that for Gen Z men. Over 5 percent of U.S. high school students struggle with gender identity, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some have learned their gender politics at the feet of their teachers. As one USA Today correspondent wrote in 2017, “the number of women’s and gender studies degrees in the United States has increased by more than 300 percent since 1990, and in 2015, there were more than 2,000 degrees conferred.” Even certain nominally Catholic colleges reject the idea of the sex binary and encourage students to select their own pronouns.

Within this population, political anxiety can lead to violence, or at least acceptance of violence. Nearly 38 percent of respondents and over half of progressives would see the assassination of Donald Trump as “justified,” notes one study. It’s a mindset that predates the Kirk assassination. Many progressives — notably women — celebrated Luigi Mangione’s alleged premeditated murder of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson. In California, a particularly strident center of such views, there’s even a pending proposition on health-care reform named after Mangione.

The postmodernists tend to be highly secular and are likely beneficiaries of America’s long-running “unchurching.” At least until recently, the country has witnessed a steady decline in Christian identification—most notably among mainstream Protestants. Only about 46 percent of Americans born in the 1990s currently identify as Christian. Younger Americans may still embrace of the notion of a spiritual power, but they are leaving religious institutions at a rate four times that of their counterparts three decades ago; almost 40 percent of people aged 18–29 have no religious affiliation.

Read the rest of this piece at: City Journal.

Photo: composite of images by RDNE Stock project and Jackson Howes.

Brussels is Capital of Many Institutions But Can Grow With Knowledge Jobs

Nima Sanandaji — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Brussels is the de facto capital of the European Union, the capital of Belgium, the capital of NATO and hosts many international diplomats and UN offices. Yet the share of adults in knowledge intensive regions is lower than in many other European capital regions. Instead, the Brabant Wallon region to the south with a smaller population is amongst the top ten most knowledge intensive in Europe.

While the European Union has no official capital region, Brussels is its de facto capital. This region hosts the European Commission, Council of the European Union, and European Council. Together with Strasbourg in France it is also the seat of the European Parliament. NATO additionally has its headquarters in Brussels, it is a hub for international diplomats and hosts several UN offices.

Due to having so many high-level institutions, Brussels is the seat of many head offices, with 30,000 employed in head office & management. The region also has 18,600 who work in programming, and 11,700 employees in engineering & architecture. In total, 12.5 percent of the adults in Brussels are employed in highly knowledge intensive jobs. This is the finding of the geography of Europe’s brain business jobs index, produced by the European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform (ECEPR), with support from Nordic Capital.

Brussels is behind in share of adults employed in highly knowledge-intensive jobs compared to the leading Central European capital regions of Bratislava, Prague, Budapest and Copenhagen where 21.5-24.5 percent of adults are employed in brain business jobs. The Nordic capital regions of Copenhagen and Stockholm have a higher share of engineers and scientists amongst the population but also higher taxes which crowd out private sector activity, they have 19.2-20.8 percents of adults in brain business jobs.

On seventh position in the ranking of 240 European regions ranks the Belgian province of Brabant Wallon, just south of Brussels. Here 19.2 percent of the adults are employed in brain business jobs. Brussels itself is behind the Brabant Wallon region, and also has lower share of brain business jobs compared to some other Western European capital regions such as Dublin (17.8 percent), Berlin (15.9 percent), Amsterdam (15.3 percent), Paris (14.4 percent), and even slightly behind Vienna (12.6 percent).

There are in total 23 regions in Europe which have a higher share of adults in brain business jobs, than the capital region of Brussels.

While Brussels certainly is a knowledge intensive region, it is mainly a region of bureaucracy which does not fully utilize the benefits of being the seat of so much high-level decision making. Instead, the Brabant Wallon region is the seat of knowledge-intensive jobs. In this region the number of adults is one third of that compared to the capital region just north. Yet there are 21,300 jobs combined in pharmaceuticals and in research & development, some 8,400 in head offices & management and 7,700 in programming.

This is a good example of how capital regions, by having high costs, local regulatory bureaucracy that limits growth of housing and commercial properties, can crowd out private business growth to neighboring regions. Brussels seems so focused on international bodies of politics, that it crowd out private sector development.

Brussels in short has a lot of potentials, but needs to aim to become as expert dense as its southern neighbor Brabant Wallon. If it managed to, then Brussels would evolve to Europe’s knowledge intensive capital region. Regulatory and tax reforms in Belgium, as well as regulatory and growth initiatives regionally, are needed for Brussels to realize its potential.

Currently there are few regions of the world that are more important for global politics than Brussels. The next step is to also develop into Europe’s brain business jobs hub, with inspiration from the success of Brabant Wallon to the south.

Brain Business Jobs per Capita
Brabant Wallon	19.2%
Brussels	12.5%
Vlaams-Brabant	10.5%
Antwerpen	9.0%
Oost-Vlaanderen	7.1%
West-Vlaanderen	5.5%
Limburg (BE)	5.2%
Liège	3.9%
Namur	3.7%
Hainaut	2.8%
Luxembourg (BE)	1.3%

Author: Nima Sanandaji, Director European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform.

Lead image: chart by the author.

The Far-Left are Destroying Portland and Seattle, and Voters Couldn't Care Less

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 20:28:38 -0400

As recently as a decade ago, Portland was widely seen as a model American city, a European wannabe built around dense apartments, mass transit and every conceivable form of political correctness. Now it is the latest place to be invaded by Donald Trump’s National Guard, and of course the political establishment is screaming its head off.

Yet whatever you think of Trump’s over-the-top move, Portland probably had it coming. No city better epitomises the increasingly radical spirit of the progressive Left. This has devastated its once vibrant downtown; liberal long-time Congressman for the area, Earl Blumenauer, has suggested that parts of it look “like Dresden in World War II”. In 2023, downtown Portland suffered the highest office vacancy rate in the nation.

This year that honour goes to Seattle, which suffers from many of the same pathologies. These cities are increasingly out of sync with the more conservative mood in the country.

During the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, parts of Seattle shut down for weeks and spawned something of a mini-Havana near its downtown. Even ardent Seattle boosters lament the large numbers of empty stores, business flight and stubbornly high office-vacancy rates, with valuations declining by as much as 40 per cent. Crime may be down, but it remains elevated.

Attempts to harass federal immigration agents (these are “sanctuary cities”) by Antifa activists are a key reason behind Trump’s moves in Portland and could also be employed in Seattle, another major Antifa centre. The ICE raids are fodder for violent groups like Antifa, deemed by the extremists as justification to attack law enforcement.

Despite its Marxist aura, Antifa is no workers’ organisation. It is largely a decentralised, web-oriented millennial movement wedded to a Bolshevik worldview that seeks no compromise with the “enemy”. In that, they are much like their Weimar German antecedents in the early 1930s (Antifaschistische Aktion), who attacked not just Nazis but also liberals and social democrats, branding their enemies “social fascists”.

Under the Biden regime, Antifa and its breed of violent radicals were rarely challenged. Even now, the centre-Left has seemed reluctant to denounce Antifa’s violent tactics and attacks on opponents. Some, like NPR political correspondent Mara Liasson, have appeared to compare Antifa with the soldiers who stormed the Normandy beaches to defeat the Nazis. Others have appeared to deny that the likes of Portland or Seattle have a problem. Just recently, New York Times veteran Nicholas Kristof blithely dismissed Trumpian assertions about Portland devolving into a crime-cursed dystopia, sneering that “‘hell’ does not serve Pinot Noir this good”.

To be sure, Trump’s typically hyperbolic move to name Antifa “terrorists” may be overkill and worthy of challenge. But the designation was embraced by those who have suffered their attacks, including the head of the Seattle police union.

Politically, one would expect that cities like Portland and Seattle, still reeling from the violence of 2020, would be hostile to those who coddle the perpetrators. But remarkably it appears that the far-Left is on the rise again in both places. In Portland, the Democratic Socialists of America are a rising force and now control at least three of the city’s 12 council seats, with much of the rest firmly, if less rabidly, on the Left.

The new race to run Seattle, a place which suffered some of the most destructive effects of the 2020’s “summer of love”, as its clueless then-mayor called it, appears likely to see the moderates elected in the aftermath of 2020 replaced with a new slate of far-Left politicians. Mayoral frontrunner Katie Wilson embraces a similar platform as New York’s Zohran Mamdani.

Demographics drive this seemingly irrational trend. Once attractive to middle class professionals, Portland and Seattle are now losing domestic migrants, both to other states and their far peripheries. Recent analysis of Census Bureau data has shown people shifting to smaller labour markets like Spokane, Centralia and Shelton in Washington, as well as Bend, Albany, and Grants Pass in Oregon.

Those left behind tend to be single, childless hipsters who stay in the Northwest for its remarkable natural attractions as well as ideological reasons. This constituency is roiling urban politics from Mandami’s New York to Minneapolis, Oakland and Los Angeles, where far-Left politics also appears to be gaining power.

The Left-ward march of Northwestern politics, unsurprisingly, is leaving these former boomtowns in poor economic condition. Portland has lost its drive to have a big tech presence and suffers from weak job growth. Longtime tech superstar Seattle over the last few years has seen its two dominant tech firms, Amazon and Microsoft, lay off some 46,000 workers. It is being overtaken in terms of growth by sunbelt cities like Austin, Nashville, Charleston and Dallas. The decline has forced the closures of hundreds of restaurants and shops.

To be sure, the Northwest maintains great assets, from its natural beauty and hydro-electric power to its strong engineering base. It has the ingredients for a future resurgence. But this is not likely to happen until the crazed progressive tide is turned back.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Photo: A demonstrator holds a sign during protests against ICE in Portland Credit: John Rudoff.

Transmission Unplugged

Robert Bryce — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 20:28:38 -0400

In May, Michael Polsky, the CEO of Chicago-based Invenergy, appeared on Fox Business to announce that his company was awarding some $1.7 billion in contracts to build the long-delayed Grain Belt Express transmission project. In an interview with Maria Bartiromo, Polsky claimed the 780-mile high-voltage project would "create 22,000 jobs along the way between transmission and generation.”

Polsky (net worth: $2.5 billion) went on to serve up more spin than Rafael Nadal. He claimed the project “will be unleashing American energy. We will be creating energy independence in a way.”

Here’s a tip: whenever you hear anyone — particularly a hype man like Polsky — promise energy independence, grab your wallet.

Invenergy, which is majority owned by the Canadian firm CDPQ, also claims the project will result in “$52 billion in energy cost savings” and that the transmission project is “private sector-led and market-driven.” Polsky, who recently announced a $75 million gift to the World Resources Institute so it can help “accelerate...the global energy transition,” concluded his CNBC appearance by saying his company needs “clarity” from the Trump administration. “We need to know what the rules” will be.

Polsky neglected to mention that if his project gets built, it will saddle ratepayers with about $500 million in costs to integrate the power it will be delivering into grids on the eastern end of the line. In other words, Invenergy wants to build a merchant high-voltage transmission line and force its way onto the US electric grid. But it doesn’t want to pay any of the costs that its project will impose on the system. Furthermore, Grain Belt Express has faced fierce opposition in Missouri for more than a decade. Earlier this month, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced a civil investigation into Invenergy for its “misleading claims and a track record of dishonesty” about the project.

But I digress.

Last week, the Department of Energy gave Polsky some high-amperage clarity from the Trump administration when it canceled a $4.9 billion loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express that the agency’s Loan Programs Office made last November in the waning days of the Biden administration.

The DOE said it killed the loan deal “to ensure more responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources.”

The cancellation of the DOE’s guarantee will almost certainly kill the Grain Belt Express. (Invenergy claims it still plans to build the project. I wouldn’t bet on that.) The demise of that project is only one of many high-voltage projects around the world that are being slowed or stopped by local opposition, soaring costs, and permitting delays.

Read the rest of this piece at: Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: The Grain Belt Express project aimed to carry wind-generated electricity from Kansas to the Indiana-Illinois border. Map credit: grainbeltexpress.com

LA Failures Are Killing Its Tourism Industry

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 12:12:21 -0400

For much of the past century, Los Angeles has been a magnet for migrants seeking a better life and tourists eager to see Hollywood up close. Yet the picture now looks very different. Since the pandemic, record numbers of residents have moved either to elsewhere in California or to the Sun Belt states. By 2060, according to the state’s Department of Finance, LA, whose current population is a little under 4 million, is expected to shed well over a million people.

Now, even the star-gazing tourists are opting out. Long among the nation’s three most-visited cities, according to reporting from this week Los Angeles has suffered an 8% annual fall in international tourism, while overall tourism revenue has dropped from $30 billion to $15 billion. The reasons for this downward trend are clear: repeated incidents of random violence and vandalism, fear of fires in a city ill-equipped to prevent them, and an urban environment that is increasingly shoddy and ill-kept.

The city’s most enviable asset, Hollywood, now appears to be in inexorable decline, with an estimated 42,000 job losses over the past two years. Particularly hard hit are the craft guilds, the largely unionised workers who proliferated in the Valley Village neighbourhood. More work headed overseas and to lower-cost domestic locales such as New Orleans and Atlanta. The spectre of artificial intelligence looms over the crafts, and potentially even the movies, if the example of Tilly Norwood is anything to go by.

In the context of falling tourism, the loss of over 10,000 hospitality jobs in 2024 could be devastating. To make matters even more challenging, the city has passed a $30 minimum wage for hospitality workers, prompting hoteliers to consider offloading their properties.

City leaders, meanwhile, feel they can lure back tourists by investing in projects such as a new $2.6 billion expansion of the Convention Center and an elaborate transit system, yet LA’s yawning budget deficit leaves it ill-equipped for pointless largesse. Downtown areas are littered with homeless encampments, as well as buildings abandoned because of arson. Empty and uncompleted luxury high-rises in the city have become notorious for their extensive graffiti, while tourist boards have failed to harness the potential of vibrant neighbourhoods such as Boyle Heights and Silver Lake

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo: Soly Moses, via Pexels.

Theodore Waddell and the Urgency of the Real

Samuel J Abrams — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 20:28:38 -0400

In an art world drunk on theory and spectacle, a Montana painter insists on snow, cattle, and weather—and on the discipline of seeing.

Most contemporary art has forgotten what a cow looks like. While the NEA funds performance artists smearing themselves with chocolate and major museums celebrate bananas duct-taped to walls, actual beauty goes unsubsidized. The art world has become a massive grift populated by many who mistake cleverness for wisdom and shock for significance.

I first saw Theodore Waddell's work at the Denver Art Museum nearly a decade ago, when Motherwell's Angus (1994) stopped me cold in a crowded gallery: six feet of Montana winter. From across the room, it read as a landscape with black cattle scattered across endless snow. Up close, it turned into paint; thick impasto ridged like frozen mud, marks more New York School than frontier postcard. For twenty minutes, maybe longer, the image toggled between abstraction and reality, between serious painting and the actual West.

At the time, it struck me as a remarkable painting. Today, it feels prophetic. In the midst of a culture war where elites peddle theory while working people navigate reality, Waddell's canvases carry urgent resonance. While MFA programs churn out theory-soaked graduates who can't draw but can certainly critique "systems of oppression," Waddell learned through calloused hands and frozen mornings about the realities he paints. Waddell’s canvasses remind us what we're losing, that some things remain stubbornly themselves. A cow is a cow. Snow is cold. Land stretches farther than ideology allows. As America's institutions drift into curated unreality and grievance performance, Waddell's work insists on the actual.

Paint with Weight

The black cattle in Motherwell's Angus aren't delicately drawn; they're dragged into being – dark incisions in a white field. The snow isn't white; it's lavender and blue sliding into gray, the color of cold that kills calves if you're careless. The tools are blunt - roofing brushes and masonry trowels that leave paint ridged like frozen mud. This is paint with consequences, paint that knows physics.

In winter canvases, the horizon drops out. Your eye keeps moving, as cattle move across frozen pasture; no destination, only persistence. These aren't animals as symbols or metaphors; they're 1,200-pound realities that need feeding when it's twenty below. Summer paintings reverse the energy: animals flicker like calligraphic marks against gold grounds, thin paint that reads as heat shimmer. Works such as Gallatin Angus and Gannett Angus reduce the animal to gesture without losing weight - abstraction that never forgets the actual.

Scale turns looking into weather. Stand before one of Waddell's twenty-foot canvases and you lose the privilege of distance. The painting surrounds you the way a blizzard does—peripheral vision fills with white, depth collapses, orientation falters. You're not observing a storm; you're in it. This is what ranchers know that museum-goers forget: weather isn't a view, it's an environment. It doesn't care about your theories or your timeline. At this scale, Waddell's paint becomes atmospheric pressure, his brushstrokes become wind. The gallery walls disappear. You're standing in Montana winter, where survival means reading the actual sky, not the weather app.

In Ruby Valley Angus (2009, 10×18 feet), held by the Booth Western Art Museum, animals blur into pattern, resolve into bodies, then blur again. You don't look at it so much as exist inside it; like actual weather, not climate abstractions peddled by activists on the far left. This is weather as ranchers know it: immediate, consequential, immune to politics.

Recent works let cattle recede into shadow while weather dominates. You can feel the barometer fall. These paintings know that nature isn't a progressive ally but an indifferent force that rewards competence and punishes wishful thinking. The sites -Monida, Lima, Beaverhead - aren't props; they're real places Waddell knows through work, not theory. Places where virtue-signaling won't keep you warm.

Against the Myth-Makers

Western art long carried the shadow of Charles Russell and Frederic Remington: the West as heroic stage, cowboys as actors. Even today, much "Western art" markets nostalgia to tourists: sunset silhouettes and noble horsemen, the West as conservative kitsch. Waddell rejects both this sentimentality and its opposite, the academy's hatred of beauty. He paints the West as workplace, where competence matters and reality doesn't care about your pronouns.

Compare him with many contemporary artists who seem to rely on their trust-funds to never hold real jobs, whose "practice" consists of writing grant applications and diversity statements. Waddell earned tenure at the University of Montana, then walked away in 1976 to ranch near Molt. He chose cattle over committees, seasons over semesters, and painted realities over fictions.

Our major institutions, meanwhile, celebrate destruction. At the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Jordan Wolfson's VR piece Real Violence forced viewers to watch a man beaten with a bat while Hebrew prayers played and all being subsidized by tax dollars. Critics praised its "urgency" and "confrontation with complicity." But it connected us only to nihilism, teaching nothing except that museums have abandoned their duty to preserve and transmit beauty. Waddell connects us to endurance, to the dignity of creatures surviving winter, to the sublime found not in theory but in temperature.

"I Can't Paint Anything I Can't See"

Waddell is blunt: "Montana has caused me to be who I am, and I love this place. I have to be where I am to paint what I paint." And more radically: "I can't paint anything I can't see."

In an age that treats truth as negotiable and expertise as oppression, that ethic of direct observation feels almost revolutionary. While academics insist reality is "socially constructed" and biology is a "spectrum," Waddell paints only what he knows through experience, not ideology. His statement - "I can't paint anything I can't see"- stands as a rebuke to every artist statement filled with jargon about "interrogating liminal spaces" or "disrupting heteronormative paradigms."

Out at the ranch and in the prairie, "you can see for 150 miles in any direction.” No mediation, no curation, just land and sky. Sculpture, his earlier mode, made no sense at that scale; he returned to painting cows. Not as symbols of environmental destruction or capitalist exploitation, but as cows. Imagine that.

He painted at 3:30 a.m. before chores; during calving season, at 2 a.m. after checking the herd. This is how actual knowledge is earned—through repetition, observation, and exhaustion, not through graduate seminars on "decolonizing the visual field." In 1987, a blizzard hit after calving. Waddell pulled dead calves from drifts as mothers stood over them, then painted for sixteen hours; not death as concept, but death as fact, persistence as necessity. "The understanding of death," he wrote, "brings about a feeling of wonderfulness and appreciation of life." No trigger warnings needed, no content advisories required. Just truth.

Evolution Through Constancy

Waddell stepped away from ranching in the 1990s, but the knowledge stayed in the paint. Early works were thick, almost sculptural - paint as material fact. Later, he layered oil with wax, letting marks show through, history built into surface. The paintings grew atmospheric, but never decorative, never mere aesthetic experience divorced from labor. Unlike government-subsidized "art" that requires wall text to explain why it matters, Waddell's work actually sells; beauty finds buyers, ideology needs bureaucrats.

This constancy, cattle and weather for half a century, resists both market novelty and academic fashion. While younger artists frantically rebrand themselves with each news cycle, mining Twitter for the next thing to be upset about, Waddell keeps painting the same subjects. Not from poverty of imagination but from its opposite: the knowledge that reality is inexhaustible, that each season reveals something new to those who actually look rather than theorize.

Recognition has come mostly west of the Rockies, in places where people still work with their hands: exhibitions at Denver and Eiteljorg, a 2015 Montana Governor's Arts Award. The coastal elites barely notice, for they are too busy celebrating "interventions" and "disruptions" to recognize actual achievement. Their loss, our clarity. While they chase the next trend, Waddell compounds wisdom like interest, each painting building on forty years of looking.

The Ethics of Looking

Stand before a Waddell painting long enough and something shifts. The clever ironies you brought with you - the ones that get you through museum galleries full of approved provocations - fall away. You're left with something harder: the demand to actually see. Not interpret, not decode, not "interrogate." Just see.

This is what Motherwell meant by ethical consciousness in painting; not virtue signaling on canvas but the discipline of sustained attention to what is. Motherwell believed that every mark carries moral weight, that abstraction itself could be an act of truth-telling. Waddell understood this. His cattle aren't just subjects; they're ethical commitments to seeing what's actually there. As such, Waddell doesn't paint his politics or his feelings about cattle. He paints cattle, in specific light, in particular weather. The ethics emerge from that restraint, that refusal to make the world carry his meanings.

Try explaining this at a meeting like Davos, where oligarchs with homes on three continents preach sustainability between private jet flights. They'd call Waddell's commitment to one place "narrow." But fifty years in Montana has taught him what they'll never learn from their conference panels: wisdom comes from limitation. You see past surfaces only by staying put, by watching the same field through sixty seasons until you understand that abstraction without encounter is just sophisticated lying. Simone Weil knew this: rootedness as the soul's deepest need, the one our credentialed classes can't even recognize anymore.

Watch people at galleries now, the quick phone snap, the audio guide summary, the performative appreciation. Waddell's paintings refuse this consumption. They demand what Roger Scruton called the education of the gaze: stand close enough to see paint ridged like dried mud, step back until cattle emerge from marks, wait through your boredom until the painting starts working on you instead of you working on it. In our culture of hot takes and viral moments, this is almost an act of rebellion; art that won't be reduced to content, that insists on being encountered rather than consumed.

Culture, Somewhere

Waddell's paintings rebuke placelessness. As David Goodhart argues, society splits between mobile "Anywheres" who mistake credentials for competence and rooted "Somewheres" who know what things actually cost. Waddell is firmly Somewhere. His canvases insist that place matters, that the universal flows from the particular, not from sociology departments or DEI workshops.

Here his work converges with Wendell Berry: modern life unsettles us from land and consequence. Global elites who lecture about "sustainability" from private jets have never sustained anything real, not a ranch, not a herd, not a community, not a marriage. Waddell has. For fifty years. Through Republican and Democrat administrations, through cattle prices rising and falling, through art world fashions that would make his work "problematic" (too white, too male, too focused on extraction industries), he kept painting what he saw.

This persistence itself becomes political. In an age of fluid everything - gender, borders, currency- Waddell's commitment to depicting actual cattle in actual weather reads as resistance. Not conscious resistance, nothing so programmatic, but the deeper resistance of someone who knows what he knows and won't pretend otherwise.

The Urgency of Now

That is why Waddell matters now. We live drowning in abstractions—digital, ideological, bureaucratic. We're told reality is constructed, merit is privilege, biology is optional, and math is racist. Universities that once taught Newton now teach nonsense. Museums that once preserved beauty now platform narcissism. Waddell's canvases refuse all of it. They remind us: snow is cold, cattle are heavy, winter kills if you're careless. No committee can vote otherwise. No theory makes it untrue.

The culture war will not be won in faculty lounges or on Twitter. It will be won in the recovery of sight; the ability to see what is there and to name it without apology. Every Waddell painting is a small victory against the long march through the institutions. They are proof that truth, beauty, and the American spirit survive wherever someone still chooses earned knowledge over credentialed ignorance, wherever someone values what works over what sounds smart at parties.

Look at his paintings. Look hard. Stand close enough to see the paint ridged like frozen mud. Step back to see cattle emerge from marks. Give them time - the time we no longer give anything, the time that reveals rather than consumes. The museums may be captured, the galleries corrupt, the NEA a welfare program for regime propagandists, but reality remains undefeated.

In an age drunk on abstraction and spectacle, what could be more radical than insisting that a cow is a cow, that Montana is Montana, and that both are enough? What could be more necessary than someone who refuses to paint anything he cannot see?

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: Theodore Waddell with "Wood River Angus" via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The Masses and the Market

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Western liberalism is in decline, challenged by rising authoritarianism on the Right and the Left. Since January 2025, Trumpism is generally perceived as the greater threat by American liberals, but the political power of the progressive Left is moving beyond its traditional redoubts in the media and academe. And for the time being, liberals are struggling to mount a coherent response.

By “liberals,” I mean those—from the Reaganite Right to the social-democratic Left—who value the basic institutions of Western society: electoral government, a free press and academy, an independent judiciary, separation of church and state, private property, and a market-based economy with a safety net. The progressive Left, on the other hand, sees these institutions as obstacles to be overcome or destroyed in pursuit of a revolutionary agenda designed to completely reorder American society. As former The New York Times opinion writer Pamela Paul argued in 2023:

In an increasingly prominent version of the progressive vision, capitalism isn’t something to be regulated or balanced, but is itself the problem. White supremacy doesn’t describe an extremist fringe of racists and antisemites, but is instead the inherent character of the nation.

And once one gives up on capitalism and the virtues of liberal institutions, assaults on equality under the law, basic property rights, and free speech inevitably follow. As two German conservatives have noted, today’s progressives embrace a “political ideology that questions the foundations of pluralism and democracy,” and favour a post-national “politics of identity and minority entitlements.”

This assault on capitalism and markets may yet be critical to the ascendency of progressives as a growing share of popular opinion shifts in their favour. According to a 2020 Edelman report, “56 percent of respondents [in 28 countries surveyed] agreed that capitalism ‘is doing more harm than good in its current form.’” More than four-in-five worry about job loss, particularly from automation. Rising inequality and a more general fear of downward mobility have boosted US support for expanded government and greater income redistribution, with a majority under forty strongly in favour of limiting wealth.

This is no longer just a call for reforming the existing system. Even in the US, a majority of young people are embracing socialism as a superior economic model. A recent survey of Europe found that “fewer than six in ten young Europeans believe that democracy is the best form of government. One in five say they would support authoritarian rule under certain circumstances. And only 6% believe their political system functions well.” According to political scientist Yascha Mounk, “signs of democratic deconsolidation in the United States and many other liberal democracies are now similar to those in Venezuela before its crisis.”

The Old Left and Progressive Violence

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) favour a mass-mobilisation model of politics, inspired by historical examples like that of Chile’s Salvador Allende, and this approach seems to be bearing electoral fruit. In New York, DSA member Zohran Mamdani looks likely to win the race for New York City’s mayoralty in November. Mamdani is the latest in a line of likeminded figures to rise to power in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Oakland (possibly soon to be joined by Minneapolis and Seattle). These politicians reject liberalism and capitalism in favour of a massive tax on the “aristocracy,” intrusive rent controls, city-owned grocery stores, free transit, and radically higher minimum wages, policies that are likely to deepen rather than alleviate America’s economic woes.

The late Michael Harrington, who was something of a personal mentor to me, co-founded the DSA. He embraced the reformist, fiercely anti-communist socialism pioneered in the last century by the likes of Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein in Germany. In the US, this tradition informed the politics of men like Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas as well as a group of pragmatic mayors known as “sewer socialists,” most notably in Milwaukee. Mike’s true passion was helping the poor and the working class—a reflection of his early embrace of Catholic values (as a young man, he joined the Catholic Worker movement, although he later became an atheist).

But modern progressivism, the late historian Fred Siegel noted, is a more elitist movement, the roots of which can be traced to Bismarckian Germany and Wilsonian America. Progressives hope to see a “revolt against the masses,” and in the West, arguments justifying elite control have come naturally to radical intellectuals: “Who else but intellectuals,” asked sociologist C. Wright Mills, “are capable of discerning the role in history of explicit history-making decisions?” Such hierarchical notions would probably not have appealed to politicians of the postwar Left like Clement Attlee, Australia’s John Curtin, New York’s Fiorello LaGuardia, California’s Pat Brown, or Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey.

Mamdani and the growing coterie of elected progressives are not looking to replicate the democratic socialism of Harrington and Debs. Nor are they looking to replicate the Swedish social-democratic model, which draws its wealth from a vibrant market economy. The models embraced by the DSA and other progressives celebrate the kind of Third World Marxist radicalism once epitomised by Kwame Nkrumah (from whom Mamdani got his middle name), Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and Hugo Chavez. Today, this manifests in support for Palestinian terrorism and increasingly naked expressions of raw antisemitism that would have horrified Mike Harrington were he alive to see it.

As support for liberalism wanes, support for political violence is being normalised on the Left and the Right, particularly among the young. A recent report found that nearly a third of all Americans—and 56 percent of those left-of-centre—told pollsters that the assassination of President Donald Trump would be at least “somewhat justified.” Almost as many feel the same way about Elon Musk. A growing online culture has made a folk hero of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of assassinating healthcare executive Brian Thompson.

In this Bolshevik worldview, no compromise with the enemy is possible, a grave reversal of normal politics that is also increasingly evident on large parts of the MAGA Right. Remarkably, many progressives and even mainstream Democrats have been reluctant to denounce the violence of modern street-fighting groups like Antifa. NPR’s political correspondent Mara Liasson even compared them to the troops who stormed the Normandy beaches.

Radicalism and the Family

Many of today’s activists seem to be driven by their own cultural anxieties and psychological needs rather than by economic concerns, and a driver of their radicalisation may be the decline of the family. When Hubert Humphrey and Harold Wilson represented the Left during the 1960s, Western democracies were still overwhelmingly familial societies. Although Marx and—particularly—Engels denounced marriage and monogamy, most moderate socialists embraced policies that encouraged family formation. They certainly never adopted anything like the anti-family doctrines are now prevalent in many feminist, gay, and transgender activist circles.

Back then, the liberal and social-democratic goal was not to undermine the family, but to provide opportunities for advancement and security into old age. Without a strong family structure, individuals can feel adrift, which makes them susceptible to manipulation and more likely to turn to the state for aid and comfort. As traditional familialism has diminished, a generation has arisen that is isolated and disconnected. A new Institute for Family Studies analysis found that, in 2020, one-in-six women remained childless by the time they reached the end of their childbearing years, up from one-in-ten in 1980. The percentage of “child-free” women is expected to rise. It is now estimated that 45 percent of women aged between 25 and 44 will be childless by 2030.

There are around 44 million single women in the US today. This makes them a larger voting bloc than African-Americans (34.4 million), labour-union members (14.3 million), or college students (more than 19 million). Progressivism across the West—including in the UK—is led by a radical vanguard of single women and non-binary men. In Canada, according to a 2020 poll, women favoured the Liberals by two-to-one while men slightly went to the Conservatives.

This shift has occurred as growing numbers of people on the Left reject traditional notions of family and gender. A 2023 Gallup poll found that over 28 percent of Gen Z women identify as LGBTQ+, more than twice the rate for Millennials and almost three times the figure for Gen Z men. Progressive women are also increasingly unlikely to have offspring. According to a recent NBC poll, women aged 18–29 who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 rank having children twelfth out of thirteen elements in their “personal definition of success.” Male Donald Trump voters in the same age cohort rank having children first. Unsurprisingly, the fertility gap between progressives and traditionalists, particularly religious traditionalists, has continued to widen since this trend began in the 1980s.

Economic Drivers

Cultural shifts may have propelled the progressive movement forward, but economics could prove to be its ticket to power. Growing pessimism, particularly among the young, provides opportunities for disruptive illiberal politics on both the Right and the Left.

A new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll found that the percentage of Americans who believe they have a good chance of improving their standard of living fell to 25 percent, a record low in surveys dating back to 1987. Nearly seventy percent of respondents said they no longer believe in the American Dream or never did—the highest level in nearly fifteen years of surveys. Negativity was particularly pronounced among Democrats, with ninety percent holding a negative view of the future, almost twice as much as Republicans.
Since the 1970s, disillusioned working-class voters have moved to the Right, and since the mid-2010s, they have increasingly embraced the populist New Right in the US and Europe. Their beef is not with property rights or markets but with firms that offshore jobs and import unskilled migrants. Remarkably, the Ohio Teamsters even endorsed Vivek Ramaswamy in that state’s gubernatorial race. As a result, the progressive base now mostly consists of educated professionals who have traditionally been protected from the economic dislocation produced by liberal trade and immigration policies.

But in the emerging AI-driven economy, many college graduates now face the prospect of a difficult future. Around forty percent of recent US graduates are underemployed and working in jobs where their college credentials are essentially worthless. Rates of homeownership among the young are far lower than in the past. Many younger workers face a world in which “good” jobs are disappearing, even as they try to cope with rising rents and exorbitant tuition fees. Artificial intelligence is likely to accelerate this trend, with educated workers making up a growing percentage of the long-term unemployed.

Eighty-two percent of Millennials fear that AI will reduce their wages. According to McKinsey, at least twelve million Americans will be forced to find new work by 2030.
Even the “geeks” are finding themselves vulnerable to what economists call “skills-based technological change.” Tech firms like Salesforce, Meta, Amazon, and Lyft have announced major cutbacks in their white-collar workforce, and these positions are unlikely to return. Within months of AI’s emergence, freelance work in software declined markedly, along with pay. And this displacement will not be restricted to Silicon Valley. Many skilled professionals, including those in finance and even in “creative jobs”—actors, writers, and journalists—could be threatened by AI. Over time, we may find that no power on Earth is more fearsome than what one Marxist scholar called “the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vise of low-paying jobs and obscene amounts of debt.”

The Impact of Climate Catastrophism

The progressive embrace of climate catastrophism reinforces the new class dynamic. As Ruy Teixeira and others have pointed out, many working- and middle-class people do not embrace a climate policy targeting the blue-collar “carbon economy.” In an article for the environmentalist magazine Breakthrough Journal, Ted Nordhaus and Alex Smith argue that climate policies have created “a class politics in which egalitarian elites, in the academy, NGOs, philanthropy, and the knowledge economy, wage economic war against the working classes.”

In places where the green regime has been ascendent—California, Canada, Australia, Greece, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom—climate policies tend to create high levels of “energy poverty.” They also raise the spectre of economic displacement. In Europe, these dynamics produced the 2019 gilets jaunes protests in France, and demonstrations by Dutch farmers and their Spanish, Polish, and Italian counterparts. Some beleaguered governments are now rethinking these policies as studies demonstrate a pattern of exaggeration on the issue in the media and academia.

But despite its negative economic impact, climate catastrophism does seem to appeal to a large youthful constituency. More than half of young people, terrified by erroneous predictions of a massive sea rise and future famines, believe that the planet is doomed. Many of them believe the solution to the climate issue lies in rapid deindustrialisation, which is already immiserating working-class communities in Europe, and in “degrowth,” a weird form of autarkic feudalism that requires people to live in small places, eat a meagre diet, and surrender any chance of upward mobility.

This kind of thing may win adherents in universities, college towns, and upper-income urban areas, but it is unlikely to be a political success elsewhere. The adherence to these draconian climate polices—along with an attachment to things like transgenderism, race quotas, and open borders—has prevented progressives from winning mass support so far, but that may be changing as those disenchanted with liberalism and MAGA look for a political alternative.

How Liberalism Can Return

The success of liberalism arose from a widespread belief that an imperfect system would nevertheless benefit most of the people most of the time. Today, however, Pew has found that the vast majority of parents—over seventy percent in the US—are pessimistic about the financial future of their offspring. Last year, less than ten percent of Americans under thirty thought that the country was headed in a good direction.

An economy where growth works for the affluent while everyone else sees rising inequality and downward mobility creates ideal conditions for a redistributive politics, particularly among the young at both ends of the political spectrum. Some Trumpists are now speaking about “MAGA communism” and even Trump is embracing state capitalism. For the time being, the rise of illiberal politics seems to be inexorable, and it is the illiberal wing of the Left that is best-placed to benefit if and when the illiberal Right falters in power. In the likely event of a Mamdani victory in New York, there are rumours that DSA-backed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may contest Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s Senate seat or even run for the White House. In a number of blue states, many Democrats in Congress and at the local level are being targeted for extinction by radicals in what could become a nasty internecine purge.

None of this is promising for the future of liberalism. The only way to slow or reverse this process lies in addressing the concerns of middle- and working-class citizens, who keep falling further behind even when the economy is strong. As in Weimar Germany, the key issue here is what historian Eric Weisz calls “the proletarianisation of the middle class.” Liberal institutions are unlikely to thrive when many people believe they are locked into a “postmodern subsistence economy.” Only the prospect of broad-base growth and greater opportunity can counter the authoritarian trend.

As Benjamin Friedman has argued, there’s a longstanding “connection between economic growth and social and political progress, not only financially but in terms of racial relations, family and support for environmental improvements.” The way to combat illiberalism is by creating conditions for a better future. We must make it easier for the young to rise, buy houses, start businesses, and raise families. If those avenues are all closed off, everyone will pay a heavy price, and the results won’t be pretty.

This piece first appeared at: Quillette.

Photo: Patrick Perkins, via Unsplash.

Bill McKibben's China Syndrome

Robert Bryce — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 17:13:32 -0400

Bill McKibben may be the highest-profile climate activist in America. For more than a decade, he has been campaigning against the hydrocarbon industry and proclaiming that the world doesn’t need — and shouldn’t use — coal, oil, and natural gas. He has also repeatedly claimed that the global economy can be fueled solely by wind and solar, if only there were sufficient political will to make that happen. He’s also declared that we should slash our use of coal, oil, and natural gas by a factor of 20, a move that would plunge the entire world into energy poverty.

I’ve known McKibben for a long time. I’ve debated him and debunked many of his claims. In 2023, I had him on the Power Hungry Podcast. I give him credit for his persistence and work ethic. As noted on his Amazon page, he’s written “more than 20 books.” And yes, he’s right: solar energy around the world is growing fast.

But the hard truth is that McKibben is an old-school huckster.

McKibben is equal parts P.T. Barnum, Amory Lovins, and The Boy Who Cried Wolf. He’s a constantly scolding climate catastrophist who blames the hydrocarbon sector for the impending doom he claims is now facing humanity. And he repeatedly praises the work of Mark Jacobson, the hyper-litigious Stanford professor who may be the most discredited academic in America.

McKibben’s latest book, Here Comes The Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization, provides another example of the hucksterism that has made him famous. It’s also another example of his rank dishonesty. The book is a 220-page love letter to America’s most formidable geopolitical rival: the People’s Republic of China. McKibben is effusive in his praise of China’s pursuit of EVs, batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines. But he blithely ignores China’s record as one of the world’s most notorious abusers of human rights. In particular, he makes only a passing mention of how dependent China’s solar sector is on the use of slavery in Xinjiang province, where numerous reports have determined that Uyghur Muslims are being enslaved to produce components for solar panels. Further, his book ignores the land-use conflicts over alt-energy that are raging all around the world. Finally, McKibben ignores the pesky problem of scale.

Read the rest of this piece at: Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: courtesy Robert Bryce.

Generation Z's New Vision for Faith and Opportunity

Aaron M. Renn — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Generation Z is America’s first post-Boomer generation.

My Generation X was enculturated into the Baby Boomers’ world. Thinking about the songs from my youth in the 1980s, it’s amazing how many of my favorites were literally about the Boomers, such as Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ‘69” or much of Bruce Springsteen’s oeuvre. Phil Collins was never more Boomer than when he sang, “My generation will put it right / We’re not just making promises / That we know, we’ll never keep.”

I long noticed that while I could easily have a conversation with people my Boomer parents’ age, there was always a disconnect when talking to those from my grandparents’ Greatest Generation. They were just culturally different. There was a cultural gap between us that wasn’t there with the Boomers.

The Millennials for their part were also often raised by Boomers. And they too seem very oriented around the Boomer world. Think about the way so many Millennial evangelicals are dedicated acolytes of Boomer or older leaders, or at least view them as their heroes. Collin Hansen wrote a book about Tim Keller and runs a center named after Keller. Matt Smethurst just wrote a another book about Tim Keller. Megan Basham is effusive in her praise for John MacArthur. William Wolfe wrote a piece for First Things calling on today’s leaders to, “Dare to be a James Dobson.”

Generation Z is the first generation fully free from the Boomer cultural grip.

For example, while speaking to someone who works for a major Christian non-profit, he observed that his younger staff were confused at the press over James Dobson’s recent death, because they didn’t know who he was. They’d never heard of him.

Gen Z is not wedded to these Boomer figures, may not even know who they are, and are certainly not concerned with any sensibilities around them.

Redeemed Zoomer, who was one of the guests on my podcast episode from yesterday, not only doesn’t lionize John MacArthur, he pointedly says that MacArthur was a Nestorian. (I’m not an expert on either MacArthur or Christology, but it does appear that he made statements about Mary that are similar to what the Nestorians said).

While he may not be entirely representative of his generation, Redeemed Zoomer is a great example of how many Gen Z people see the landscape of America very differently than previous generations. Rather than suggesting leaving for the most conservative evangelical denomination or church one can find, he advocates joining a mainline church and working for renewal within. He thinks that if enough people do this, the faithful will inherent these denominations. He calls this “Operation Reconquista,” and I interviewed him about it two years ago.

I’m not sold on the idea that his plan is feasible. But his thinking illustrates the way that Generation Z is taking a new look at a very changed landscape. Many Boomer conservative Christians endured bruising battles with liberals in these institutions, which they lost. This has shaped their thinking, and in turn that of the generations they raised or influenced.

Gen Z is arriving on the scene after mainline decline has reached a much more advanced point, and in which some of the older veterans of previous denominational wars are no longer around. They view these denominations an an opportunity zone.

Read the rest of this piece at Aaron Renn Substack.

Photo: screenshot from author's podcast interview.

How Blackstone Killed the Homeowner

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 16:29:44 -0400

Zombie foreclosures. They sound like the dullest disaster movie ever — but, in fact, represent the grim reality for a rising number of Americans. The theory is simple. First, giant real estate funds buy up properties, deliberately allowing them to deteriorate. That takes homes off the market, and drives up prices, especially when demand is so high and supply so persistently low.

The upshot? A bonanza for investors, with firms like Blackstone betting literally billions of dollars on buying up American homes, before renting them out to desperate tenants. And if 28% of US single family homes were sold to investors in Q1 2022, an 8% jump on the previous year, the trend is increasingly popular on the far side of the Atlantic too. Not content with dolling out mortgages, Lloyds Bank apparently has plans to become Britain’s biggest landlord.

Yet as large corporations gobble up a diminishing supply of houses, they pose an enormous threat to would-be homeowners, particularly those Millennials too young to have cashed in the boom of earlier decades. Combined with frequent complaints that these mega-landlords don’t maintain their new purchases — and signs that they’re keen to scoop up even more real estate — much of the Western world edges closer to genuine disaster territory, even if the antagonists are more feudal vampires than undead shamblers.

Housing now dominates political discourse right across the developed world. Among Americans, it now ranks second only to inflation as a leading economic worry. In my native California, almost 70% of residents are concerned about housing costs; in Britain, housing has risen to become one of the top issues for voters — well ahead of defence, security, poverty and crime. That’s hardly surprising: especially under the country’s inflexible NIMBY regime, projections suggest that nearly five million UK households will live in unaffordable accommodation by 2030.

And if the Anglosphere is especially bad in this respect, it’s hardly unique. Studies have found similar problems stalk the European and East Asian markets too, as prices rise far faster than household incomes or inflation. And if the OECD warns that living standards are bound to “stagnate or decline” in consequence, this is far more than a series of individual catastrophes for the families involved. Rather, the West’s housing crisis, so exacerbated by outfits like Blackstone, has terrifying implications for the maintenance of middle-class democracy.

Small landowners have been the bulwark of democracy for millennia. This was true in the early origins of Athens and Rome, and in the rise of the Dutch Republic during the 17th century, perhaps the first genuinely middle-class society in history. If, however, the rise of property ownership undermined the aristocracy and hastened the end of feudalism, the most dramatic changes came after the Second World War.

Servicemen returning home wanted something better than the dank Victorian apartments they’d inhabited before. Their dreams were embraced, and indeed realised, by a series of progressive governments, often on the Left but sometimes Christian Democratic. There are plenty of examples here: Harry Truman’s GI Bill and Clement Attlee’s welfare state are probably the two most famous, but Australia and Canada pursued similar policies too.

And if President Roosevelt was surely right when he proclaimed that a “nation of homeowners” is unconquerable, the postwar embrace of quality, affordable houses for all provided “the secret sauce” that made liberal capitalism palatable to working people. Throughout the Fifties and Sixties, that was self-evident for those thousands of working-class families that fled the slums of Brooklyn or Wapping, embracing instead a front lawn and back garden in Long Island or its Essex equivalent. “Was there ever such a stealthy social revolution as the rise of this semi-detached suburbia?” wondered the filmmaker John Boorman, recalling his childhood in a South London suburb.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo: Nick Bastian, via Flickr, CC 4.0 License.

Pause in the Rush: Rediscovering the Majesty of New York Through Mikko Takkunen's Lens

Samuel J Abrams — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 20:28:38 -0400

New York rarely stops moving. The rhythm of the subway, the honk of impatient horns, the relentless press of footsteps on concrete - the city demands motion. Most of us move through it in a blur, our attention fixed on the next destination, the next notification, the next task.

The result is a quiet tragedy: we stop seeing the city. Bridges, parks, ferries, squares, and many special spaces of gathering - the very things that knit our civic life together - become mere backdrops to our private routines. We rush past what was built for us and what we must care for.

That's why Mikko Takkunen's New York photo series feels like a revelation. The Finnish photographer and New York Times photo editor brings to the city the same eye that captured Hong Kong's hidden poetry. His images slow the city down. They strip away noise and distraction, showing New York not as a blur but as a series of deliberate, astonishing human creations. In doing so, they remind us that attention is the first act of stewardship.

We live at a time when images are everywhere- scrolling endlessly across our screens, popping up in our feeds, flashing past in seconds. We are bombarded with pictures designed to provoke or sell, but rarely to deepen. In this context, Takkunen's work feels almost radical. His photographs don't demand a quick reaction. They demand a pause. They ask us to look carefully, to ponder, to reassess what we think we know about the spaces we inhabit.

As philosopher Matthew Crawford argues in The World Beyond Your Head, attention is a form of agency. What we choose to notice shapes what we value, and what we value ultimately shapes our democracy. When we fail to notice our shared surroundings, when our eyes are perpetually turned inward or downward, we begin to lose the habits of care that civic life requires.

Takkunen's photographs push back against that erosion. They reawaken our capacity to see.

The Bridge as a Constellation

The Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge, known to most as the 59th Street Bridge, opened in 1909. It is an essential artery, carrying thousands of people and millions of stories every day. Its purpose is purely practical: to move bodies and goods between Manhattan and Queens. Over time, it has faded into the background, a piece of infrastructure so familiar that it becomes invisible.

For me, the bridge has always been more silhouette than structure. I've never walked it. I've ridden my bike across it, passed beneath it countless times on the FDR, glimpsed its towers while crossing in a cab, felt its presence without really seeing it. It has been a backdrop, not a subject—useful, dependable, helping me arrive at a particular destination, but rarely noticed.

Takkunen changes that.

In one of his most haunting photographs, the bridge all but disappears. The entire field is black: no river, no sky, no surrounding city. Out of that darkness, a thin thread of white lights traces the suspension cables, fragile and precise. At the top of each tower, a single red beacon flashes softly, guiding aircraft overhead.

And that's all. The steel, the stone, the massive physical weight of the bridge—gone.

What remains is pure outline, a constellation drawn by human hands. It is at once functional and transcendent. In Takkunen's frame, the bridge becomes a floating idea, a quiet testament to human ingenuity. It reveals what I have missed in my own motion: that even the most practical structures can hold beauty and wonder, if only we stop to see them.

This is more than an aesthetic insight. As urbanist Jane Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the physical design of a city shapes its social life. Bridges, parks, sidewalks, these are not just structures; they are stages for civic interaction. When we stop noticing them, we begin to neglect the relationships and responsibilities they sustain.

Takkunen's image of the Queensboro is a reminder that infrastructure is not neutral. It carries the weight of collective history and shared purpose and a city's ambition, poise, and vision. To see it is to begin to care for it.

Central Park and the Towers

Central Park tells a different story. It was never meant to fade into the background. Conceived by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in the mid-19th century, it was a radical civic experiment: a green commons carved out of urban chaos, open to all, free of charge, and designed to foster what Olmsted called "unconscious recreation."

When you stand in the park and look south, you see another kind of human ambition: the row of ultra-slender towers along 57th Street, the so-called "Billionaires' Row." These needle-like skyscrapers seem almost impossible, rising so high they appear to pierce the clouds. They are feats of engineering and symbols of global capital, inspiring both awe and unease.

In many ways, they are the anti-Olmsted: private wealth manifested in public view.
Takkunen's images capture this tension. In his photographs, the towers shimmer like glass blades while the park below sprawls organic and irregular. The juxtaposition is striking: the deliberate geometry of human construction set against the natural forms of trees, rocks, and rolling lawns.

Looking at these images, I am reminded of Robert Putnam's work on social capital. In Bowling Alone, Putnam argues that shared public spaces and institutions are essential for building trust across differences. Central Park was designed for precisely this purpose. The towers, by contrast, symbolize a kind of vertical segregation, spaces that only a few will ever enter, looming over a park that belongs to everyone.

Takkunen doesn't moralize. He doesn't need to. His photographs let the viewer sit with the tension: nature and ambition, public and private, the city we inherited and the city we are still building.

The Ferry and Rediscovering Wonder

One of Takkunen's photographs shows an East River Ferry gliding across dark water, an outline of passengers in tow, the city's lights scattered behind it like reflections on glass.

I take that ferry regularly. Most days, I barely look up and take even a moment to ponder the environment around me. My attention is on the tasks of the day ahead, but rarely on the river beneath my feet, the skyline around me, or even the color of the sky.
My son sees it differently.

When he rides the ferry, he runs straight to the rail, his face lit by the glow of the city. He leans into the wind, breathes in the salt air, and watches the towers and bridges slip past as if they were miracles. For him, every crossing is an adventure, a moment of pure discovery and wonder.

When I saw Takkunen's photograph, it stopped me cold. It captured my son's experience, not mine- the magic I'd forgotten. Through his lens, the ferry became more than transit. It was a reminder that this city is not just a place to move through, but a place to marvel at and be inspired by.

The Power of Photography in an Age of Overload

Photography has a power that words alone cannot match. It can make us pause, reconsider, and see the world anew. This is especially valuable now, in an age of relentless digital saturation.

Social media bombards us with images designed to shock or sell. As media critic Neil Postman warned decades ago, when everything becomes entertainment, we risk losing our ability to think seriously about what we see. Today, as Zeynep Tufekci has argued, our feeds are flooded with visual noise: outrage, envy, distraction, endless stimulation.

Most of these images pass through us without leaving a trace. They are consumed and discarded in seconds, forgotten almost as quickly as they appear.

Takkunen's work offers the opposite. His photographs are not quick hits of dopamine. They are sustained invitations to ponder. They slow our perception. They train us to look again at the world around us, to notice its textures, its patterns, its moral weight.

As Matthew Crawford writes, attention is the foundation of freedom. To see clearly is to choose freely. By helping us see, Takkunen helps us reclaim a measure of agency in a culture that often seeks to hijack it.

Seeing as Civic Duty

This is not just an aesthetic gift. It's a civic one.

When we stop noticing the city, we stop caring for it. A bridge becomes "just a bridge." A park becomes "just a park." A ferry becomes "just a ride." But these things are not inevitable. They exist because generations before us built them, maintained them, and believed they were worth the effort. They endure because we choose to preserve them.

Edmund Burke famously argued that society is a partnership between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born. Our public spaces embody that partnership. The Queensboro Bridge was built by people long gone, for the sake of people not yet born. Central Park was imagined as a democratic experiment to serve generations who had not yet arrived. Even the ferry routes we take for granted are the result of choices made decades ago about what kind of city we wanted to be.

My son's wonder is natural. Mine must be chosen.

If we want to pass on a city worthy of him, we must teach him - and ourselves - to pause, to notice, to appreciate. Seeing is the first step toward belonging. Belonging is the first step toward stewardship.

As Yuval Levin, my colleague at AEI, often reminds us, institutions thrive when we recognize them not as platforms for personal expression but as frameworks of shared responsibility. The same is true of the city itself. It is not a stage set for our individual performances. It is a common inheritance, and its survival depends on our willingness to see and to serve.

A Call to Look Again

The next time I pass beneath the Queensboro, glance south from Central Park, or step aboard the ferry, I will try to see as Takkunen sees and pause, if only for a moment, to let this remarkable built world move me. For when we lose sight of what we’ve created, we risk losing it altogether.

Photography alone cannot save a city. But it can remind us why cities matter. It can reveal how beauty and function, past and future, private ambition and public good are bound together in the places we share.

In a culture of constant motion and shallow seeing, that reminder becomes a quiet act of resistance and an essential one. By looking closely, we not only rediscover our surroundings, we remember that cities are living communities, held together by care and attention. Past generations built with this sense of stewardship, and it falls to us to do the same: to see clearly, build wisely, and protect what we’ve been entrusted to preserve.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: 59th Street Bridge, aka The Queensboro Bridge by Fraser Mummery via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

China's Scramble for Africa

Joel Kotkin and Bheki Mahlobo — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The West is about to get its comeuppance – if it does not wake up. The balance of the world economy is shifting decisively to what was once seen as the Third World, a shift led by China and, to a lesser extent, India. It is a dynamic that China hopes to exploit in order to replace America as the new global rule-maker. One region in particular is at the centre of China’s economic and geopolitical plans: Africa.

The rise of Africa, which now has 11 of the world’s 20 fastest-growing economies, is only just beginning. And China’s strategy is clearly focussed on harvesting Africa’s growing wealth, while sidelining the US and the diminished former European powers. In 2023, the EU’s then foreign-affairs and security-policy chief, Josep Borrell, warned that, ‘Little by little, we are losing Africa’.

Africa’s importance begins with its unparalleled resource endowments, particularly in critical minerals. These are used to power everything from fighter jets to smartphones. The Democratic Republic of Congo alone controls over 70 per cent of the world’s cobalt reserves – a critical mineral used in electric-vehicle batteries and jet engines. South Africa boasts over 80 per cent of global platinum and 70 per cent of the world’s chromium, minerals without which we couldn’t make jewellery, car exhausts or most industrial applications.

These strategic materials provide the foundation for modern technological civilisation, and China has systematically secured preferential access through long-term partnerships that exclude American and other Western competitors. Beyond critical minerals, the continent also has substantial deposits of oil, natural gas, diamonds and gold. Nigeria and Angola are among the top 20 oil-producing nations, while Mozambique’s liquefied-natural-gas reserves promise to reshape global energy markets. China has invested heavily in all three countries. In recent years, it has also upped its investment in oil-rich Libya, a major producer once aligned with Europe.

African agriculture is also strategically important. With 60 per cent of the world’s uncultivated arable land, Africa represents the world’s last major frontier for agricultural expansion. Perennially facing ‘food-security concerns’, China has recognised this potential, and is investing heavily in African agricultural infrastructure and securing long-term food-supply agreements. This will reduce China’s dependence on American agricultural exports while positioning itself as Africa’s primary food-security partner.

Most importantly, Africa is producing the one critical asset that the world economy needs most: people. While China’s population is projected to decline, falling to 1940s levels by 2100, Africa’s population is heading in the opposite direction. It is projected to double to 2.5 billion by 2050, with the median age remaining below 25 throughout this period. Critically, Africa is predicted to be home to 25 per cent of all working-age adults by 2050.

Given Africa’s vast resources, agricultural potential and population growth, one would think Western capitalists and their governments might be seeking to invest in Africa. But instead, the African economy has acquired a distinctly Chinese cast, with little competition from the West. Beijing’s approach to Africa represents the most comprehensive foreign-engagement strategy on the continent since European colonialism.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Bheki Mahlobo is an economist at Cronje Private Clients. He specialises in economic and financial markets research as well as political trend analysis.

Photo: President Cyril Ramaphosa and President Xi Jinping Co-Chair the China - Africa Leaders Round Table; GovernmentZA, via Flickr, CC 4.0 License.

Rauschenberg’s New York and the Problem of Seeing Only Surfaces

Samuel J Abrams — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 20:28:38 -0400

New York has always been a city of images. From the iconic skyline to the endless stream of photos on Instagram, what we see of the city often stands apart from what it truly is. In our digital age, this divide has only deepened. Much of New York today is curated and consumed as surface - restaurants staged for TikTok, neighborhoods branded like products, moments captured and filtered rather than lived. The regular sharing of photos in DUMBO of the Manhattan Bridge framed by old warehouses and a cobblestone street exemplifies this trend.

This present, mediated, and distorted version of New York came to mind as I walked through the Museum of the City of New York’s new exhibition, Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Pictures from the Real World. The show celebrates one of the most influential American artists of the 20th century, best known for collapsing the boundaries between art and everyday life. Rauschenberg famously sought to bring the “real world” into his work, incorporating humble materials, discarded objects, and photographs into his paintings and sculptures.

The exhibition, part of the Rauschenberg Centennial, is organized in three sections: Early Photographs, In + Out City Limits, and Photography in Painting. The museum describes Rauschenberg’s vision as one of capturing “the signs and symbols of human culture, even in humble or discarded remnants of the city.” It is an evocative framing and a revealing one.

For all the talk of “the real world,” what struck me most was its absence. Rauschenberg’s New York is a city of surfaces. His camera captures objects and patterns with undeniable skill, but the people who inhabit those spaces are missing. In photograph after photograph, we see signs but not speech, architecture but not civic purpose, remnants but not renewal.

Fragments Without Wholes

The first section of the show features Rauschenberg’s early experiments as a student at Black Mountain College, where he explored framing, light and shadow, and the flattening of the picture plane.” These images are witty and visually striking.

One particularly memorable photograph captures a classical statue of Venus surrounded by discount-store signage, kitsch figurines, and a small sign reading “SALE.” The juxtaposition of timeless beauty with disposable consumer culture is funny, biting, and clever. Another image focuses on a pile of framed paintings stacked haphazardly in a shop window, reducing them to shapes and reflections rather than works of art.

These photographs anticipate the irony-saturated world we live in now, where the high and the low, the sacred and the profane, collide endlessly online. Rauschenberg saw decades before Instagram how easily culture could be fragmented and remixed.

But this very strength is also a limitation. These early works excel at noticing surfaces, yet they offer little sense of what lies beneath. They revel in ambiguity without guiding us toward understanding. The viewer is left to appreciate the clash of images, but not the lives and communities those images represent.

The Urban Survey

The exhibition’s centerpiece, In + Out City Limits, extends this approach to the entire city. Created between 1979 and 1981, the series documents the physical remnants of New York at a time of profound upheaval. These photographs are filled with weathered storefronts, broken signage, and architectural fragments.

One image depicts the façade of a diner. Its neon sign is half-broken, the letters dark, while shuttered metal grates seal off the entrance. Below, trash bags are piled neatly on the curb. The composition is beautiful in its starkness; the textures of brick, metal, and plastic rendered almost abstract.

Another photograph zooms in on the stately columns of a civic building near Astor Place. The image emphasizes symmetry and shadow, stripping away context until the institution becomes pure pattern.

These works are striking, but they are also unsettling. They document a city in decline without showing the people living through it. We do not meet the workers who once staffed that diner, the congregants who gathered in that civic hall, or the neighborhood residents navigating decay and renewal. The photographs turn lived experience into aesthetic object.
This aestheticization of decline mirrors a broader cultural mood. In late-1970s New York, economic crisis and social unrest were visible on every block. By focusing on remnants rather than relationships, Rauschenberg recorded the city’s struggles but offered no vision for its renewal.

From Art to Algorithm

The final section of the exhibition shows how Rauschenberg combined his photographs with painting and other media, creating complex, layered works. By reversing, resizing, and juxtaposing images, he demonstrated the mutability of meaning itself. A single photograph could be endlessly recontextualized and transformed.

In the 1960s and 1970s, this was radical. Today, it feels prophetic. We now live in a world where every image can be manipulated, cropped, filtered, and recirculated at lightning speed. What was once avant-garde has become our daily experience.

Our phones are full of Rauschenbergian collages: fragments of news, entertainment, advertising, and personal updates competing for attention. This endless remixing has consequences. When everything is provisional and ironic, it becomes harder to sustain shared narratives. Civic life depends on more than fragments. It requires institutions, rituals, and ideals that endure.

This is where Rauschenberg’s vision, for all its brilliance, falters. By privileging surface over substance, his art reflects a cultural tendency to treat cities and the people within them as aesthetic material rather than moral and civic realities.

The Civic Counterpoint

Edward Glaeser, the Harvard economist and urbanist, has written in Triumph of the City that the strength that comes from human interaction is the very magic of cities. My own work has echoed and confirmed this sentiment finding that cities thrive when they are built on dense networks of institutions: families, faith communities, schools, local businesses, civic associations. These are the places where trust is built and responsibility learned.

When these institutions are weak, cities become brittle. The physical landscape may remain, but the human connections that give it meaning erode. A diner is not just a building; it is a gathering place. A civic hall is not merely columns and stone; it is a stage for collective decision-making and celebration.

Rauschenberg’s photographs show us what happens when those connections fray. His images are full of remnants and signs, but the communities they once served are absent. This is not just an artistic choice. It is a reflection of a real civic crisis; a crisis that continues today.

New York’s Present Tense

These questions are not abstract. In New York today, battles over public space are really battles over belonging. Debates about housing policy, transit, and policing are at their core debates about how we share the city and how we see one another.

Walk through neighborhoods from Queens to the Bronx and you’ll see scenes that could be straight out of In + Out City Limits: vacant storefronts, faded signage, striking juxtapositions of old and new. These surfaces tell part of the story. But the real challenge lies in the invisible: the strength or weakness of the relationships beneath them.

Consider the fight over a local park. To some, it is simply a space to be programmed or redeveloped. To others, it is a living institution, shaped by years of block parties, youth sports, and informal gatherings. The policy debate is about zoning and funding. The civic debate is about belonging and meaning.

Rauschenberg’s art helps us see the fragments. Our task is to connect them into a whole.

A Call to Rebuild

The exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York is a fitting tribute to Rauschenberg’s creativity and influence. But it is also, unintentionally, a mirror of our current predicament. We live amid surfaces - online and offline - that can dazzle but also distract.

If we are to renew our cities, we must move beyond surfaces. That means investing not only in infrastructure and development but in the relationships and institutions that make physical spaces matter. It means strengthening families, supporting local businesses, empowering community organizations, and fostering civic education.

Rauschenberg captured the fragments of a city. It is up to us to assemble them into a living whole. A thriving New York does not need more curated images. It needs the messy, vital work of neighbors meeting, building, and belonging.

As I left the exhibition and stepped back into the streets, I saw many of the same elements Rauschenberg photographed decades ago: broken signs, fading paint, architectural details caught in late afternoon light. But I also saw people: families walking home from school, small business owners sweeping sidewalks, friends gathered on stoops.

The real world is not just what we see. It is what we build, together

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: New York City; Robert Rauschenberg 1981 Gelatin silver print, © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

Mass Migration Creating a New Anti-western Underclass

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The “anti-colonial” Left wants Western societies to atone for their “original sins”. From its historical role in slavery, imperialism and the extirpation of native peoples to class oppression, progressives argue that the West should pay penance today by allowing unrestricted mass immigration from the most wretched parts of the earth.

Yet mass migration has aroused increasingly fierce opposition throughout the West. This is true not only in the United States, but in other countries with a long history of successful migration, including the UK, the Netherlands and France. Moves to reduce migration are already in place in Italy, and seem set to be imposed soon in Germany, whose welfare state is creaking under the burden. Canada, once seen as one of the countries most positive about mass migration, has also announced plans for major reductions.

There are good, rational reasons for this. Voters who oppose mass migration, including illegal migration, are regularly accused of being racist and xenophobic, or of prioritising their own selfish needs at the expense of economic progress. Yet if you actually look at what is occurring on the ground level, it’s not clear how much of the current wave of mass migration has been economically positive.

To be sure, legal immigrants from Europe and Asia enriched Western societies in the past. Guest workers from southern Europe and Turkey, for example, played a critical role in solving a labour shortage that threatened the European economic resurgence during the postwar recovery. And today, both libertarian conservatives and progressives still see essentially unregulated migration – upwards of 10 million since 2021 during Joe Biden’s inept reign – as the only means of addressing the West’s demographic implosion and of reviving its stagnating economies.

But these views increasingly reflect nostalgia rather than reality. Countries that have experienced the greatest infusions of new migrants – particularly people applying for asylum or simply hiding from the law – have not tended to benefit economically.

Take the UK and Canada. Canada’s rate of immigration has been among the world’s highest. In the year to June 2023, the country of 40 million, received more than a million immigrants, accounting for almost all of the country’s population growth. But despite the influx, Canada over the past decade has suffered some of the slowest economic growth rates of the advanced countries, particularly in terms of GDP per head of population. The UK, which has recently taken considerably more immigrants per capita than the US, is also largely economically stagnant.

Rather than an emerging new middle class, many immigrants, even in the US, increasingly struggle. As recently as 1993, immigrants accounted for 14 per cent of the US population living in poverty and, in 1994, only 11 per cent of the poor were non-citizen immigrants; three decades later, immigrants made up almost a quarter of all poor people, and 13.2 per cent of those in poverty were non-citizen immigrants.

A combination of a changing economy – manual labour dropped to 22 per cent of all US jobs in 2025 from 35 per cent 50 years ago, for example – and the extension of the welfare state appears to be creating an ever-growing underclass in countries which are already deeply in debt and struggling economically.

Today, in large parts of Europe, newcomers have been found to be more dependent on non-contributory welfare than natives. In Spain, the proportion of immigrants from outside the continent, mostly Latin America and Africa, deemed at risk of poverty is roughly three times that of native population. In Canada, one study found that one in five recent immigrants now suffers poverty – defined as an inability to afford goods and services consistent with a modest standard of living – compared to only 10 per cent of the whole population.

The massive surge of undocumented migrants, particularly to countries like the United States, has also been seen as an assault on the working class, whatever their ethnicity, given competition for housing and jobs.

The prospects for upward mobility – particularly for immigrant groups from poor countries – are further hampered by factors such as dysfunctional schools. Most Western education systems appear to have shifted away from promoting loyalty to the country, towards a focus on indoctrinating students via “decolonised” curricula. Instead of encouraging newcomers to integrate, this is likely to agitate them into despising their host country’s heritage.

None of this bothers the bourgeoisie of brownstone Brooklyn, Georgetown and Silicon Valley, the sorts of places where one is most likely to see “no person is illegal” signs. After all, uncontrolled immigration provides cheap nannies for wealthy people, who often now have more kids than the average American. It also serves as the latest cause célèbre for celebrities and self-promoting influencers, who defend undocumented immigrants in fulfilment of their relentless virtue signalling. Many businesses still embrace mass unvetted immigration – much of it illegal – as a source of cheap labour.

But they are increasingly losing the argument. A working and middle-class backlash against mass migration has sparked the growth of Right-wing political parties in the UK Netherlands and France, as well as buoying support for Donald Trump. This trend has been further exacerbated by concerns that recent migrants have no intention of accepting Western values. People from migrant backgrounds have been well-represented at anti-Israel protests, and supporters of terrorists now harass and intimidate Jews and other citizens in the streets of cities like Amsterdam, Toronto, Los Angeles, London and Paris, all once considered beacons of tolerance.

In addition many recent immigrants to the West come from states in Asia and South America with often high rates of violent crime. According to StatsCan, for example, the violent crime rate in usually placid Canada rose almost 40 per cent between 2014 and 2023, a period of high migration. Gangs have turned Canada into a haven for car theft, shipping both cars and parts to developing countries.

To be sure, Western societies still need immigrants – everything from skilled manufacturing workers and doctors to rocket scientists. But the key question is which immigrants and how many, and whether we should look first at how to re-engage parts of our existing labour force.

What we don’t need are more casual labourers and unvetted, sometimes criminal, young men wandering around our cities. Immigration could well be a critical factor in re-energising Western economies, but only if policies are crafted not as an exercise in global penance but as something that affirms and enhances the allure of our countries.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Photo: Immigrants lined up at the US-Mexico border. Credit: John Moore.

São Paulo has Strong Potential in Deep-tech

Nima Sanandaji — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 20:28:38 -0400

São Paulo in Brazil is rated as the sixth most populous city in the world. With 23 million inhabitants, it is just slightly ahead of even Mexico City, Beijing, Mumbai and Osaka in population size. The city also stands out as the deep tech hub of South America, which is important given the long-term potential for technological growth in South America.

While currently globally leading deep tech companies are focused to North America, Europe and Asia, the rest of the world is gradually also making an impact. Much like Africa, South America is a place with significant potential for economic and technological progress. Rising populations and gradually more focus on education allows for these parts of the world to prosper and grow with increased technological specialization.

A comparison can be made with India. This country is Asia’s leading deep tech nation, with five percent of the top 100 leading engineering & mathematical universities and also same five percent of the world´s leading 500 deep tech companies. The strength of India is that many students, research students and researchers abroad in leading universities originate from India. Subsequently, much of the global talent pool engaged in academics and in technology companies comes from India. While this does represent brain migration, the foreign opportunities create a boost for education and research in India. Internationalization of India´s talents boost the country also at home, as Indian chains gain stronger foothold in global technology value chains.

Talents from Brazil are already today playing a key role in international universities and tech companies. Universidade de São Paulo ranks amongst the top 100 engineering & mathematics universities in the world, the only place of higher learning in South America to achieve this.

This is the finding of the Deep Tech Index. Conducted annually by the European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform (ECEPR) with the support of Nordic Capital, this study maps and evaluates the global deep tech landscape.

Sao Paulo has particular strength in clean tech. Growing populations in South America leads to much development of companies dealing with managing the environmental impact of large population concentrations. Clean tech development plays a key role in adapting to the needs that arise with regional population growth.

Brazil also has another globally leading deep tech hub, Joinville. It is the largest city of the Santa Catarina region in southern Brazil. While only having around one inhabitants of each twenty in Sao Paulo, also Joinville stands out as an important center of deep tech, with strengths in fintech.

The growth limitations of South American countries is often linked to limitations of capital markets, ownership rights and financial transactions. Fintech development is important for boosting the growth potential of South American countries.

In the early 2000s Brazil had a more open economic policy than currently. Currently it is less free economically than the typical country in South America. Property rights are fairly strong, though in need of improvement. Judicial effectiveness similarly is good but can improve. Limitations in investment freedom and in financial freedom limit economic growth.

Brazil is open to trade and has potential. The strong limitation is government expenditure which are nearly 46 percent of GDP. In Australia researchers have found that the level of total public expenditure most optimal for growth is 31 percent of total economic output. This finding is likely also applicable to other countries. Higher levels of taxation means that more private sector output is crowded out. Correspondingly higher levels of government expenditure also crowds out the activity of the private sector.

Reducing government expenditure, boosting education results, investing in more universities to reach the global top, and improving investment freedom are all needed reforms in Brazil. The country already has São Paulo as the leading brain business hub of South America, and can further progress with institutional reform. In the long-term, much speaks for Brazil´s deep tech success, provided economic policies become more growth-oriented.

Nima Sanandaji, Director, European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform (ECEPR)

Photo: Drone photo of São Paulo skyline, taken from above Parque da Aclimação (cropped from original), via Wikimedia in Public Domain.

Yes, Fascism is a Threat, But It's Coming From the Left

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Fascism is in the air, on television and print. We read about American progressive celebrities and academics fleeing to other countries like the United Kingdom, Ireland and Canada to exercise their notion of a free society. In her campaign, after all, Kamala Harris called Donald Trump a “president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”

To be sure, Trump’s hysterical antics remind one of Benito Mussolini, but the long-term undermining of such things as free speech comes not primarily from MAGA land but in the favoured precincts of the progressives. The defenders of democracy, like Anne Applebaum, a brilliant analyst of Communist repression, and noted fascism scholar Timothy Snyder, now at the University of Toronto, focus their current angst almost exclusively on Trump, the nationalist and religious right.

What they ignore is the more fashionable fascism of the respectable establishments in both Europe and North America. This left-of-center authoritarianism is particularly evident in Europe, where established “moderate” and left parties in places like Germany, Romania and France have worked to keep populist candidates off the battlefield. In the U.S., progressives even tried to prevent Trump from running, although unsuccessfully.

In Keir Starmer’s Britain, you can go to jail for violating speech codes and also experience “two-tier” law enforcement, one for native Brits and another for newcomers, including the undocumented. And just wait till they pass their definition of “Islamophobia” which no doubt concerns them far more than antisemitism, which has been growing at a much faster pace.

Then there’s Ireland, where anti-Israel sentiments are strong, and where officials have pushed for censorship of online speech, most of it taking place on U.S. platforms. This drew opposition from U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

But perhaps nowhere is the hypocrisy greater than in Canada. Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Canada attempted to pass an online harms bill widely seen as draconian. Mercifully, it has not yet been passed. Trudeau, particularly during COVID, repressed basic rights, and during the truckers’ protests froze the fundraising efforts of dissidents. In a country that seems unwilling to arrest antisemites and rampaging Islamists, opposing government policy by middle-class Canadians risks jail time.

Read the rest of this piece at: National Post.

Photo: William F. Hertha, under CC 4.0 License.

Scott Weiner's Autocratic Regime

Tim Campbell — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 20:28:38 -0400

On Friday, September 12, the last day of the legislative session, the California Legislature passed SB-79, a bill supposedly meant to increase high-density affordable housing near urban public transportation hubs. Governor Newson, who indicated his support, will probably sign the bill within the next few weeks.

State Senator Scott Wiener, the bill’s sponsor, claimed it will decrease the cost of housing by removing the need for city approvals to build apartment buildings of up to nine stories within a half mile of a “transportation hub.” But it is a singularly odd bill, packed with caveats, exemptions, and strange definitions of what a transportation hub is. For example:

The bill only applies to counties with 15 or more train stations, or only eight counties. Affordability is a statewide issue, so why exempt 50 other counties?
Although advertised as a housing affordability measure, only seven percent of a new development has to include affordable units. The rest can be rented at market or above.
As originally written, the bill would have applied to all areas within a half mile of most bus stops, encompassing large swaths of residential areas. But Wiener whittled the bill down to target homes within a half mile of train stations, subway stops, and “high-frequency” light-rail and commuter rail stops. Buildings within the nearest quarter mile of Amtrak stations and Los Angeles subway stations can top out at nine stories. But parcels farther out or closer to less used transit stations will be limited to about five stories.
Cities will be obligated to approve high density development within these zones as a simple ministerial process, regardless of zoning or nearby land uses.
To force tenants onto public transportation, developments will not be required to provide parking facilities. Nor will builders be required to take infrastructure capacity, such as water and sewer services, into consideration when planning a new development.

Since 2018, Senator Wiener has been trying to gain approval for such policies. He finally succeeded by winning union support when he included prevailing wage language into the bill’s construction requirements. Because of the odd limit of 15 train stations in a county, legislators in suburban and rural counties could support it knowing it wouldn’t affect them. But approval of SB-79 represents more than the usual give-and-take of the legislative process. It is the victory of Wiener’s single-minded obsession with forcing his urban vision statewide. Many legislators didn't listen to their constituents, choosing instead to follow Wiener’s misguided path and the theocrats who have declared single family homes as one of society's greatest evils.

In reality, many of the housing bills Senator Wiener has sponsored have had little impact. As Zelda Bronstein detailed in a 2023 48hills.com column, Wiener's bills haven't produced very much affordable housing but have done a great job weakening local control of land use. Dick Platkin regularly writes about the failure of California's housing policy in CityWatch. The day before the bill passed, Christopher LeGras wrote in his urban community blog Allaspect.com, an excellent piece on how SB-79 will undoubtedly fail to produce the promised results. Yet despite a vast body of evidence showing how density policy fails time after time, our state legislature keeps passing apartment developer-friendly bills.

There are really two things behind SB-79's approval. One is simple corruption. In 2020, Housing as a Human Right, hardly a NIMBY organization, published an expose of Wiener showing he gets major funding from developers and real estate speculators. Although one of his favorite tropes is that single family housing is a relic of institutional racism, his policies s has pushed working-class and communities of color out of their homes in favor of market-rate and luxury development. He's not progressive in any sense of the word--but created bill designed to maximize revenues for his developer sponsors while placing other special interests. This was voting trading at its worst.

The second thing behind SB-79 is more insidious and predates Wiener’s appearance on the political scene; the usurpation of local control by the state. As a “police power,” land use has always been one of the fundamental prerogatives of local government. Cities form as an expression of a community’s collective will. Orange County is geographically one of the state's smallest counties, but it has 34 incorporated cities. One of the reasons is local control. People in Anaheim live in a different city than people in Mission Viejo and need different services. By having direct access to community leaders in their city councils, residents have a say in how their city operates. That is as it should be the state has a role that is distinct from local government; it should set state-wide priorities like highway planning, environmental policy, and indigent health care. Cities should control policies closer to home (literally in this case) like land use and public safety.

But over the last several years the state has been exerting more control over land use and other local policy matters. This trend usually manifests as one-size-fits-all regulations that supersede local ordinances. Cities were expected to adopt extensive sewer regulations, regardless of cost, and the state regulations imposed substantial penalties for noncompliance. The penalties focused on process violations rather than actual environmental damage. In 2008, the state, acting as judge, jury and executioner, fined the City of San Marcos $119,000 for failing to submit sufficient reports on its sewer spill response. Note the fine wasn’t because of the damage the spills caused; it was because the city didn’t file reports to the state’s liking.

What we see in the sewer, housing, and homelessness policy areas is a focus on process over outcomes. The goal should be to increase the stock of affordable housing by the most expedient means available. Instead, the state has adopted policies that focus on vague theories of easing construction of high-density developments under the assumption that the cost of housing will decrease as supply increases. There are two fundamental flaws with that theory. Critically, it ignores other market forces like location, neighborhood amenities, and desirability. In October 2023, I was a member of panel on housing and homelessness that included Senator.

Senator Wiener’s--and therefore the state’s--housing policy is also an example of the paternalistic and arrogant ethos of the state government’s self-labeled New Progressive wing. It is a theocratic belief that only certain officials have the intellectual and moral superiority to make decisions about where and how Californians should live. It is the belief that they can tell people they must live in densely-packed apartment complexes with no green space, even though, as Christopher LeGras points out here, more than 70 percent of California’s families live in single family homes.

High-density is central to the progressive dream of 15-minute cities, communities where people can live, shop and find amenities within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from their apartments. While a potentially admirable dream, the 15-minute city is simply fantasy given the sprawling geography of almost all California cities, with the exception of Wiener’s San Francisco. It also devalues and demonizes the foundational American Dream of owning one’s own home, . the leading way the middle class can build generational wealth. It is a manifestation of an absolute worldview, where housing, as a reflection of economic justice, is either good or evil.

This absolutist view creates some impressive acts of moral acrobatics, where self-professed progressives ally themselves with corporate developers. One of SB-79’s backers were Streets for All-LA, a supposedly grass-roots bicycle advocacy group. Streets for All is aligned with California YIMBY, a nonprofit funded by corporate real estate and tech billionaires. California YIMBY has a reputation for creating housing for high-tech employees at the expense of communities of color and working-class neighborhoods. California YIMBY was also one of Wiener’s SB-79 supporters. It is an odd breed of progressive who say they support affordable housing while simultaneously supporting organizations that seek to destroy it.

What we are really seeing in bills like SB-79 and other state efforts is a concerted effort to make city government obsolete. Like absolutist theocrats from Lenin to the Taliban, new progressives believe being a state official imbues them with a broader vision than someone at the local level, hence authority must come from the top down. The goal, as one California YIMBY spokesperson, is create something “closer to even dismisses the vastly different history, the Danish capital is one of the most expensive cities in Western Europe, especially in terms of housing.

The California elite is betraying what California is and The right of California’s cities, and their citizens, to have some say over their community.

Tim Campbell is a semi-retired veteran public servant who spent his career managing a municipal performance audit program. Drawing on decades of experience in government accountability, he brings a results-driven approach to civic oversight. Campbell emphasizes outcomes over bureaucratic process, offering readers plain English analyses of how local programs perform—and where they fall short. His work advocates for greater transparency, efficiency, and effectiveness in Los Angeles' government.

Photo: Brookings Institute via Flickr, under CC 3.0 License.

The Jews' Coming Civil War

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Whether right or left, Muslim or Christian, anti-Semites speak of Jews as people who pull the strings in culture, politics and especially finance. They assume we are all united in this conspiracy. In reality, not only is there no conspiracy, we Jews are also as divided among ourselves as any other people.

In their long history, the Jewish people have maintained a permanent unified state for no more than 120 years – and that was three millennia ago. It was then divided into two kingdoms before eventually being conquered and divided into separate entities. Devastation followed in the early years of the first and second centuries, when Jews revolted against the might of the Roman Empire.

Other divisions have developed over the centuries. There were notable conflicts between Zionists and anti-Zionists, and between backers of the USSR and America, which continued well into the 1960s. There were also splits between those who clung to ancient traditions, those who looked to jazz up the old faith and others who just walked away.

Today the split among Jews is largely three-way. There’s a zealot-like ultra-nationalist movement with considerable power and influence inside Israel, which could be losing a majority of Israelis and even key Zionists in the diaspora. Then there’s a relatively small, increasingly alienated but well-connected ‘progressive’ faction, which lines up against Israel. Finally, there is the majority – that is, the rest of us who cleave to a middle ground.

The zealots

Today a significant number of Jews, particularly in Israel, embrace an extreme concept of Zionism that parallels the ideas and ultra-nationalism that animated the original Zealots who fought the Romans nearly two millennia ago – and, in the process, extinguished the last strands of Jewish self-government. Those Zealots decided total independence was non-negotiable, and some ringleaders slaughtered any Jew who wished to accommodate Rome.

Those ancient Jews fought gallantly. But they also fought against each other, so that ‘the blood of all sorts of dead carcasses stood in lakes in the holy courts themselves’, as the ancient Roman-Jewish historian Flavius Josephus reported. To this day, on the occasion of Tish B’Av, Jews mourn the ensuing destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD, an event precipitated by refusing to surrender to the conquering Romans. ‘As for our misfortunes’, Josephus laments, ‘we have only ourselves to blame’.

Today’s zealots, notes author Jacob Siegel, follow a similar ideological approach. They embrace what is widely called revisionism, the notion that Israel’s ‘land is indivisible’ from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. Unlike their antecedents, however, they are militarily sophisticated, and their enemies, though certainly bloodthirsty, are nothing like as fearsome as the Roman Empire.

This faction largely controls the current Israeli government, favours the expansion of settlements, denies any prospect for a Palestinian state and fends off any attempt, even by the United States, to impose limits on its ultra-nationalist vision. Although its members rely on the diaspora for political support and financial aid, they are also antagonistic towards it. As Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of revisionism, stated in 1938: ‘Eliminate the diaspora or the diaspora will eliminate you.’

The modern zealots’ policies also provide grist for those who already have little love for either Israel or Jews. But it is easy for Jews living in the relative safety of the diaspora to underestimate the viciousness inherent in the conflict with the Palestinians. The Zionist conquest of Palestine was so violent in part due to unrelenting and uncompromising resistance among Arabs to even the notion of a Jewish state. Attempts to wipe out the Jews in the Middle East go back to the 1930s when the Yishuv, or Jewish settlement, suffered numerous massacres and pogroms. Some Zionists, and not only the extremists, retaliated with sometimes vicious assaults on both defenceless Arab civilians and British occupiers.

The mainstream of Zionism during the 1930s and 1940s was leftist, Western in culture, resolute and keen to find a modus vivendi with the Arabs, notably Jordan. In contrast, the revisionist wing of Zionism – including paramilitary groups like the Irgun and the Stern Gang – showed few qualms about committing atrocities, as well as indiscriminate attacks on occupying British forces.

Today’s zealots owe some of their success to the Palestinians’ refusal to compromise, preferring to resort to unmitigated terror. This has helped turn the right-wing Likud, now under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, into the dominant political force in Israel for most of the past half century.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo credit: Alisdare Hickson via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Long Island City: When Density Becomes a Community

Samuel J Abrams — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 20:28:38 -0400

A decade ago, Long Island City was a cautionary tale. Glass towers shot up along the East River, promising a glittering new skyline, but the streets below were eerily empty. Walking through Court Square felt less like exploring a neighborhood and more like navigating a sterile construction site. There were no bookstores, no bagel shops, no places where neighbors might casually bump into each other. It was a place you passed through, not a place you belonged to.

Today, those same streets hum with life. On a recent Thursday morning, I watched a line of forty people snake down Jackson Avenue outside Utopia Bagels, a beloved Queens institution that opened its LIC location this spring. Next door, a small independent bookstore hosted a children's story hour. Across the street, young professionals took swings at Five Iron Golf's simulators while museum-goers spilled out of MoMA PS1, animatedly discussing the art they'd just seen. These weren't just busy shops and crowded sidewalks—they were signs of civic vitality, evidence that a once-sterile development had matured into a real neighborhood.

For years, Long Island City embodied the worst fears of modern urban development: density without soul, rapid growth measured in raw numbers rather than lived experience. Planners focused on building vertically - towers, unit counts, floor-area ratios - without giving much thought to what life at street level would feel like. By 2017, LIC had more new housing than any other neighborhood in New York City. The population surged from roughly 35,000 to 63,000 between 2010 and 2023, an astonishing 78 percent increase in just over a decade. Yet for all those new residents, there was little sense of community. The 7 train platforms at Court Square became dangerously overcrowded. Streets designed for trucks were unsafe and unpleasant for pedestrians. At night, you could see lights glowing in hundreds of windows, proof that people lived there. By day, the sidewalks were eerily empty. The towers housed thousands of people, but they lived side by side without truly sharing a neighborhood. It was proximity without connection; a physical closeness that lacked the civic fabric to turn residents into a community. Local institutions and everyday relationships give density its meaning. Without them, a place is just buildings and bodies, not a functioning neighborhood.

That began to change slowly, and then all at once. Edward Glaeser, the Harvard economist, has written argued many times in books like the Triumph of the City that the strength that comes from human interaction is the magic of cities. But that magic doesn't appear automatically. It has to be cultivated, nurtured through planning, infrastructure, and cultural choices. In recent years, three shifts in particular transformed LIC's civic ecosystem and made street-level life not only possible but vibrant.

First, transit reliability improved. By mid-2025, weekday subway on-time performance reached 83.7 percent, a marked improvement over pre-pandemic levels. Buses now exceed 95 percent reliability, and ridership citywide is up 10 percent from last year. These may seem like dry statistics, but they translate directly into lived experience. Without dependable public transit, density simply means congestion and frustration. With it, streets are freed from parking battles and cars, allowing them to function as public spaces rather than storage facilities.

Second, public parks became the civic living rooms of the neighborhood. The completion of Hunter's Point South Waterfront Park in 2018 turned eleven acres of industrial wasteland into a vibrant communal space where families picnic, kids play, and strangers become neighbors. Next year, The Baseline will add another acre beneath the bridge ramps, featuring art installations, play areas, and dog runs. Parks are not decorative extras. They are essential institutions, as vital to the health of a city as sewers or power lines. The fact of the matter is that shared public spaces build trust and social capital by creating opportunities for repeated, informal interactions- the often unseen but very strong glue of community life.

Finally, the ground floors of buildings came alive. Consider Sven, a 67-story tower at Queens Plaza. Its nearly 1,000 units might have been just another anonymous vertical stack of apartments, but its design prioritized the street level. Restaurants, retail shops, and the restored Clock Tower now line the sidewalk. Jane Jacobs famously wrote about the importance of "eyes on the street," and she was right: every open storefront adds safety, interest, and reasons to linger rather than rush home behind locked doors.

These changes didn't just alter the feel of the neighborhood; they altered its trajectory. Nowhere was this clearer than in the saga of Amazon's abandoned HQ2 plan. When Amazon announced in February 2019 that it was canceling its massive LIC campus after fierce local opposition, Governor Andrew Cuomo called it "the greatest tragedy" of his tenure. Many feared the neighborhood would stall without the tech giant's investment. But the opposite happened. Freed from the gravitational pull of one dominant employer, growth diversified. Small businesses, mid-sized firms, and local entrepreneurs filled the void. By the end of 2019, Modern Spaces reported selling 160 more units in six months than in all of 2018. Commercial interest didn't vanish; t multiplied.

This was an important lesson. Cities do not need a single corporate savior. They thrive when thousands of smaller actors make investments and take risks. Community strength comes from pluralism and diversity of contributors, not top-down dominance. The Amazon chapter taught LIC that resilience is built from the bottom up.

The arrival of Utopia Bagels this May captured this spirit perfectly. On opening day, the line for free bagels stretched down the block. People weren't just there for food - they were there for belonging. MoMA PS1 continues to draw over 200,000 visitors annually, and its Warm Up summer series fills the streets with music and conversation. Even Five Iron Golf, with its seven simulators, has become an unlikely gathering spot where neighbors meet for drinks and casual play. These institutions - whether cultural, culinary, or recreational - are more than amenities. They are the "third places" sociologist Ray Oldenburg identified as vital for civic life. They create the sidewalk ballet Jacobs celebrated, the choreography of daily routines that builds trust and connection.

But this success brings new challenges. Market-rate rents at Sven now range from $3,700 to $7,800 a month OneLIC rezoning could add 14,700 new units, with 4,300 designated as "affordable,"but in practice "affordable" often means out of reach for teachers, artists, and service workers. If working- and middle-class families are priced out, LIC risks becoming a monoculture of affluence; a vibrant stage set with no diversity behind the scenes. Infrastructure is also straining under the weight of rapid growth. Schools are overcrowded. The local police precinct was never designed to serve so many residents. Even the sewer system struggles to keep up. And some longtime residents feel displaced, not just physically but culturally, as the pace of change accelerates. These are not side issues. They are existential questions about what kind of community LIC will ultimately become.

For other cities grappling with similar pressures, LIC's evolution offers practical lessons. Link housing to reliable transit so density doesn't just create gridlock. Treat public space as essential infrastructure rather than an afterthought. Support local businesses and cultural anchors that give neighborhoods authenticity and character. Require active, human-scale design at street level and build housing that genuinely includes people across the economic spectrum. None of these ideas are radical. They were once the common sense of American city building. Somewhere along the way, we forgot them.

Last week, I sat in one of LIC's new pocket parks, watching children chase each other while parents chatted on benches. A street musician strummed his guitar as cyclists coasted past on a protected bike lane. Just a few years ago, this exact spot was a fenced-off construction site filled with rusting equipment. For a long time, I walked these streets with frustration, seeing only what was missing. Today, I walk them with hope and excitement, continually discovering new spaces and places that remind me how vibrant urban life can be when density is shaped by vision and care.

The Manhattan skyline still looms to the west, but LIC no longer feels like just another bedroom for Manhattan workers. It has its own rhythms, its own character, its own civic life. We've proven that density isn't destiny. With patience, planning, and the kind of institutional strength that comes from diverse stakeholders working together - local businesses, cultural organizations, and resident groups; even the most barren landscape can become home. Done right, density and community are not enemies, they are partners. LIC shows what is possible when a city remembers that it is building not just towers but places where life can flourish.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Graph: Joe Mabel Flickr, under CC 3.0 License.

Why Immigration Can't Revive the Economy

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Boosting immigration would seem a no-brainer to address the West’s ongoing demographic implosion and revive its stagnating economies. Even Japan now recruits foreign temporary workers for its rapidly aging economy. Yet mass migration has aroused fierce opposition, not only in the United States but in Great Britain, Netherlands, and France. Moves to reduce migration are already in place in Italy, and seem imminent in Germany, whose welfare state is creaking under the burden.

This runs against conventional economic theory. Both libertarian conservatives and progressives see unregulated migration—upwards of 10 million during Joe Biden’s presidency—as a net plus. Many businesses see it as a source of cheap labor and demographic vitality. But if migrants have boosted population number, they have done little to revive stagnating economies in Europe and Canada.

“Mass immigration doesn’t seem to go along naturally with economic growth.”

Opposition to migration is often blamed on racism and xenophobia, and depicted as a drag on economic progress. Yet if you actually look at what is occurring on the ground level, mass immigration doesn’t seem to go along naturally with economic growth.

This is particularly evident in Britain and France, both of which have experienced massive increases in migration but have largely stagnant economies. Canada once based its migration policy on luring newcomers who could boost the country’s economy. But under Justin Trudeau the mantra was simply the more the merrier. In 2023 the country of 40 million received a million immigrants, accounting for 97.7 percent of Canada’s population growth. But despite the influx, over the past decade Canada has suffered the slowest economic growth rates among advanced countries while its once high standard of living continues to decline.

This failure is less obvious in the more dynamic United States. But here too many newcomers, particularly the undocumented, are low-skilled and now must compete in poorly paid manual labor or service jobs with other recent immigrants or the indigenous poor. Jobs requiring extensive manual labor have dropped to 22 percent of all jobs in 2025, from 35 percent 50 years ago. As we add more workers to the low-wage pool, their presence does tend to retard wage growth, as noted by a recent Congressional study, and could discourage natives from work.

But much of the pain is borne by the immigrants themselves. In the past, immigration came with the promise of upward mobility. Today we offer immigrants jobs that pay poorly, and make up the difference with social assistance, creating what Michael Lind calls a “low-wage/high-welfare model.” Under such a system, there’s not much incentive for employers to upgrade their operation or grant better working conditions and wages.

Read the rest of this piece at: Compact Magazine.

Photo credit: Naturalization Ceremony, U.S. Dept of Homeland Security via Flickr in Public Domain as a Government work.

Annual US Report on Means of Work Access

Wendell Cox — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 20:28:25 -0400

The US Census Bureau has released its one-year 2024 American Community Survey (ACS). This article covers the overall national data and also the major metropolitan area data (the 57 with 1,000,000 more population in this decade).

US National Data

The largest gain was registered among those who work at home, with a 13.3% market share, up 133.0% from the 5.7% in 2019. The ACS figure measures the “usual mode” of work from home access. If that can be assumed to be 3 days per week, the number of people working at home at least part of the time would be higher. WFH Research estimates that 27% of full work days are at home, as of July 2025.

Carpools had a small increase, to 9.2% in 2024, up 3.6% from 8.9% in 2019. Carpools now account for 2.5 times the commuter demand of transit.

Driving alone continues to be down from before the pandemic (2019). In 2024, 69.2% of commuters drove alone to work, an 8.8% drop from the 2019 figure (75.9%).

Transit continues to have the largest losses, with a 3.7% market share, down 25.6% from the 5.0% in 2019. However transit’s “modal reliability,” which estimates how consistently a commuter uses their primary mode of travel , suggests a smaller share. According to the National Household Travel Survey, the actual use of transit is about 35% lower.

Major Metropolitan Area Data

Work access data is provided for the 57 major metropolitan areas in Table 1. Table 2 includes the rankings for each major metropolitan area. This edition adds a new major metropolitan market, Omaha, NE-IA. The top five and bottom five major metropolitan areas are highlighted.

Drive Alone

The highest drive alone share was in Birmingham (78.6%), followed by Tulsa, Memphis, Oklahoma City and Cincinnati (62.5%). The metros with the lowest drive alone shares were New York (44.5%), behind San Francisco (this does not include San Jose, despite the fact that the San Jose metro is virtually across the street from the San Francisco metropolitan area, on both sides of San Francisco Bay), Washington, Boston and Seattle. As has been the experience for years, no major metropolitan area had a drive alone share lower than its transit share.

Work from Home

The highest working from home share was in Raleigh (Durham is in a separate metropolitan area, despite the fact that some analyses refer to Raleigh-Durham, which is justified by the fact that the Research Triangle Park divided between the two metros), at 23.5%. Raleigh is followed by Austin, Denver, Portland and Washington. The lowest working at home shares were in Honolulu (7.7%) behind Fresno, New Orleans Tulsa and Memphis.

Car Pools

The highest work car pool share was in Honolulu (14.2%), followed by Las Vegas, Fresno, San Antonio and Salt Lake City. The lowest car pool share was in New York (6.6%), behind Pittsburgh, New Orleans, Cincinnati and Denver.

Transit

The highest transit market share was in New York at 27.2%, followed by San Francisco, Boston, Chicago and Washington. The lowest transit markets shares were in Oklahoma City, at 0.3%, behind Memphis, Tulsa, Jacksonville and Indianapolis. Overall, 18 of the 57 major metropolitan areas had transit access shares of 1.0% or less.

Bicycle

There seems to be outsized interest in bicycles, and so we are reporting the data. The highest bicycle market share is in San Jose, at 1.8%, followed by San Francisco, Portland, Boston and Honolulu. The lowest bicycle market share was in Memphis, at 0.1%, below Dallas-Fort Worth, Birmingham, Atlanta and Nashville. In each case, the bicycle market share is less than that of transit.

Walking

Surprisingly, walking is as popular or more popular than transit in most markets (36). This includes such markets as Austin, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus. Dallas-Fort Worth, Denver, Kansas City, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Nashville, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Diego and Tampa-St. Petersburg. Ironically a number of these metro areas have urban rail systems, and there have been proposals in others. Honolulu, Boston and New York had the strongest walking market shares. Birmingham had the lowest walking share, at 1.0%. Overall more people used transit than walked, with much larger transit shares in a few metros.

The Future

In the future, it is likely that the financial difficulties of transit will be the principal public policy issue in urban transportation. Transit has historically had costs that rose faster than inflation and its passenger revenue has been seriously eroded as a result of the large number of employees who work fewer than five days per week. Some of these employees now drive, while those that have remained on transit ride less frequently. At the same time, the problem is exacerbated by the large financial assistance provided by the federal government to ease the financial burdens of the pandemic. Most transit agencies face perhaps what could be overwhelming fiscal challenges in retaining service with considerably lower revenues. Private firms have faced such difficulties and survived. Transit may need to take a look at similar strategies.

Chart: U.S. means of work access, comparing 2019 data with 2024 data from American Community Survey.

Table 1 back to reference

WORK ACCESS BY MODE — 2024: MAJOR METROPOLITAN AREAS
Major Metropolitan Areas	Drive Alone	Car Pool	Work from Home	Transit	Bicycle	Taxicab	Walk
Atlanta, GA	67.8%	8.5%	18.8%	1.6%	0.1%	2.0%	1.1%
Austin, TX	62.1%	8.8%	23.2%	1.4%	0.5%	2.0%	1.9%
Baltimore, MD	68.4%	8.3%	15.1%	3.5%	0.3%	1.8%	2.6%
Birmingham, AL	78.6%	7.8%	10.8%	0.7%	0.1%	1.1%	1.0%
Boston, MA-NH	58.3%	7.5%	16.2%	9.8%	1.2%	2.3%	4.8%
Buffalo, NY	75.3%	7.6%	10.4%	2.4%	0.5%	1.5%	2.3%
Charlotte, NC-SC	67.9%	9.0%	19.0%	1.1%	0.2%	1.5%	1.4%
Chicago, IL-IN	62.5%	8.0%	14.9%	9.0%	0.7%	1.6%	3.3%
Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN	75.6%	7.1%	12.7%	1.0%	0.2%	1.6%	1.8%
Cleveland, OH	71.8%	8.6%	13.5%	1.9%	0.4%	1.8%	2.1%
Columbus, OH	70.6%	8.0%	16.9%	1.0%	0.4%	1.2%	1.8%
Dallas-Fort Worth, TX	70.5%	10.1%	15.6%	0.6%	0.1%	1.7%	1.3%
Denver, CO	64.0%	7.3%	22.6%	2.1%	0.6%	1.3%	2.1%
Detroit, MI	75.6%	8.0%	12.5%	0.8%	0.2%	1.7%	1.2%
Fresno, CA	71.6%	13.3%	8.4%	0.8%	0.3%	4.2%	1.4%
Grand Rapids, MI	75.5%	8.4%	11.4%	1.2%	0.2%	1.2%	2.1%
Hartford, CT	71.6%	8.1%	13.8%	3.0%	0.3%	1.7%	1.6%
Honolulu, HI	63.7%	14.2%	7.7%	5.5%	1.2%	2.2%	5.5%
Houston, TX	71.8%	11.0%	12.1%	1.7%	0.3%	1.8%	1.3%
Indianapolis. IN	74.6%	8.3%	13.6%	0.6%	0.2%	1.4%	1.4%
Jacksonville, FL	70.3%	8.0%	17.4%	0.5%	0.3%	2.2%	1.3%
Kansas City, MO-KS	73.4%	8.1%	14.7%	0.6%	0.2%	1.6%	1.4%
Las Vegas, NV	69.8%	12.0%	11.4%	2.3%	0.2%	2.6%	1.5%
Los Angeles, CA	67.0%	9.7%	14.9%	3.5%	0.6%	2.1%	2.3%
Louisville, KY-IN	75.1%	8.4%	12.5%	0.7%	0.3%	1.6%	1.3%
Memphis, TN-MS-AR	76.4%	10.8%	9.9%	0.3%	0.1%	1.4%	1.1%
Miami, FL	67.5%	10.8%	14.3%	2.6%	0.5%	2.6%	1.6%
Milwaukee,WI	72.6%	8.2%	12.9%	2.2%	0.4%	1.3%	2.4%
Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN-WI	68.5%	7.5%	17.4%	2.1%	0.6%	1.6%	2.2%
Nashville, TN	70.5%	9.2%	16.8%	0.8%	0.1%	1.5%	1.0%
New Orleans. LA	71.5%	10.6%	9.2%	2.3%	0.6%	2.1%	3.6%
New York, NY-NJ	44.5%	6.6%	12.9%	27.2%	0.9%	2.4%	5.4%
Oklahoma City, OK	76.3%	9.9%	10.5%	0.3%	0.2%	1.3%	1.5%
Omaha, NE-IA	75.1%	8.8%	12.5%	0.6%	0.2%	1.3%	1.6%
Orlando, FL	68.9%	9.7%	16.8%	1.1%	0.3%	2.0%	1.2%
Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD	64.1%	7.8%	15.4%	7.3%	0.6%	1.5%	3.3%
Phoenix, AZ	66.3%	10.5%	17.8%	1.2%	0.4%	2.4%	1.4%
Pittsburgh, PA	69.7%	6.8%	15.7%	3.4%	0.3%	1.4%	2.7%
Portland, OR-WA	62.9%	8.3%	20.0%	3.4%	1.3%	1.2%	2.9%
Providence, RI-MA	72.2%	8.8%	11.1%	2.5%	0.5%	1.9%	2.9%
Raleigh, NC	66.2%	7.0%	23.5%	0.6%	0.2%	1.5%	1.0%
Richmond, VA	70.2%	8.1%	16.1%	1.3%	0.3%	1.6%	2.4%
Riverside-San Bernardino, CA	73.8%	11.6%	10.9%	0.9%	0.3%	1.4%	1.2%
Rochester, NY	74.2%	8.0%	12.0%	1.2%	0.4%	1.4%	2.8%
Sacramento, CA	67.5%	9.2%	16.8%	1.8%	1.0%	1.6%	2.1%
St. Louis,, MO-IL	73.7%	8.3%	13.3%	1.7%	0.3%	1.1%	1.6%
Salt Lake City, UT	65.6%	11.8%	16.3%	2.5%	0.6%	1.1%	2.1%
San Antonio, TX	69.5%	12.0%	13.4%	1.4%	0.2%	1.5%	1.9%
San Diego, CA	67.6%	8.3%	16.1%	1.9%	0.4%	2.1%	3.6%
San Francisco, CA	53.4%	9.4%	18.9%	10.9%	1.6%	1.9%	4.0%
San Jose, CA	65.5%	10.9%	14.6%	2.8%	1.8%	2.0%	2.4%
Seattle, WA	60.3%	9.0%	18.5%	6.3%	1.0%	1.1%	4.0%
Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL	67.1%	8.6%	19.3%	0.9%	0.6%	2.2%	1.3%
Tucson, AZ	68.5%	11.6%	13.7%	1.6%	0.8%	1.7%	2.1%
Tulsa, OK	77.1%	10.5%	9.4%	0.4%	0.2%	1.1%	1.3%
Virginia Beach-Norfolk, VA-NC	75.0%	8.3%	11.3%	1.2%	0.4%	1.5%	2.2%
Washington, DC-VA-MD-WV	57.1%	8.6%	19.9%	9.0%	0.8%	1.7%	2.9%
SUBTOTAL	65.3%	8.9%	15.3%	5.6%	0.5%	1.8%	2.5%
OUTSIDE MAJOR METROS	74.9%	9.6%	10.5%	0.9%	0.4%	1.4%	2.3%
TOTAL	69.2%	9.2%	13.3%	3.7%	0.5%	1.7%	2.4%
PREPANDEMIC (2019)	75.9%	8.9%	5.7%	5.0%	0.5%	2.6%	1.4%
Derived from American Community Survey 2024 (1 year)

Table 2 back to reference

WORK ACCESS BY MODE — 2024: MAJOR METROPOLITAN AREAS
Major Metropolitan Areas	Drive Alone	Car Pool	Work from Home	Transit	Bicycle	Taxicab	Walk
Atlanta, GA	37	30	9	30	54	15	53
Austin, TX	52	24	2	32	22	14	29
Baltimore, MD	35	36	25	9	32	19	15
Birmingham, AL	1	49	50	48	55	56	57
Boston, MA-NH	54	52	19	3	4	6	3
Buffalo, NY	8	50	52	18	20	36	20
Charlotte, NC-SC	36	22	7	38	52	40	43
Chicago, IL-IN	51	46	27	4	11	32	8
Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN	5	54	39	41	50	28	32
Cleveland, OH	19	29	34	25	29	20	27
Columbus, OH	24	43	14	40	27	50	31
Dallas-Fort Worth, TX	25	15	23	49	56	22	48
Denver, CO	48	53	3	23	17	47	23
Detroit, MI	6	44	40	44	43	25	52
Fresno, CA	21	2	56	46	31	1	40
Grand Rapids, MI	7	32	46	37	42	52	24
Hartford, CT	22	42	31	13	36	23	34
Honolulu, HI	49	1	57	8	5	9	1
Houston, TX	20	8	43	27	39	21	44
Indianapolis. IN	12	35	33	53	48	44	42
Jacksonville, FL	27	45	13	54	30	7	47
Kansas City, MO-KS	16	40	28	50	45	33	41
Las Vegas, NV	29	3	45	19	41	2	37
Los Angeles, CA	42	18	26	10	18	10	19
Louisville, KY-IN	10	31	41	47	33	29	46
Memphis, TN-MS-AR	3	10	53	56	57	42	54
Miami, FL	39	11	30	15	19	3	35
Milwaukee,WI	17	39	37	21	23	49	18
Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN-WI	34	51	12	22	13	30	21
Nashville, TN	26	20	16	45	53	39	56
New Orleans. LA	23	12	55	20	12	11	7
New York, NY-NJ	57	57	38	1	8	4	2
Oklahoma City, OK	4	16	51	57	46	46	38
Omaha, NE-IA	9	26	42	52	51	48	33
Orlando, FL	32	17	15	39	35	16	50
Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD	47	48	24	6	15	34	9
Phoenix, AZ	43	13	11	35	26	5	39
Pittsburgh, PA	30	56	22	12	34	43	14
Portland, OR-WA	50	38	4	11	3	51	12
Providence, RI-MA	18	25	48	17	21	17	11
Raleigh, NC	44	55	1	51	49	37	55
Richmond, VA	28	41	21	33	40	31	16
Riverside-San Bernardino, CA	14	7	49	43	37	45	51
Rochester, NY	13	47	44	36	25	41	13
Sacramento, CA	40	21	17	26	6	27	28
St. Louis,, MO-IL	15	37	36	28	38	53	36
Salt Lake City, UT	45	5	18	16	14	55	26
San Antonio, TX	31	4	35	31	44	38	30
San Diego, CA	38	34	20	24	24	12	6
San Francisco, CA	56	19	8	2	2	18	4
San Jose, CA	46	9	29	14	1	13	17
Seattle, WA	53	23	10	7	7	57	5
Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL	41	27	6	42	16	8	49
Tucson, AZ	33	6	32	29	9	26	25
Tulsa, OK	2	14	54	55	47	54	45
Virginia Beach-Norfolk, VA-NC	11	33	47	34	28	35	22
Washington, DC-VA-MD-WV	55	28	5	5	10	24	10
Derived from American Community Survey 2024 (1 year)

Gavin Newsom Trashed California. Worse, He's Getting Away With It.

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 20:28:38 -0400

For the past half century, California has been the driving force in American technology, culture and political development. After all, it was Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan who led the last great resurgence on the Right from the state, and Governor Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown who largely created the green-oriented, high-tech progressive underpinnings of the Clinton and Obama regimes, even if he never reached the presidency himself.

Today, history may be repeating itself, but in a way that – to paraphrase Mark Twain – no longer rhymes. Under Nixon, Reagan and Brown, the California connection was a golden one; California was the epitome of American success, the dream cubed. Today, Gavin Newsom – increasingly seen as the front-runner for the presidency in 2028 – would find it difficult to make anything like such a claim, given the awful condition in which he is leaving the state.

Yet Newsom’s relentless self-promotion seems to be succeeding, at least among Democrats. He won’t have to worry much about any serious scrutiny from big media, either inside the state or nationally. Even in the race to succeed him as California’s governor, it seems all but assured that his successor will continue his approach or move further to the Left.

Now that the unfortunate Kamala Harris has bowed out of consideration for California’s governorship once Newsom’s term ends, post position belongs to former Representative Katie Porter, an acolyte of Elizabeth Warren and firmly on the Left of the party. But the true front-runner, if he chooses, would be Senator Alex Padilla, who has generally acted as a pliant tool of the California establishment. If he runs, suggests Democratic consultant Paul Mitchell, “it will be game over”.

The only reasonable hope for a course correction lies in the possible candidacy of LA real estate mogul Rick Caruso. Yet although he has the business skills desperately needed to engineer a state recovery, he was a disappointing candidate in his 2022 LA mayor race against Karen Bass, coming off more like a rich guy on an ego trip than a relatable candidate. The only Democrat looking to fill the middle lane, notes long-time Democratic consultant David Gershwin, might be former LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, but he would likely be crushed by the union- and green-dominated Democratic machine.

How about the Republicans? As we would say in my native New York, fuggedaboutit. The state that gave birth to modern conservatism has become a no-go zone for the GOP. Even as the Democrats seek to limit the number of seats Republicans might win in the House, already a paltry nine out of 52, barely one-in-four California voters are registered Republican, while Democrats own close to half.

Demographics explain much of this. “How do you win elections when you keep losing your voters?,” asks a pained Shawn Steel, the GOP national committeeman for California. California’s conservatism was rooted in the migration of voters from the Mid-West and South, who found in the Golden State an outlet for their material aspirations. But over the past two decades, over 2.6 million net domestic migrants have left – equal to the population of San Francisco, Anaheim and San Diego combined – and many, according to IRS estimates, are concentrated among the middle class family-age population.

Left behind is a rapidly ageing population, as well as a large coterie of affluent professionals, state-dependent individuals and, most importantly, the public sector, whose unions are helping to fund Newsom’s redistricting drive. It’s almost impossible to imagine any of the Republican hopefuls for governor – former David Cameron advisor Steve Hilton or Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco – winning, and it’s possible that neither will even make it to the run-off election. A Republican has not won a state-wide race in California in almost two decades.

Leading Democratic pollster Mitchell says that the Republicans recapturing the Governor’s mansion would be “a one in every 200 years event”, possible if too many Democrats run and the GOP stays united. But generally Republicans remain stuck with 42-45 per cent of the vote, not nearly enough to make a major challenge.

But the Democrats’ stranglehold over California is both unjustified and damaging. Newsom can crow about the state’s giant economy – largely due to the presence of a handful of the world’s seven companies with trillion dollar valuations, and the highest number of billionaires in the US. But the average Californian has not benefited much from his regime, as the Golden State suffers among the nation’s highest proportion of the population living in poverty, tepid job growth and the US’s highest rates of unemployment, particularly elevated for teenagers and Generation Z.

For those older than 30, buying a home – the traditional route to the middle class – has become a nightmare. Regulations aimed at stopping suburban development have helped push the median cost of a home to nearly 2.5 times higher than in the rest of country. Not surprisingly California has the second lowest homeownership rate in the nation, at 56 per cent (New York’s is lowest at 54 per cent). High prices have been a boon to upper-middle professionals, increasingly the Democratic Party’s base, but ownership rates for those under-35 are half the national average. This is precisely the group that is deserting the West Coast for “cost of living” reasons.

Even worse, the Newsom economy has been a disaster for workers. California is one of the worst states for creating jobs that pay above average. In the year to January 2025, the only net new jobs created in California were in areas substantially subsidised by government (like healthcare) and in government itself as well as some in the low wage service sector.

Meanwhile, companies in key high wage sectors – technology, aerospace and defence – are heading increasingly to other states, notably to the Carolinas and Texas. Many will be tempted to follow the likes of Elon Musk, who is busily working to turn the Lone Star State into the epicentre of America’s 21^st century space economy.

Although they have little choice in the matter in an essentially one party state, most Californians, according to a UC Berkeley poll last year, think it is headed in the wrong direction. Only around 44 per cent of voters approve of Newsom; by two to one, voters believe he is more concerned with his political ambitions than delivering decent governance, a charge made recently by San Jose’s Democratic mayor, Matt Mahan.

Even Californians no longer see their state as a model for the country. In a 2024 survey conducted for the Los Angeles Times, only 15 per cent of respondents felt that California is a model other states should copy; 39 per cent said the state was not a model and should not be emulated. Barely one in three state residents – and only one in four younger voters – now thinks the American dream is achievable.

This is a far cry from the California that produced Nixon, Reagan and Jerry Brown. Its failures, which should make Newsom vulnerable, will be hidden as much as possible by a compliant media, and largely ignored in the gubernatorial campaign. But Americans, however distressed over Maga excesses, may still have second thoughts about adopting a Golden State political agenda that promises, on the national level, something potentially equally or even more catastrophic.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Photo: Gage Skidmore, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Failures of the Renewables Transition Era are Insults to Taxpayers

Ronald Stein — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Natural gas and crude oil are commonly needed fossil fuels to manufacture insulation, wires, and computers used in all methods of generating electricity. This is because components of natural gas and oil are essential feedstocks for creating plastics, which are used for insulation and many computer parts.

Fossil fuels are also required for the vast amount of energy needed throughout the manufacturing process.

Insulation

Many of the polymer plastics used for insulation, like polyethylene (PE), cross-linked polyethylene (XLPE), and polyvinyl chloride (PVC), are made from feedstocks derived from fossil fuels. Natural gas liquids, primarily ethane, are heated in cracker plants to produce ethylene, which is then used to create polyethylene for electrical wires and cables. Crude oil fractions, particularly naphtha, are also used to make ethylene and other petrochemical feedstocks for different types of plastics.

Wind turbines and solar panels only generate electricity, so where is the transition away from fossil fuels?

Wires

While wires themselves are made of copper, a high conductor of electricity, the fossil fuel industry is deeply connected to their production process. Insulation: The manufacturing of the insulating plastics for wires and cables depends on feedstock from natural gas and oil. Energy: The mining, refining, and manufacturing of copper wires is an energy-intensive process that relies heavily on fossil fuels.

Computers

The production of computers and the electronics they contain is one of the most fossil fuel-intensive manufacturing processes per unit of weight. Components: Plastics derived from fossil fuels are used in many parts of a computer, including the casing, circuit boards, and connectors. Energy consumption: The energy required to mine, refine, and manufacture all the different components of a computer comes largely from fossil fuels. One 2004 study found that producing a single desktop computer required ten times its weight in fossil fuels.

Fertilizers

Conventional nitrogen fertilizers are made using fossil fuels, primarily natural gas, in a process that turns atmospheric nitrogen and fossil-fuel-derived hydrogen into ammonia. This energy-intensive process, called the Haber-Bosch process, is a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. While phosphorus and potassium fertilizers are made from mined minerals, most agricultural production is reliant on synthetic fertilizers derived from fossil fuels.

Read the rest of this piece at America Out Loud.

Ronald Stein is an engineer, senior policy advisor on energy literacy for the Heartland Institute and CFACT, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book "Clean Energy Exploitations."

Photo: courtesy America Out Loud.

Revival: Americans Heading Back to the Hinterlands

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 20:28:32 -0400

The famous New Yorker magazine cover showing much of civilization ending at the Hudson River, save for Chicago, D.C., and then the West Coast, had more than a grain of truth for much of the 20^thcentury. The term “flyover country” was not just a snobbish put-down but a reality as a handful of core cities – New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco – exerted oversized influence over America’s culture, politics, and economy, with rural communities and smaller cities playing a relatively marginal role in the national drama.

The early decades of the 21^stcentury have altered America’s geographic reality. Moribund small cities have come back to life. Two decades ago, downtown Fargo, North Dakota, was dull and somewhat derelict. Now it boasts loft apartments, a fine boutique hotel, and a panoply of cultural attractions, including art studios and dance venues. Since 2010, about 14,000 Americans have moved to its metropolitan area. That total is small, but it reflects the experiences of many other once withering communities that are attracting people from larger urban centers. The Fargo metro area added nearly double the number of net domestic migrants as the nearest large metro area, Minneapolis-St. Paul, which is 15 times larger.

Some of this can be traced to considerably lower housing prices, which allows millennials to be on their own much earlier;only 5% of millennialsin the Great Plains states live at home, less than half the percentage in California, New York, and New Jersey. It’s also a result of a new wealth created by tech, manufacturing, and other industries seeking to reduce costs in less-regulated, less expensive areas where more people are willing to relocate.

Smaller Communities Rebound

Springfield, a metropolitan area of nearly 500,000 people in the southwest corner of Missouri, has blossomed in the past decade. Its economy, anchored by Southwest Missouri State University, is also home to several large firms, including Bass Pro Shops, O’Reilly Auto Parts, and accounting firm BKD. These businesses provide promising opportunities for millennials.

Between 2010 and 2023, a net 38,000 new residents moved into the area from elsewhere in the U.S. Rather than being rejected as outsiders by longtime residents, newcomers are welcome to join localboards and commissions.

“What Springfield attracts are people who are self-starters who want to fast-track their involvement in the community,” says millennial Matt Simpson, chief research and planning officer at Ozark Technical College, who was recently elected to the City Council. “People of my generation are motivated by the fact that you can have a say at an earlier age.”

Much of Springfield’s appeal lies not in culture or consumerism, where big cities are still hard to beat, but in the local habits and traditions found in numerous churches, charities, and civic groups.

Note: This is the second in a two-part series of the Great Dispersion of Americans across the country. Read part one here.

Read the rest of this piece at: Real Clear Investigations.

Photo: Diedrich via Wikimedia, under CC 4.0 License.

Exodus: Affordability Crisis Sends Americans Packing From Big Cities

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 20:28:32 -0400

For much of the past century, in both the United States and elsewhere, the inexorable trend has been for people to move from rural areas and towns to ever larger cities, particularly those with vibrant downtown cores such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, and dozens of other iconic American cities. Most visions of the future still view urban cores as the uncontested centers of production, consumption, and culture, with rural areas, small cities, and suburbs relegated to the backwaters of modernity.

A RealClearInvestigations analysis has found that we may be on the cusp of a new era. Urban cores have started to shrink, losing first to the suburbs, then to ever further exurbs, and now to small towns and even rural areas. For the first time since the 19th century, America’s growth pattern favors smaller metros – Fargo, North Dakota, as opposed to Portland, Oregon – many of which once seemed out of favor.

This transformation can be hard to detect because demographers often discuss metropolitan regions, which put city centers at their cores. But this method of classification masks the trend that much of the growth is at the edges of these areas. In virtually all the fastest-growing metros, it has been the further-out exurbs, themselves until recently rural areas, that have experienced most of the expansion. While Raleigh, North Carolina – a sleepy state capital for much of its history – continues to draw migrants from across the country, the most explosive growth is not occurring in the city center but the surrounding “countrypolitan” towns of Apex, Fuquay-Varina, and Zebulon that offer land and a relaxed rural environment along with access to modern amenities.

Between 2010 and 2020, the suburbs and exurbs of the major metropolitan areas gained 2 million net domestic migrants, while the urban core counties lost 2.7 million. The pandemic, which normalized remote work and encouraged people to keep their distance, turbocharged this movement to smaller, less crowded, less expensive housing markets. Through the first four years of this decade, the urban core counties of the major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 population) lost 3,259,000 net domestic migrants, three times the rate of loss in the last decade. In contrast, 2.3 million net domestic migrants moved outside the major metros.

Net Domestic Migration

This is a shift the media has underplayed or pinned almost entirely on the pandemic, leaving the impression that small towns and rural areas have little to offer other than a safe haven from illness and crime. In a pre-pandemic 2018 article asking “Can rural America be saved?” The New York Times reported that small cities and towns, particularly in the middle of the country, were “getting old” and facing “relentless economic decline.”

The data suggest the opposite: that Americans are heading back to the land. The steep costs of urban housing and an Amazon economy that allows anybody, anywhere to get almost anything, is rekindling our deep-seated desire for privacy, space, and home ownership.

The New Demographics

The first phase of geographic reinvention began to take shape by 2000, as workers followed both U.S.- and foreign-based companies, which were increasingly expanding into lower-cost states in the Sun Belt and Midwest. Since then, the two most urbanized big states, California and New York, have each lost more than 4 million net domestic migrants. Two other trends – a drop in immigration and fertility rates, especially among people living in big cities – are making it hard for these states to restock their urban populations.

Note: This is the first in a two-part series of the Great Dispersion of Americans across the country.

Read the rest of this piece at: Real Clear Investigations.

Photo: Carlos Oliva via Pexels.

Geography, Place, and the Making of Citizens

Samuel J Abrams and Isaiah Ellis — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 20:28:32 -0400

Last year, only 34 percent of Americans could locate Ukraine on a map even as Congress debated billions in military aid that would shape global security. This geographic illiteracy isn't just embarrassing; it's dangerous.

In today's schools, students are far more likely to be introduced to coding languages or STEM electives than to a sustained study of geography. This shift may seem natural in an economy powered by technology, but it reflects a profound miscalculation. Geography is not a secondary subject. It is a cornerstone of civic literacy. Our lives, our identities, our communities, our politics are conditioned by place and space. A generation that cannot situate itself in the world risks becoming disoriented, vulnerable to demagoguery, and ill-equipped for democratic self-government.

Human existence is always rooted in place. The environments into which people are born shape opportunities, occupations, and cultural traditions. A desert village produces different forms of resilience than a port city; a farm town fosters different habits than an urban neighborhood. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan distinguished between space, which conveys openness and possibility, and place, which infuses space with meaning. Indigenous knowledge systems have long recognized this truth: that wisdom itself is place-based, emerging from intimate knowledge of local ecologies and landscapes. To lose sight of geography is to overlook the very conditions that form identity and belonging.

Community life is equally dependent on space. Émile Durkheim underscored how rituals and shared spaces foster solidarity, while Robert Putnam famously demonstrated how the decline of bowling leagues, town halls, and neighborhood associations has weakened American civic life. Geography clarifies that social life is not abstract. Social life is organized through neighborhoods, public squares, and civic institutions embedded in physical landscapes. Where such spaces thrive, trust and civic engagement flourish; where they vanish, isolation and fragmentation follow. The design of a New England town common, with its central green surrounded by church, school, and town hall, embodies democratic ideals in physical form, a lesson lost when we fail to read our landscapes.

Politics, too, is inseparable from geography. Borders define sovereignty, districts shape representation, and natural resources determine both prosperity and conflict. The war in Ukraine cannot be understood without reference to its wheat fields that feed the Middle East and Africa, its Black Sea ports that connect grain to global markets, and its plains that have served as invasion corridors for centuries. Water scarcity in the American West shapes policy as surely as legislation does: seven states now battle over Colorado River allocations that will determine which cities thrive and which farms survive. During COVID-19, we learned that semiconductor shortages in Taiwan could halt American auto production, that a single blocked canal in Egypt could disrupt global commerce, and that the geography of meatpacking plants could determine virus spread across entire regions. How can citizens evaluate trade policy, immigration reform, or climate legislation without understanding the geographic realities that underlie them?

Critics might argue that geography education too often meant rote memorization of capitals and rivers, or that GPS has rendered such knowledge obsolete. These objections miss the point entirely. Geographic literacy isn't about memorizing facts but about understanding systems: how watersheds shape water rights, how mountain ranges influence political boundaries, how proximity to ports determines economic development. GPS can tell you where you are, but it cannot tell you why that place matters, how it came to be, or what forces shape its future.

But geographic literacy is not just about reading a map of the world. It is also about being able to read the environment around you, to understand how the spaces you inhabit are delivering subtle messages about power, priorities, and possibilities. For students arriving at university these weeks, it is worth asking: are your classrooms front-facing, or are they arranged in a circle? Is each student "pointed" at their instructor, or do they have a clear view of their fellow students' faces? What departments and administrative wings are gathered around your university's central quad? Can you accurately guess which buildings came first, and which are newer? Is your campus surrounded by a gate, with only a few ways in? Or can any passerby walk or drive onto it? Are your study spaces enclosed and hidden, or are they surrounded by glass, creating a fishbowl with you at the center? Are your science laboratories housed in buildings that match their surroundings, or do they rise above campus like towering monoliths?

These arrangements of space and architecture speak volumes about institutional values and pedagogical philosophies. A seminar room arranged in a circle models democratic deliberation; a gated campus suggests exclusivity over community engagement; glass-walled study spaces privilege surveillance over solitude. Understanding these spatial messages and questioning them is practice for reading the broader geographic forces that shape political and social life. When students can decode their campus geography, they're better equipped to recognize how gerrymandered districts dilute democratic representation or how highway placement can segregate communities for generations.

Many assume geography no longer matters, with much of our social and learning lives taking place online. We seem to inhabit a borderless world of feeds and streams. This is an illusion. The smartphones and platforms that make such life possible depend on cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, lithium extraction in Chile's Atacama Desert, and rare earth processing in China. Data centers consume 200 terawatt hours annually, enough to power Argentina, and cluster near rivers for cooling and cheap hydroelectric power. Even our information has geography: undersea cables carrying 99% of international data follow colonial-era shipping routes, creating vulnerabilities that nations exploit. Social media algorithms create distinct "information geographies," serving different content to users in Bangalore than in Boston, shaping political realities as surely as any border wall.

Consider the residents of Newton County, Georgia, whose water taps began to run dry when Meta built a data center nearby, consuming 500,000 gallons daily. Or ask Ireland, where data centers now use more electricity than all rural homes combined. To ignore these realities leaves students unprepared for a world where digital sovereignty depends on server locations, where authoritarian regimes use geographic internet restrictions to control information, and where a single ship stuck in the Suez Canal can trigger a global recession.

The strongest argument for geography education is ultimately humane. Geography restores a sense of orientation in a world that can feel dizzying and fragmented. It cultivates empathy by showing how other people live in relation to their landscapes: why Bangladeshi farmers adapt to seasonal floods, how Swiss villages negotiate avalanche zones, what makes Phoenix's growth possible despite its desert location. It grounds young people, reminding them that life is lived in neighborhoods, nations, and ecosystems, not in abstractions or algorithmic feeds. When students understand how soil quality shapes Midwest voting patterns or how proximity to toxic waste sites correlates with race and income, they become citizens capable of pursuing environmental justice. Geography affirms our shared humanity by situating individuals within a larger, interconnected whole while warning against environmental determinism, the dangerous notion that geography is destiny rather than context.

Educators should treat geography as essential, not optional. Curricula must integrate geography across the humanities, social sciences, and life sciences. States like Texas and Colorado have shown it's possible, implementing standards that connect local landscapes to global systems. Schools should invest in teacher training that emphasizes geographic literacy, and universities without meaningful concentrations of faculty whose research and teaching center around place ought to acquire them as soon as possible. Students should master not just how to read maps but how to analyze border-making practices, watershed management, and the geographic dimensions of inequality. They should use Geographic Information Systems to map food deserts in their communities, track urban heat islands that coincide with redlined neighborhoods, and understand how their congressional districts came to have such peculiar shapes.

Above all, geography must be taught as civic preparation, to ground the rising generation in the world as it is: textured, bounded, and interconnected. At a time of global upheaval and domestic fragmentation, geography is not merely another subject in the curriculum, just as living in and with the dynamics of one's place is something from which not even the most chronically online of us can opt out. It is the map by which Americans can once again find their bearings, not just as consumers in a global economy or users on digital platforms, but as citizens rooted in real places, responsible for real communities, capable of charting democracy's course through an uncertain terrain.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Isaiah Ellis is a professor of Urban Religions at Southern Methodist University.

Graph: global shipping routes, modified from graphic accessed at Wikimedia, under CC 3.0 License.

Paris is a Knowledge Leader but France as a Nation Lags Behind

Nima Sanandaji — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 20:28:32 -0400

Paris hosts some of the world´s leading technology companies, has several of the leading technological universities and is the European region with highest total number of knowledge intensive jobs. France as a country however lags as a knowledge economy, with limited progress outside the capital region.

Together with London and Zurich, Paris is one of the three European cities which has the highest concentration of world´s 500 leading deep tech companies. It is strong in the areas of photonics, clean energy, biotechnology and quantum computing.

Those regions which tend to have a high share of world leading technology firms, are usually also where some of the highest-ranking technological universities of the world are found. France hosts four out of the world´s QS World University Rankings top 100 leading institutes in engineering and technology. These are Institute Polytechnique de Paris, Université Paris-Saclay, Université PSL and Sorbonne University.

The common theme of the four leading universities is that they are all found in the French capital region. Likewise, while some of the leading technological companies of France are found outside Paris, in Rennes and Lille, most are focused to the capital region.

In Paris 14.4 percent of the adult population is employed in brain business jobs, a term for employment in knowledge-intensive firms in tech, information and communications technology, advanced services, and creative professions. This is not quite as high as leaders Bratislava and Prague that have 24.5 and 23.8 percent of their adults in brain business jobs, but is still one of the highest levels in Europe. However, in total numbers Bratislava only has 107,600 brain business jobs, while Prague has 190,300. Paris is the only European region with more than one million adults employed in highly knowledge intensive jobs. There are nearly twice as many brain business jobs in total in Paris than in Madrid.

Ranking and Total Number Brain Business Jobs
1	Paris	1,066,200
2	Madrid	586,000
3	Lombardia	550,000
4	Oberbayern	453,200
5	Cataluña	365,800
6	Warsaw	344,900
7	Berlin	343,600
8	Darmstadt	297,900
9	Bucharest	284,200
10	Dublin	280,700

(Note: UK and thus London not included, stopped publishing data following Brexit. Previously when data for London was published, the city has somewhat fewer total brain business jobs than what Paris did).

As a country, France however lags behind in knowledge. In Switzerland 1.56 of the world’s leading 500 deep tech companies exist per million adults. The same share is 0.79 in the Netherlands and the UK, 0.61 in Sweden, and 0.58 in Ireland. In France there are merely 0.17 world leading deep tech 500 companies per million adults, above Spain (0.13) and twice that of Italy (0.08) but not amongst the European top.

In total 6.4 percent of the adult population in France is employed in highly knowledge intensive jobs. This is quite far from the leaders Switzerland and Ireland (11.2 percent) as well as Sweden (10.3 percent).

Even in Southern Europe, Malta (9.4 percent) and Cyprus (9.0) percent have a significant lead in knowledge intensity to France. Portugal (7.8 percent) likewise has a significantly higher share of its population in knowledge intensive jobs.

Paris has a strong performance, since it combines a very large size with relatively high knowledge density. Yet France as a whole has limited knowledge intensive jobs, world leading technology companies and world leading universities in technology and mathematics outside of the capital region.

France has strong opportunities to be Europe’s leading knowledge intensive hub, but high taxes and correspondingly high government expenditure are crowding out private sector growth. Strengthening education and implementing more favorable taxation and business policy, is needed for France as a whole to grow as a knowledge intensive region. For Paris itself, a challenge is to boost growth of new housing, since if growing knowledge intensive companies find it difficult to find housing for their staff, it gives them another reason on top of taxation and regulation to locate to a competing knowledge intensive region, such as the capital regions of Central European nations.

Brain Business Jobs per Capita, Paris and Other Cities in France
	Brain business jobs per capita		Brain business jobs per capita
Paris	14.4%	Auvergne	3.4%
Rhône-Alpes	6.8%	Basse-Normandie	3.0%
Midi-Pyrénées	6.6%	Franche-Comté	2.6%
Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur	5.2%	Poitou-Charentes	2.5%
Pays de la Loire	5.1%	Bourgogne	2.4%
Aquitaine	4.9%	Lorraine	2.3%
Bretagne	4.5%	Champagne-Ardenne	2.3%
Alsace	4.5%	Limousin	2.3%
Nord-Pas de Calais	4.0%	Picardie	2.2%
Haute-Normandie	3.7%	Corse	2.1%
Languedoc-Roussillon	3.7%

Author: Nima Sanandaji, Director European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform.

Chart: adapted from public domain map

Don't Judge Trump's Economic Agenda on One Jobs Report

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 20:28:32 -0400

The recent jobs report showing declines in almost all high-wage sectors — notably manufacturing, professional and business services — does not augur well for the durability of the MAGA revolution. Although Trump inherited a weak economy, his policies in the short run seem to have accelerated layoffs without yet sparked hiring.

The numbers are frankly depressing. Manufacturing shed 12,000 jobs, extending a decline that began in February 2023. Wholesale trade also suffered, reflecting exposure to tariff turmoil. High-wage sectors were hit too, with lost jobs likely due less to trade than to the rise of AI. As in the closing years of the Biden administration, job growth is concentrated in low-end services such as retail, healthcare, and food.

Some of the problems lie in timing. Trump’s tariff threats have succeeded in winning huge commitments from major tech and industrial companies. But these developments take years to build, and even longer to become operational. In many ways Trump may suffer the indignity of seeing his positive legacy reaped not by his acolytes, but by the likes of Gavin Newsom.

This seems ironic given that Trump does not seem like a man with a coherent strategy or long-range vision. MAGA is, and will remain, a reactionary movement bent on rolling back progressive policies that reached their extremes during the twilight of the Biden years. Under the climate and social justice regime imposed by the Democrats, the economy could never really expand outside of government services, a reality more associated with Europe than America.

Trump has worked to roll back these trends, to his credit, but this will not be painless. There are vast constituencies — tech companies, financial markets, libertarian ideologues — who would like to see his economic policies fail, so that we can remain a country on an inexorable economic and technological retreat. A country that cannot produce screws can’t overcome one that can.

Sometimes entrenched problems need to be purged, and in this Trump has been effective. His approach to critical issues such as energy production, EV mandates, DEI, and expenditures of dodgy progressive projects, here and abroad, have had some effects. By the time he is finished, Trump may have unraveled much of the regulatory regime that has stifled production and deepened America’s perilous dependence on China.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Chart credit: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, via FRED, data as of Sept. 8, 2025.

Big Tech Is Scorching The Electric Grid

Robert Bryce — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 20:28:32 -0400

In 1946, when ENIAC, the world’s first general-purpose computer, was first turned on, it used so much power (about 174 kilowatts) that it caused the lights in Philadelphia to dim momentarily.

Six years later, John von Neumann, the mathematician and computer pioneer, unveiled MANIAC, short for Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer, the first computer to use RAM (random access memory). MANIAC was far more efficient than ENIAC, drawing about 19.5 kilowatts, or one-ninth the power needed by its predecessor. Author George Dyson has written that, “the entire digital universe can be traced directly” back to MANIAC.

As I explained in May 2024, the energy efficiency of our computers has continually improved since the days of ENIAC and MANIAC. And while the efficiency of our digital machinery has increased:

The power hungry nature of computing has not. The Computer Age has been defined by the quest for ever-more computing power and ever-increasing amounts of electricity to fuel our insatiable desire for more digital horsepower. As data centers have grown over the past two decades, concerns about power availability have surged.

Today, the US is facing an unprecedented power crunch. After two decades of flat electricity demand, power use is suddenly soaring as the world’s biggest tech companies race to build massive data centers running thousands of AI computers that will use stunning volumes of juice. On August 11, the Electric Power Research Institute estimated that AI’s existing power demand is approximately 5 gigawatts, but that demand could reach 50 GW by 2030. For perspective, 50 GW is larger than the total electric generation capacity in Pennsylvania, which has a population of 13 million people and is the fifth most-populous state in America. (Pennsylvania currently has about 49 GW of electric generation capacity.)

On August 27, Monitoring Analytics, the independent market monitor for PJM, the largest regional transmission organization in the US, warned that the costs associated with meeting the surging demand for AI could result in a “massive wealth transfer” from ratepayers to Big Tech. The way to avoid that, it said, was for data center operators to “bring their own new generation.” In other words, PJM should require Big Tech to build its own power plants rather than simply connecting to the existing grid. PJM has previously projected that it expects peak loads on its system, due to data centers, to jump by 30 GW by 2030.

Read the rest of this piece at: Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: composite by Robert Bryce.

Why is California Losing Good Jobs to Other States? It's Not Rocket Science

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 20:28:32 -0400

For a century, it worked, and brilliantly. The “California model” rested on massive investments in higher education, development of industrial zones in places such as the South Bay and Silicon Valley, and persistent upgrading of basic infrastructure.

Yet the system that made California dynamic and prosperous for so long is now broken and backward-looking. The state still provides ample opportunities for technological and financial elites but leaves behind a broad spectrum of the middle and working classes.

This failure is reflected in the state’s poverty and unemployment rates (both the highest in the nation), and its tepid job growth. Meanwhile other states — Texas, Florida, Arizona, the Carolinas and Tennessee, for example — have copied the California model and they have done it, as Californians once did, based on the goal of lifting up all classes. Long reactionary in their politics and social structure, these states’ business-friendly policies now have something to teach the progressive Golden State.

The defense and aerospace industries are showcases for California’s problem and missed opportunities. The state still leads in numbers of aerospace engineers and creates cutting-edge technologies. But once companies develop products based on all that innovation, they’ve tended to move the manufacturing, with its high paying blue-collar jobs, elsewhere, chasing fewer regulations, cheaper energy and a less expensive cost of living.

Take Jet Zero, which makes fuel-efficient planes. The company, based in Long Beach, is ready for prime time, with large orders for its new planes. But those jets will be built in Greensboro, N.C., in a $4.7-billion plant employing more than 14,000 people over the next decade. The company also plans to move its headquarters to Greensboro when the plant is finished.

Elon Musk’s story is well-known. The space economy is expected to be worth trillions, but Musk’s rocket company has already decamped in large part from California to Texas. Space X and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have built large test facilities in Brownsville and Van Horn, Texas, bringing a blue-collar bonanza to traditionally poor regions.

Even companies that plan to stay headquartered in California are making big investments elsewhere. Anduril, a fast growing tech-driven defense company, designs its systems in Orange County but has announced plans to build a 4,000-job plant in Ohio and is also expanding its operations in Mississippi.

This pattern should alarm the state’s leaders who seem more concerned with boosting green energy, fighting Trump and saving Hollywood. Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi has been pushing for a space commission, as exists in Texas and Florida, but so far to no effect. The California Coastal Commission’s recent rejection of Space X’s request to double launches at Vandenberg Space Force Base, ostensibly over environmental questions, is another sign that the state’s focus is anywhere but on aerospace.

Read the rest of this piece at: Los Angeles Times.

Photo credit: SpaceX launch of Iridium-4 from Vandenberg AFB by Kevin Gill, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Below Replacement Rate Fertility World-Wide Seems Imminent

Wendell Cox — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 20:28:32 -0400

The World Bank recently released its Total Fertility Rate (TFR) estimates for 2023. The data covers 217 economies, including entire nations and “other geographies for which authorities report separate social or economic statistics.”

The World is experiencing a significant decline in births, with only 101 geographies maintaining a TFR above the population replacement rate (2.100 births per woman of child-bearing age. These data are reported by governments to the World Bank.

Lowest Total Fertility Rates

The seven lowest reported TFRs are all below 1.000. The lowest national geography is Korea (South Korea), at 0.721 Three of the four lowest are separately reported parts of China and the United States. The lowest TFR, including these areas is Macao (0.586) and the third lowest Hong Kong (0.751), both of which are parts of China. The fourth lowest TFR is in Puerto Rico (0.920), a part of the United States. Singapore ranks fifth lowest (0.970). Three of the five lowest geographies have little or no rural area (non-urban). Non-urban areas generally have lower TFRs and if Macao, Hong Kong and Singapore had material rural areas, their TFRs would doubtless be higher.

Ukraine had a TFR of 0.977, which has dropped at least in part due to the war according to an official of the United Nations population fund.

China is the only other economy with a below 1.000 TFR, at 0.999. The TFR decline in China has been stunning, having fallen 40% from 1.668 in 2010.

Spain had the lowest European TFR, at 1.120, followed by Poland at 1.158. Japan and Italy had a TFR of 1.200 (Figure 1).

Very few high income economies had above replacement rate TFRs. These include Monaco, Panama, Saudi Arabia, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Guyana, Oman, St, Martin (the French Part), Guam, Israel (2.850) and Nauru (3.331).

Other high-income geographies were below replacement rate, including, for example, Canada (1.260), Australia (1.500), New Zealand and the United Kingdom (1.560) and the United States (1.617).

Highest Total Fertility Rates

The highest TFRs were concentrated in Africa, which accounted for 18 of the 20 highest. Five nations all had TFRs over 6.000, with Somalia the highest, followed by Chad, Niger, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Central African Republic. Mali and Angola had TFRs over 5.000. These along with Burundi accounted for the eight highest TFRs in the world.

Overall, 39 of the 41 highest TFRs are located in Sub-Saharan Africa, according to the World Bank geographical classifications. Only Afghanistan and Yemen were outside Sub-Saharan Africa (Figure 2).

Higher Incomes and Lower Total Fertility Rates

There is a strong relationship between higher incomes and lower TFRs. The World Bank annual income classifications are as follows: (Gross National Income or GNI) classifications.

Low-income economies: GNI per capita of $1,135 or less
Lower-middle-income economies: GNI per capita between $1,136 and $4,465
Upper-middle-income economies: GNI per capita between $4,466 and $13,845
High-income economies: GNI per capita of $13,846 or more

Figure 3 indicates the TFRs by income classification.

Toward a World-Wide TFR Below Replacement Rate

Since 1960, the World’s TFR has declined by 54% (Figure 1). The post 1960 World peak was 5.314, which dropped to 4.256 by 1974, 2.730 in 2000 and the 2.196 in 2023 (Figure 4).

The World TFR dropped 14.5% between 2010 and 2023. Among the reporting economies in Sub-Saharan Africa, the downward trend is even more, at 18.4%.

Given the strong downward trend, it seems likely that the World’s TFR will drop to below replacement rate in the near future. A table shows the World Bank data for all reporting economies in 2023.

Download the table (Excel spreadsheet opens in new tab or window)

Lead image: flag of the Republic of Korea via Wikimedia in Public Domain.

Trump's Factory Revival is Happening

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 20:28:32 -0400

Think what you will of President Trump’s chaotic-seeming tariff policies. The ostensible goal — the revitalisation of US manufacturing — is of decisive importance for the success of the nation. Or put another way, America is unlikely to maintain global primacy with finance, services, and high-tech alone. All the capital, nice hotels, and mind-bending apps in the world can’t replace factories. While tariffs may prove a good start toward this goal, they are hardly sufficient.

Tariffs are hardly a MAGA invention, of course. On the contrary, the United States has levied protective tariffs almost from its origins as a nation. Tariffs and import substitution formed one of the central pillars of Alexander Hamilton’s political economy.

Today, Europe screams about Trumpian tariffs, but the Continent has been reluctant to lower its own historically high protective barriers, most of them based on non-tariff regulatory policies. Canada, too, has been very protectionist and for a long time. Now, after decades in which Washington put global integration over its own workers and industry, America is playing the same game.

The benefits of Trump’s tariffs will take time to become apparent. Already, they have spurred companies like Eli Lilly to recommit to domestic production, forced Honda to scrap plans for shifting production of new models to Mexico in favor of Indiana, and prompted chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor and Samsung to build new plants in Arizona and Texas, respectively. Likewise, Nvidia, a company that long offshored its production to Taiwan, has committed to multibillion-dollar development projects.

Still, job recovery is gradual. US manufacturing revival has been a bipartisan goal, pursued in fits and starts, since the Great Recession. As the Reshoring Initiative notes, the country has managed to claw back approximately 1.7 million jobs in an effort to bring manufacturing to or nearer the US homeland. This could just be the beginning. By some estimates, as China rises up the value chain and production costs there increase, up to a third of all Chinese capacity will move away from the Middle Kingdom in the near future.

This shift gets an unintended boost from the increasingly hostile atmosphere in China, which confronts even big, established firms like the appliance giant Whirlpool, General Electric, Caterpillar, Goodyear, General Motors, and Polaris. Most recently, Chinese exports to America dropped to the lowest level since the pandemic, driving the trade deficit to $280 billion this year, down from $500 billion under President Joe Biden.

Yet the road from here is by no means easy. One key concern is that firms will merely shift production from China to other third countries. This would be a plus in terms of weakening Beijing as a rival, but only domestic production in key industries can guarantee US economic preeminence and, with it, US geopolitical primacy.

Like any trend that enriches some, reshoring faces strong opposition from those who benefit from the offshoring trend. You can start with the greens, whose anti-growth ideology and embrace of “net zero” are simply incompatible with industry-led economic growth. Their view boils down to letting the Chinese and their satraps do the dirty work, while America and the West purchase the products from the world’s No. 1 polluter.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo credit: Mark Cleghorn; Roy Bearden performs flux cored arc welding on a M1 tank. Public Domain.

California Roulette

Christopher LeGras — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 20:28:33 -0400

Serious question, occasioned by evidence and experience: Do some members of California’s political class actually want people to die horrific deaths in wildfires and other natural disasters? Because they’re sure acting like it.

In the game of Russian Roulette, people put guns to their own heads while gamblers wager on the outcome. California Roulette is different. It involves politicians putting guns to everyone else’s heads while the powerful financial and business interests that control them rake in massive profits. At least Russian Roulette requires balls. California Roulette is premised on cowardice, mendacity, and avarice.

Take state Senator Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco), who has been on an eight year crusade to destroy suburbs and single family neighborhoods. He has called houses “racist and exclusionary,” as if inanimate objects can be bigoted. Wiener, who grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, one of the wealthiest (and whitest) suburbs on the planet, doesn’t want anyone in his adopted state to enjoy the kind of life he did as a child. He envisions a brave new California in which 39 million people all live in small, densely packed apartments and get around on public transit and bicycles. No more front or back yards and quiet, tree-lined streets for us naughty, carbon spewing fleshbags. Definitely no more cars.

His hypocrisy isn’t just galling. It’s dangerous. Wiener, who has been called “California’s most devious and craven politician” (which, considering the competition for that particular crown, is really saying something) routinely dismisses concerns about housing development in hazard zones. In fact, he’s introduced multiple pieces of legislation that sought to make it easier for developers to make millions constructing huge apartment buildings in high fire danger severity zones (HFDSZs), tsunami zones, liquefaction zones, areas vulnerable to subsidence, and other places in which dense housing is completely inappropriate.

A flood of dangerous, irresponsible legislation

For example, last year Wiener introduced Senate Bill (SB) 610, which would have eliminated local officials’ power to identify high fire danger severity zones (HFDSZs) in their jurisdictions and prohibit development within those boundaries. He asserted that cities were “weaponizing” HFDSZ designations in order to limit needed new housing (more on the Big Lie behind California’s non-existent housing crisis in another post).

In Scott Wiener’s fever dreamworld, selfish city councilmembers are forever concocting all manner of nefarious schemes to prevent new housing construction. It is beyond his (limited) power of imagination to grasp that local leaders actually care about the safety and lives of the people they represent. Wiener lives in a purely transactional, binary world in which there are only two sides in the housing debate, YIMBYs and NIMBYs. The former are beyond reproach while the latter are beyond salvation. Everyone must be shoved into one of those categories, else his entire reality comes crashing down.

Wiener’s cynicism is boundless. In February, even as the embers of the Eaton and Palisades Fires in Los Angeles were still smoldering, even as a hundred thousand Angelenos were barely beginning to sift through the ruins of their homes and their lives, even as the body count was still being tallied and cadaver dogs were sifting for human remains, he wrote and introduced SB 677. That bill would have made it easier for developers to replace single family homes with four, eight, or ten units – but only in disaster zones.

Read the rest of this piece at All Aspect Report.

Christopher LeGras is an attorney, journalist, muckraker, and Californian.

Photo: Pacific Palisades: To normal people, a scene of unspeakable loss and tragedy. To many in California’s political class, a blank slate and opportunity. Drone image by Christopher LeGras.

Off the Rails 2

Randal OToole — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 20:28:33 -0400

Rail transit is finally getting the attention it deserves in Washington, DC. Early this month, Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) released a report describing billion-dollar boondoggles. While the star is California’s high-speed rail, many of the projects criticized by the report involve rail transit, including Honolulu’s rail project and Maryland’s Purple Line. The projects are not only billions of dollars over budget, many of them are years behind schedule.

As a starting point, Ernst used a one-page Department of Transportation “annual report” of federally funded projects that the Biden administration had refused to release, but which was recently released by the Trump administration. The list included five Federal Aviation Administration-funded projects that had no cost overruns, three Federal Highway Administration-funded projects whose cost overruns averaged 75 percent, three transit projects whose cost overruns averaged 80 percent, and three Federal Railroad Administration-funded projects whose cost overruns averaged 395 percent.

I’m sure it is only a coincidence that the name of the report, Off the Rails, was also the name of a 2023 report I wrote about Minnesota’s rail transit boondoggles, one of which currently has an $800 million cost overrun. Ernst specifically calls out this project as one that should have been included in the DOT report but was not.

Of the projects in Ernst’s report, the one (other than California high-speed rail) with the greatest cost overrun is the Honolulu rail line, which is also expected to be completed 11 years late. The report didn’t mention that operating the Honolulu rail line last year cost taxpayers more than $70 for every passenger it carried. On a percentage basis, however, the Maryland Purple Line wins, as it had a 130 percent cost overrun compared with 94 percent for Honolulu.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Photo: cover artwork from Off The Rails report.

From Drivers to Passengers: What We Lose When We Stop Taking the Wheel

Samuel J Abrams — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The Road as America's Mirror

America has always defined itself by the road. Our highways are more than infrastructure; they are metaphors for freedom, movement, and agency. To take the wheel, to choose a route, to wander into the unfamiliar has long symbolized possibility and independence. Whitman sang of the open road. Kerouac mythologized it. Families once loaded into station wagons to see the country for themselves. Driving was not just about arrival. It was about charting your own course, testing your independence, and learning to inhabit a vast and varied nation.

That is why some of the most revealing portraits of the United States have come from those who traveled with a camera. Two moments, separated by seventy years, capture the changing meaning of the road. In the 1950s, Robert Frank and Todd Webb each received Guggenheim grants to document "the American way of life." Their journeys produced contrasting but complementary visions of a booming, self-confident nation. Seven decades later, Karen Knorr and Anna Fox retraced U.S. Route 1. Their project presents a very different country. Together, these bodies of work tell us how our civic life has shifted—from confidence to fragility, from taking the wheel to surrendering it, from seeing the road as a mirror to treating it as a pipeline.

Frank and Webb: Confidence Through the Windshield

Robert Frank's The Americans (1958) remains a landmark of twentieth-century photography. Out of 27,000 exposures, Frank distilled 83 images into a searing portrait of diners, jukeboxes, funerals, and flags. His was a harsh critique, but leveled from within a society secure enough to confront itself honestly. Frank's America was booming and dynamic and capable of absorbing criticism because it had confidence in its own strength.

Todd Webb's photographs provide a gentler counterpoint. A middle-aged Midwesterner, Webb traveled more slowly and did so on foot, bicycle, even by sail. He chronicled storefronts and small-town parades with affection. He could find beauty even in wreckage; one famous and memorable image transforms a junkyard of Packards into something sculptural.

Together, they captured a society still on the move. They didn't simply look at America; they traversed it, lingering in towns most people bypassed. They recorded a country tied together by rituals that bridged difference: parades, congregations, civic clubs, and Main Street habits. Their agency mattered. They chose their routes, stopped where they wished, met strangers along the way. The road was both mirror and classroom—a way of encountering America in its fullness.

Knorr and Fox: Fragility Along Route 1

Seven decades later, Karen Knorr and Anna Fox spent nearly a decade documenting U.S. Route 1. Their exhibition U.S. Route 1 (After Berenice Abbott)—currently at Les Rencontres d'Arles—brings together 150 color photographs that reveal a sobering America.

Their Route 1 is lined with shuttered storefronts, hollow strip malls, and abandoned motels. Billboards proclaim religious and nationalist slogans. Veterans are left behind. Some moments verge on the surreal: a wax figure of a slave displayed as kitsch, a clown wandering through a mall. Critics describe their work as confronting abandonment, gun culture, and division. Where mid-century photographers found promise, Knorr and Fox reveal fragility.

Even their decision to drive Route 1 carries significance. To take the wheel with intent, to encounter difference on the ground is increasingly rare. Americans, especially younger ones, delay or forgo licenses. They rely on parents or ride-shares that move them between curated points. Navigation is ceded to algorithms. The detour, the wrong turn, the unexpected diner, once common experiences, are vanishing. Knorr and Fox remind us what is lost when we stop making such journeys: the practice of seeing the country unfiltered, the humility that comes with encountering places not designed for us.

What Changed: From Joiners to Passengers

The difference between eras reflects deeper changes in civic life. Mid-century America was a society of joiners. People moved more, traveled farther, and encountered others unlike themselves. Shared rituals gave diverse communities a sense of belonging.

That fabric has unraveled. Americans now move less, join less, and know fewer people outside their circles. Religious attendance has collapsed, volunteering has declined, and loneliness has surged. In 1990, only 3% of Americans said they had no close friends. By 2021, that number quadrupled to 12%. Social media narrowed horizons further, reinforcing echo chambers.

For younger Americans, the decline in driving captures this trend perfectly. In 1983, 46% of 16-year-olds and 80% of 18-year-olds held driver's licenses. By 2021, only 25% of 16-year-olds and 60% of 18-year-olds were licensed. Among 19-year-olds, the licensing rate fell from 87% in 1983 to 70% in 2010. By 2023, only about 33% of teens 19 and under had licenses, down from 45% in 2003.

What was once a rite of passage has become optional. Even Uber's CEO recently noted his adult son hasn't acquired a license, preferring ride-shares. The message is clear: for a rising generation, taking the wheel is no longer central.

The Loss of Agency

The loss is not simply practical. It is cultural and civic. Without driving, young Americans have fewer encounters with the unexpected. They don't stumble into small-town diners or wrong-turn parades. They move from one curated node to another, carried by parents or apps, insulated from the unplanned.

Driving once provided not just mobility but humility: the realization that the country is vast, varied, and not designed to conform to you. Without it, empathy shrinks, resilience weakens, and civic trust withers. What is being lost is agency itself: the ability to choose, to discover, to see for oneself. A generation that no longer drives itself may be less prepared to steer the nation forward.

Roads as Pipelines, Not Mirrors

This is why Knorr and Fox's work matters so deeply. Their photographs remind us what happens when the road ceases to be a mirror. Frank and Webb could only make their portraits because they took the wheel, moved through America on their own terms. Knorr and Fox did the same. But most Americans, especially the young, no longer do.

When we stop driving, we cede agency. We allow algorithms to decide where we go and what we see. Roads without drivers are not mirrors; they are pipelines. They move us efficiently but show us nothing. We glide between curated destinations without inhabiting the places in between. The unexpected detour, the chance encounter, the human surprise vanish. And with them vanishes the civic practice of meeting difference face-to-face.

A society that does not drive is a society that no longer wanders, no longer discovers, no longer learns humility by being a stranger in a strange town. It is a society of passengers, not participants—discontented, disconnected, and blind.

Serendipity has become nearly extinct. Social media feeds us pre-digested itineraries and step-by-step scripts for experiencing every place and culture. We follow the same ten restaurants, photograph the same scenic overlooks, perform the same rituals of consumption masquerading as discovery. The algorithm has replaced the accident. The curated has conquered the unexpected. And in this endless reproduction of identical experiences, the genuine gifts of human encounter—surprise, discomfort, growth—wither away. We are all following the same maps to the same destinations, and the social world grows more impoverished with every perfectly planned journey.

Reclaiming the Road

America's roads remain mirrors. The arc from Frank and Webb to Knorr and Fox is not just about changing photographic styles. It's about civic health and the question of whether or not we are still willing to take the wheel, to encounter difference, to recognize ourselves in the process.

The lesson is clear: America can only be understood through its differences. Parades and picnics, junkyards and diners, strip malls and veterans' halls; all are part of the same civic fabric. To ignore them is to unravel who we are.

But younger Americans are losing the habits that once made the road formative. They inherit it not as a mirror but as a corridor of convenience, navigated by algorithms and driven by others. Without the practice of taking the wheel, they lose the civic muscle that comes from agency, discovery, and encounter.

That is the warning in Knorr and Fox's Route 1. They did what Frank and Webb did seventy years earlier; they took the wheel, chose their stops, lingered where algorithms would never lead. Their 150 photographs are not merely documents of decay but proof of what becomes visible when we still make such journeys. Each shuttered storefront exists because they drove there themselves, stopped, looked, and recorded. Their work is both portrait and demonstration showing not only what America looks like when we stop looking, but what we might still see if we reclaim the practice of looking for ourselves.

If we fail to heed this lesson, we risk raising a generation of passengers—young Americans who inherit Frank's critique and Webb's affection as museum pieces rather than living practices, who no longer know their own country because they no longer choose their own routes through it. This is not mere nostalgia for the open road. It's about the fundamental skills of democratic citizenship; the ability to navigate disagreement, to be comfortable with discomfort, to find common ground in unexpected places. These are precisely the capacities we need to bridge our political and cultural divides, yet they're the very skills a curated, algorithmic existence fails to develop.

The story these photographers tell, from Frank's 27,000 exposures to Knorr and Fox's decade-long journey, remains worth seeing precisely because they saw it themselves, unmediated and unfiltered. Each transformed the road from pipeline to mirror. And in doing so, they preserved not just images but a way of encountering America that is rapidly vanishing.

Making the deliberate choice to drive through difference, to seek the unexpected, to inhabit the uncomfortable is worth saving. Because without it, we lose more than mobility. We lose the very capacity to see ourselves.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: Pexels.

Demographia World Urban Areas - 2025

Wendell Cox — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

1: Introduction

Demographia World Urban Areas (Built-up Urban Areas or Urban Agglomerations) is the only regularly published inventory of population, corresponding land area and population density for urban areas with more than 500,000 population. Unlike some other regularly produced lists, Demographia World Urban Areas applies a generally consistent definition to built-up urban areas.

2: Defining Urban Areas

Urban areas are urban footprints, or expanses of urbanization on the natural environment. Urban footprint data is reported without regard to political boundaries that are generally associated with metropolitan areas or sub-national jurisdictions. A useful definition was supplied by Alex Blei, of the NYU (New York University) Stern Marron Institute Urban Expansion Project, who described urban areas as contiguous or mostly contiguous built-up areas that “function as an integrated economic unit, linked together by commuting flows, social and economic interactions.”
Combined Urban Areas

This edition of Demographia World Urban Areas introduces a broadened definition that combines adjacent urban areas, where nearby urban areas have become a single urban footprint. This revision has been undertaken especially in response to the spreading of continuous urbanization in China, the ultimate being in the Pearl River Delta (Guangzhou-Shenzhen) and the Yangtze River Delta, stretching from Shanghai to Changzhou, which are now shown as the first and second largest urban areas in the world.

In the United States, single labor markets can be either metropolitan areas (MSAs), or combined statistical areas (CSAs), which are, overlapping metropolitan areas or metropolitan regions, with somewhat weaker commuting interchanges. Where continuous urban footprints exist within a CSA. Demographia World Urban Areas combines them into a single urban area. For example, the New York built-up urban area stretches from New York to other US Census Bureau defined urban areas, such as Bridgeport-Stamford, New Haven, and Trenton and others (Table 1).

In addition, the US Census Bureau has retained some urban areas, despite their now continuous urbanization with other urban areas within the same metropolitan areas. Demographia World Urban Areas combines this into a single built-up urban area. Cleveland and Lorain, Ohio, as well as Orlando and Kissimmee, Florida are examples of this (Table 2).

Read the full report here.

American Quality of Life Jeopardized Due to Reduction of Refineries

Ronald Stein — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Most people may not realize that the underground black tar commonly referred to as crude oil is essentially useless unless refined into something usable. Fortunately, in less than a few centuries, mankind’s ingenuity led to 250 groundbreaking hydrocarbon processing and refining techniques being discovered. The impact of that ingenuity continues today, benefiting the 8 billion people living on Earth with more than 6,000 products and transportation fuels that are derived from oil.

Across the world, people are living longer. In 1900, the average life expectancy of a newborn was 32 years. By 2021, this had more than doubled to 71 years. Today, it’s better than 75 years.

Today, we have more than 50,000 merchant ships, more than 20,000 commercial aircraft, and more than 50,000 military aircraft that are built with products made from oil. The transportation fuels to move the heavy-weight and long-range needs of jets moving people and products, and the merchant ships for global trade flows, and the military and space programs, are also dependent on what can be manufactured from crude oil.

In addition to the large oil reserves, the world has an abundance of coal that can somewhat replace crude oil through coal gasification and coal liquefaction plants, but they, too, have emission challenges.

We know that raw crude oil is useless unless it can be refined into derivatives that are the basis of more than 6,000 products, and for various transportation fuels.

Technology is always evolving, like fracking, but at the current crude oil usage of about 82 million barrels a day, those “known” reserves of crude oil may run out in the next 100 years or more.

Refineries in America are getting old, and several are starting to shut down.

It’s almost impossible to get a new refinery sited, permitted, and built in America.

Coal gasification and coal liquefaction plants may face the same or even greater challenges for new refineries – getting them sited, permitted, and built.

However, the expansion plans for refineries, coal gasification, and coal liquefaction plants face challenges, particularly with growing environmental concerns and policy shifts towards reducing emissions and fossil fuel consumption, according to the Institute for Energy Research.

In recent decades, no new refineries have been built in America. Building these projects is not only expensive but also fraught with environmental and political opposition, particularly with rising concerns over climate change and the transition to greener energy. These projects can experience delays due to various factors, including financing, logistics, and regulatory hurdles.

Read the rest of this piece at America Out Loud.

Ronald Stein is an engineer, senior policy advisor on energy literacy for the Heartland Institute and CFACT, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book "Clean Energy Exploitations."

Photo: courtesy America Out Loud.

Seeing the Midwest Clearly: What Robin Bailey's Photography Teaches Our Politics

Samuel J Abrams — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

A single streetlamp glows over a shuttered storefront, paint cracked and signage faded to near illegibility. In Robin W. Bailey’s black-and-white frame, what might appear ordinary becomes monumental: a meditation on memory, loss, and endurance. Raised in the factory towns of Northeast Ohio and now living in suburban Chicago, Bailey turns his lens on the Midwestern landscapes that shaped him—and in doing so, reveals something essential about America’s civic condition.

The power of Bailey’s work begins with its craft. His choice of black and white is not a nostalgic flourish but a discipline. Color would distract; monochrome clarifies. Line, form, and texture emerge with uncommon sharpness. The faint glow of a lamp against brick, the shadowed outline of a warehouse against the night sky—details that slip past the casual eye become, in Bailey’s hands, carriers of memory. His compositions are balanced yet unforced, dignifying the vernacular architecture of diners, storefronts, and union halls without sentimentality. What others might overlook as decay, Bailey presents as endurance.

In this sense, Bailey belongs squarely in the American documentary tradition that stretches from Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to Todd Webb. Evans, with his storefronts and signs, revealed fragility during the Depression; Lange gave the dislocated of the Dust Bowl a human face; Webb found quiet dignity in unnoticed city blocks and small-town corners. Bailey extends that lineage into the post-industrial Midwest. Where Evans chronicled collapse and Lange humanized displacement, Bailey strips people out of the frame entirely. His images insist that the landscape itself—empty streets, weathered facades, dimming neon—has become the vessel of memory.

Consider again that lone street corner. At first it seems unremarkable, even bleak. Yet Bailey’s precision makes it luminous. The absence of people is precisely the point: the corner persists, carrying the traces of lives once lived, of conversations once had, of transactions once made in its glow. The buildings remain as survivors, not ruins. They are silent witnesses to the erosion of civic life and, paradoxically, its durability.

To look at Bailey’s photographs is to understand that landscapes are never neutral. They are political texts and social commentary, written in brick, wood, and asphalt. A shuttered factory or a converted diner testifies not only to economic loss but to civic unraveling. When places lose their institutions, trust frays. A boarded-up storefront is not simply architecture; it is a marker of abandonment, a visible sign of what happens when bonds of community and belonging are allowed to collapse.

Bailey himself has said that he grew up “just before the demise of the factory towns.” The decline of manufacturing in the Midwest meant more than layoffs. It meant the dissolution of the bonds that held communities together. Unions weakened, congregations dwindled, civic associations disappeared. Robert Putnam chronicled this unraveling in Bowling Alone; Bailey shows us its physical remains. His photographs are the visual counterpart to the data, capturing absence and endurance at once.

And this is why Bailey’s art speaks so directly to our politics today. The very towns and counties he photographs are the ones that have unsettled American elections. These are the “red wall” places, the counties that swung from Barack Obama to Donald Trump, the exurbs where disaffection runs deepest. When we see Bailey’s images of faded signs and empty sidewalks, we are looking at the geography of realignment. They show us why populism, both left and right, finds such ready audience. His photographs are not abstractions. They are the built environments of distrust.

Our political class, meanwhile, too often refuses to see them clearly. The “middle class” becomes a polling category, not a neighborhood. The Midwest is flattened into a trope. Candidates campaign in diners for photo-ops, then forget the communities those diners once sustained. Bailey’s art refuses such flattening. His images insist on specificity: this storefront mattered to someone; this corner carried a childhood. When elites ignore these realities, they confirm the suspicion that institutions no longer belong to everyone.
That suspicion is now measurable. Gallup finds that only four in ten Americans retain confidence in higher education, once a source of civic pride in Midwestern towns. Pew surveys show trust in government and media at generational lows. These attitudes are not born in abstraction. They are rooted in lived experience—rooted in the sense that institutions have failed to sustain the communities people love. As the cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan observed, humans form deep bonds with place, a sentiment he called topophilia. Bailey’s photographs are exercises in topophilia. They honor the bonds between people and their landscapes even when those landscapes are scarred by decline.

It would be easy to mistake Bailey’s work for elegy, a lament for what has vanished. But that is too simple. These images are not about ruins. They are about survival. Their endurance is itself a form of hope. They remind us that continuity remains possible, that communities retain strength even after decades of neglect. The question is whether politics will recognize this endurance—or whether leaders will continue to treat the Midwest as mere backdrop while advancing policies that erase memory in the name of efficiency.

Bailey warns of that erasure himself, noting that modern development risks turning the Midwest into “a mere geographical territory”—bland, indistinct, interchangeable. That is not merely an aesthetic loss. It is a civic wound. When Main Streets give way to anonymous logistics hubs and chain outlets, residents feel more than economic dislocation. They feel their community’s story being erased. And when memory is erased, alienation deepens. Disengagement grows. Populist anger becomes inevitable.

A conservative response must begin where Bailey does, with memory and particularity. Strong communities are built by strong institutions that anchor people to place. That means schools that teach local as well as national history, cultivating pride not only in America as an idea but in the towns and regions where that idea takes root. It means supporting small businesses, civic organizations, and houses of worship that provide texture to daily life. It means infrastructure and planning that revitalize rather than obliterate—policies that preserve continuity even as they accommodate growth. Renewal does not require nostalgia, but it does require respect. Examples from Ohio and Michigan show that Main Street revival is possible without surrendering uniqueness. These efforts should be replicated.

As Yuval Levin has argued, institutions exist not only to shape individuals but to embody continuity across time. Bailey’s photographs make that continuity visible. They show us not simply buildings but communities, memory, and identity that persist against neglect. They remind us that civic trust cannot be restored in abstraction. It must be built in real places.

Bailey’s Midwest is not a stage set of decline but a landscape of survivors. Streets may be empty, facades weathered, neon dim, yet dignity endures. His photographs remind us that America is not only an idea but a collection of particular places, full of meaning and memory, still waiting to be honored.

Bailey shows us these places in stark black and white. Like Todd Webb before him, he reveals their quiet dignity. But his work is more than art. It is civic witness. And if our politics is ever to recover trust, it must learn what Bailey’s photographs already know: that to see America clearly, we must first learn to see its places.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: Instagram post.

AI Revolution Will Crush the Blue States

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

“The first step onto the corporate ladder is vanishing for many new graduates,” argued a recent Fortune report. As a result, CEOs are warning that entry-level jobs are on the brink of extinction, with internships and opportunities for college graduates drying up.

Of course, not everyone will feel the impact in the same way. At the top of the pyramid are investors, entrepreneurs, and elite programmers who now command salaries on par with professional athletes. But artificial intelligence — fuelled by a huge infusion of Wall Street cash — threatens to eliminate many software jobs, along with high-end professional roles that involve routine analysis.

Young people are acutely aware of this. In the class I teach with Marshall Koplansky at Chapman University, several students predicted that the jobs they currently hold will soon disappear. Among them were a game designer, two human-resources executives, and a manufacturing and warehouse manager.

My engineering colleagues report a similar trend. While opportunities remain strong for mechanical and chemical engineers, as well as for those designing robotics, the outlook is far less certain for computer science students. Despite soaring profits at the largest tech companies, AI programming tools have enabled sweeping layoffs at firms such as Amazon, Intel, Meta and Microsoft. Today, among college graduates aged 22-27, computer science and computer engineering majors face some of the highest unemployment rates, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

In response, many firms are now focusing on building tangible products rather than merely shifting algorithms for commerce or generating more social media. In the aerospace and defence sectors, for example, AI is seen not as an end but a tool. It is a means to enhance human creativity and productivity rather than replace it. “Software is not in the greatest position with AI,” Delian Asparouhov, who runs a firm focused on in-space manufacturing, told me. “Now people are shifting to hard tech. Designing and building spaceships still needs people.”

This could spell trouble for elite universities, but represents a major advantage for schools that teach the practical skills companies actually need. So far, these opportunities are largely concentrated in red and purple states in the Midwest and South — the regions most focused on reshoring manufacturing and other industries from overseas.

Attitudes are shifting alongside these economic changes. One recent survey found that roughly 83% of Generation Z feel that learning a skilled trade can be a better pathway to economic security than college — including 90% of those already holding college degrees. Indeed, as college enrolment has dropped between 2020 and 2023, trade school enrolment grew by 10%. These changes suggest that as practical skills gain value, regions offering them are likely to attract both talent and jobs.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo credit: Robot navigating a course during the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Robotics Challenge (DRC) June 5 in Pomona, California. Source: Office of Naval Research via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The Next Californias

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Not long ago, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon were widely hailed as states with bright futures. For decades, they attracted scores of out-of-state migrants, turning Denver, Seattle, and Portland into celebrated urban hubs.

But that changed as these states began adopting the very policies—above all on energy, housing, and regulation—that many newcomers had fled from in California. Once politically purple, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon have turned solid blue, embracing the same agenda that even the New York Times concedes has turned “the California dream” into “a mirage.”

True, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon have yet to reach California’s levels of dysfunction. Yet each shows signs suggestive of the Golden State’s experience, including lower job growth, sluggish housing-construction rates, a deteriorating business climate, and surging domestic out-migration.

The shift in migration patterns may be the clearest sign of the three states’ Californication. Like California, these states long attracted newcomers with their remarkable natural beauty. People only began leaving California—still arguably the most beautiful state in the continental U.S., with some of the most pleasant weather on earth—when its political, economic, and cultural climate became unbearable, especially for young families.

Initially, as California began hemorrhaging residents, Washington, Oregon, and Colorado kept growing as destinations for domestic migrants. Between 2010 and 2020, Colorado gained more than 390,000 domestic migrants; since 2020, that total has fallen below 24,000, per the Census Bureau. Oregon and Washington together gained well over 600,000 net domestic migrants between 2010 and 2020, but they’ve lost more than 40,000 since 2020.

What happened? Politics. Until the 2010s, all three states boasted robust two-party systems, with liberal-leaning metros and conservative-tilting countrysides. No longer. Washington, which has not elected a Republican governor this century, may be the furthest along the progressive path. Neighboring Oregon is not far behind, with consistent Democratic control of the statehouse and governor’s office since 2006.

The biggest shift has taken place in Colorado, where Republicans were highly competitive as late as 2018. Governor Jared Polis’s image as a “libertarian” largely reflects his positions on social issues. Polis, who comes from the ultra-progressive university town of Boulder, presides over a state with the nation’s sixth-worst regulatory burden.

Read the rest of this piece at: City Journal.

Photo credit: James St. John, view of Denver via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Cities and Suburbs: Get it Together

Pete Saunders — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

I’ve written some versions of this topic many times over the years. Now it’s time for the latest installment.

Every so often, there are people who want to cast “cities” (here I’m defining them as the core or foundational municipality of a larger metropolitan region) against “suburbs” (the non-core, usually smaller jurisdictions, that have an economic, social and cultural connection to a core city). Every so often, people want to use various metrics to demonstrate that either cities or the collective suburban areas are doing better or worse than the other.

Researchers of all types on either side of the city/suburb divide will cherry-pick data to prove a point about cities or suburbs. I could bore you with a long historical explanation of this divide, but the tl;dr version is that as cities were beset with economic and social issues in the mid-20^th century, and as “suburbs” had grown to a point where they had their own constituency and political representation at the same time, the line between the two was drawn. In the early 21^st century, many cities recovered and saw revitalization. However, those committed to suburbs were quick to suggest that not all is well with cities.

The Covid pandemic period had plenty of examples of this pushed forward by suburban advocates. Two examples stand out. When researchers saw a surge in city out-migration in 2021 and 2022, many were saying the pandemic was causing people to flee cities in favor of more spacious and pleasant suburbs, exurbs and rural areas. Suburbs offered more comfort and protection than the more-crowded cities. When downtown office buildings effectively shuttered because of the pandemic shutdown, and office workers finally took advantage of meaningful ways to work from home, many people were saying that office-centered downtowns that were reliant on office worker traffic were doomed; if a worker could work principally at home, one could live anywhere, potentially threatening the very existence of cities.

Of course, there were city advocates (I include myself) who pushed back on those narratives. For one, I maintained that cities had an “experiential advantage” over suburbs that would survive the pandemic. There are amenities and attractions that cities have that still bring people to cities, and there are people who will still choose to live in an amenity-rich environment.

On the other hand, there are city advocates who are priced out of expensive cities, and getting behind the YIMBY and/or abundance movements to increase the supply of housing in cities and suburbs. Many YIMBY activists have become deeply involved in zoning reform in large cities, promoting the elimination of exclusive single-family zoning districts and increased housing density in transit-accessible areas. To address the same issues in suburbia, many YIMBYs have taken to proposing statewide legislation at state legislatures, encouraging states to take a more direct role in shaping local land use and zoning policy.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Renee Silverman via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The Case for Defanging Ottawa

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

When globalism was hot, then-prime minister Justin Trudeau tried to be hotter by deciding that Canada has “no core identity, no mainstream,” and suggesting Canada had become a “post-national state.” Now that nationalism is back in vogue, Prime Minister Mark Carney, unwilling or unable to counter U.S. President Donald Trump’s taunts and tariff barrage, has become an odd recipient of Canada’s quest for a U.S.-like national identity. Even as he rails against America’s temperamental chief executive, he has shown little interest in curbing his country’s own protectionist policies.

But Canadians, indulging in a rare burst of nationalist authoritarianism, may be jumping on the wrong train. Even as people reject globalism, the “national state” is also losing its appeal — not only in the United States, but throughout Europe and the United Kingdom, as well. Some of this, on the left at least, reflects anti-western ideology, epitomized by DEI and the mandatory acknowledgement of First Nations land rights, which are now deeply entrenched in the education systems of the U.S., Canada and Europe.

Support for a highly centralized state also represents a rejection of Canadian and American attempts to balance national and regional concerns. As enormous countries, we each have populations that have predominately different origins and exist in often wildly different economies. A suburbanite at the edge of the Golden Horseshoe or in the endlessly expanding sprawl north of Dallas has very different ideas and priorities, whether in terms of schools or support for terrorism, than an arts or non-profit worker in central Toronto or Manhattan.

The differences get greater when you look across the continental expanse. Alberta and the Prairie provinces depend on raw material production, which is not exactly in line with Carney’s ultra-green vision, as Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has rightly pointed out. British Columbia inhales new urbanist dogma and seeks to reduce fossil fuels, and Ontario remains divided between its industrial base and its greener-than-thou urban elites. Like them, Carney seems more focused on things other than finding ways for Canada’s various communities to thrive.

But more power to the provinces or the states does not really go far enough. For most things, outside of national defence and foreign relations, the real goal should be to bring decision-making down to as local a level as possible. This notion is popular among Canadians, most of whom wish to see decisions made closer to home.

This notion is also embraced in the U.S., notes Gallup. Big companies, banks and media receive low marks from the public, but small business continues to enjoy widespread support across party lines. Millennials, largely liberal on issues such as immigration and gay marriage, are as one commentator suggests, more “socially conscious,” but they do not necessarily favour the top-down structures embraced by earlier generations; many prefer small units to larger ones.

Read the rest of this piece at: National Post.

Photo credit: Prime Minister Mark Carney addresses the crowd during Canada Day festivities in Ottawa. Photo by Jean Levac/Ottawa Citizen.

Time to Rethink Homelessness Policy

Edward Escobar — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Walk through any major American city today—San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle—and you’ll see the same troubling pattern: sidewalks turned into encampments, public parks overtaken by tents, and transit stations rendered unusable. This isn’t just a humanitarian crisis. It’s a public safety emergency, a sanitation nightmare, and a glaring indictment of failed policy.

Let’s be clear: no one is guaranteed a home simply by virtue of living in America. What we can and should offer is temporary, transitional shelter—a safe place to stabilize, not a permanent entitlement. But instead of enforcing this principle, our cities have allowed the streets to become de facto housing, with little oversight and even less accountability.

The Real Crisis: Oversight, Not Just Compassion

Many of those living on the streets face serious challenges—mental illness, substance abuse, trauma. These are not conditions that resolve themselves. The state has a custodial responsibility to intervene, not abandon. That means enforcing laws, offering treatment, and ensuring that public spaces remain safe and functional for everyone.

But instead of real solutions, we get performative compassion—billions funneled into nonprofit organizations that promise progress but deliver stagnation. These groups, often politically connected, operate with minimal transparency and maximum funding. Their executive directors earn six-figure salaries while the streets they claim to serve grow more dangerous and dysfunctional.

Cronyism Masquerading as Charity

Let’s call it what it is: grift disguised as goodwill. Elected officials funnel taxpayer dollars to nonprofits that support their campaigns, creating a feedback loop of exploitation. The suffering of the homeless becomes a business model, not a problem to solve. And when the public demands answers, these officials feign confusion—“We don’t know why it’s getting worse,” they say, as billions vanish into bureaucratic black holes.

This isn’t socialism. It’s not even capitalism. It’s cronyism, pure and simple. And it’s unacceptable.

A New Path Forward

We need policies that are firm, fair, and focused:

– Mandatory transitional shelter with clear timelines and pathways to treatment or employment.

– Enforcement of public space laws to protect safety and cleanliness.

– Audits and accountability for every dollar spent on homelessness programs.

– Mental health and addiction services that are compulsory for those who need them—not optional.

Compassion without structure is chaos. America must stop pretending that letting people suffer in tents is humane. It’s not. It’s abandonment.

Let’s reclaim our cities—not with cruelty, but with courage. Let’s demand results—not rhetoric. And let’s stop subsidizing failure.

This piece first appeared at: California Globe.

Edward Escobar is a seasoned activist, organizer & prolific political operative. He is the founder of the Coalition for Community Engagement and the Citizens Unite Movement, driving common-sense initiatives with a focus on tangible change and community empowerment. He is a significant leader in the historic Recalls of both Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price.

Photo credit: Edward Escobar, the author.

Economies with Anglo-Saxon Roots Dominate Technology

Nima Sanandaji — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

A systematic mapping of where the world’s global leading companies in deep tech are located shows that the UK is second best in the world. More importantly, the four dominant deep tech countries all have economic models based on an Anglo-Saxon legal tradition – shows the Deep Tech Index.

Currently Santa Clara Valley by itself hosts a fifth of all globally leading deep tech companies. The region has had a first-movers advantage, since Thomas Edison created the world’s first industrial innovation laboratory there 150 years ago. This massive lead is gradually normalizing, due to rising costs and talent shortage. Other parts of the US, and more importantly other parts of the world, compete with growing deep tech companies.

The USA has fully 62 percent of the world´s leading 500 deep tech companies, a large but falling share. The UK is second best in the world, hosting 6.6 percent of all global deep tech. In the areas of fintech and clean tech, the UK is world leading. Also, in photonic & electronic as well as space & advanced materials, a relatively large share of the world´s leading deep tech companies are found in the UK.

Further 5.6 percent of the deep tech companies of the world are located in Canada and 5.4 percent in India. These four countries which share an Anglo-Saxon legal tradition dominate global deep tech, far surpassing any rivals. Adding in Australia and Ireland, fully 80 percent of the deep tech companies in the world are found in these four nations.

It is astonishing that four out of five world-leading technology companies exist in Anglo-Saxon economies.

The five urban regions with most share of global deep tech companies are Santa Clara Valley, Boston, New York, London and Los Angeles. London is the only top 5 deep tech region outside of the USA. Other leading regions outside of the USA include New Delhi, Vancouver, Mumbai, Singapore and Toronto. These regions all exist in countries with an Anglo-Saxon legal tradition.

Zurich, Eindhoven, Tel Aviv and Stockholm are examples of globally leading deep tech hubs that exist in countries that have a legal tradition other than Anglo-Saxon.

There is a close link between having a high share of globally leading deep tech companies per million adults, and having a high share of the world´s leading top 100 universities in mathematics and engineering. Currently 23 of those top universities exist in the USA, 4 in Canada, 5 in India and 8 in the UK. Further 6 are found in Australia, a nation which is very successful in attracting students from abroad. Combined with an Anglo-Saxon business tradition and competitive taxation, Australia is likely to keep growing with deep tech in the coming years.

The UK and countries that used to be its colonies and therefore have an Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, have a strong lead in knowledge when looking at the university level. They have an even more impressive lead when looking at the level of deep tech company success. While other parts of the world are catching up gradually, this strong Anglo-Saxon dominance can explain why English is the predominant business language.

Historically, the Anglo-Saxon business model has had a strong focus on venture capitalists interacting with entrepreneurial capitalists. This model, popularized today in tv-series such as The Dragon´s Nest, existed in early form already during the industrial revolution. The strong venture capital sector and its interaction with specialized technology firms can explain why countries with Anglo-Saxon legal tradition have such a massive lead in global deep tech.

Already the world´s first entrepreneurs, the tamkãrum of ancient Babylonia and Assyria, had a division between those entrepreneurs who were manufacturers and traders, and those who were investors. This concept existed already some 4 000 years ago, but in today´s modern economy it is Anglo-Saxon countries that do it best. The key is allocating capital to technology development, and keep the funds growing to fund more technology. This form of investment capital is very sensitive to taxation, since so high risks are involved risk and reward have to be balanced. This form of innovation ecosystem ultimately flourishes if the revenues are taxed once they are finalized, not if return from one project is invested in another innovation activity. Building a tax environment conductive to innovation funding remains a challenge for many countries that do not have an Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, and explains the strong continued dominance.

Author: Nima Sanandaji, Director European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform

Lead image: by Andrew Bossi; aerial view of London central business district via Wikimedia under CC 3.0 License.

Gavin Newsom, the Chameleon Who Destroyed California

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Gavin Newsom may be saddled with an awful record. But the California governor is rapidly emerging as a leading bet – even a frontrunner in some polls – in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. How is this possible?

The simple answer is that Newsom might be the ultimate candidate for the attention-deficient generation. He is a political chameleon who changes positions compulsively – not according to facts, but to whatever best seems to fit the national mood. We witnessed this after last year’s presidential election, when he began ‘bro-washing’ his slick image with some cringe-worthy appearances on podcasts. One of these even included an embrace of gun ownership – a surprise to many of his supporters who had voted for him on the basis of his strong anti-gun record.

Newsom follows what may be charitably described as a flexible ideology. He flip-flops even on his core issues, such as climate change. Newsom, an avid supporter of Net Zero, basically fell on his knees before Big Oil in April, when two companies announced they were shutting their Californian oil refineries as a result of oppressive green regulations.

Newsom has proven equally slippery on woke social issues. In recent years, he made California a ‘refuge’ for transgender children, supporting the experimental use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy on minors. Indeed, these policies were central to Newsom’s assaults on rival states Texas and Florida. But he shocked trans activists in March by admitting that having biological males compete with women was ‘unfair’. Clearly, he had sensed which way the political wind was blowing.

Now, the chameleon has changed his colours once again. After trying to appeal to MAGA voters in the aftermath of Trump’s November victory, he is back leading the ‘Resistance’. Last week, he promised to redraw California’s congressional districts to the advantage of Democrats. In June, as US federal agents targeted undocumented immigrants in California, Newsom accused Trump of a ‘brazen abuse of power’. Like all aspiring Democrats, he regularly denounces Trump as a fascist.

But Newsom has an even bigger, more vulnerable Achilles’ heel than his shifting political positions. It is the undeniable economic and social decline he has overseen as governor of California.

A state that was once the envy of the world is now best described as a bastion of feudal inequality. Huge wealth is concentrated in a few hands, while it accommodates roughly half of America’s homeless population. It not only has the highest cost-of-living-adjusted poverty rate in the US, it also has the highest unemployment. Nearly one in five Californians lives in poverty, while the Public Policy Institute of California estimates another third live in near poverty.

This is a far cry from when the Golden State epitomised opportunity for the middle and working classes. Today, it is the single-worst state for creating above-average-paying jobs, while topping the league for producing below-average and low-paying ones. California haemorrhaged 1.6million above-average-paying jobs in the past decade – more than twice as many as any other state. Since 2008, it has created five times as many low-wage jobs as high-wage jobs.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Wind Brake

Robert Bryce — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

During more than 15 years of reporting on the opposition to solar and wind projects, I’ve never seen anything like the opposition to the Lava Ridge wind project.

As I explained in these pages last September, the entire state of Idaho was against it.

In 2023, the Idaho House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution stating its opposition to the proposed project, which aimed to put a 1,200-megawatt wind project on 57,000 acres of federal land near the southern Idaho town of Dietrich. Residents objected to the project for multiple reasons, including concerns that it would infringe on the Minidoka National Historic Site, which commemorates the incarceration of thousands of Japanese-American citizens during World War II.

Despite the state’s fierce opposition, the Biden administration predictably did Big Wind’s bidding. On December 11, 2024, less than six weeks before Joe Biden left the White House, the Department of Interior published a short note in the Federal Register saying that it would issue a permit for New York-based LS Power to build the 231-turbine project on acreage owned by the Bureau of Land Management.

Last Wednesday, in a move that numerous Idaho politicians applauded, the Trump Administration rescinded that permit. The Interior Department said it “will no longer provide preferential treatment towards unreliable, intermittent power sources that harm rural communities, livelihoods and the land.” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the decision “defends the American taxpayer, safeguards our land, and averts what would have been one of the largest, most irresponsible wind projects in the nation.”

Now that the Trump administration has done the right thing on Lava Ridge, it should also put a stop to Philip Anschutz’s massive Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind project in Wyoming, which aims to use even more federal land than Lava Ridge. Anschutz, a Denver-based billionaire, is a major Republican donor. If he succeeds in getting his Wyoming wind project built, it will have a deadly, long-term impact on America’s Golden Eagle population. It will also slaughter thousands of other birds and some 6,300 bats every year.

Let’s take a look.

The wind industry’s deadly impact on birds is well known. I have been reporting on the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act for more than 30 years. For decades, the wind industry has largely been exempted from the enforcement of those statutes.

Read the rest of this piece at: Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: Jon Nelson, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

DC and LA Failures Play Into Trump's Hands

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Donald Trump’s reviled takeover of the DC police and his earlier deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles serve as a direct challenge to the power of America’s big cities. To the Democrats who run these cities, this all seems part of an authoritarian plot. But it also may be one of Trump’s traps.

Although clearly violating America’s long-standing federalist principles, Trump’s incursions are being justified by the incompetence of most blue-city leaders. There is evident disorder in major cities, particularly those controlled by the Democrats’ progressive wing: quasi-socialist mayors in Chicago and Los Angeles may soon be joined by comrades elsewhere in the country. The explicitly socialist Zohran Mamdani is the Democratic candidate for New York mayor, while Omar Fateh and Katie Wilson could also win in Minneapolis and Seattle. All three elections take place on 4 November.

Big-city mayors see Trump’s antics as a get-out-of-jail-free card for their failures. But this won’t work. Americans know that these cities have severe problems which are driving people out. The demographer Wendell Cox notes that Americans are increasingly moving to suburban areas, despite consistent attempts from planners to encourage urbanisation. Even with a surge of illegal immigration, Chicago’s population has shrunk to its lowest level since 1920. Meanwhile, the California Department of Finance predicts a reduction of more than a million people in LA County by 2060.

Clearly, we are a long way from dense urbanity dominating the future, as the media and academics have repeatedly predicted. “Mayors should rule the world,” suggested political theorist Benjamin Barber in 2013. No one in their right mind would suggest this now. However, cities could make a decent comeback — if governed correctly.

Attempts to distract from DC’s horrendous public safety record reveal how clueless most progressives can be. To deflect Trump, Democrats need to show an ability to address urban problems. There are some promising new approaches in places such as Houston and San Francisco, where voters have embraced moderate, pro-business candidates. With their ties to sectors including energy or tech, these politicians could prove the ideal model for Democrats as they look to return to power.

Sadly, most of America’s big cities seem determined to prove Trump correct. Chicago’s Brandon Johnson epitomises progressive failure, having managed to turn “the city that works” into a dystopian failure with high crime rates, a severe budget deficit, exiting companies, and failing schools. Johnson’s ally, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, wants to be president, but he will have to carry Chicago’s decline with him.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo: Virginia Guard Public Affairs via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Unforgotten Cities: What Ancient Urbanism Teaches About America's Crisis of Place

Samuel J Abrams — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

What do cities reveal about us? Not just our engineering or art, but our longings—what we value, what we revere, how we choose to live together.

William Frej's new book, Unforgotten: Ancient Cities from a Distant Past, documents 130 ancient cities through hundreds of stark photographs. From Machu Picchu to half-forgotten ruins across 25 countries, these images capture not just what's broken or lost, but what these places once aimed to be: moral, spiritual, and social worlds made physical. These were not just places where people lived. They were places where people belonged. And that distinction may hold the key to addressing America's deepening crisis of social isolation and political polarization.

Consider the Peruvian cities that Frej documents—places like Ollantaytambo in the Sacred Valley. Their builders carved public plazas from mountainsides, designed amphitheater-like spaces that naturally drew crowds into circles, created stone seating that encouraged lingering conversation. The very topography was sculpted to inspire what sociologist Robert Putnam would later call "social capital"—the networks of relationships that make communities function. Walk through these ruins today and you can still feel the intention. The architecture itself was a technology of belonging, anticipating by centuries Jane Jacobs's insight about successful urban spaces generating "eyes on the street" and Christopher Alexander's "pattern language" of human-scaled design.

Compare this intentionality to most American public spaces. Where ancient builders created plazas that amplified human voices, we've constructed environments dominated by traffic noise and designed to move people through rather than bring them together. Peruvian mountain settlements fostered face-to-face interactions; American strip malls often explicitly discourage any interaction beyond commercial transactions.

The irony is that America once understood this wisdom. Charleston's historic squares, Savannah's grid of parks, and Philadelphia's original city plan remain among our most desirable neighborhoods precisely because they offer what contemporary development lacks: human-scaled design that fosters community and public amenities. Yet postwar America systematically abandoned these principles. Urban renewal programs demolished functioning neighborhoods in favor of superblocks that isolated residents. Euclidean zoning separated uses that had been naturally integrated for millennia, requiring residents to drive between home, work, and commerce rather than encountering neighbors naturally.

The result is what Putnam documented in Bowling Alone: Americans increasingly isolated from civic institutions and casual encounters that build social trust. We traded traditional urbanism's inefficiencies—mixed uses, narrow streets, shared spaces—for car-dependent development where neighbors drive garage-to-garage without meeting.

This isn't merely aesthetic loss. Research shows walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods with quality public spaces generate higher property values, support more local businesses, and correlate with better health outcomes. Ancient insights about beautiful public spaces serving economic functions prove empirically correct.

The stakes extend beyond urban planning to American democracy itself. In an era of increasing polarization and digital tribalism, shared physical spaces become crucial for the cross-cutting social ties that democratic theorists identify as essential for political stability.

When people encounter each other regularly in pleasant surroundings—at farmers’ markets, in neighborhood squares, playgrounds and dog parks, and on walkable streets—they develop civic engagement habits that strengthen democracy. Contemporary development patterns work against this democratic ideal. Gated communities and car-dependent suburbs sort people by income, minimizing the diverse encounters that build social capital across class and political lines.

This represents bipartisan failure. Conservatives who value tradition and beauty have allied with developers whose profit-maximizing strategies destroy the communities they claim to champion. Progressives who identify inequality as serious have sometimes embraced planning approaches that create sterile environments lacking organic neighborhood vitality.

Conservative intellectuals from Roger Scruton to Christopher Lasch have long argued that rootedness and beauty are essential human needs. American conservatism's alliance with suburban sprawl betrays these deeper conservative values. True conservatism should champion development that creates lasting communities rather than disposable environments abandoned each generation.

Fortunately, some American cities are rediscovering ancient wisdom. Charleston's design standards have created economic success while maintaining walkable, human-scaled character. Portland's urban growth boundary encourages dense, transit-oriented development. Bryant Park's evolution from crime-ridden wasteland to beloved public space shows how thoughtful design creates the civic life that ancient plazas fostered. The New Urbanism movement – despite its many failures and problems – catalyzed a change in thinking about the built environment that has now proven market demand exists for walkable, mixed-use communities when zoning permits.

Translating ancient insights into contemporary policy requires specific reforms. Form-based codes that regulate building character rather than just use can encourage pedestrian-friendly development. Zoning reform allowing corner stores and small apartments in residential neighborhoods can restore natural integration of daily activities. Transportation policy must prioritize pedestrians over cars—not from environmental ideology but because walkable streets create conditions for civic life. Complete streets design and transit-oriented development are essential infrastructure for rebuilding social capital.

Most importantly, cities must invest in beautiful, well-programmed public spaces. This isn't luxury but economic necessity in the experience economy. Amazon's HQ2 search explicitly prioritized locations with vibrant urban amenities. Companies recognize that knowledge workers value walkable neighborhoods and interesting public spaces. Traditional neighborhood design isn't just more beautiful than sprawl—it's more fiscally sustainable, generating more tax revenue per acre while requiring less infrastructure investment.

Frej's photographs remind us that the human impulse to create meaningful places isn't lost—it's been suppressed by zoning codes and development patterns that work against community formation. The ancient builders who carved gathering spaces into Andean mountainsides weren't operating with different human nature; they organized societies to encourage rather than discourage civic life. We can do the same. The policy tools exist: zoning reform, form-based codes, complete streets design, tactical urbanism. What's needed is political will to prioritize long-term community building over short-term development profits.

As Americans increasingly sort into ideological enclaves, shared public spaces become essential democratic infrastructure. The alternative to intentional community building isn't neutral—it's continued fragmentation with all the political pathologies that follow. If ancient cities still speak across centuries, it's because they reflect enduring truths: people need beauty, places to encounter neighbors, environments that signal civic investment and shared purpose. The stones they left behind aren't just ruins. They're blueprints for renewal.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: Gaillard Center, Charleston, Charleston County, South Carolina, by J. Pellgen Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The Young Would Be Less Screwed If They Started Making Better Choices

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

It’s been over a decade since I wrote the original “screwed generation” piece for Newsweek. In the subsequent years, the idea that younger people face a difficult future has become commonplace in public debate.

In the United States, the basics have been evident for some time – low rates of marriage and property ownership, and diminishing demand even for educated workers. Overall, notes the Financial Times, under-40s are less conscientious, more neurotic and less agreeable than previous generations. The political ramifications can already be seen, from the swelling numbers of socialist hipsters in New York’s “commie belt” to the angry, alienated incels living in parental basements, mostly in suburban and exurban areas.

We should sympathise with this “screwed” generation but also suggest ways that they can improve their prospects. After all, every generation faces some sort of existential challenge, like those who lived through the Depression and the World Wars or Vietnam, the Civil Rights era, de-industrialisation, and the sexual revolution.

If millennials and their successors, the so-called Gen-Zs, want to get ahead, maybe it’s time to stop complaining and start changing. In my mind, there are several things that could provide a roadmap to a successful adulthood – moving to places of opportunity, getting married and starting a family, and finally seeking out jobs that actually are in demand.

The first step is to move. People have been gravitating away from expensive, elite-controlled areas throughout history; the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are all products of this kind of aspirational movement. Indeed, America’s great national myth, Manifest Destiny, was shaped by people who left the East Coast for the opportunities west of the Appalachians.

The hipster socialists backing Zohran Mamdani in New York or the various Left-wingers on the Pacific Coast may demand that landlords and taxpayers underwrite their preferred lifestyle as largely childless, and unmarried, permanent renters. But many others are taking the plunge and moving to smaller towns and less expensive metropolitan areas. In fact, after dominating migration among people between the ages of 25 to 44 for much of the past half century, the share of that age group moving to big metro areas has fallen since 2010, while smaller cities, and particularly areas with under 250,000 people, have surged in appeal.

More young people should look at migrating to places that can accommodate their aspirations. As the Brookings Institution’s Mark Muro has noted, salaries across the central states, adjusted for the cost of living, are above the national average. A recent study by Jed Kolko, formerly economist for Indeed Hiring Lab, found this true of smaller metros; in 2019, of the 10 areas with the highest adjusted incomes, eight were in the Heartland. In contrast, those with the lowest adjusted incomes were entirely on the ocean coasts.

Home ownership remains the key driver for this shift. Despite media accounts about how young people do not want to start families or own homes, most surveys show that the vast majority want to replicate the essentials of the middle-class lifestyle, including starting a family and buying a house.

As numerous studies have found, both homeownership and marriage are key elements for success in life, leading to higher incomes, less child poverty and probably higher fertility rates. Even Warren Buffett, at the 2009 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, said that to “marry the right person … will make more difference in your life. It will change your aspirations, all kinds of things”.

The next shift lies with career choices. For the past few decades, parents have tended to encourage their offspring to “follow their passion”, taking degrees in such things as gender and race studies, and environmental engineering. But there is little market – outside government and the nonprofit world – for such “skills”. These young people face a job market getting tougher for college graduates.

For years, young people have been told that a university degree is essential for a good career, but many increasingly don’t buy this line. Between 2020 and 2023, new enrolment at trade schools grew by 10 per cent.

Trade schools are far less expensive, and can leave their enrollees with more opportunity without the huge debt. In contrast to many traditional university-enabled professions, there is an ever growing shortage of industrial and craft workers. Such jobs should offer hope for the rising number of young people disengaged from the labour force; the rate of prime age men not in the labour force is three times what it was a few decades ago while that of young men under 25 is twice that of baby boomers at the same age. Europe has, if anything, a larger cohort of the young and disengaged. In some countries, almost 20 per cent of the population under 30 is neither in school nor a job; in Britain, parents worry about “generation jobless”.

Taking these steps may not be as appealing as living by the beach, indulging in singular fantasies, accessing pornography, or working in a protected job in government or a non-profit. But if attitudes don’t adjust to reality, the next generation will be forced to depend on the generosity of our increasingly parlous state for their sustenance. Then they really will be permanently screwed.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Photo: Kindel Media via Pexels.

Urban Transit Falls Flat in June

Randal OToole — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

America’s public transit systems carried 80.43% as many riders in June 2025 as during the same month in 2019 according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration yesterday. This is slightly down from 80.46 percent in May, which was slightly down from 80.73 percent in April, which was slightly down from 80.91 percent in March (these numbers are slightly updated from previous reports).

Transit agencies are almost all crying that they are in a fiscal crisis, yet they operated 97.9 percent as many vehicle-miles of transit services in June 2025 as they had done in June 2019. Of course, they spent a lot more money doing it because most of them had given employees hefty pay increases, especially at the executive level.

Transit continues to do better than average in the New York urban area, which carried 85.5 percent as many riders in June as before the pandemic. Others that did above average include Miami (84.4%), Dallas-Ft. Worth (84.1%), Houston (88.4%), and Washington (89.2%). Somehow Cincinnati is at 104.2 percent, Richmond is at 121.7 percent, and Tucson is at 123.6 percent.

Chicago (68.6%), Atlanta (55.4%), Phoenix (60.9%), San Francisco-Oakland (69.8%), the Twin Cities (63.0%), Denver (61.3%), St. Louis (52.3%), and Portland (69.6%) are all still well below average. The real basket case is Memphis at 37.6 percent.

Memphis transit has had its budget cut so it only was able to provide 67 percent of pre-COVID service. But some of these poor results are despite providing high levels of service: Chicago provided more than 100 percent of pre-pandemic service, while Atlanta, San Francisco, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Portland were all above 95 percent. Cleveland transit actually provided 112.8 percent of pre-pandemic service yet carried only 78.9 percent as many riders. Thus, spending more on transit to recover riders doesn’t always work.

The Federal Highway Administration still hasn’t published driving data for May, much less June. I’ll report those data here when they are issued.

As usual, I’ve posted an enhanced version (excel sheet) of the FTA’s spreadsheet. This includes the FTA raw data in cells A1 through KF2327; annual totals in columns KG through LD; mode totals in rows 2330 through 2351; transit agency totals in rows 2360 through 3359; and urban area totals in rows 3361 through 3851. Column LE compares June 2025 with June 2019; LF compares June 2025 with June 2024; and LG compared the year to date in 2025 with the same months in 2019.

This piece first appeared at The Antiplanner.

Graph: chart of public transit ridership statistics, compared to other modes of transportation, courtesy The Antiplanner

California Net-zero Leaders Want to Shutter its only Zero-emissions Electricity-generating Plant

Ronald Stein — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Over the years, the so-called forward-thinking policymakers in California have achieved questionable results:

California’s high cost of electricity is already more than 80 percent higher than the national average for residential and commercial, more than 140 percent for commercial, and is projected to go even higher.

California imports more electricity than any other US state, more than twice the amount of Virginia, the second-largest importer of electricity. California typically receives between one-fifth and one-third of its electricity supply from outside the state, mostly from out-of-state coal-fired power plants.

California now has the second–highest rate of unemployment.

California has lagging job growth

California has roughly half of the nation’s homeless population

The same policymakers who have achieved the above “low” points for the residents of California are the same ones seeking zero-emission targets for the State, while concurrently attempting to shutter its only zero-emission electricity-generating plant!

California prides itself on being a good environmental steward. However, since 2014, Warren Buffett’s PacifiCorp has sold almost a billion dollars of electricity at wholesale to California, mostly from pollution-laden coal-fired electricity generation sites outside of California. PacifiCorp’s lobbying has successfully introduced corruption into California energy policies.

The independent nonprofit intervenor Californians for Green Nuclear Power’s (CGNP’s) filings link this large volume of PacifiCorp power with post-2012 sales to Southern California Edison (SCE) of “unspecified power.” (Unspecified power is a California-specific legal euphemism created in 2010 that mostly applies to out-of-state coal-fired power.)

Read the rest of this piece at America Out Loud.

Ronald Stein is an engineer, senior policy advisor on energy literacy for the Heartland Institute and CFACT, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book "Clean Energy Exploitations."

Photo: courtesy America Out Loud.

Inequality is Inefficiency

Pete Saunders — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

I’m an urbanist. If you’re reading this, you probably are one too. You, like me, want to make cities better places. That’s at the absolute core of being an urbanist.

How we make them better places is where differences surface. And I guess it depends on what each one of us wants from a city. If you want to eradicate homelessness or have more housing options that are affordable and offer more choices than single family homes, you’ll want dense, walkable neighborhoods. If you want to reduce auto dependence because of its impact on climate change, you’ll advocate for efficient public transit, or the spread of multimodal path systems for biking and pedestrian use.

Simple. That’s the state of urbanism now.

I follow Canadian planner and urbanist Brent Toderian on X. Toderian was at one time the chief planner for Vancouver, BC, one of the great North American cities. Toderian is a huge proponent of building up cities to promote environmental sustainability. He is also, as his consulting website says, a “passionate practitioner and advocate for creative, vibrant city-building.” Last month he started a thread with this:

“Let's try this one tonight—you get just THREE WORDS to sum up the ways we could dramatically improve cities for people. Pics or graphics to illustrate the point are allowed.”
— Brent Toderian, planner and urbanist

My take on urbanism, however, has always been a little different. If contemporary urbanists viewed cities as systems that individuals can modify to improve their quality of life, I saw them fundamentally as economic systems created by societies to generate and distribute wealth.

Considering where I grew up (Detroit), when I did (1970s and ‘80s), and how I did (in a rapidly resegregating environment that saw white residents essentially abandoning the city between 1970 and 1980, and witnessing the economic base leave with them), I saw a city that was struggling to distribute wealth. Wealth was still being generated, perhaps not like it once was. However, the distribution function was warped. I viewed cities as the greatest economic accelerator for humans, warts and all. I viewed my people, Black people, as being on the cusp of advancing our economic opportunity, and watching it slip away.

That led to my three-word entry:

“Inequality is inefficiency.”

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: screenshot from exchange between Brent Toderian and Pete Saunders on X, courtesy Pete Saunders.

Awe and Reckoning: Edward Burtynsky's 'The Great Acceleration'

Samuel J Abrams — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

I recently experienced Edward Burtynsky’s The Great Acceleration at New York’s International Center of Photography—and it was nothing short of remarkable. This is Burtynsky’s first major institutional show in New York City in over two decades, spanning more than seventy photographs, including monumental murals and rarely seen early works. Curated with surgical precision by ICP’s creative director David Campany, the exhibition is both a retrospective and a provocation.

Burtynsky has spent nearly fifty years documenting the vast imprint of industrial civilization—from open pit mines in North America to e-waste sites in China and oil infrastructure in Azerbaijan. The exhibition, timed to coincide with Climate Week NYC, reads as both a visual history of global transformation and an urgent meditation on the consequences of unrestrained human activity.

What struck me most was how Burtynsky uses beauty and scale to deliver a warning. His images—sweeping views of irrigation systems, scarred expanses of mining sites, orchards of shipping containers—are breathtaking in their composition, texture, and color. Yet each is also a ledger of environmental depletion and human ambition pushed to the brink.

Take, for instance, a 28-by-28-foot mural of pivot irrigation in the Texas High Plains. From above, the circular plots resemble abstract graphics—perfect geometry and muted tones—until you spot the tiny farmhouses and irrigation arms draining the Ogallala Aquifer. It’s both sublime and devastating: agriculture’s elegance set against planetary cost.

Or consider Dry Tailings #1 from the Congo, which zooms in on a cobalt mine’s tailings pond. Its reds and ochres evoke abstract painting—until you notice the minuscule human figures combing through the toxic sludge. Suddenly, the image transforms from aesthetic marvel to sobering window into the hidden costs of global consumerism.

Burtynsky’s aerial compositions—taken via helicopter, drone, or elevated terrain—deliberately remove us from first-person sympathy. We’re not immersed; we’re distanced, forced into the role of planetary witness. As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman might suggest, this detachment is a hallmark of modernity itself: systems so vast that they dissolve individual responsibility. Yet that detachment is precisely what these images disrupt.

Still, The Great Acceleration avoids the trap of “landscape porn.” It includes intimate portraits of workers in mines, shipbreaking yards, and factories. These quieter moments ground the scale of the industrial sublime in human reality—underscoring that environmental systems are also economic and moral systems.

National Geographic once described Burtynsky’s perspective as that of an “alien observer”—a distant intelligence reporting on human civilization. That’s apt. His photographs don’t lecture. They reveal. And that revelation—of scale, of complexity, of consequence—invites reflection, not ideology.

In fact, The Great Acceleration builds on the coherence of Burtynsky’s earlier landmark projects like Manufactured Landscapes and Anthropocene, but here, the synthesis is tighter and more direct to the audience. We traverse mining pits, suburban sprawl, irrigation networks, oil fields, and recycling centers—each frame a chapter in the human reshaping of Earth. The show isn’t fragmented; it’s a visual essay.

So what does it all mean?

In my view and first, scale matters. Climate change, resource depletion, waste accumulation—these are not abstract or distant problems. Burtynsky’s aerial vantage and mural scale compel us to confront their magnitude. Second, beauty can be disruptive. His images seduce with form, but then provoke with content. This is not moralism dressed up as art. It’s moral inquiry embedded in visual tension—between seduction and unease, distance and responsibility. Third and finally, urgency is implicit. The exhibition does not shout. It slows us down. It teaches us to see. The inclusion of a recent image of the Palisades wildfire aftermath—hung by the ICP gift desk like a quiet warning—makes the stakes painfully current. Climate disruption is no longer confined to faraway wastelands. It’s here and it is very real.

The exhibition’s ethical resonance echoes Wendell Berry’s warning from 1977: “The earth is what we all have in common.” For Berry, land is not merely backdrop but inheritance—an inheritance degraded when treated as commodity rather than community. Burtynsky’s work, like Berry’s writing, calls us back to responsibility, not through guilt but through vision.

In short, The Great Acceleration isn’t just photography. It’s a meditation on human agency, environmental cost, and visual citizenship in the Anthropocene. It reminds us that the systems we’ve built—oil wells, aqueducts, shipping routes, neighborhoods—are not just infrastructure. They are stories. They encode decisions, tradeoffs, inequities.

For those of us in policy, academia, or theology, Burtynsky offers a quiet rebuke: stewardship must matter more than spectacle. Innovation without humility leads to exhaustion. And faith in progress without moral limits is no faith at all.

In an era saturated with imagery—where Instagram delivers an endless scroll of drone shots, vacation vistas, and algorithmically curated #earthporn—Burtynsky still manages to shock, surprise, and connect. That’s because his work isn’t just aesthetic spectacle. It’s about scale—geographic, ecological, and moral. His ability to render vast, human-altered landscapes both legible and emotionally resonant sets him apart in a visually overloaded culture. Despite our global connectivity and access to travel, we rarely see the infrastructural systems that sustain modern life. Burtynsky forces that confrontation. His images reveal how oil flows, minerals move, food is irrigated, and waste accumulates. And in doing so, they cut through the noise of digital ephemera to deliver something rare: awe and reckoning.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Photo: courtesy the author.

Elite liberal Yimbys are Killing off the Family Home

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Housing is now as hot an issue in politics as the shape of Sydney Sweeney’s jeans (or genes). The socialist Zohran Mamdani’s stunning primary win in New York came largely off the back of concerns about housing affordability. California has recently passed legislation to reform environmental regulations that have hindered home-building. The power of the so-called Yimby (“Yes in my backyard”) movement seems only to have been reinforced. Yet the great irony is that where the Yimby agenda has advanced furthest – notably my home state of California – housing affordability has remained consistently the worst.

Yimbys have got something right – the central problem behind the housing affordability crisis is the failure to build enough homes. Homebuilders built hundreds of thousands fewer homes (including rental units) in 2024 than in 1972 when there were 130 million fewer Americans. One estimate has put the US housing market short by approximately 4.5 million homes.

But if Yimbys have correctly diagnosed the problem, their solutions – oriented towards building more high density urban apartments – have tended to make matters worse. High density development, often seen as the alternative to “sprawl”, does not necessarily lower prices, as is sometimes suggested, because of higher urban land costs and higher construction fees. In fact, US data suggests a positive correlation between greater density and higher housing costs.

Housing, of course, is not just a New York issue. Mainstream Yimbys, so obligingly financed by tech oligarchs and urban real estate interests, see the solution not in socialist housing but for the private sector to construct their dreamscape of high density homes and apartment buildings. They are not interested so much in people buying their own properties, and seem to care little that investors already own one in four single family homes.

Yimbys repeatedly blame poor housing affordability on so-called Nimbys (“Not in my backyard”) groups, including those who want to preserve the lower density neighbourhoods, filled with detached family homes, that they bought into. Getting rid of zoning that prevents the construction of taller buildings is a critical Yimby priority, which they have pushed not only in California but in the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast.

Yet the positive impact on home-building via these policies has been negligible, with the mixed exception of strong growth in so-called Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) – self-contained units that often remain part of a primary property, most of which are kept for relatives, or used as a spare guest house, an office, or as a high-end rental.

Overall, even with ADUs, California housing construction is at among the lowest rates in America. Only one California metropolitan area was among the top 20 for housing growth last year; Texas had four areas on that list, Florida three. In Los Angeles, the state’s dominant metropolitan area, just 1,325 new homes were approved citywide in the first quarter of 2025.

The Yimbys believe that the only real solution is to roll back regulations further and introduce new housing laws designed to increase urban density. Much of this is based on often exaggerated climate concerns about “sprawl”. Remarkably they have gained the support of the libertarian Right. One might think such people would embrace the notion of promoting a class of small property owners, but it seems that juicing the profits of large corporations is a higher priority. The problem here, for Yimbys on the Right and Left, lies in the small matter of market preferences: most people don’t want to live in the inner-city high rise apartments beloved by planners and Yimbys, but in a house with a garden of their own.

Indeed, generally high-end dense housing has a relatively small market. Condos and apartments may thrill Yimby imaginations – the public, not so much. Surveys, such as one in 2019 by political scientist Jessica Trounstine, have found that the preference for lower-density, safe areas with good schools is “ubiquitous”. Three out of four Californians, according to a poll by former Obama campaign pollster David Binder, opposed legislation that banned zoning which only permitted single family homes.

This mismatch between what is being built and what most people want can be seen in the huge oversupply of apartments, not just in the US but in Canada’s big cities too, causing prices for such properties to drop over the past two years. Yet despite all the evidence, Yimbys show little or no interest in the predominant dreams of their own citizens.

Worse, their ideas are helping to inform the agenda of the so-called “Abundance Democrats”, a fashionable new movement which seeks to make peace between the Left, prosperity and growth, inspired by a book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Even the Yimbys’ more moderate ideas as laid out in the book – also called Abundance – largely ignore the suburbs and exurbs, where most Americans live, and stay clear of ownership.

As attorney Jennifer Hernandez suggests, there is an “ugly elitist underbelly” to Abundance, reflecting the values of hipster professionals while eschewing “even a passing wave to those who choose not to live in city centres, who want to be able to buy a detached, single family home, and who don’t want to share a wall, sound, ride or odours with their neighbours…”

The obvious and likely failure of Yimby policies might well empower far more radical approaches to housing, which seem more interested in turning cities into a souped up version of greater Moscow. The Mamdani approach of public housing and rent control may come to be seen by progressives as the best alternative – however disastrous public housing has been in cities across the United States.

Given the utter failure of mainstream Yimbyism, the progressive embrace of a more socialist approach seems inevitable. Well-heeled Yimbys, and their corporate backers, are unlikely to enjoy the results.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Photo: Brett VA via Flickr under under CC 2.0 License.

Toward a Clearer Definition of City and Suburb

Pete Saunders — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

If there's one thing that really bothers me in urbanist circles, it's that there's no real agreed upon definition for what exactly is "urban". This is a fundamental problem, because it leads to differing sides always talking past each other, often using the same data to drive home vastly different points. Could astronomers and astro-physicists talk to each other if there were similar debates about what "space" is? I've been working on a development typology, based on my earlier "Big Theory" on American development, and it's time for us to stop being confused or misled about what's urban and what's not.

Take for example two recent pieces on city and suburban growth. Demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institute wrote last week about the recent trend of big city population growth rates exceeding that of suburban areas since 2010:

"On the positive side for urban boosters, the numbers show that many cities have gained more people in the three-plus years since the 2010 Census than they gained for the entire previous decade. This includes three of the five largest cities, New York, Philadelphia and Chicago (which lost population in the previous decade). Among the 25 largest cities, nine are already ahead of their previous decade’s gains, including Dallas, Denver, Memphis, San Francisco, San Jose and Washington, D.C. (See table)

Still another positive indicator for big cities is their growth rates. For each of the last three years, cities with populations exceeding 250,000 grew at rates exceeding 1 percent—far higher than their average annual rate of 0.49 percent over the 2000-2010 decade (Figure 1). Among the fastest growing, with rates exceeding 2 percent are Seattle, Austin, Charlotte, Denver and Washington D.C., each with new knowledge based economies and high amenity downtowns."

Yet demographer Wendell Cox writes at New Geography that the recent trend is an isolated event, and that Americans are clear in their preferences for a suburban built environment:

"On a percentage basis, the historical core municipalities of the 52 major metropolitan areas (more than 1,000,000 population) managed to grow 3.4 percent between 2010 and 2013, more than the suburban rate of 3.1 percent. This is probably the first time this has occurred in any three year period since the end of World War II.

But the core municipalities now contain such a small share of major metropolitan area population that the suburbs have continued to add population at about three times the numbers of the core municipalities (Figure 2). Indeed, if the respective 2010-2013 annual growth rates were to prevail for the next century, the core municipalities would house only 28.0 percent of the major metropolitan area population in 2113 (up from 26.4 percent in 2013)."

Here's how I see it. Irrespective of local political boundaries, most people recognize three types of development patterns in America -- pre-urban (mostly areas platted and developed before 1860 and relatively scarce), urban (platted and developed between roughly 1870-1935, and often linked to transportation networks), and suburban (platted and developed after 1945, and generally car-oriented). I connect the pre-urban, urban and suburban periods with the three development eras I've come up with since the formation of our nation -- the mercantile era, the industrial era, and the auto era.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: aerial view of Irvine, looking south. John Wayne airport runway is shown at center right of the image. Source: Wikimedia

Democrats Are Not Backing Away from the Green New Deal

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

As they contend with their lowest approval ratings in recent memory, Democrats may wish to reconsider some of their least popular positions. Some even suggest the party is preparing to jettison Joe Biden’s “Green New Deal” — once central to his floundering economic agenda. As Axios recently reported, Democratic lawmakers have largely stopped using the term, even as they continue their relentless attacks on all things Trump.

This is just one example of a subtle effort to distance themselves from positions such as climate alarmism, transgender ideology, reparations, and affirmative action — all increasingly out of step with their once-reliable working-class base. But this should be seen less as a genuine change in conviction and more as a tactical retreat from the loudest rhetoric that risks derailing their political recovery. After all, only a handful of Democratic members of Congress voted against the original Green New Deal and they can be expected, like good cadres, to embrace another round as soon as possible.

To date, green politics and opposition to Trump’s climate policies remain one of the most reliable bridges between the two dominant factions within the party: the oligarch-funded establishment and their progressive counterparts. Both support the idea of “net zero”, eliminating all fossil fuel production, and forced urban densification. They may differ on issues such as anti-trust, capital gains, and income redistribution, but not so much on green policies.

Of course, any shift back toward fossil fuels will meet ferocious opposition from progressives and their green allies. The progressives are aware, as the British historian James Heartfield once suggested, that “green capitalism” provides a perfect opportunity for the wealthy to maximise their returns on artificially scarcer resources. They can achieve this from land and agricultural products, notably through mandates and tax breaks for renewable energy.

Ultimately, this hurts middle- and working-class families by raising prices for housing, electricity and gasoline. California, the dominant ideological force in Democratic politics, suffers the highest energy prices in the continental US. The Golden State’s energy prices are double the national average, which has exacerbated “energy poverty”, particularly among the poor and those in the less temperate interior.

These prices reflect the real impact of climate policy. Indeed, in 2023 the California Air Resources Board disclosed that current state climate policies will disproportionately harm households earning less than $100,000 per year, while boosting incomes for those above this threshold.

Read the rest of this piece at: Unherd.

Photo: Victoria Pickering via Flickr under under CC 2.0 License.

Coast-to-Coast High Speed Rail

Randal OToole — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

According to Newsweek, some nutty group called AmeriStarRail is proposing to run high-speed trains from New York to Los Angles, which it says can be done at a profit. Only they wouldn’t be high-speed trains and they almost certainly wouldn’t earn a profit.

The AmeriStarRail proposal is to run a train from New York to Los Angeles on existing tracks. The train would take 72 hours for an average speed of 45 miles per hour, which is hardly a high speed. The train would replace, not supplement, existing trains on the proposed route: the New York-Pittsburgh Pennsylvanian, the Pittsburgh-Chicago portion of the Floridian, and the Chicago-Los Angeles Southwest Chief.

I’m not sure why they didn’t choose the more obvious route, the Lake Shore Limited and Southwest Chief, which currently takes only 67 hours to get from New York to Chicago. Replacing the Floridian with this transcontinental train would leave that train, which continues from Pittsburgh to Washington and then to Miami, dangling. That’s not much of a loss as I doubt many people take it from Chicago to Miami anyway.

The twist that would supposedly make this profitable is that AmeriStarRail is proposing to carry trucks (and their drivers) as well as passengers, thus putting Amtrak in the freight business in competition with the railroads that would host the train. There aren’t enough trucks going between New York and Chicago to make this profitable, so the freight railroads probably wouldn’t care.

According to its web pages, AmeriStarRail consists of a “team” of four people: a bankruptcy attorney (which is appropriate), a former president of Amtrak, and two former transit agency employees. Somehow I don’t think that three people experienced in running money-losing organizations are going to come up with realistic proposals, but at least they’ll have the help of a bankruptcy specialist when the proposals fail.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Photo: Courtesy the Antiplanner.

Reframing African Media

Jamila Salih and Bheki Mahlobo — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

When people think about media, Africa is rarely the first thing that comes to mind. And when it does come up, it is often portrayed through a very narrow lens—poverty, conflict, or outdated stereotypes.

But African media is so much more than that. It is powerful, growing, and deeply influential across music, film, fashion, and even digital innovation. That is why it is important that we start paying attention.

Media serves as the backbone of any democratic society. It informs citizens, holds leaders accountable, and provides a platform for diverse voices. In Africa, media has played a pivotal role in shaping public opinion, influencing political outcomes, and driving social change. However, the media landscape across the continent is as diverse as its cultures, languages, and histories.

In many African countries, media outlets have been instrumental in exposing corruption, advocating for human rights, and promoting transparency. Investigative journalism has uncovered scandals that have led to governmental reforms and, in some cases, the resignation of public officials. Moreover, media has been a tool for education, raising awareness about health issues, environmental concerns, and social injustices.

Yet, the media in Africa faces numerous challenges. Press freedom is often under threat, with journalists facing harassment, censorship, and even violence. Economic constraints limit the reach and quality of media outlets, especially in rural areas. Additionally, the dominance of foreign media narratives often overshadows local voices, leading to a misrepresentation of African realities.

Read and download the full report.

Contributors

Jamila Salih is the primary author of this report. She grew up in Denver, Colorado, and spent some of her high school years in Ethiopia, gaining a unique global perspective early on. She later moved to California for college, where she earned a degree from Chapman University. Jamila now works in marketing consulting at a biotech company — AmplifiDx, combining creativity with strategy to support innovation in the health and science space.

Bheki Mahlobo provided written data anaylsis for this report.
Bheki is an economist and Partner at Frans Cronje Private Clients. He began his career at the Centre for Risk Analysis before joining the financial consulting firm ETM Analytics as a financial analyst. Specialising in economic and financial markets research as well as political trend analysis, Bheki has briefed numerous companies on South Africa’s long-term economic, market, and political outlook. He has drafted an extensive range of analytical notes and reports and he co-author of a chapter in the book The Future of Cities, written in collaboration with Professor Joel Kotkin of the American Enterprise Institute.

Raised in the rural Eastern Cape village of Lupapasi and later relocating to Johannesburg for his schooling, Bheki brings a unique perspective to his work. He is currently pursuing a Masters in Behavioural and Computational Economics at Chapman University, further enhancing his expertise in the field.

Marshall Toplansky wrote the introduction, and Joel Kotkin served as editor for this report.

Mediterranean Connectivity

Nima Sanandaji — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The Mediterranean Sea region plays a key role in global connectivity infrastructure, this is the message of a new report by DC Byte. Indeed, several knowledge intensive hubs of Europe exist in the Mediterranean region, and are increasingly interconnected as subsea cable networks are expanded. The growing IT-infrastructure will further regional integration, including the regions on the Western coast of North Africa.

Already in the mid-19th century, telegraph cables running under water connected countries together. Messages have since then been transmitted across long distances, such as across the Atlantic. In the modern age, underground cables are a key part of the digital connectivity infrastructure.

The European city which is connected by most subsea cables is Marseille. Fully 12 live subsea cables land in this second largest city of France. It is also a relatively knowledge intensive province. Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, in which Marseille is located, has 5.2 percent of the adult population employed in highly knowledge intensive brain business jobs. After the capital region of Paris, Rhône-Alpes, and Midi-Pyrénées, this is the fourth highest rate in France. The province in which Marseille is located has 59,500 employed in high technology and 49,300 in the ICT sector.

Crete in Greece is leading in terms of IT-capacity growth compared to the same period last year, according to the DC Byte study. Crete experienced more than double the growth rate of capacity compared to Marseille. The region, with the formal name Kriti, has 3.3 percent of adults in brain business jobs. This is the same as the Kentriki Makedonia region and, compared with the rest of Greece, second only to the Athens capital region. In Kriti there are some 4,900 high technology jobs, and 3,500 jobs in advanced services.

Barcelona in Spain is experiencing a strong growth of pipeline capacity. In total 177 MW total pipeline capacity is live, under construction, committed or early-stage developments, according to the DC Byte report. The broader urban region around Barcelona is the fifth most populous urban area in the European Union.

In total numbers, Barcelona is indeed a leading brain business hub of Europe. In total numbers, there are 1.1 million brain business jobs in the French capital region Paris, 586,000 in the Spanish capital region Madrid, 550,000 in the north Italian region Lombardia, 453,200 in the German region Oberbayern including Munich, and 365,800 in Spanish Cataluña including Barcelona. Cataluña, the region in which Barcelona is located, has 7.5 percent of its adult population employed in highly knowledge-intensive brain business jobs. This is second to the capital Madrid region the highest share in Spain. Barcelona is further to this a site of world leading deep tech development, in biochemistry, according to the deep tech index.

The larger countries in the Mediterranean region suffer from high taxes and regulatory burden, which limits their progress in terms of knowledge intensive jobs. The smaller countries with more competitive economic policies are already ahead. The highest share of adults employed in highly knowledge-intensive brain business jobs in the Mediterranean region is found in Malta (9.4 percent). This small free market island also now leads the healthy life span league of newborn girls and boys, surpassing Sweden which used to have the lead until recently.

The second highest share of adults employed in brain business jobs in the Mediterranean region is in Slovenia (9.2 percent), followed by Cyprus (9.0 percent). Portugal (7.8 percent) also is relatively knowledge intensive. France (6.4 percent), Italy (5.5 percent) and Spain (5.4 percent) are relatively far behind, while Greece (4.7 percent) has amongst the lowest shares of knowledge intensive jobs in Europe.

The Mediterranean countries of Europe have significant differences in knowledge intensity. As they become increasingly more connected, through cables, air travel and European economic integration, this will allow for further collaboration and institutional competition.

Currently, The Medusa cable system plays a key role in Mediterranean connectivity. This 8,760 km submarine cable system connects France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Cyprus with Algeria, Egypt, Marocco and Tunisia.

Recently, AFR-IX Telecom secured €3.7 million from the European Commission for the ATMED Malta project, which will connect Malta to the Medusa network. This would add a sixth underwater cable to Malta. The Medusa subsea cable network is being expanded into the western coastline of North Africa, with a €14.3 million grant from the European Commission.

Mediterranean connectivity growth is important for the whole region. Particularly the Western part of North Africa will be more connected to Europe, which allows for economic integration and growth.

France
	Brain business jobs per capita
Paris	14.4%
Rhône-Alpes	6.8%
Midi-Pyrénées	6.6%
Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur	5.2%
Pays de la Loire	5.1%
Aquitaine	4.9%
Bretagne	4.5%
Alsace	4.5%
Nord-Pas de Calais	4.0%
Haute-Normandie	3.7%
Languedoc-Roussillon	3.7%
Auvergne	3.4%
Basse-Normandie	3.0%
Franche-Comté	2.6%
Poitou-Charentes	2.5%
Bourgogne	2.4%
Lorraine	2.3%
Champagne-Ardenne	2.3%
Limousin	2.3%
Picardie	2.2%
Corse	2.1%

Greece
	Brain business jobs per capita
Athens	8.5%
Kriti	3.3%
Kentriki Makedonia	3.3%
Dytiki Ellada	2.4%
Ionia Nisia	2.4%
Ipeiros	2.4%
Notio Aigaio	2.4%
Thessalia	2.2%
Anatoliki Makedonia Thraki	2.1%
Peloponnisos	2.0%
Dytiki Makedonia	2.0%
Voreio Aigaio	1.8%
Sterea Ellada	1.8%

Spain
	Brain business jobs per capita
Madrid	13.7%
Cataluña	7.5%
País Vasco	5.2%
Comunidad Foral de Navarra	4.3%
Aragón	3.8%
Galicia	3.7%
Principado de Asturias	3.5%
Comunidad Valenciana	3.5%
Illes Balears	3.2%
Andalucía	3.1%
La Rioja	2.9%
Región de Murcia	2.9%
Castilla y León	2.8%
Canarias	2.7%
Cantabria	2.7%
Castilla-la Mancha	1.9%
Extremadura	1.8%
Ciudad de Ceuta	1.1%
Ciudad de Melilla	0.9%

Nima Sanandaji, Director, European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform (ECEPR)

Photo: screenshot of Medusa network, via AFR-IX.

Far-Left Teachers are Indoctrinating Children to Hate the West

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The breakdown in relations between the US’s top teacher’s union, the National Education Association (NEA), and the Anti-Defamation League, a civil rights group focused on tackling anti-Semitism, reflects a deeper and dangerous takeover of education by determined activists. Besides the usual financial demands, education is increasingly seen as a means to achieve progressive, even radical “social justice”, which of course means boycotting anything connected to Israel.

The NEA is clearly taking political sides, claiming that it is pledging “to defend democracy against Trump’s embrace of fascism”. The union is also adamant in defending undocumented immigrants, opposing parental rights, and pledging to back mass demonstrations against the administration. This approach is seen by boosters as “social justice unionism”, adding political stances to the usual economic ones.

The political orientation of NEA and the second largest teacher’s organisation, the American Federation of Teachers, with a combined membership of 4.5 million, is pretty clear. Their political donations even before Trump went 95 per cent to Democrats.

But the transformation of teachers into cadres of the progressive Left is not restricted to the United States. It can be seen throughout Europe and the United Kingdom. In the UK, Britain’s National Education Union has drifted ever further to the extremes. Last year, it passed a resolution denouncing Israel as “racist”. Its rabid anti-Israel status has elicited complaints of anti-Semitism. The union has been labelled a “hostile environment” for British Jews.

Such attitudes can be carried into the classroom. This can be seen in California’s ethnic studies programme, shaped by critical race theory, which has been accused of being openly anti-Zionist and of dismissing Jews as white oppressors. As one observer put it, the programme implies that “Genghis Khan was a nice guy. Israel is evil”. San Francisco has seen anti-Israel walkouts in high schools, allegedly organised by an advocacy group with access to student addresses. In Toronto, children as young as eight were reportedly “compelled” to attend a rally that devolved into anti-Israel chanting at the bequest of their progressive teachers.

This takeover of the teaching profession by the far-Left poses a profound challenge to liberal institutions. Teaching always had some inherent political implications, but in the past the emphasis remained on learning maths and language skills, while exposing students to various viewpoints. Today, students in many places are treated mostly to highly partisan takes on issues, from the Middle East to gender and climate change, with little interest in alternative views.

In many ways, the Left-wing orientation of teachers reflects the biases so deeply entrenched at the colleges where they learn their craft. In 2017, according to one oft-cited study, 60 per cent of college faculty identified as either far-Left or liberal compared to just 12 per cent being conservative or far-Right. In less than three decades, the ratio of liberal identifying faculty to conservative faculty had more than doubled. Even in purple Arizona, Democratic professors appear to outnumber their GOP counterparts by 28 to 1.

Today teachers, whose training now focuses far more on radical themes, tilt towards the Left, more so even than Hollywood actors. And once they have graduated, more of these teachers embrace an agit-prop orientation.

Their actual record of educating young people has become ever more awful. The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as The Nation’s Report Card, found that barely a quarter of students are proficient in reading, with the results little better in maths. Pressed by educational theorists, schools have abandoned phonics and other effective approaches for “whole language”, producing a population where 60 per cent of 4th graders are poor readers.

The long-term results of teacher failure are hard to contradict, and the impact is pervasive. A recent federal survey suggests that 28 per cent of Americans now occupy the lowest level of literacy, up from 19 per cent in 2017. We may now also be seeing the first reduction of the average American IQ in 100 years.

This decline in educational outcomes is evident not only in the US but across the West. Across Europe, students’ scores have been plummeting as well. Poland, Norway, Iceland and Germany, for example, recorded a decline of 25 or more points in maths between 2018 and 2022, which can surely only partly be attributed to the Covid lockdowns. Canada, too, is seeing its performance standards dropping over time. Indoctrination also has its consequences; a recent study of Canadian college students found 80 per cent claiming that fears about climate change affect their mental health.

All this bodes ill for the future of the West, as the pattern of indoctrination, and poor instruction, grows deeper. Once Western educational institutions, based on liberal principles, represented a distinct advantage. Now our educators seem more interested in ideology as opposed to knowledge. It’s bad news not just for conservatives or Jews, but for our societies’ ability to compete against countries, like India or China, who still focus on basic skills and prefer actual results, not just endemic virtue-signalling.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Photo: Anti-Israel protest at George Washington University, by Ted Eytan via Flickr under CC-BY-SA 2.0 License.

Mamdani Doesn’t Care about CO2 Emissions

Randal OToole — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

In answer to critics of his proposal for free bus transit, New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani posted the video below pointing out that the Staten Island Ferry is free. “Who said public transit can’t be free?” he asks.

Yet it isn’t really free for three reasons. First, taxpayers spent $154 million operating it in 2023 (plus $19 million on capital replacement costs to keep it running), which worked out to well over $10 per trip. In 2019, before the pandemic, ridership was higher but it cost more than $7 per trips.

That money had to come from somewhere. Mamdani apparently thinks he can tax the 1 percent highest-income people in New York City to pay for all his dreams, but they are already paying nearly half the taxes collected by the city. Increases in taxes will lead to some of them moving out, which will probably reduce total tax collections.

Second, the reason why it is free to users is that nearly all of the riders are expected to transfer to some other form of transit at one or both ends. In 1997, New York City implemented a Metrocard system to pay for transit rides, allowing users to pay one fare to ride, say, a bus and then connect to a subway. Rather than spend a lot of money installing card readers for the Staten Island Ferry that (since most riders would continue on a subway or other transit line) wouldn’t generate much net additional income, the city decided to let passengers ride the ferry for free.

While that seemed like a sensible decision at the time, it is due to such decisions that the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has driven itself so heavily into debt and expects to run $1 billion to $2 billion deficits each year for the foreseeable future. Mamdani proposes to reduce fares on the buses that connect to the ferry to zero, thus eliminating the reason why it made sense to make the ferry free in the first place.

The third reason why it isn’t free is the environmental cost. Ferries are notorious energy hogs. Operating the ferry in 2023 consumed 8,800 British thermal units (BTUs) of fuel and emitted 647 grams of carbon dioxide per passenger-mile (up from 4,962 and 363 in 2019). The 2023 numbers are well over twice the amounts used and emitted per passenger-mile by the average light truck and three times the emissions of the average car and even the 2019 numbers are worse than an SUV. Apparently, carbon dioxide emissions are only a problem if they come from automobiles, not from expensive substitutes for those autos.

People are debating whether to call Mamdani a communist, Marxist, socialist, democratic socialist, or municipal socialist. That’s just semantics. Whatever you call him, it is clear that he doesn’t understand the relationship between revenues and costs or why prices make markets into a feedback system that works for most goods and services, including grocery stores and transportation. Judging from his videos, he seems like a nice guy that anyone would be happy to host for dinner, but not someone who should be put in charge of a major portion of the nation’s economy.

This piece first appeared at The Antiplanner.

Photo: Staten Island Ferry, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Why the South is Winning

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

For much of America’s history, the South has been a laggard, a poor region weighed down by intense racism and reactionary politics, lacking both industry and newcomers, foreign or domestic, to imbue it with dynamism and energy. But that’s changing — big time. Far from singing romantic paeans to Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy’s president, or celebrating his (blessedly) “lost cause,” the South increasingly embraces the very attitudes and policies that once made the North dominant.

Progressives like Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson complain that America looks the way it would “if the Confederacy” had won. Yet the South’s triumph today is one the old rebels would barely recognize. The region, to be sure, still has more than its share of Blimpish nativists and religious fanatics. Even so, more people, including African-Americans, led by those with college degrees, now flock there in search of opportunity.

This marks a huge historical turnaround. Well into the Twenties and Thirties, the South was lagging and losing migrants to the North and the West. Slavery, and then segregation, notes historian Gavin Wright, kept down labor costs and, with them, the incentive for innovation and labor-saving technology. The South was almost its “own country,” as Wright says, a poor appendage to a much richer, more dynamic nation.

But now, the South is capturing cutting-edge industries, drawing in capital as well as a swelling tide of migrants from within the country and abroad. Overall, the southeast quadrant of the country is now the most dominant economic region, and since 2018 has produced almost all the country’s population growth and half its new jobs, according to the Texas Stock Exchange.

By contrast, it’s the Northern and Pacific cities that are pursuing John C. Calhoun-style nullification to resist Washington. And the Trump administration has taken note of this. Recently, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared that “we want the US to be more like Florida and less like New York.” With Gotham about to embrace socialism and a globalized intifada, things look good for Trump Central in Palm Beach, the new favored boomtown for millionaires and billionaires.

Of course, inertia still works for the North and California after decades of dominance. Even today, per-capita incomes remain higher in the Northeast and California, but this likely reflects fewer families and higher costs, which often wipe out income gains, particularly for minorities and the working class. The income disparity has been receding since the Forties, as the South grows in power and influence and shifts to sophisticated businesses like aerospace, software, and finance — once unthinkable for the agrarian region.

One key factor to the Southern ascendency has been investment in education, which has long been a critical weak spot, with average expenditures half the national average well into the Forties. With an economy built around labor-intensive farming and light manufacturing, generations of ambitious Southerners sought opportunities elsewhere. Many headed to colleges in the Northeast and West Coast. But today, that flow has reversed, with ever more college students choosing to attend schools in the South.

Read the rest of this piece at: Unherd.

Photo: SpaceX via Flickr under under CC 2.0 License.

Young Americans Want Homes and Connection

Samuel J Abrams — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

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.

According to a new report from the Institute for Family Studies, a clear majority of young adults still aspire to own single-family homes. When asked about their ideal living arrangement, nearly 60 percent of 18–34-year-olds chose detached homes with yards over apartments or townhouses. To younger Americans, space is so critical for families that they are willing to increase commute times and sacrifice neighborhood amenities for bedrooms.

It is time, therefore, for a recalibration of our thinking about young Americans and housing policy for there is a powerful reality present: Americans, even young ones, want space, stability, and the chance to put down roots.

Critics might scoff: Doesn’t suburban life lead to isolation? Isn’t urban density the precondition for civic engagement, social capital, and belonging?

Not quite.

In fact, recent research from the American Survey Center shows that social life in the suburbs is not only alive and well—it’s thriving. Contrary to stereotypes, suburban Americans are just as socially connected, civically active, and community-minded as their urban peers. In some key areas—like knowing neighbors, volunteering, or attending neighborhood events—they outperform their city-dwelling counterparts.

Privacy, it turns out, is not the enemy of connection. The suburbs offer both: the opportunity to retreat and the opportunity to engage. There’s a reason why religious congregations, PTAs, youth sports leagues, and neighborhood associations remain strongest in precisely these communities. The suburban model gives people the bandwidth—and the incentive—to invest in local life.

Part of the appeal is developmental. As people age out of the transient lifestyles of early adulthood, their priorities shift. Safety, affordability, good schools, and green space begin to matter more than nightlife and density. It’s not a sign of regression—it’s a sign of responsibility. Many Millennials who once rented in Brooklyn or Silver Lake are now seeking the same kind of stability their parents once prized. The only difference is that today, they’re often priced out.

Read the rest of this piece at AEI.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Photo: New homes by Curtis Adams, via Pexels.

Fascism Has Not Yet Come to America

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 13:43:35 -0400

Endless jeremiads from the mainstream media, academia and a large chunk of the political class warn that Americans are on the precipice of a fascist hell, presided over by our own orange-haired Il Duce. Some prominent progressive scholars, like Yale’s Timothy Snyder, a historian of fascism, claim to have read the Weimar-like tea leaves and have now relocated to Canada.

Trump’s vengeful actions against his well-entrenched enemies certainly invite parallels to the kind of behaviour exhibited by fascist leaders, as well as their Communist analogues like Stalin or Mao Zedong. But we are far from a Fourth Reich. Somewhere between 3.3million and 5.6million protesters attended the anti-Trump ‘No Kings’ protests last month and were met with no pushback from the authorities. This clearly would not happen in a truly fascist country. Nor would Trump’s political enemies still control most of the media, academia and the vast non-profit world. In Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, they would have been supplanted, jailed or even executed.

Critically, MAGA is hardly the Nazi Party or Mussolini’s Fascists or, for that matter, the Bolsheviks. It represents, rather, an ad hoc and fundamentally unstable alliance. It spans career GOP political hacks, rogue billionaire executives, rabid Evangelicals, radical populists and media screamers – including some who espouse racist themes, as well as the equally awful Tucker Carlson.

As the fallout over the so-called Epstein files suggests, MAGA’s prime chatterers are less focussed on coherent policy than on conspiratorial hysteria. It is hardly a mass movement across a broad spectrum of the population, but essentially a rebellion of the middle orders and mostly older voters – 60 per cent of the Trump base was aged over 50 in 2024. Trump himself is a blimpish 79-year-old who seems ready for serious decline, while Mussolini and Hitler were in their late 30s and early 40s respectively when they took power.

Furthermore, both Hitler and Mussolini expressed a horrific, but coherent worldview with broad appeal. Italian fascism ‘drew in all class levels, from workers to the aristocracy’, notes art historian Martina Caruso, who is writing a book about her grandfather, Pietro Caruso, who was executed for crimes committed as Rome’s chief of police under Mussolini.

Indeed, Mussolini’s rise during the 1920s was widely hailed even in democratic countries. It was fuelled by media skills acquired as editor of a prominent daily, and by a vision that many people found alluring and inspiring. ‘It stirred people with a contemporary culture including the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage (and by extension of violence), the sense of belonging to a community’, Caruso suggests. ‘That’s how he gained hegemony – through symbols, mass rituals, the media and modernist architecture.’ If that sounds far removed from the MAGA movement, then that’s because it was. Architects, artists and college students are not exactly flocking en masse to Donald Trump, much less donning uniforms.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Trumpism and fascism is that Trump stands, first and foremost, for Trump. He has no true ideological lodestone, which makes the fevered attempts to discern one just silly. His appeal lies not in the revolutionary rhetoric of the 1930s but in seemingly commonsense alternatives to the truly insane policies of the increasingly left-leaning Democrats – on issues from the border and transgender ‘rights’ to the protection of the criminal class. Economically, MAGA is more reactionary than visionary, pointing, as it does, towards a return to the torpid 1950s.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo: Official White House Photo by Molly Riley via Flickr, Public Domain, Government Work.

Selling the Public Lands

Randal OToole — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The federal government owns about 640 million acres of land — some 28 percent of the land area of the United States — but according to some press reports, members of the U.S. Senate are proposing to sell 250 million of those acres. The press reports are wrong, but even if they weren’t, I can’t help but feel schadenfreude at environment groups that are going ballistic at the proposal.

Federal land aficionados all agree that the lands are enormously valuable. Yet Congress has given away most of the resources produced by those lands, including minerals, forage for domestic livestock, recreation, and water, to various special interest groups for nothing or well below their true value. As result, federal taxpayers lose roughly $10 billion per year managing the federal lands.

The 1980s saw a movement to privatize national forests (about 193 million acres) and Bureau of Land Management (about 247 million acres) lands, but it never got very far. However, I examined the arguments made by the privatizers and realized they were hard to refute. The lands were poorly managed, they said, and almost any environmentalist would agree. The politicization of federal lands meant that people fought over them rather than cooperated with one another to see that they were used for their highest values. Federal land mismanagement had bad influences on adjacent private lands. Privatization could have solved many of these problems.

Maybe I’m selfish, but I never supported privatization because I liked the idea of being able to freely travel across and through large scenic areas. However, data published by the Forest Service revealed that there were enough people like me that the most valuable use of about 98 to 99 percent of federal lands was for recreation, wildlife, and other so-called amenities, meaning things other than timber, grazing, and minerals. The remaining 1 or 2 percent included some Wyoming coal fields as well as oil & gas fields, which are distributed widely but can be extracted by occupying only a small amount of the surface.

Instead of privatization, I proposed marketization: letting federal land managers charge fair market value for all resources and funding those lands exclusively out of a share of those revenues. Managers would then have incentives to allocate the lands to their most valuable uses and competing user

My proposal was more complicated than that and eventually included a number of checks and balances aimed at protecting endangered species and other resources whose values might not be fully captured by the market. My original 1988 proposal gained some traction within the environmental movement until the fall of the Soviet Union, when the movement was taken over by people who wanted to control public lands from the top down.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Photo: Grizzly getting a good look at some of the nation’s federal lands. (As it happens, since I took this photo a week ago, this land has been burned in a wildfire. Although the Forest Service has concluded the fire was human-caused, we didn’t do it unless the zooming of a one-year-old dog was enough to ignite the grass.) Courtesy the Antiplanner.

The $130 Billion Train That Couldn't

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

In the annals of stupid and poorly run schemes, the California High-Speed Rail project ranks among the worst. Its future, even a dramatically scaled down one, has become ever more precarious since the Trump administration’s Department of Transportation rescinded $4 billion in funds already granted the project.

Governor Newsom has already filed a suit to reverse the action, but he can’t legislate away the reality that this project is an abject embarrassment. When voters approved $9 billion for the plan in 2008, the California High-Speed Rail Authority estimated that it would cost $33 billion and start running by 2020 – and that was just for the San Joaquin Valley portion. The cost has since ballooned to $130 billion, and no stretch is operational.

In neither the short-term nor the mid-term is there a way of providing the promised San Francisco to Los Angeles service in 2 hours and 40 minutes. Instead, the plan is now for the train to work in a “blended” fashion, mixing with conventional and freight trains in parts of the San Francisco and Los Angeles metropolitan areas. To say the least, a line running from the Central Valley hubs of Bakersfield, Fresno and Merced hardly seems a romantic return to the rails of the past.

Governing Magazine, not exactly a voice for reduced public spending, traced this cost explosion to “uncoordinated planning” that ignored basic construction logistics and bent to the knee to please political factions. Indeed, the route was in large part sold to the California interior’s denizens as an economic boon, which hardly fits into an economy based not on tourism or knowledge work but on truck-dependent agriculture, manufacturing and oil.

Many observers understand this reality. A decade ago Kevin Drum, writing for the left-leaning Mother Jones, labeled the project “ridiculous.” Yet the project has retained enough support from the state’s labor unions, the Democratic Party apparatus and the greens to keep it chugging, albeit slowly, along.

The same pattern of blue-state infrastructure failure can be seen across the country. In Maryland, there are the slow repairs to Baltimore Harbor’s collapsed Francis Scott Key. Boston’s Big Dig – a mega project to elevate a portion of Interstate 93 – turned out to be plagued by cost overruns and delays and came in at nearly $25 billion, $10 billion more than was expected. Similarly, the Marron Institute at New York University found in 2023 that the US suffers “among the highest transit-infrastructure costs in the world” – far higher not only than China, but also most European countries.

For example, New York’s Second Avenue subway line, Marron notes, was 8 to 12 times more expensive than what the international analysis suggested should be the baseline cost, a product of strict overtime rules, local-union agreements that limit the available labor pools geographically and an unwillingness to address staffing and labor agreements.

At least there are customers for New York’s subways. Contrast this with proposals to create a network of high-speed trains, promoted in Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s Green New Deal. This is grown out of a progressive fantasy. In a world where most people drive and many commute from home, the idea of sinking tens of billions into high-speed projects seems a poor bet. These realities led Britain’s cancelling of high-speed services to Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds. Rather than a bold leap into the future, these projects seem more like a “bridge to the 19th century,” as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch acidly put it.

Facing the vicissitudes of reality, the last best hope for the California project laid with the free-spending Biden, and it would have benefited even more under a Kamala Harris presidency. In a February 2025 report, the state’s Office of the Inspector General of High-Speed Rail reported that to maintain progress toward the goal of starting service between 2030 and 2033 (already 13 years late and about 400 miles short), the California High-Speed Rail Authority must secure $6.5 billion in funding by 2026.

With no prospect of private investment, it’s hard to see where the money will come from. This puts Governor (and aspiring presidential candidate) Newsom in a tight spot, forcing him to choose between funding the money-mad train and balancing his budget, or addressing critical progressive priorities such as public-employee pensions and free healthcare for the state’s estimated 2.5 million undocumented immigrants.

Worse yet, the biggest financial obstacles loom ahead. Much of what has been built has been easier-to-build flat valley land. Far more expensive tasks lie ahead, such as building 30 miles of tunnels through the San Gabriel Mountains and nearly 15 miles of rails traversing Pacheco Pass. One stretch must climb from approximately 400 feet above sea level in Bakersfield to about 4,100 feet. If the costs of the Los Angeles and San Francisco extensions replicate the experience of the much-easier Bakersfield-to-Merced segment, our analysis suggests a final cost that could be nearly double present projection: about $250 billion.

But in the progressive bubble that is California, Newsom and the project supporters, such State Senator Dave Cortese, insist the project is still viable. They claim that the public, which likely knows little about the spending, still supports the project’s completion. There is, however, no rush in Sacramento to raise the necessary revenue. Cortese insists nothing can stop his “can do” state from meeting the challenge. A better bet is that no one will be taking the 2 hour 40 minute high-speed train from San Francisco to Los Angeles in the foreseeable future.

This piece first appeared at: The Spectator.

Photo: NC3D, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Chicago Heat, Thirty Years Later

Pete Saunders — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 19:23:56 -0400

(Note: this is a post modified and updated from one written ten years ago on the 20th anniversary of the 1995 Chicago heat wave. I included some new reflections and context on that time. More than anything, however, I want to make clear that segregation and inequality benefits some people but also exacts deadly costs on others. Please take a look. -Pete)

Thirty years ago today, the intense heat in Chicago mercifully cooled down to a high of 94 degrees, signaling an end to one of the worst heat waves in the city’s history.

I vividly remember the day three days earlier when I experienced the single hottest day I ever felt, anywhere. That was when Chicago topped out at a very humid 106 degrees, with a heat index that made it feel like 125. I remember leaving Chicago's City Hall to walk outside, so I could feel what the terrible heat felt like.

I don’t know exactly why, but I decided to immerse myself in the heat, to take it all in. I walked the nearly two-mile journey from City Hall to Navy Pier on the lakefront, a place known for its cooling summer breezes off Lake Michigan. Meteorologists were already noting that no lake breeze was forming during this heat wave; in fact, there was no breeze at all. I remember looking at a still and silent Lake Michigan as if it was the world’s largest hot bath.

The humidity was absolutely oppressive. I’ve experienced 110+ degree temperatures during visits to Phoenix and Las Vegas before, but they simply do not compare with humid heat. I’ve experienced the stifling heat and humidity of the Deep South also. Without a doubt, 112 degrees in the desert is very hot. However the air retains a lightness to it. Humidity is heavy; it’s like adding weight on your back while trying to tolerate the heat.

Within a week's time, the cumulative effect of unrelenting heat and humidity led to more than 700 deaths in Chicago from heat strokes, dehydration and other heat-related illnesses., Almost all of them poor, without access to air conditioning in their homes or nearby, living in the most distressed neighborhoods in a city that was entirely unprepared to handle the onslaught. The vast majority of the heat-related deaths came from residents of the city's South and West sides. The 1995 Chicago heat wave is now known as one of the deadliest natural disasters in U.S. history, surpassed in the years since then only by Hurricane Katrina, though few have ever heard of it.

It was around this time that the notion of a bifurcated Chicago, one of deep economic and social differences between haves and have nots, began to solidify in my mind.

Chicago public radio station WBEZ’s Reset with Sasha-Ann Simons gathered some rememberances of the event, aired last week. For further understanding of the event, I'd highly recommend reading Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago by Eric Klinenberg. It’s mentioned in my recent list of books that influenced my perception of the Midwest.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Chicago had so many dead bodies piling up during its 1995 heat wave that the city recruited refrigerated trucks to handle the overflow. Source: npr.org

The Losers and Lunatics Battling It Out to Lead the Democrats

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

In today’s Democratic Party, nothing succeeds like failure. According to a recent poll tracker, the preferred candidates to contest the 2028 presidential election are a host of proven losers. Kamala Harris is the No.1 choice, followed by Pete Buttigieg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cory Booker and, of course, the slickest of all the failures, California governor Gavin Newsom.

Far less popular, it seems, are candidates who might appeal beyond the party faithful. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, who has cross-party support in his state, registered less than a quarter of the support banked by Harris among Democrats nationally. Other Democrats with a greater potential for success include Kentucky governor Andrew Beshear and Maryland’s Wes Moore, yet both of them failed to even break into the poll.

For most Democrats, as Ruy Teixeira notes, ‘the progressive moment’ has not ended, despite all evidence to the contrary. This has been made clear by their reluctance to denounce the recent riots in Los Angeles. A recent poll found that Ocasio-Cortez – who simultaneously downplayed the riots and blamed them on Donald Trump – is most likely to be considered the ‘face’ of the Democratic Party, followed by Bernie Sanders and foul-mouthed Texas congresswoman Jasmine Crockett. This sounds like a potential dream team… for the Republicans.

Democrats pose as upholding ‘fundamental values’, as Newsom puts it. Essentially, this means forsaking public safety and defending criminals and violent protesters. Harris has even insisted, contrary to all evidence, that those LA protests were ‘overwhelmingly peaceful’. Even though most who participated only exercised their rights, the demonstrations provided cover for the keffiyeh-wearing, Mexican-flag-waving mob. In the bizarro world of the current Democratic Party, the police (in 2020) and the National Guard (in 2025) are responsible for the unrest, rather than the politically driven militants.

So far, the only internal pushback from this fraught stance comes from senator John Fetterman and some newly elected Democratic mayors, like San Francisco’s Daniel Lurie. Unlike most Democrats, this small group is aware of the primacy of law enforcement as a pillar of democratic order, and they know that to be seen to be embracing violence, particularly from people in the US illegally, is electorally disastrous outside the deep-blue lunatic zones. Yet if current trends are anything to go by, their relative sanity will condemn them to an unsuccessful career in the Democratic Party.

The reigning queen of upwards failure is Kamala Harris. The former vice-president and 2024 presidential candidate is so inept that she lost to an unpopular Trump, despite her campaign vastly out-spending his and enjoying a compliant media. Unsurprisingly, California seems ready to anoint her as the next governor, despite her repeated inability to win in competitive elections.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Photo: via Gavin Newsom on X.

Why New York's Success Matters to the Whole Country

Samuel J Abrams — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Bret Stephens recently argued that if Zohran Mamdani becomes mayor of New York City, Republicans should welcome it. A Mamdani victory, he suggests, would make Democrats unelectable by exposing their radicalism and disconnect from ordinary Americans. It’s a tempting thought; but it’s dangerous.

New York isn’t just another city—it’s a global hub of culture, commerce, and creativity. To treat its decline as a political opportunity is to forget what it contributes to America’s economy and soul. A Mamdani administration wouldn’t just misgovern; it would fracture the civic ecosystem that allows New York to thrive—and in doing so, undermine a cornerstone of American dynamism.

New York has long drawn ambitious people from around the world—those who want to build, connect, and create. Its uniqueness lies not in its skyline, but in its density of networks: artists and bankers, coders and lawyers, chefs and marketers—all colliding in shared space. That proximity fuels knowledge spillover: ideas cross-pollinate, accelerate, and scale.

It’s no accident that Hamilton emerged here, where history and ambition coexist. Nor is it a coincidence that fashion, finance, and publishing still call this city home. Cities like Austin or Nashville are vital, but only New York fuses culture and commerce at such scale and speed.

This isn’t just economics. It’s about values. The city’s animating ethos has always been meritocratic: come here, work hard, and you can make it—regardless of who your parents were. It’s noisy, imperfect, and expensive, but also one of the last places where talent still beats pedigree.

That ethic is under threat. Mamdani and others like him don’t just challenge policies — they reject the premise of New York’s success. His campaign doesn’t merely push for more services or taxes. It frames the city, and the country, as morally bankrupt. In his view, capitalism isn’t to be refined — it’s to be dismantled. Institutions aren’t flawed — they’re irredeemable. The goal isn’t to expand opportunity but to seize and redistribute power.

This isn’t a nostalgic plea for 1990s Giuliani-era New York. Nor is it an endorsement of Wall Street or real estate magnates. New York has always needed reform — on housing, policing, education, and more. But Mamdani-style governance isn’t reform. It’s reaction; it’s grievance over growth, ideology over innovation, and a vision of America defined more by its sins than its promise.

Read the rest of this piece at AEI.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Photo: Empire State Building, NYC - by Sam Valadi, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

AI and the Future of Society and Economy

Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

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.

4.1 Section One: AI and the Evolution of Business

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is perhaps the most widely discussed new technology in history. Forecasts of its future range from imminent societal collapse to the spawning of a new paradigm for economic organisation. Some two-thirds of Americans fear its rise and roughly three in five, according to a 2023 poll, see it as a direct threat to civilisation (Edwards, 2023; Tong, 2023). World Economic Forum chairman Klaus Schwab warns about humans losing control of the world during the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Newcomb, 2023).

The business appeal of AI is obvious. AI is about improving the accuracy of decision-making by harnessing past experience to predict the future. It is not about creating new sentient, infallible life forms like “Ultron” from Marvel Comics or “Lt. Commander Data” from Star Trek. It is about eliminating mankind’s natural stupidity that comes from making the same mistakes over and over again without learning from the past. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) estimated AI technologies would add US$15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030. McKinsey & Company estimates generative AI alone will add US$4.4 trillion annually to the global economy (Chui et al., 2023; Goldman, 2023; PwC, 2017).

Entrepreneurs and innovators may seek to disrupt existing order, but most businesses are built around optimising existing systems. Build the same thing cheaper so you make more money than your competitors. Define target audiences more precisely so you can reach them more efficiently and effectively. Identify friction points in processes so you can smooth them out and make things happen faster and more easily. This is the ongoing struggle of businesses and markets since the beginning of capitalism.

Historically, humans have performed these analytical tasks manually. They created tools, like spreadsheets and surveys to help them. However, the task of optimising businesses has largely been the province of human analysts. This is where AI steps in. Its focus is on speeding up the time for collecting, analysing and forecasting by orders of magnitude in ways beyond the capability of human analysts in a timely manner. To put the speed gap into perspective, a study conducted by Stanford University compared the performance of AI algorithms against human radiologists in detecting breast cancer from mammograms. The AI algorithm achieved a 94.5% accuracy rate, outperforming the human radiologists who achieved an accuracy rate of 88.1%. Furthermore, the AI algorithm took an average of just 2.5 seconds to analyse each image, while the radiologists took an average of 11.8 seconds, and the AI algorithm can work 24 hours/day, 365 days/year without resting (Bakar, 2024).

AI finds patterns in the flow that accurately predict the observed behaviour of a business or of a consumer or of a market. Those patterns may be very counter-intuitive to the “conventional wisdom” that has been built up over time around an industry. However, they may be far more accurate in their predictive power. The economic value of being able to predict outcomes accurately outweighs the comfort of understanding the root causes that go into a prediction. Moreover, since the world does not stand still and is in continual motion, being able to accurately automate the prediction process has even greater economic value.

The underlying premise of AI is that machines can learn to detect patterns and changes in those patterns better than human beings can. Typically, the machine learning process starts with humans “teaching” computers what they know. Humans define the rules for the machine. “Here is what winning is”, or “Here is what we define as a desired outcome”. AI technology has progressed to the point that machines take over the responsibility of learning how to identify patterns accurately on their own. They create their own internal competition to test which patterns are more accurate in predicting things (Rouse, 2023).

At this early stage of AI, computers are prioritising predicting relevance, not factual accuracy. In ChatGPT or Google Gemini (originally known as “Google Bard”), for instance, computers learn by competing with each other to accurately predict what YOU are looking for, based on your prompt. You may ask a question like, “Is global warming happening and why?” The answer you get back reflects what the AI thinks you are asking about and feeds you back what has been published in the world on that topic, organised in a way it thinks you will find useful. It has based its submission to you on what other people have asked about that same topic. You then tell ChatGPT or Google Gemini whether the answer is satisfactory. Or you may then ask the question in another way. The AI learns from how you phrase things to refine the answer in a way that is more satisfying.

At this stage in AI, it is NOT actually concerned with the underlying accuracy of the answer. It is “crowd sourcing” its answers. This “group think” can have its obvious dangers. However, if you believe that people generally act as a herd and follow what most other people do or say, the power of AI to reduce the volatility of humans and their markets may be compelling to businesses that are NOT looking to disrupt existing behaviour patterns.

Ultimately AI works off the surveillance of people and ideas. Its key is mass observation of human and machine behaviour on a continual basis. The notion that we are all being constantly surveilled is understandably repugnant to a large swath of society, which was reared on the notion that their privacy and individuality is sacrosanct. Unfortunately, like it or not, privacy is largely an illusion today. Virtually everything anyone does is tracked and recorded for the computers that then add their behaviour to the vast stew of AI databases. The younger generation’s acceptance of and fascination with social media systems, fuelled and funded through mass surveillance, indicate to us that humans seem willing to make the trade-off of their privacy for some economic advantage. Unions are already raising concerns about how AI could help bosses keep close watch on their employees, even outside their jobs (Tracy, 2023).

For better or worse, AI is just in its infancy. There are already experiments to see how it can be enhanced with human brain cells (Blain, 2023). It is also not simply one thing. AI comprises a wide range of technologies and use cases. From the large language and generative AI models like ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Dall-E, they are the equivalent of the first automobiles: fun to play with, somewhat unreliable and maybe a little dangerous. But over time, the lesson for companies, notes Rich Karlgaard (2023, para. 4), will be clear: Who Learns Fastest, Wins.

Read all of Chapter 4.

Buy the book at Routledge.

Notes:

Edwards, B. (2023). Poll: AI Poses Risk to Humanity, According to Majority of Americans. Retrieved March 6, 2025, from Ars Technica website. (back to reference)
Tong, A. (2023). AI Threatens Humanity’s Future, 61% of Americans Say: Reuters/Ipsos Poll. Retrieved March 6, 2025, from Reuters website. (back to reference)
Larsson, A., & Hatzigeorgiou, A. (Eds.). (2025). The Future of Labour: How AI, Technological Disruption and Practice Will Change the Way We Work (1st ed.). Routledge. doi.org/. (back to reference)
Chui, M., Hazan, E., Roberts, R., Singla, A., Smaje, K., Sukharevsky, A., … Zemmel, R. (2023). The Economic Potential of Generative AI: The Next Productivity Frontier. Retrieved March 6, 2025, from McKinsey Digital website.(back to reference)
Goldman, D. P. (2023). Why AI Can’t Think. Retrieved March 6, 2025, from Law & Liberty website. (back to reference)
PwC. (2017). Sizing the Prize. Retrieved March 6, 2025, from PwC website. (back to reference)
Rouse, M. (2023). Generative Adversarial Network. Retrieved March 6, 2025, from Technopedia website. (back to reference)
Tracy, R. (2023). Business and Labor Square Off Over AI’s Future in American Workplace. Retrieved March 6, 2025, from The Wall Street Journal website. (back to reference)
Blain, L. (2023). Computer Chip With Built-In Human Brain Tissue Gets Military Funding. Retrieved March 6, 2025, from New Atlas website. (back to reference)
Karlgaard, R. (2023). Who Learns Fastest, Wins. Retrieved March 6, 2025, from Forbes website. (back to reference)

More on Cities and Distressed Neighborhoods

Pete Saunders — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

It’s time for me to follow up on the post I wrote ten days ago in response to fellow planner and Substacker Bill Fulton’s "garlic knot" cities concept.

Here’s a quick summary. Fulton notes in his article that there are metro areas across the country anchored by core cities that have solid and successful downtowns surrounded by quickly rising close-to-downtown neighborhoods and growing suburban areas further out. However, many have struggling neighborhoods in between the downtown and suburbs, either awaiting the boom that revitalized downtown or becoming recognized as a great alternative to suburbia. Here’s how he put it, after being reminded of this while spending time in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor:

“Not all of Baltimore, of course, is like this. Like many older rust belt cities that have lost population – Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland – the suburbs are still growing and the center is getting very strong, but the old city neighborhoods are in rough shape. A mile away from where I was enjoying a high-amenity experience, people are trapped in neighborhoods of extreme poverty.

We used to call places like Baltimore and Detroit “donut cities,’ because there was nothing left in the center. But after decades of both public and private revitalization efforts, they’re not really donuts anymore. Some time ago, the Christian urbanist (no, that’s not an oxymoron) Aaron Renn called them “The New Donut,” but that term doesn’t quite fit either.

Instead, I’d call them Garlic Knot Cities – very dense and satisfying in the center, but the center is small and doesn’t have much of substance surrounding it.”

It’s an astute observation, and one I’ve noted as well (without any cool name for it). I think it stands out as one of the most pressing issues of urban planning, policy and governance today, yet it’s almost never framed in this way. There are loud voices in cities advocating for new housing, so housing becomes more affordable. Meanwhile, the machinery that has supported the growth of suburbia continues to build more on the periphery of metro areas. Sun Belt metros, particularly in Texas and Florida, remain locked in on the suburban model. The middle neighborhoods, unfortunately, get left out of the discussion.

Why is this? Mostly because that’s where a significant chunk of urban distress is housed in American cities. These are the areas noted for high crime, poor quality schools, abandoned or obsolete housing, limited access, lacking in amenities, few job opportunities and other ills that plague cities. Residents of these neighborhoods are often looking for the kind of substantial public investment that turned downtowns around, or the private investment that boosted neighborhoods that were once very similar to them into attractive hip hotspots.

But these neighborhoods inhabit a different space than the revitalized downtown and the still-growing suburbs. Back when the term “donut cities” did make sense, cities realized the importance of strengthening the center. In came the new stadiums, mixed-use developments, institutional expansions, and a new commercial ecosystem to support them. And it worked. As I mentioned earlier, the suburban model keeps chugging along, even in weak metro economies. Without the appeal of being a metro area’s showroom to the world, or a metro area’s next shiny new thing, those in between continue to lag.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: A residential street view of a neighborhood in South Dallas. Few people associate neighborhoods like this with Dallas, choosing to focus on its revitalizing interior or booming outskirts. But neighborhoods like this exist there, and a big part of the Metroplex’s success is hiding this view from outsiders. Source: google maps.

ICE Raids are Cruel, But So is an Economy Built on Undocumented Labor

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Even as Californians protest the crude and often brutal deportation tactics employed by President Trump’s ICE and Homeland Security agents, we’re giving too little thought to how our state, and the nation, is failing the very immigrant community we want to protect.

In the past, particularly in the last century, when the U.S. economy, and California’s, was growing at a fast rate, loosely controlled immigration filled critical needs and, over time, moved many immigrants into an increasingly diverse middle class. But now newcomers are getting stuck. According to new findings from USC and University of California researchers, immigrants account for nearly a quarter of the U.S. population living in poverty, up from 14% three decades ago.

The immigrant poverty rate fluctuates, but it has been rising in recent years, especially since the pandemic. In 2024, 22.4% of all immigrants and 28.4% of non-citizen immigrants, including the undocumented, were poor, the highest rates since 2008.

As well, welfare dependency is more pronounced among immigrants than the native born. A 2023 analysis of census data showed that 54% of households headed by naturalized citizens, legal residents and the undocumented use one or more welfare programs versus 39% of U.S.-born households.

In California, the overall situation is only slightly better. A 2023 report from the Public Policy Institute of California put the poverty rate for all foreign-born residents at 17.6%, compared to 11.5% for those born here. For unauthorized immigrants, however, the rate was even higher than the national figure: 29.6%. Undocumented households, notes a separate USC study, have consistently had the lowest median household income in L.A. — $46,500, compared to $75,000 among all Angelenos in 2024.

The grim statistics reflect a decline starting in the 1980s in blue-collar industries in California, which traditionally offered upward mobility to immigrants. Unionization in the immigrant-heavy hospitality industry has helped lift some families, but those gains may lead to fewer jobs as employers look to rein in costs, potentially by automating some services. And immigration itself, especially mass immigration, puts downward pressure on many of the jobs newcomers fill — in agriculture, for example, or construction.

The dearth of jobs that support families has pushed California toward a model that Michael Lind, a Texas-based historian and author, describes as the “low wage/high welfare model.”

Read the rest of this piece at: Los Angeles Times.

Photo: SEIU Local 99, via Flickr,underCC 2.0 License.

Donohue's and the Soul of the City

Samuel J Abrams — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

From the outside, Donohue’s Steak House looks like it belongs to another era—and maybe that’s part of its charm. Nestled on Lexington Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, its faded green awning and dated décor stand in quiet contrast to the sleek storefronts and chain eateries that now dominate the neighborhood. Donohue’s doesn’t try to impress. In fact, it looks slightly out of place.

But step inside, and something different unfolds.

There’s a hum to the room: clinking glasses, laughter from regulars, waitstaff who know your drink before you sit down. It’s not trendy or curated—it’s lived-in. And it’s always full. Donohue’s doesn’t just serve steak—it serves memory, comfort, and the rare feeling of being known in a city that too often insists on anonymity.

I’ve eaten at Donohue’s many times over the years. It’s an authentic third place—not home, not work, but the vital space where community lives. Donohue’s earned that role through consistency and care. The food is solid. The atmosphere is sincere. And if you show up enough, someone nods in recognition. A few visits later, you’re greeted by name. Just like that, a restaurant becomes a home base.

That’s what’s at stake now. After 75 years, Donohue’s is considering closing when its lease ends in 2026. Owner Maureen Donohue-Peters recently opened a second location in Westhampton Beach and is “pondering” whether the original spot will remain open.

She’s candid about the reasons. One of them is crime. A rise in burglaries and break-ins in the neighborhood has shaken her confidence and sense of safety. When a multigenerational business owner begins to fear for the well-being of her staff and space, it’s not just a personal concern—it’s a civic failure.

If New York City wants institutions like Donohue’s to survive, it has to make safety a real priority, not just a talking point.

That challenge sits alongside another: the slow grind of economic and cultural pressure that makes it harder for legacy businesses to stay afloat. Even after surviving real estate booms, blackouts, and a pandemic, Donohue’s may not outlast the next lease negotiation. And that should be a wake-up call.

Because Donohue’s isn’t just a steakhouse. It’s an anchor. A space of belonging in a city that can feel transactional and cold. These are the places that sustain a city’s soul—not just its economy. They are where friendships form, loneliness is softened, and civic trust is built, quietly, over years.

You don’t legislate a third place into existence. You nurture it. You protect it. You ensure it isn’t priced out, pushed out—or left vulnerable to crime and disorder.

New York has long celebrated small businesses and neighborhood institutions in rhetoric, but too often fails them in practice. When a place like Donohue’s begins to consider closure—not for lack of customers or community, but because the city around it no longer feels safe or supportive—it’s time to reexamine our priorities.

Read the rest of this piece at AEI.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Photo: Donohue's Steak House on Lexington Ave., NYC - by Jazz Guy, via Flickr underCC 2.0 License.

ICE Backlash is Pushing LA Towards New York Style Chaos

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Los Angeles politicians have long dreamt of their city overtaking New York as North America’s dominant economic centre. Yet if LA is now becoming more like New York, it is for entirely the wrong reasons.

Radical anti-ICE protests that began last month have continued into July in California. This fury has only been exacerbated by the death on Friday of a man who was injured during an ICE raid on a cannabis farm. With nearly a million undocumented migrants living in LA, the city has become a natural setting for these demonstrations, while Mayor Karen Bass is seemingly opposed to any efforts to enforce immigration laws. The largely youthful demonstrators have habitually broken laws, attacked police, and set fire to Waymo vehicles. Radicals hail what they call “a student intifada”. One local political leader has even suggested the city’s notorious gangs join the fight against ICE officers.

How did it come to this? The decline of the higher-end economy has left LA’s roughly 50% Latino population in a dire state. The city was once a beacon of opportunity for migrants, but Latino incomes, adjusted for cost of living, and homeownership rates are among the lowest in the nation. LA’s poverty rates are the highest of anywhere in California and among the worst in the country, and it’s the immigrants who suffer most. One study from last year found that 41% of undocumented migrants under the age of 26 live in poverty. Undocumented households have a median income of $46,500, compared to $75,000 among all Angelenos.

What’s more, LA now suffers from a low-wage/high-welfare model, dependent on poorly-paid immigrants who rely on government support. The Congressional Budget Office warned last year that the “massive surge in immigration” in recent years will impact the salaries of low-income US workers, who compete with newcomers for living space, jobs and social services.

All this is a tragedy for the city, but a boon for Left-wing politicians. The Democratic Socialists of America, of which Zohran Mamdani is a member, already hold four seats on LA’s 15-seat city council. Backed by the all-powerful public employee unions, they have been able to apply pressure on the hapless Bass.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo: Luke Harold, via Flickr, Public Domain.

The Reality of America’s Multi-Racial Working Class

Robert Ordway — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

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.

I grew up in Northwest Indiana in a small mill town called Lake Station, founded around 1850. It was at the terminus of the first train through Lake County, but the community failed because George Pullman decided to locate his sleeper train cars on Chicago’s South Side. The city was renamed East Gary in 1908, just two years after the founding of the City of Gary, where J.P. Morgan removed the dunes from Lake Michigan and built the world’s largest fully integrated steel mill. It was part of the world’s first billion-dollar company, U.S. Steel. East Gary was marketed as a suburb for steel executives, but the plan didn’t work, and the city failed again.

Over the next 15 years, Gary became a destination for 50+ different ethnicities, primarily uneducated men from Eastern and Central European poor countries. World War I prohibited the immigration of workers from European nations that were at war with the United States. During the Great Steel Strike of 1919, Inland Steel, located next door in East Chicago, recruited Mexicans to the area as strikebreakers. In Gary, the founder of the local chapter NAACP helped organize interracial solidarity during the strike.

Two years later, Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, limiting immigration again. U.S. Steel then went on to aggressively recruit southern whites and blacks to fill the gap but also to stop unionization.

After 150 years as subsistence farmers in western Kentucky, my Papaw’s family moved to Gary where he gained employment in the Sheet & Tin Mill at U.S Steel in the late 50s. It was dirty and dangerous, but it was one of the few places where blacks and whites worked together. The local history is well covered in Ruth Needleman’s book Black Freedom Fighters in Steel. “People helped each other, and a guy would come up to you and ask for a dime or nickel, and if you had it, you’d give it to them, white or black.” As one family member recounts, Papaw did the same; he regularly invited black union colleagues to work on their cars and never charged them for even the parts, much less the labor.

After the 1959 steel strike, the longest in U.S. history, my Papaw, his wife, and two kids bought a house next door in the much more affordable and agrarian-feeling East Gary.

The community already had a significant Polish, Slovak, and Croatian contingent. Still, the migration of southern whites and some Mexicans to the area was so intense during the second wave in the late 1950s that the township had to build a new high school in an emergency. We are called the Ingots in honor of steelmaking, and our mascot is Joe Macarac, a Croatian steelworker hero of folklore.

As Gary began to decline from imports, automation, and white flight after the election of the nation’s first black mayor of a major city, East Gary returned to its original name, Lake Station, in 1977. There are claims this was driven by racism; however, as a historically heavily Democrat voting city, in 1984, the locals voted for Katie Hall in the three-way primary, the first black woman to represent Indiana in Congress.

After my Dad graduated from River Forest, he followed Papaw’s steps into Gary Sheet & Tin, but he was laid off during the mass consolidation of the industry in the 1980s. That decade shows Chicagoland and Gary losing more black population than anywhere in the nation, a story rarely written about.

A generation later, Mamaw and Papaw retired back to Crayne in Crittenden County, KY, and gave my Dad and uncle that little 864 sq. ft. home. I was raised in the same house, which sat on “the color line,” which included Mexicans and Puerto Ricans along with multi-ethnic and multi-racial folks. Interstate 65 separated and segregated us from the city of Gary, which by then had been coded for ‘black,’ which meant poor, and dangerous.

When I was a kid in the 1990s, Gary was the murder capital of the nation for multiple years running. In 1997, my Dad and I traveled to the Black Oak neighborhood, the city's original multiracial now only white-majority neighborhood, to help one of his Hungarian friends build a house. On our way over, I saw both prostitutes and drug dealers in broad daylight. This flew in the face of what I witnessed on TV, as all of my favorite athletes, musicians, and actors were black.

Perhaps it’s part of the crude steelworker language from earlier generations or a product of the time with ‘Parental Advisory’ labels on music albums, but we used ethnic and racial epithets toward each other with impunity at school. When you’re all part of the same social class, owning a particular stereotype is humorous because it is at least partially true. My peers were known by hyphenated ethnicities, from Mexi-rican to Polish-Mexican and a personal favorite, Czechoslovakian-Mexican or “Chex-Mex.” Others were so mixed that 23andMe DNA testing still can’t figure them out. Today, I couldn’t guess the ethnic or racial background of my peers’ kids.

Read the rest of this piece at: Aaron Renn.

Robert Ordway is a Republican policy analyst. He currently serves as Senior Policy Advisor to Indiana Governor Mike Braun. You can find him on Substack.

Photo: Gary Works Sheet & Tin Mill, courtesy the author.

The West's Immigration Reckoning is Here

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The recent riots in Los Angeles, sparked by President Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, could be a harbinger to a new era of ethnic conflict not only in the U.S. but throughout the West, including Canada.

Many leading countries for immigrants, notably in the Middle East, may have higher percentages of international migrants, but many are only there temporarily. But in Canada, Australia, and the U.S. — where the foreign born represent between 15 and 30 per cent of the total population — most come to stay, with sometimes problematic results.

President Joe Biden changed immigration policies, allowing millions, some barely vetted, to enter at ever increasing rates, causing the number of undocumented immigrants to soar past 11 million. Until recently, former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau followed a similar liberalization that allowed large numbers of migrants, some coming as refugees, into the country.

In both countries, the mass migration has deepened already serious class divides as many new migrants remain poor. In Canada, one in five recent immigrants now lives in poverty, with most suffering from “deep poverty” — an income below 75 per cent of the poverty line — compared to only five per cent of the whole population.

Such complexities are rarely part of the public discussion of immigration. In the U.S. legacy media spin on the crackdown focuses on the abuses and often ham handed approach used by the Trump administration in working class Latino communities. Stories of individual cases of respectable and upright families targeted by the crackdown predominate, stirring up ever more fear of a racist, even “fascist” crackdown on minorities.

In contrast, the MAGA view focuses on criminal migrants and radical demonstrators, some of whom have engaged in violence. The images of young protesters waving Mexican flags is offensive to many American citizens, even in California. For MAGA, the crackdown represents both a return to legality as well as a defence from hostile elements.

Both views largely ignore a more complex, and often contradictory reality. Historically, as immigrant advocates rightly claim, the migration of peoples have been critical to the economic health, and cultural dynamism, of countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and France.

Guest workers, for example, played a critical role in the revival of Europe’s economies, and steady immigration sparked growth in Canada, the U.S. and Australia. Yet as immigration levels have soared, the economic payoffs seem to be increasingly dubious, particularly when we put into account the changing structure of the labour market.

The reality is that immigrants are not only filling in for jobs with no workers, but are replacing native born workers who are increasingly on the sidelines. In much of Europe up to one quarter to one-third of the population under 30 is neither in school or working. In the U.K. one out of seven under 25 is on the economic sidelines, the highest level in a decade.

Much the same pattern is emerging in North America. In the U.S., labour participation has steadily dropped since 2000. More American men are now out of the workforce than in a half century. Canada too has a declining labour participation rate, which is now at the lowest level since 1997.

These two phenomena — immigrant poverty and native non-participation — likely intersect. The immigrant’s presence at the lower end of the labour market does tend to retard wage growth , as noted by a recent Congressional study , and could discourage natives from work. This may be a boon for professionals for cheaper waiters, busboys, gardeners, and nannies but not for working class people. Early claims that Trump’s crackdown has helped reduce crime and lifted wages for low-income workers should be treated with care, but could become persuasive, at least outside the media and academic establishment.

Read the rest of this piece at: MSN.

Photo credit: Union workers rally for David Huerta, the president of Service Employees International Union California, who was arrested during a Los Angeles protest, via SEIU California, under CC 3.0 License.

Elon Musk's Party for Oligarchs

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Just what America doesn’t need – another party dominated, and this time even started, by oligarchs. SpaceX owner Elon Musk may be able to design rocket ships, but his understanding of politics and public opinion is below elementary-school level. His plan to launch a new party, the America Party, seems largely delusional.

Musk had been teasing the idea of a new, third party for several weeks, following his spectacular falling out with US president Donald Trump. Musk, who had previously led the White House’s efforts to cut public spending at the Department for Government Efficiency (DOGE), was dismayed to learn of Trump’s plans to massively boost spending in his flagship One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Last weekend, Musk announced the creation of the America Party, which he claims will be able to defeat the Republican-Democrat duopoly and represent the ‘80 per cent’ of Americans ‘in the middle’. Billionaire Mark Cuban and financier Anthony Scaramucci have offered to help get the party going.

Musk may be the most successful entrepreneur of his generation, but he is not remotely popular, with 55 per cent of Americans disapproving of him. Nor is the idea of oligarchs funding political parties well received. According to Pew Research, 80 per cent of Americans believe wealthy donors have too much power – and they are right. In 2024, election spending in real dollars is estimated to have been two to three times higher than two decades ago. Some 40 per cent of all political contributions, according to Jacobin, come from the wealthiest one per cent.

The US Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which essentially prevented any real restraints from being placed on campaign spending, accelerated this pattern. This is hardly just a Republican gambit. Until recently at least, the main beneficiaries of so-called dark money have been Democrats, getting big paydays from backers like Microsoft’s Bill Gates, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. These donors helped Kamala Harris raise well over $1.5 billion – the highest figure in history – for her losing presidential campaign.

Americans once admired the tech oligarchs but increasingly find them objectionable and scary. Between 2018 and 2021, Facebook, Amazon and Google all suffered a large-scale loss of confidence. They are now even more unpopular than the hated mainstream media.

Let’s face it. These guys are not upstarts anymore, but increasingly monopolists. Google and Apple account for nearly 90 per cent of all mobile-browser use worldwide, while Microsoft, Android (Google) and iOS (Apple) hold roughly the same share of all operating-system software. Like Wall Street bankers, their power epitomises the relentless concentration of the economy that many Americans instinctively fear.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo: Elon Musk and President of Argentina Javier Milei at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Credit: Gage Skidmore, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, of Electric Vehicles

Ronald Stein — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Electric vehicles are being mandated in California, but Governor Newsom is oblivious to the fact that it’s just another product that cannot exist without oil, as all the thousands of parts and components of EVs, from tires, insulation, and computers, are made from the oil derivatives manufactured out of crude oil.

Newsom’s efforts to “transition away from fossil fuels” have yet to comprehend that humanity is not addicted to fossil fuels, but they are addicted to the products and transportation fuels made from those fossil fuels to meet the materialistic demands of humanity and the economy. Despite the demand for the products and transportation fuels that so-called renewables cannot make, only wealthy economies, like that in California, have “green” movements and are pursuing them with mandates and costly subsidies.

The recently released documentary “Electric Vehicles: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” isn’t just another documentary that lazily cheerleads the industry, though there is a fair amount of marveling at the technology and underscoring its benefits and potential. It’s an enlightening, educational, and entertaining 90-minute documentary that is a MUST viewing by everyone to enhance their Energy Literacy and help them decide for themselves if EVs are good, bad, or ugly. The documentary is available for purchase at $12.99, or you can rent it for a 72-hour lease for $9.99.

It’s appalling that the policymakers, just in wealthy countries, are setting “green” policies that continue to support humanity’s atrocities and environmental degradation in poorer developing countries that are mining for the exotic minerals and metals to go “green.”

The documentary demonstrates the environmental degradation and humanity’s atrocities to people with yellow, brown, and black skin in those poorer developing countries as unethical and immoral, just for materials to make EV batteries. The documentary is narrated by Larry Elder, a talk radio host, author, politician, lawyer, and former candidate for governor of California.

Read the rest of this piece at America Out Loud.

Ronald Stein is an engineer, senior policy advisor on energy literacy for the Heartland Institute and CFACT, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book "Clean Energy Exploitations."

Photo: courtesy America Out Loud.

Under Zohran Mamdani, the Jewish Exodus from New York Likely to Accelerate

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Zohran Mamdani may represent the future of New York, but only by destroying the secrets of its past success. The city, even under the quasi-socialist mayor Fiorello La Guardia, has from its Dutch days been a fundamentally capitalist enterprise. It is the search for success, often by less than respectable means, which led millions – including the ancestors of Donald Trump – to Gotham.

Mamdani calls himself a democratic socialist. The party’s platform seeks “the abolition of capitalism” and the “social ownership of all major industry and infrastructure”. It goes further than the conventional Leftism of New York, which was social democratic, but strongly patriotic and interested in a stronger economy. The old-fashioned New York Left fought for civil rights, but also for equal treatment and greater opportunity. It would no more talk about taxing “whiter” areas, as Mamdani’s campaign platform recently did, than embrace defunding the police, which he formerly espoused.

To be sure, the exodus that will be most followed in the media will be that of the ultra-wealthy. Like London, New York, even as it has lost its middle orders, continues to attract the rich, at least part-time. Yet however much they love the opera, the fashion or Broadway, the ultra-wealthy cherish their riches even more.

This process appears already to have started. Between 2018 and 2022 over hundred thousand taxpayers left for Florida, draining an estimated $14 billion from the city’s coffers. Mamdani’s election would be a boon for places like Palm Beach, Austin and Dallas, which is building a stock exchange to rival Wall Street. Eric Johnson, Dallas’s mayor, has suggested that Mamdani’s election could increase his own city’s appeal among “rattled” business people fearful of plans to tax them at much higher rates in New York.

But the larger threat perhaps lies in the loss of the city’s middle class. Pummelled by high taxes, a weak economy, street disorder and miserable education, the city’s long-established minority groups – Italians, Irish, Jews, African Americans, Puerto Ricans – have been heading for the exits for years. This trend was joined by younger people, particularly of marriage age, and accelerated during the pandemic.

Left behind are the most recent immigrants, largely from developing countries and many of them Muslim. But Mamdani’s true base lies basically with affluent, young, childless, single professionals (a majority of adult Manhattanites have never been married). Their unifying principle is rent control and staying true, like Mamdani, to their college indoctrination.

This new political nexus between recent migrants and hipsters – despite often vast cultural divides – should be familiar to residents of Paris, London or Toronto, and is also increasingly common in Los Angeles and Chicago. To trumpeters of the Left, like The Guardian, this could be the “roadmap” that leads Democrats back to power. Mamdani is not only good for America, Salon suggests, but for “the world”.
He seems unlikely, however, to be good for New York City’s Jewish community. When I was growing up, the city was home to roughly two million Jews, one in four New Yorkers. Today it is down to one million, just slightly above the almost 800,000 Muslims estimated to be in the city according to a 2016 study (the figure is likely to have risen since). Jews are still a part of the mosaic but a clearly shrinking one. They will surely feel ever more uncomfortable with a mayor who reacted to the October 7 pogrom by criticising the Israeli response and who has threatened to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he bothers to come to the largest diaspora city.

Increasingly, Jews are finding better and safer homes elsewhere. Many have moved to the American South, long considered a difficult terrain for non-Christians. Florida’s Jewish population, barely 100,000 in 1960, now stands at over 670,000. The Jewish community in Houston grew by approximately 50 per cent between 1986 and 2016. The Jewish population in Atlanta has also grown strongly to well over 100,000. In 1930, 60 per cent of American Jews lived in the Northeast to today’s 40 per cent. The percentage of American Jews who live in the South has grown from 9 per cent in 1960 to 22 per cent today.

This geographic sea change can be seen on college campus communities, as well. The first and third largest Jewish student populations in the United States today are the University of Florida and Central Florida University. According to a Brandeis study, southern schools tend to be less intolerant of Jews.

There still remains a chance that Eric Adams, the scandal-plagued current Mayor of New York, might win as an independent. But New Yorkers need to realise that Mamdani and his brand of hipster socialism represents a rejection of the entrepreneurial, tolerant and profoundly American nature of the city.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Photo credit: Eden, Janine and Jim, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

The Midwest Climate Critique is Bogus

Pete Saunders — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Every so often I see that someone makes the claim that people are leaving the Midwest because the weather sucks. That claim is bogus.

X poster Hunter (@StatisticUrban) made this claim in a tweet sent Monday:

“Nobody wants to hear this but one of the reasons the midwest is struggling is that the weather just sucks.

It's freezing cold, dark, and snowy in the winter, and hot and humid in the summer. The truly "nice" parts of the year are limited to a few weeks in the spring/fall.”

One parenthetic note, here: the OP’s location on X is given as the United Kingdom. Assuming they are from London, perhaps the best climate in an otherwise climate-challenged nation, I find it odd that someone from a place so cloudy, misty and perpetually cool would make this point. Nonetheless, London’s weather has not kept it from becoming one of the world’s premier global cities.

Let me say I don’t completely disagree with this person. The Midwest’s weather is not, uh, optimal. There are better places climate-wise. And that’s fine. However, it’s not the principal reason people leave the Midwest.

I’ve always maintained that there’s little difference in climate between Midwestern and Northeastern cities. I looked at climate data listed on the Wikipedia page of several cities, and here’s what I found. A quick one-on-one comparison between cities at similar latitudes makes the point. Here in this data comparison of the climates of Boston and Chicago, they’re essentially the same:

The climates of New York City and Indianapolis? The same:

Guess what? Comparing Washington, DC and St. Louis, they’re the same:

In every comparison, there’s virtually no difference in annual precipitation, annual snowfall, record high and record low temperatures, average annual relative humidity, or the amount of annual sunlight and cloudiness. Midwestern cities have slightly higher maximum temperatures and slightly lower minimum temperatures, due to their inland locations. Otherwise, at similar latitudes, the cities are quite comparable.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo source: Snow on Boston Common Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Homes for Hipsters

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

More than his good looks, charm and great social-media game, the biggest reason that Zohran Mamdani may become New York’s next mayor grows from his focus on the city’s affordability crisis, most of which is tied to high housing prices.

Mamdani’s ‘cost of living’ campaign – offering rent control, free buses, childcare and city-owned supermarkets – seems to some leftist pundits a potential road back to power, under the guise of the burgeoning YIMBY (‘yes in my backyard’) movement that seeks to lower rental prices through massive housing construction.

Although Mamdani claims his focus on affordability appeals to working-class voters who shifted to Donald Trump, his core constituency lies elsewhere – with relatively affluent, young, single and childless professionals. For them, rent control is a true blessing, although they may not need free buses or want city-financed grocery stores, unless they resemble Whole Foods.

Housing, of course, is not just a New York issue. It also has a particular resonance for younger Americans. A Harvard poll of 18- to 29-year-olds this year ranked housing as the third-most-important issue overall, after inflation and healthcare. The educated hipster class – Mamdani’s base – understandably worries about the fact that in New York, you need a $135,000-a-year salary to afford a decent place, without it eating up most of your paycheque.

On a national basis, Mamdani’s win could prove a critical boost to the YIMBYs. From their origins in California, they have always been an odd agglomeration, originally financed by Bay Area tech and real-estate elites, while also embraced by more predictable leftist advocates of rent control, heavy subsidies and public housing. As YIMBY policies – like rezoning and densification – have either failed to solve the problem, or failed to gain traction with the public, more draconian socialist approaches seem to be gaining currency.

The YIMBYs are at least right about one thing: the lack of new housing is a profound national failure. Homebuilders constructed a million fewer homes – including units – in 2024 than in 1972, when there were 130 million fewer Americans. One estimate puts the US housing market short by an estimated 4.5 million homes.

But if YIMBYs have diagnosed a key problem, their solutions – wherever imposed – have tended to make things worse. High-density development, often seen as the alternative to urban sprawl, does not solve the problem of higher urban land costs and higher construction fees.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo credit: Affordable housing construction (2015) in Prospect Height, NYC, by Billie Grace Ward, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Do Driverless Cars Hallucinate Electric Sheep?

Randal OToole — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Waymo is operating driverless taxis in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco, partnering with Uber in Atlanta and Austin, and expanding into Miami and Washington DC soon. Volkswagen is making a driverless ID Buzz available to ride-hailing and taxi companies anywhere. Tesla has begun offering robotaxis in Austin, with some opening glitches. Amazon is set to build 10,000 driverless taxis a year. A company called Aurora is testing driverless trucks between Dallas and Houston.

People have responded to the growth of driverless vehicle programs with predictable horror. Some worry that driverless cars will increase congestion and take people’s jobs. Others fear that they will be dangerous on the highway, especially if they begin “hallucinating.” Perhaps due to fears like these, ICE protesters set five Waymo cars on fire in Los Angeles.

Some of these fears are without foundation. Although large language models like Chat-GPT, game-playing programs such as AlphaGo and Deep Blue, and autonomous vehicles have all been labeled “artificial intelligence,” these are in fact very different things.

Wikipedia says that the term “artificial intelligence” embraces such things as machine problem solving, planning and decision making, social intelligence, and natural language processing, these are non-overlapping programs. While researchers may have an ultimate goal of creating an artificial general intelligence that could do all of these things, they are nowhere near that and probably won’t be for decades.

ChatGPT and similar programs do natural language processing and they do it well enough that they could probably pass a Turing test. Yet they are incapable of simple arithmetic and more complex analysis is well beyond them. They are unable to tell the difference between truth and falsehoods or even to understand the meaning of truth.

Someone has posted a database of cases in which lawyers relied on such programs to write their legal briefs only to discover (after submitting the briefs to a court) that the program fabricated legal citations. The idea that these language models, which some have called “stochastic parrots,” will soon evolve into a general intelligence or be self-aware should be completely laughable, yet it makes a great fund-raising tool to attract gullible investors.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Photo: Volkswagen’s ID Buzz configured for driverless taxi service. Courtesy the Antiplanner.

Beware the New Eugenics

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Visionaries, dreamers, and autocrats have long dreamt of reshaping humanity to their preferred model. In the last century, eugenics was enthusiastically embraced among Anglo-Saxon elites, then by Communist Russia as a means of creating a hyper-selfless Homo Sovieticus, and, most infamously, Nazi Germany’s drive to create a “master race” via racial-hygiene laws and the extermination of people with disabilities and other “lives unworthy of life.”

Eugenics, a policy that seeks to “improve” humanity, dismisses the importance of bestowing a sense of worth and dignity to all individuals in the quest of breeding only “the finest”. Today, our expanding knowledge of genes and demographics has created eugenic possibilities far beyond those of the last century. Once rejected largely due to Nazi atrocities, eugenics is being embraced by both the Left and Right. Yet its beating heart lies not in politics, but in tech-driven approaches that reflect, as New York Marxist academic David Harvey called it, “a fetishism of technology” that transcends conventional politics.

In a way that past eugenicists could only dream, technology now opens the possibilities of engineering something far more radical than sterilizing the weak and giving bonuses to those with the right genetic inheritance. Instead, the looming prospect of an entire biological transformation emerges. For half a century, scientists have been dreaming of engineering humans to better specs before conception, as they look to edit genes to produce “superior” offspring.

New technology — from “gene editing” to in-vitro birthing and cloning — provides new ways to create “the better human.” One big difference from 20th-century eugenics is that today’s effort is a largely private matter, at least until now, shaped not by the state, but the technocratic elite. What’s emerging is a modern version of John Calvin’s Protestant “Elect,” based not on faithfulness but measurements of IQ and ability. This new dominant class, as Daniel Bell predicted some 50 years ago, can employ “new intellectual technology” as a means of “ordering the mass society.”

Promoted by technologists, these efforts tend to be intrinsically “dehumanizing,” as the late British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks warned. Eugenic technology, Sacks argued, operates “in detachment, driven by analysis, the breaking down wholes into constituent parts.” In this emerging world, we see the expansion of technology imposed on masses that have become less intelligent not despite but because of ever greater exposure to social media and increasingly, to artificial intelligence.

Don’t worry, at least that’s what those who benefit the most from this shift suggest. Their answers boil down to this: let us lead you into the perfectly honed future. Masayoshi Son, the founder of Japan’s influential Softbank venture fund, recently suggested that artificial intelligence would lay the foundation for the creation of the “superhuman.” Not satisfied with making life better, Son now “really wanted to become an architect, to design the future of humanity,” as the Financial Times reported.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo credit: Martin Pot, via Wikimedia, under CC 3.0 License.

The Big Beautiful Bill Torpedoes Big Solar & Big Wind

Robert Bryce — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Last November, I published 10 can’t miss predictions about the presidential election. One of my predictions was that if Donald Trump won another term in the White House, he wouldn’t repeal the alt-energy subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act. I wrote:

The idea that the US will spend trillions on alt-energy projects while the deficit is soaring ($35.8 trillion and counting) is the definition of fiscal insanity. But Big Business is feasting on the subsidies, and the most powerful trade associations in Washington have pledged to fight to continue the handouts. Thus, there’s little reason to expect Trump will be able to eliminate the IRA subsidies even if he wants to.

The other nine predictions are still looking pretty good. But right now, it looks like I was wrong about the IRA subsidies. (Yes, it happens.)

The latest version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which was released by the Senate yesterday, takes a flamethrower to the massive alt-energy subsidies that were passed in 2022 under the IRA. As Reuters explained, the legislation, “will effectively repeal the incentives for solar and wind immediately.” Furthermore, it will impose a tax on wind and solar projects completed after December 31, 2027, if they cannot prove they do not contain any Chinese components. Additionally, tax credits for new, used, and commercial electric vehicles would expire on September 30. (Predictably, Trump’s former DOGE buddy, Elon Musk, doesn’t like this provision.)

To be clear, under the reconciliation process, the OBBBA has a long way to go. It still faces debate in the Senate and must be sent back to the House for further consideration. Nevertheless, if the current version of the bill reaches Trump’s desk and becomes law, it will be good news for taxpayers, wildlife, and rural Americans who are fighting back against the encroachment of massive alt-energy projects.

Let’s take a look.

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: GPA Photo Archive Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Carney's Canada Will Devolve into Feudalism

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

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. But now, particularly with the rise of the ultimate establishmentarian, Mark Carney, as prime minister, Canada’s feudal future seems increasingly assured.

Carney’s election places power in the hands of the “ultimate Davos man,” a habitue and beneficiary of the elite financial and real estate. He is a reliable advocate for the kinds of strenuous climate, tax and regulatory policies undermining Canada’s middle class.

Canadians like to boast that their country is more egalitarian — in terms of distribution of wealth — than the United States. And to be sure, America’s more ruthless capitalism tends to create both a great many winners and a lot of losers, with the middle classes struggling in between. Yet, despite the aspirations of Trumpian fascism, it has been Canada, and notably the Liberals, who allow the clerisy — the modern-day Church — and the bureaucracy, to limit free speech, a classic fascist tactic.

But the essence of feudalism lies in the marginalization of the middle and working classes. Here, Canada is failing; its per capita income relative to the United States has been slipping for years, and is now at the lowest level on record. Nor is it living up to its oft-repeated egalitarian image. Rather, today, Canada is well on its way to feudalism, having its highest income inequality ever recorded, with the top 20 per cent of households holding more than two-thirds of all wealth, while the bottom 40 per cent holds only 2.8 per cent. At the bottom, notes the left-leaning Policy Options magazine, up to one-in-four Canadians suffer from “a poverty level standard of living.”

Canada not only lacks corporate headquarters, but it is also hardly an entrepreneurial hotbed like the United States. Canadian small businesses, notes one recent analysis, are less productive than those in the U.S., one reason why few, particularly in manufacturing, become large. A paper by the Business Council of Alberta identifies trade, financing, institutional, regulatory, or taxation constraints. Overall poor productivity, particularly among high end workers, also contributes to Canada’s mediocre performance.

Not surprisingly, job creation outside government employment has been meagre. Overall, as the bureaucracy has thrived under the Liberals, the people, in general have not. In 2002, Canada’s GDP per capita was about 80 per cent of the U.S.’s, but has dropped by 2022, to 72 per cent of that of its neighbour to the south.

But perhaps nothing so reflects Canada’s feudal dilemma than housing. Despite being a country with enormous reserves of land, even in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec, Canadian climate and regulatory policies, coupled with high levels of immigration, have made building new homes extraordinarily expensive by putting more pressure on an already inadequate supply. Although immigration levels may now be reducing, a surge of migrants, including those fleeing the Trump immigration policies, is already overwhelming border cities like Niagara Falls.

In this shift towards oligarchy, homeownership and investment profits play a major role. This is particularly true in terms of housing, where the Liberal party has long championed “urban containment,” a policy that seeks to limit suburban and exurban development while promoting dense urban growth. The result, notes a new study by demographer Wendell Cox, has been housing prices that, in terms of the relationship between median home prices and household income, are increasingly out of reach for the average Canadian.

Immigration, key to Canada’s population surge, has contributed to this shortage. While the country’s working population swelled by a record 3.7 per cent at the start of this year, housing starts remained essentially flat. At one housing start for every 4.9 people entering the working-age population, “there is no precedent for a housing supply deficit of this magnitude,” notes National Bank of Canada economist Stéfane Marion. The biggest losers have been people under 40, for whom the homeownership rate has dropped to around 50 per cent, almost 10 per cent less than a decade before. It also helps to have wealthy parents who own a home; children of homeowners are twice as likely to acquire a home themselves.

If you wish to live in Canada’s two great international cities, and are not of aristocratic stock, it’s getting tough to get shelter. Four of the six major markets in Canada have a median multiple — a ratio of the median house price by the median gross (before tax) annual household income — of 5.4, considerably higher than the U.S.’s 4.8. Vancouver now ranks fourth among all anglophone markets at 11.8, behind Hong Kong, Sydney, and San Jose. Toronto, at 8.4, stands as the second-least affordable market in Canada and ranks 84th out of 95 markets in international affordability, with a severely unaffordable median multiple of 8.4. As late as about 1990, national price-to-income ratios were “affordable,” at 3.0 or less in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

This pattern severely restricts homeownership, which has been declining since 2021. Not surprisingly, rates are lower in both Vancouver and Toronto than in much of the country. Clearly densification, the preferred growth option of the elites, does not help a housing shortage or reduce prices as Patrick Condon of the University of British Columbia has shown. Indeed, now Vancouver is now producing less-than-half the housing units needed to meet demand, one reason for the high prices even in a weak economy. Condon, an eloquent advocate of densification, cites the “indisputable” evidence that “upzoning” increases the value of land (by increasing the development value).

Concentrations of property and wealth are likely to worsen under the renewed Liberal regime. Planners and climate activists, as in California, a place which almost rivals Toronto and Vancouver in their progressive domination, will likely get even stronger with “net zero” devotee Carney in charge. Similarly, industries that tend to create high-wage jobs, notably in oil and gas, will find themselves constrained, leaving the big money to financial institutions and those firms who rely on protectionism to shield themselves from both Chinese and American competition.

It may comfort the current ruling elites in Canada to bloviate over Trumpian idiocy, but none of this will slow the country’s growing shift to feudalism. Blaming Trump may deflect the suffering public from identifying the real culprits, the property and financial elites, and their political operatives like Carney, whose preferred policies threaten to stymie the progress of most Canadians.

This piece first appeared at National Post.

Photo: National Post.

The Cruel Inhumanity of the YIMBY Movement

Christopher LeGras — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

A large and ever-expanding body of research demonstrates what anyone with a reasonable functional frontal cortex knows instinctively: Human beings benefit in myriad ways – physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually – from spending time in nature. As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2021, at the height of pandemic lock downs (or more accurately, lock-ins), “Spending time in the woods — a practice the Japanese call ‘forest bathing’ — is strongly linked to lower blood pressure, heart rate and stress hormones and decreased anxiety, depression and fatigue.” Getting out into nature on a regular basis can even reduce people’s risk of cancer. Similarly, living in a neighborhood with open spaces, trees, gardens, and yards, has benefits over living in dense, congested, largely nature-free urban cores.

It’s not just the exercise. When we’re in a forest, up in the mountains, walking along the beach, or walking down a quiet, tree lined street, we’re engaging in versions of activities that every living creature in history did all day, every day, until relatively recently. We’re doing what we evolved to do for the first 300,000 years of our existence on this planet. We are quite literally in our natural element. No wonder we feel good.

Of course, most people don’t need peer-reviewed studies to reach these conclusions. Hiking or jogging in the forest or hills, walking in the park, spending time in local open spaces, and so forth are part of our weekly routines. For many of us that hour or two on the trail is a highlight of our days. Our brains slow down, our anxiety eases, our stress levels drop.

These inarguable realities of human existence point to a central, and fatal, flaw with the so-called YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) approach to housing and community development. The YIMBY movement, which unfortunately has captured public policy in city halls and statehouses nationwide, is premised on the notion that the solution to the country’s housing affordability crisis is to pack Americans into dense urban cores comprised of large apartment buildings that lack so much as setbacks for trees and other greenery. We’ll be lucky to have a small balcony with a view of the buildings across the street.

We definitely won’t have cars, because another YIMBY obsession is the elimination of private automobiles. Not only will we live in those steel, cement, and glass labyrinths, we won’t have the ability (aka freedom) to travel to our favorite trailhead, surf break, or picnic spot. We’ll rely on mass transit, bicycles, and our own two feet in what YIMBYs call “15 minute neighborhoods,” places in which all of life’s essential needs are, theoretically, accessible within a quarter hour walk, bicycle ride, or transit trip (a lucky few will be able to afford a $40 or $50 round trip to the trail in a Waymo several days a week). Another word for “15 minute city” is “Khruschevka.” In the 1950s and 60s under Premiere Nikita Khruschev, the Soviet Union built millions of five to ten story apartment blocs in centrally planned microneighborhoods in which necessities were within — wait for it — walking distance. The more things change, and such.

Read the rest of this piece at All Aspect Report.

Christopher LeGras is an attorney, journalist, muckraker, and Californian.

Photo: This violent graphic was posted with approval on a pro-YIMBY Twitter account. We can only hope the residents and drivers escaped the flames. Courtesy The All Aspect Report.

AI is Killing Jobs and Fueling Campus Radicalism

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Revolution and disruption rarely stem from the poor and destitute, but from what Alexis de Tocqueville described as “a revolution of rising expectations”. After all, it was the bourgeoisie who forged both the American and French revolutions. In the 20th century, it was the educated middle classes, often underpaid and feeling unappreciated, who flocked to Vladimir Lenin’s banner or that of the Nazi Party.

Today we may again be creating an assertive and angry class — as evidenced in the recent LA riots and the pro-Palestine protests on US campuses over the last year and a half — made up of degree holders. We can see this in recent reports that show the job market getting tougher for graduates. Hit hardest are those professionals on the “soft” side of the economy (finance, accounting, law, coding) whose jobs are increasingly threatened by the rise of artificial intelligence.

These industries tend to have a higher proportion of humanities graduates and countries in the West more generally have a problem with elite overproduction. As AI grows, there won’t be enough jobs to go round, and even if those graduates do get a job, their employers, with so many candidates to choose from, won’t pay well.

These developments may be felt most by upper-middle class young women, who make up almost two thirds of humanities graduates. This demographic has also been the driving force for campus radicalism. If they were alienated before by the patriarchy and capitalism, just wait till they can’t find a decent job and lose economic power.

More broadly the changing labour dynamics also undermine the future of universities, now the prime institutional bulwark of the American Left. The roots of this crisis were being dug up by economic forces well before Donald Trump started attacking them. This is due in large part to demographic declines among the young: by 2029 there will be 700,000 fewer people entering high school than in 2010. Since 2011 enrollments have fallen by roughly 15%. The ratio of college students to the total American population has declined even more, by around 20%.

At the same time, employers are increasingly disappointed with the quality of college students, according to the Harvard Business Review. Even the students know the score: more than half (53%) of these college graduates feel unqualified for an entry-level job in their field with nearly half (42%) admitting they did not have all the skills listed in the job description.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Photo: Deepak Pal, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Spain’s Impossible Dream of ‘Green’ Electricity

Paul Driessen — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Updated Man of La Mancha lyrics could read: “To dream the impossible dream of clean, green, net-zero electricity, to fight the unbeatable foe of manmade climate cataclysms, we must run where the brave dare not go.”

Don Quixote saw windmills as malevolent and dangerous dragons. Spain’s governing classes view them from the Chinese perspective: benevolent and magical dragons.

They’ve erected over 22,000 gigantic windmills, to harness the wind and generate electricity. Portugal has nearly 3,000. Together, when conditions are perfect, they can generate almost 38 gigawatts.

Like Cervantes’ hero, the elites also want “to reach the unreachable star” – or at least capture the energy from one star: the sun. Spain and Portugal together also have 38 GW of photovoltaic solar panels.

However, the Iberian Peninsula neighbors have long ignored the dark sides of the forces they seek to commandeer.

Those wind turbines, solar panels and transmission lines sprawl across some 2,000,000 acres of Spanish and Portuguese vistas, habitats and croplands. That’s equal to Delaware and Rhode Island combined.

They kill eagles, bustards, vultures, and other raptors and birds. Building them requires mining, pollution and child labor on historically unprecedented scales. Solar panels are easily destroyed by storms.

Worst, they provide intermittent, weather-dependent electricity – necessitating expensive backup power and making the electrical grid unstable. Just how unstable was demonstrated recently, and dramatically.

On April 16, for the first time, for a few minutes, Spain generated 100% of its electricity with wind, solar and hydro power.

A fortnight later, on April 28, a prolonged blackout sent Iberia into chaos. Lights, televisions, refrigerators, cell phones and traffic lights went dark. Trains, subways and elevators trapped passengers. Airports canceled flights. Hospital backup power provided only basic and emergency services.

The outage even struck parts of France and Belgium. It was Europe’s biggest blackout ever. If France hadn’t shut off its connection to Spain’s cascading problems, all of Europe could have shut down.

Just a week later, another blackout hit Spain’s Canary Islands.

Power outages are nothing new. But the Spain-Portugal blackouts underscore fundamental problems with the supposedly “inevitable transition” from coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear electricity to wind, solar and battery power.

Read the rest of this piece at Heartland Institute.

Photo: Andasol Solar Power Station via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.

Zohran Mamdani’s Progressive Intifada will be a Disaster for New York

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 20:52:05 -0400

Whoever is elected New York City mayor in November, Zohran Mamdani’s impressive win this week in the Democratic mayoral primary marks a breaking point in the party, the city and US society as a whole.

New York, where my family settled 120 years ago, is special. It is America’s capital of intellect, art and, most importantly, capitalism. New York’s financial elite have largely tolerated the ‘progressive’ excesses of the Democrats in recent years, but the prospect of a self-described ‘socialist’ running the city may be a bridge too far. We can expect them to renounce the Democrats altogether or join the mass migration south.

Yet while the financial elites might be reeling from the result, Mamdani’s win was no working-class uprising or revolt of the lower orders. His main rival, former New York state governor Andrew Cuomo, did best in heavily black and ethnic white enclaves, many of them quasi-suburban, as well as some elite precincts in Manhattan. Mamdani won most convincingly in the far-from-impoverished hipster belts of Brooklyn, Queens, the Upper East Side and Lower Manhattan. These precincts now dominate a Democratic Party once driven by white ethnics and working-class African Americans.

The key element here is the younger, mostly white, economically marginalised new proletariat – sometimes called the ‘precariat’. They are most lured by Mamdani’s propositions like frozen rents, free buses and childcare – all funded by higher taxes on the wealthy. Their angst reflects the realities of today’s New York, which works for the wealthy elites but suffers very high levels of inequality. Job growth has been weak and concentrated in low-wage sectors like hospitality and tourism. While incomes for most have stagnated, housing costs have not – rising to record levels this year.

The New York these young people have inherited is no longer the epicentre of economic opportunity. It flourishes largely as a hub for trustafarians, top-tier professionals, globe-trotting elites and cultural creators. While New York’s overall population has declined, the number of ultra-wealthy residents has continued to grow. There’s nothing like the job prospects that earlier generations of New Yorkers had – neither in manufacturing nor in business or financial services.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo credit: Bluesky, Zohran's profile.

Wars Are Won on the Factory Floor

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

As recent events in Iran have so aptly demonstrated, technological progress married to industrial might produces the most tangible form of power. In the recent conflict in the Middle East, this meant that a second-tier power like Iran was clearly outmatched – first by Israel, then by America.

The West needs to learn this lesson and apply it to its rivalry with a far more formidable foe: China. Unlike the theocrats of Tehran, China’s ambitions are distinctly material. And, until recently, China has made tremendous headway facing relatively little, and largely ineffective, Western opposition.

Fortunately, in America at least, there is an emerging industrial renaissance, led by a wave of new firms investing in key technologies, such as drones, satellites, fuel-efficient jet engines and robotic drilling. These and similar companies remain the West’s best hope of slowing China’s bid for global pre-eminence – a campaign that now extends into space and advanced military systems.

China, the most important ally of Tehran’s beleaguered mullahs, cannot be easily dismissed. Since its accession to the World Trade Organisation in 2000, China has grown to the point where it boasts as many factory exports as the US, Japan and Germany combined. In 2023, the Middle Kingdom forged roughly half the world’s steel and became the world’s largest automobile market – including for electric vehicles, whose batteries are linked to an industrial economy that’s highly dependent on coal-burning power stations. It also accounts for more than half of all shipbuilding.

The impact has been devastating on the West. Europe’s industrial sector continues to decline, shedding one million manufacturing jobs between 2019 and 2023. In the US, a study by the Economic Policy Institute found that China’s export surge alone cost up to 3.7million American jobs since 2000. Between 2004 and 2017, America’s share of global manufacturing fell from 15 per cent to 10 per cent, even as its reliance on Chinese inputs doubled, while those from Japan’s and Germany’s fell.

Unlike Japan in the 1980s, whose growth threatened American industries, China’s rise is directly tied to power projection, with substantial investment in space, robotics and other technologies with military uses. By contrast, the US struggles to supply its own forces – and those of its closest allies – with basic ammunition. Until recently, it has even relied on China-based industry to produce key parts in areas as sensitive as submarine production.

Without a full-scale industrial revival, the West risks following the disastrous path of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union – all of which were ultimately overwhelmed by superior industrial and technological power.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo credit: Picryl.

Africa's Deep Tech Centers

Nima Sanandaji — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

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.

West Africa has a long history of technological and economic prosperity. Mansa Musa, the 14^th century ruler who is estimated to have been the richest individual in history, is famously from this part of the world.

Nigeria is currently the largest population center of Africa. While the sixth most populous country in the world currently, Nigeria is also experiencing a strong long-term population growth. The size allows economics of scale and in turn success in technologically advanced fields.

Government integrity, property rights and juridical effectiveness need improving in Nigeria, as does business freedom. The level of taxation and government expenditure is however low, which encourages more private business and leads to limited crowding out of private enterprises through government policy.

Lagos in southwestern Nigeria is the most populous city in Africa, and an important center for development of world leading deep tech. The same is true of the nation´s capital Abuja. Both regions have strengths in clean tech. Growing populations in Africa lead to much development of companies dealing with managing the environmental impact of large population concentrations.

Additionally, Lagos is a key global center for photonic & electronic deep tech development. This illustrates that African nations have ability to compete in even the most advanced areas of technology.

Nairobi, the largest city and capital of Kenya, is East Africa’s leading deep tech hub. Nigeria has a similar pattern of economic policy, with strengths when it comes to limited taxation and public expenditure, but limited government integrity and property rights. Besides clean tech, Nairobi also has strength in clean energy deep tech development. A strong link exists between energy supply and prosperity. It is therefore relevant to stay ahead of energy technology in order to boost long term prosperity growth.

Developing with technology is not only a matter of climbing the technological ladder, increasing national security capabilities and boosting prosperity – it is also related to jobs.

Youth unemployment tends to be lower in countries that have many world leading deep tech companies per million adults.

This is because these companies create jobs directly, indirectly via other businesses as undersupplies in the value chain, and also locally through the income effect. The income effect arises because high value chains that bring in international exports pay their employees well, and create indirect revenues in other businesses in the value chain also boosting salary of these businesses – which in turn increases local purchase power and local taxes funding public services. New deep tech jobs stimulate other jobs to grow, boosting prosperity and reducing unemployment risk of the new generation.

Egypt is the deep tech leader of North Africa. The capital city of Cairo is a leading center for economic development and technological progress. The large population creates a need for clean technology solutions.

The economic policy performance of Egypt is similar to Kenya and Nigeria, with strengths in limited government and weaknesses in fair government. Property rights are relatively strong, while having need to further improve. With further reform Egypt can become a strong candidate for economic and technological progress. The key change needed is to improve judicial effectiveness and fiscal health.

It is both possible and likely that reforms to boost market economic functions will continue in the leading technological nations of Africa. One broader change that needs to happen is for African countries to invest more abroad. The global pattern is that countries with many world-leading deep tech companies tend to have high share of total economic output invested abroad.

South Africa is an African nation with a long tradition of investing abroad. Cape Town is widely considered the tech capital of South Africa. South Africa has stronger property rights and government integrity, more effective judicial system. The burden of taxation and government spending crowding out private sector spending is however somewhat higher.

Besides economic policy, the development of deep tech is strongly linked to education progress. African nations need to join the global PISA-project to systematically track, benchmark and improve their educational results.

While African students are currently important human resources in mathematical and technological institutes abroad, African nation’s themselves need to develop their own top universities. The aim needs to be for African universities to climb the ranks of the 100 best mathematical and technological institutes of the world.

An inspiration can be taken from India, Asia's leading deep tech center, and the world´s leading talent exporter. Five out of the top 100 best mathematical and technological institutes in the world are currently according to the QS World University Ranking Indian Institute of Technology centers - namely in Bombay, Delhi, Madras, Kharagpur and Kanpur. If India from which many top students and researchers migrate abroad can achieve this, it is also in the coming years possible for Africa’s best centers of higher learning to replicate a similar success.

Africa already has world leading deep tech centers – from Cape Town in the South, to Nairobi in the East, Lagos in the West, and Cairo in the North. Growing population, competitive wages and a willingness to grow with improved business climate allows for African nations to continue this progress. In terms of policy lessons from the world, African nations need to continue strengthening property rights and judicial efficiency. It is important to retain limited taxation and government spending and upgrading the education system including with focus on the best technological universities.

African nations both can and need to grow with deep tech, it is ultimately about creating the jobs, security and prosperity of the future with sound policies.

Nima Sanandaji, Director, European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform (ECEPR)

Photo: Tech worker, via Unsplash in Public Domain.

Donald Trump is Saving California from Itself

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Gavin Newsom has changed direction once again. After a brief feint as a Maga-whispering moderate, California’s governor has “woken up” in the wake of the LA immigration riots to become the self-anointed leader of the anti-Trump #Resistance.

Just weeks ago, Newsom had launched a podcast, inviting Right-wing firebrands like Charlie Kirk, Michael Savage, and Steve Bannon as his initial guests. Progressives detested this shift. But now that he has effectively denounced Donald Trump as a “dictator”, The Daily Beast and MSNBC have been quick to celebrate his reinvention. The progressive clerisy’s homepage, The Atlantic, recently dubbed Newsom “the nation’s foremost Trump foil”.

Although changing colour might help with this chameleon’s bid for the 2028 Democrat presidential nomination, it’s not good news for the long-suffering people of California. The working and middle classes don’t benefit from his performative talk of avoiding tariffs and ignoring federal immigration law. What Newsom should be looking at is how to bolster California’s struggling economy, which lags way behind rivals such as Texas and Florida in crucial areas like job creation.

And that would mean making peace with at least some of Donald Trump’s agenda.

To be sure, the president’s tariffs appear to be hurting California’s ports and tech companies dependent on overseas manufacturing, but the state clearly needs some sort of economic paradigm change. Virtually every high wage sector has lost jobs since 2022, including business services and information, the supposed linchpins of the state’s economy. All this occurred before Trump’s chaotic tariff barrage.

Trump’s commitment to investment in new military technology and space exploration, as well as reshoring manufacturing more generally, also opens enormous opportunities for California’s heavily Latino blue collar workers. Should Newsom choose to embrace the president’s policies, that is.

Consider space. Boosted by a huge surge of investment, space industry global revenues are up tenfold since the early 2000s, from $175 billion (£130.4 billion) in 2005 to almost $385 billion (£286.9 billion) in 2017. By 2040, the industry’s annual revenues globally are projected to surpass a trillion dollars. California has a 19 per cent international share in the sector, as well as 40 per cent of the industry in the US.

With Trump’s backing, that could grow even further. California already enjoys by far the country’s largest cohort of aerospace engineers, typically earning salaries around three times the national average. Many are employed by large contractors, but the most exciting developments can be seen in places like El Segundo, which calls itself “the aerospace capital of the world”, and Douglas Park, next to the Long Beach airport.

If Newsom would wake up from his dogmatic slumbers, he would realise that “deep tech” firms in space and aerospace likely have a far better future than traditional consumer and media-oriented firms like Salesforce, Meta, and Google. In part due to artificial intelligence, all have announced major cutbacks. Even many “creative jobs” – actors, writers, journalists – could be threatened by AI generated content.

In contrast, hardware engineers, skilled machinists, and the builders and designers of spacecraft, drones, space mining operations and new engine systems could share an expansive future. The aerospace boom is being driven by more than just a few brilliant geeks backed up by H1-B visa indentured servants. Aerospace firms have their share of PhDs, but they also employ welders and other production workers. In a state that has been very hard on blue collar workers, this should be embraced, even if it reflects Trumpian priorities.

There are further opportunities for California among Trump’s policy objectives. The president wants to revive the US shipbuilding industry, and California was once critical to constructing America’s “arsenal of democracy”. One place that could benefit is Solano County in the Bay Area, which once was home to Liberty ship production.

Even virulently anti-Trump Hollywood could see advantages. This Newsom-aligned industry is now losing employment at a fearful rate, down more than one-third over the past 10 years, with 18,000 full time positions disappearing in just the past three. Tariffs may not be what the industry needs – it’s already too dependent on cheaper, highly subsidised foreign productions – but the people who work in it would benefit if California and the Trump White House devised an incentive package to reverse off-shore production.

And then there is housing, a prime concern for most Californians. The federal government is the nation’s biggest landowner and owns roughly half of California. Republicans have floated the idea of selling federal lands as an option for closing the deficit. Federal lands adjacent to the state’s large urban areas also could create, in selected places, an opportunity for new housing that could dodge many of California’s currently stifling regulations.

But perhaps Trump’s biggest gift would be to push California politics back towards the centre, including on immigration. Due to Trumpian cutbacks, Newsom is being forced to abandon his dream of providing free health services to all undocumented immigrants. Now that the state is suffering a severe deficit, Washington is unlikely to send money to preserve Newsom’s dreamscape.

Of course Newsom blames the current budget deficit on Trump, although he does not explain why many other states, including archrivals Texas and Florida, enjoy surpluses. California would do far better if its governor focused on how to take advantage of Trump’s initiatives. After all, Maga will be in office at least until 2028. Californians can enjoy the fruits of Trump’s policies even as they grumble darkly about him.

This piece first appeared at Telegraph.

Photo: Gavin Newsom visits the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Delusion Down Under

Robert Bryce — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Nearly three dozen countries have legally binding targets to achieve net zero. The list has some notable countries including Russia and Ukraine. In addition, Nigeria, the European Union, Canada, and the Republic of Moldova, have all pledged to slash their carbon dioxide emissions to zero over the next two decades or so.

While all of these countries are mouthing the words about net zero, none will come anywhere close to achieving zero emissions for the simple reason that the goal can’t be achieved — or, to be more specific — net zero can’t be achieved unless these countries intentionally sabotage their economies, ban all hydrocarbon use, and in doing so, plunge their people into starvation and penury.

But amid all the tomfoolery about net zero, Australia’s barmy plan to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 stands out for its stubborn disregard for the facts and physics of global energy. The recent re-election of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his Labor Party shows that plenty of Aussie voters like the idea of renewable energy. A survey released last December by the leftist Australia Institute found that 80% of the people it polled put solar and wind among their top three favored forms of energy. Alt-energy may poll well, but it’s clear that Albanese’s plan to slash emissions by 43% by 2030, hit net zero by 2050, and turn Australia into “a renewable energy superpower” is a mirage.

I’ve been in Australia (population: 27 million) for more than a week, doing speaking engagements about the country’s net zero plans. Thus far, I have visited Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, and Melbourne. (I will be speaking in Melbourne on Monday and Sydney on Wednesday.) Since I arrived, local newspapers have published at least one article per day on the country’s disastrous energy policies, including articles about the soaring cost of electricity, the failing plans to use “green” hydrogen, and looming shortages of natural gas due to the premature shuttering of the country’s coal plants.

Let’s take a closer look at the Delusion Down Under.

Affordability matters. Given that, let’s start with prices. Aussie households have seen their energy costs rise by more than 40% over the past three years alone. The news clip above was published in the Australian Financial Review’s weekend edition. It explains that electricity rates across Australia will continue rising as the country’s electric grid is forced to accommodate more alt-energy.

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: Australian Gothic illustration, by Picsart.

New Report: How to Save Our Urban Centers

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

“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.

Today, many urban centers, particularly older cities, are in decline. The proportion of Americans living in core urban areas has been decreasing for generations, a trend that has only accelerated in the wake of the pandemic, rising crime, and increasingly radical politics.

Economic and sociological trends are driving these changes. Even before the pandemic, the “transactional city” conceived by Jean Gottman – center of exchange, not production - was already facing challenges. Demographic and economic growth has shifted to less dense, often newer communities. The cities most identified with the transactional model – San Francisco, Chicago, and New York – are among those suffering the most.

Yet, urbanity itself – the concept of people living in proximity within a defined place – is far from dead. We continue to see the emergence of new communities on the urban periphery, as well as the revitalization of older suburban communities that are developing their own successful urban centers. In some major cities, even as office demand declines, residential construction continues to grow – particularly for the childless, young and affluent.

Rather than dismiss the urban future entirely, this paper explores how urbanism is being redefined in communities across the country. Cities, from the earliest times, have long been the cornerstones of human civilization. They will remain so – but in new and oft unrecognized forms, if local communities can organize themselves successfully.

View and download the full report here.

Why No Unicorns in Italy?

Andrea Zorzetto — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

I’m on a panel about this tonight.

A unicorn is a privately owned startup company worth more than $1 billion.

Cool.

But what does that really mean in practice?

It means super fast growth.

What’s the opposite of that?

Stagnation.

And what country has been stagnating in the last 30 years, the age of the unicorns?

Italy, you guessed that right.

There you go.

Why we have no unicorns. It’s really that simple. It’s really that complicated.

Take the opposite: how come China is full of recently founded companies that are now huge?

Well, if you have 1.3 billion people going from North Korea to California within a couple of generations, growing on average 10% per year… you will get lots of entrepreneurs quickly becoming very rich.

Low VC volumes are over-discussed

In my bubble, people focus a lot on the little amount of capital invested.

I used to say that it’s a symptom, not a cause.

In the end, capital is way more mobile than other assets, and if we had lots of great startups, foreign funds would move in.

Then I realized innovation is a complex system, and there is no scientific way to break down cause-effect relations. It’s all interlinked.

Sure, VC invested is a metric, but you can also argue that in the early stages, local capital matters a lot, and the risk aversion of our VC funds (and more upstream, of their LPs), does create problems.

Still, this is only one piece of the puzzle.

On a micro level, a good startup needs a kickass team and a growing market with an appetite for new solutions.

On the macro level, you have supply of and demand for innovation.

Read the rest of this piece at AndreaZorzetto Substack.

Andrea Zorzetto is Founder and President at Poliferie and Co-Founder and CEO of Peoplerank, a review platform of startup founders and investors for the Italian market.

Photo: Vincent van Zeijst, sculpture of unicorn with its foal, roaming in the courtyard of the Bernhoven Hospital in Uden (Netherlands), via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.

Inside America's Right-Wing Tech Armoury

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

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. But here, in a jumble of old industrial buildings under the shadow of a giant Chevron refinery, a group of entrepreneurs are embracing the country’s emerging “hard tech” revolution, something which could soon transform both America and the wider world.

Rather than simply growing the social media sinkhole, hard tech focuses on building real-world equipment. “We’re inventing the new factory town, and recovering the sense of what works in America,” says Cameron Schiller, whose Rangeview Corporation startup uses 3D technology to make castings for the metal parts used in aerospace. And if Schiller feels his team is fighting the right fight, he’s far from alone. El Segundo, after all, is home to around three dozen such firms, the biggest concentration in the region, together making everything from drones to engines, drilling systems to satellites.

As Schiller implies, all this could finally restore America to the kind of blue-collar prosperity it enjoyed after 1945. It could also protect the country against threats from overseas and even take the country to the stars — if, that is, El Segundo can fend off competition from both other states and the looming threat of China’s own high-tech space sector.

The emergence of El Segundo, known to locals as “Gundo”, comes after decades of struggle. With the end of the Cold War, America’s traditional aerospace industry stumbled. Big contractors like Lockheed and Boeing got fat and lazy, particularly given the lack of competition after the Soviet Union’s demise.

Over recent years, and especially with the end of the Pax Americana, the country’s aerospace sector is making a comeback, jumping by 7.1% in 2023. Yet this revival isn’t really focused on poorly managed primes — Lockheed Martin’s Artemis moon rocket has been plagued by delays and failures — but rather on the smaller firms snatching up their engineers. Scattered like lost pennies from LAX to coastal San Diego, a stretch of about 100 miles, these firms are concentrated in old industrial areas like El Segundo, where the daytime population reaches 50,000, or else Long Beach’s Douglas Park, with a million square feet of industrial space.

Around 40 of these new firms are spinoffs from SpaceX, which is now worth an estimated $350 billion and whose founding headquarters once sat just 11 miles east of Gundo. One good example here is Relativity Space, a Long Beach-based outfit that develops reusable rockets and raised $650 million in 2021. Another spinoff is Impulse Space, a satellite developer that lately secured $300 million of its own.

As the SpaceX connection suggests, this is something new. For if American tech was once dominated by coders and marketers, these jobs are increasingly disappearing off to Bangalore, with software firms from Salesforce to Google facing eye-watering job cuts. Not that it’s all bad. For if algorithms are on the way out, America’s virtual economy is being replaced by what Delian Asparouhov calls “harder tech”.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Photo: NOAA's GOES-T weather tracking satellite is launched, via Flickr, in Public Domain.

Affordable Housing for $1.3 Million Per Unit

Randal OToole — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The Washington Post has discovered that there are “inefficiencies” in the nation’s affordable housing programs, including its largest one, low-income housing tax credits. Due to these inefficiencies, one non-profit developer in DC is spending up to $1.3 million per housing unit. Another developer spent $800,000 per unit, while right next door the very same developer built market-rate housing for just $350,000 per unit.

Ontario Place, the project pictured above, “will include a rooftop aquaponics farm to produce fresh fruits and vegetables for its tenants,” which contributed to the $1.2 million per unit cost. Another expensive project found by Post writers, which cost “only” $815,000 per unit, “includes a fitness room to encourage physical activity, a library, a large café with an outdoor terrace, a large multi-purpose community room with a separate outdoor terrace, an indoor bike room, on-site laundry, lounges and balconies on every floor.”

As economist Alex Tabarrok recently observed, affordable housing is unaffordable because the agencies distributing the funds are often more concerned about such things as environmental sustainability, racial equity goals, community development, and other factors that have little or nothing to do with affordable housing. Due to these misplaced priorities, I calculated more than a year ago, between 2004 and 2019, the amount of money spent subsidizing affordable housing more than doubled but the number of units built declined so that the subsidies per unit increased by at least 130 percent.

Most affordable housing projects are supported by multiple federal, state, and local housing funds. A report from California found that each additional funder adds more than $20,000 per unit to total development costs.

The Post discovered that New Jersey has set a cap of under $400,000 per affordable housing unit. “When you look at a deal structure, almost everyone else in the deal makes more money when costs go up,” the director of New Jersey’s housing agency told the Post. The developers themselves typically get 15 percent as a “developer fee.” So neither the developers nor any of the contractors have an incentive to oppose policies that make either affordable or market-rate housing more expensive.

Most developers sell low-income housing tax credits to banks for 25 percent discounts. The developers themselves have been found to get 45 percent of the benefits from affordable housing projects. After deducting costs added to the projects in the name of sustainability and other goals, low-income people probably get less than 20 percent of the benefits of the projects.

Congress created low-income housing tax credits in 1987 in the hope that private developers would be more efficient in building affordable housing than public housing agencies. Instead, the program has proven that private businesses can be just as wasteful and costly as public agencies if they are given the same bad incentives. It’s time to abolish affordable housing programs. If four-fifths of the benefits of affordable housing go to people other than tenants, low-income families would be better off if just one-fourth of the costs of those program were dedicated instead to housing vouchers.

This piece first appeared at The Antiplanner.

Photo: Ontario Place, a so-called affordable housing project that is costing $1.2 million per unit. Courtesy the Antiplanner

What's the Matter with Los Angeles?

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

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 that epitomizes everything wrong with American cities.

That’s ironic because since its infancy Los Angeles sought to develop a new model of post-Dickensian urbanity – what the early 20th century minister and writer Dana Bartlett called “the better city” – one dominated by middle class single family homes. At the time, the city that was among the whitest, and most protestant in the nation. Bartlett predicted it would become “a place of inspiration for nobler living.”

The strategy, a combination of vaulting ambition and careful planning, worked brilliantly. Lured by the pleasant climate and a business-dominated political economy, industries and entrepreneurs flocked to the Los Angeles area. Initially, the growth came largely from oil and agriculture, but by the 1920s, the nascent movie industry had settled in Hollywood, putting Los Angeles on the world map. By 1940, the county’s population, barely 300,000 in 1900, had grown fivefold, bumping San Francisco off the top of the list of California’s biggest urban areas.

In the ensuring decades, the city and the surrounding region absorbed millions more migrants, both from overseas and across the country. LA thrived becoming in the words of author Carey McWilliams, “the first modernized decentralized industrial city in America.” Los Angeles became the leading manufacturing center of the country, with dominant positions in everything from aerospace to fashion and toys.

But by the early decades of this century, the city’s economic edge faded. Once a beacon for the upwardly mobile, it now suffers the highest poverty rates in the state, and among the worst in the country. The worst poverty rates, poor income, and homeownership among minorities. Latino incomes, adjusted for cost of living, and homeownership rates are among the lowest in the nation. This has left the immigrant population – roughly one third of its total – largely stuck in the low wage economy. And now a section of that group is rioting and being arrested.

The riots fit a pattern a steep decline. Over the past 20 years, the LA region has lost 750,000 people under 30 – the biggest decline in youth among all large U.S. counties. Even the immigrants are leaving; between the 2010 and 2020 Censuses, the number of foreign-born residents actually dropped. Looking ahead, the state’s Department of Finance predicts no population growth and a reduction of well over a million people for L.A. County.

What went wrong? You can start with the political takeover of the city by ever more leftist leaders. Once dominated by Republicans and conservative Democrats, the city has fallen ever more into the progressive mold, genuflecting to green, gender and racial ideology, which has left LA with an awful reputation among businesses and particularly developers. Indeed despite the city’s advocacy for more housing, it is among the least proficient in building them. There have been declines in everything from manufacturing to Hollywood.

Not everything is failing. There are pockets of success, particularly in the revived aerospace industry, located south and west of the city, but also in spots such as the Asian-dominated San Gabriel Valley or a host of largely successful Latino-dominated cities to its south.

But overall Los Angeles, particularly its central core, now suffers from all the plagues associated with older cities, such as Detroit, Cleveland, Manchester or Liverpool. Far from being “the better city”, Los Angeles is now best known for riots and failing to solve a massive homeless problem, the second worst in the country, despite billions in expenditures.

But the homeless are only the surface of a bigger problem. We’re seeing a huge emergent class of disaffected and disappointed youth. Asked whether in LA is a place where working hard pays off two-thirds of young people said no, which is far higher than older generations.

It’s not just impromptu streetside rioting. It’s “smash and grab” gangs making commerce impossible. It’s criminal crews stripping the city lights of their copper wire, leaving parts of the city in darkness.

And until the city again becomes a place of aspiration, the violence and alienation will only increase. As everyone can now see, life in “the better city” gets worse and worse.

This piece first appeared at The Spectator.

Photo: Los Angeles protest (2017) Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The Fundamental Falsehood Guiding Modern Liberal Politics

Christopher LeGras — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

One of the more curious, not to mention consequential, aspects of modern liberalism is its reliance on assumptions that collapse under even rudimentary scrutiny. For example, the liberal “YIMBY” movement (for “yes in my back yard”) assumes that the sole cause of the housing affordability crisis plaguing liberal states like California is a lack of supply. There isn’t enough housing, ergo, housing is expensive. Build more of it, of any type, and prices will fall. It isn’t simple, it’s simplistic. A robust and growing body of research demonstrates that housing costs are far more complex, involving variables like income levels in different neighborhoods, costs of land, materials, and labor, and market preferences. More fundamentally, the YIMBY theory reduces supply and demand to a meaningless tautology.

Nevertheless, lawmakers in states including California, Washington, and New York have jumped on the YIMBY bandwagon. Over the last seven years, California alone has passed some 400 new laws intended to unleash a new flood of housing supply by limiting or eliminating local zoning, land use, and development rules as well as state environmental reviews. Other bills provide myriad perks to developers of market rate and luxury multifamily housing by eliminating things like setbacks, height limits, floor area ratios, and off street parking. Supply, supply, supply.

This is all coming from Democrats, particularly liberal Democrats, who until recently were champions of things like housing affordability and accessibility, and, in particular, environmental protections. In contrast these days, California Democrats have embraced trickle down economics to a degree that would leave Ronald Reagan himself aghast at their audacity. It’s not just housing. They’re using supply side policies to spur everything from mass transit to wind and solar energy. Everywhere you look it’s “build, baby, build.”

There’s just one little problem: None of it is working. The YIMBY theory of housing is producing housing that most people don’t want. According to the US Census Bureau, about 82% of Californians live in single family or small multi-family homes (duplexes, fourplexes, townhouses, small apartment buildings). The vast majority of those homes are in low density urban neighborhoods, suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas. This, of course, stands to reason. Most people want space of their own, private or shared front and back yards, gardens, lawns, and trees. These features aren’t “nice to haves,” enjoyed by the privileged few. They’re fundamental to quality of life.

This isn’t what a majority of people want, but it’s what California liberals are building by the thousands.

Yet YIMBYism is predicated on dense new urban neighborhoods consisting of apartments with no green space. In a very real sense, the movement seeks to turn back time. After a century in which Californians, and Americans in general, flooded out of cities for suburbs, YIMBYs want to claw them back. Which is where the movement rests on another easily disprovable assumption, that, with apologies to Dr. Seuss, a home is a home no matter the type. In other words, YIMBYism is premised on the assumption that housing is fungible.

This is economically illiterate. A fungible product is one that is identical, or nearly so, no matter the supplier. Commodities are generally close to perfectly fungible. So is currency. The $20 bill in your wallet is identical to the one in my pocket. On the retail side, gasoline is close to fungible. Think of the intersection in your city where there are gas stations on two, three, or all four corners, all offering the same price per gallon. Generally speaking, you don’t care whether you fill up at Shell, Chevron, or 76. You’re going to fill up at the station with the shortest line, or the one that happens to be on the side of the street you’re on.

Read the rest of this piece at The All Aspect Report.

Christopher LeGras is an attorney, journalist, muckraker, and Californian.

Photo: An example of high density housing that is popular with planners, but isn’t what a majority of people want. Courtesy The All Aspect Report.

Los Angeles Has Fallen

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Los Angeles is burning again, and it is not the Olympic flame. After riots in 1965, 1992 and 2020, Angelenos are bearing witness once more to a rash of violent unrest. US president Donald Trump deployed the National Guard at the weekend and he has since called in the Marines, too. Trumpian lunatic-in-chief Steve Bannon even suggests these riots augur a domestic ‘World War 3’.

Reality may not be quite so grim, but it is understandable if the world feels less than enthused about flocking to LA for the Olympic Games in 2028 – or the World Cup in 2026. Yet come they will.

Ahead of the Paris Olympics last year, the French capital was similarly disrupted by sometimes violent protests. And as happened there, a huge security presence will be needed for LA. Indeed, the Paris games required 45,000 police officers, 10,000 soldiers and 22,000 private security staff. If Kamala Harris were in the White House, substantial aid would surely flow to LA to allow it to mount an operation on a similar scale. But now the city must petition the mercurial and spiteful Trump for security assurances.

LA28, the organisation responsible for organising the games, claims it has secured enough sponsorship and television deals to meet its needs – and that had better be true, given the city’s fiscal situation. LA today lacks the entrepreneurial dynamism that once defined its remarkable rise. Fortunately, the city’s sporting legacy – notably its two previous Olympics – has bequeathed it the stadia and much of the infrastructure needed to host the world, and even to protect it.

But unless vast sums are spent on a Potemkin-like makeover, the world will also witness what many of us residents have long suspected – that the city is slipping into an inexorable decline.

Things were very different in 1932, when LA first hosted the Olympics. With a population of 1.2million – a third of today’s population – LA was still fledgling. But the 1932 games served as a wake-up call to the world that LA was on its way to becoming one of the planet’s great cities.

I covered the run-up to the second LA Olympics, in 1984. It was arguably the most successful games in history, despite Russia’s Cold War-era boycott. This was LA at its peak – with native son Ronald Reagan in the White House, and the defence, aerospace, housing and entertainment sectors all booming. ‘LA’s the place’, as the promoters then put it, and few could deny the truth of it.

Some may hope the new games will rescue the city from its doldrums. But numerous studies show that hosting an Olympics offers, at best, fleeting economic benefits – and often leaves enormous burdens. It can provide an opportunity to make a statement, heralding the rise of cities such as Berlin under the Nazis in 1936 or Beijing under the CCP in 2008. But staging an Olympics in a city plainly in decline seems a fool’s errand.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Photo: Opening ceremonies at 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles Wikimedia in Public Domain.

Cities and Economic Pivots

Pete Saunders — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

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. Or, as AI just told me when I asked for its interpretation of the phrase, the past provides context and background for understanding the present and planning for the future.

In the context of cities, this applies to the economic histories of numerous cities across America. Throughout history cities have been founded for economic, social or cultural reasons. They are places where people initially came together to trade, to administrate, to celebrate, to defend. Later on, cities would find new reasons for their existence, often built on the knowledge gained from the city’s earlier phases.

Consider New York City. A deepwater seaport connected to a river that reached deep into the hinterlands made Manhattan an excellent location for the fur trade 400 years ago. The early Dutch and later British settlers were able to bring furs from the interior to New York Harbor and shipped to Europe. More entrepreneurs sought other goods to sell across the ocean. A link to European markets was established, and that enabled other commercial ventures to flourish. That created opportunities for banking, financing and investing to grow.

Soon, New York City and business became synonymous. Very early on, it became not just the primary physical point of entry into America, but the economic entry as well, for foreign investors interested in making money, and immigrants looking for employment. That made it easy to become a city that would be skilled in media and publishing, interpreting and explaining American events to a worldwide audience. Elite universities both within and just beyond New York City’s limits would reinforce this, making sure a steady stream of smart and ambitious people were always attracted to it. Sure, it sounds seamless, but it wasn’t. There were aspects of this that overlapped, but there were aspects that had gaps, too. Still, in retrospect New York’s economy grew something like this.

However, “what’s past is prologue” is true, only up to a point. Sometimes cities serve an economic function well, until that economic function isn’t needed anymore. When this happens, cities are often sent adrift as they ponder the next economic driver.

This is easy to think about when looking at river cities that supported freight shipping activities until railroads made barge traffic irrelevant, or the manufacturing centers of the Midwest that couldn’t compete with global low-cost labor. Yet this is also true of Southern cities that served the 19^th century plantation economy, either through slave importation (Charleston, Savannah) or the shipping of products coming from plantations (New Orleans, Memphis). In all cases, one economic reason for being ran its course, but another one had yet to be identified.

As a Midwest native who’s seen the region’s economic diminution up close, I wonder about how those opportunities to reset happen.

When are new ideas or opportunities presented? How did city leaders, business elites, major institutions react to a possible reset? The answers to these questions can tell you a lot about how today’s thriving urban areas got where they are, and others are still lagging.

Consider the San Francisco Bay Area, specifically Silicon Valley. From an historical perspective, it’s pretty well understood that San Francisco rose to prominence as the financial capital of the West, spurred on by rapid growth due to the California gold rush in the 1850s. Across the bay, Oakland’s position as a deepwater port and the terminus of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad allowed it to become an industrial and manufacturing center. To the south, however, the areas that would become Silicon Valley (San Mateo and Santa Clara counties) were probably best known as “the largest fruit-producing and packing region in the world up through the 1960s”.

That changed shortly thereafter, as “past as prologue” took over in the Bay Area. The region became a military research and technology hub, driven by the U.S. Navy, beginning in the early parts of the 20^th century. Stanford University’s role in nurturing faculty and graduates to start their own businesses led to the creation of the Stanford Research Park in 1951. Numerous tech businesses got their start there, and by the 1980s a global technology center was born.

Silicon Valley, however, wasn’t the only region that had a shot at this kind of reset. It could’ve been Detroit.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo source: detroithistorical.org.

Class Warfare LA Style

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The most recent Los Angeles riots reflect, among other things, the response of immigrant activists to President Trump’s crackdown, and the latest resurgence of organized left-wing activism, which had been relatively quiet in the early months of the new administration. A less widely remarked factor, however, is the emerging and complex nature of class in contemporary America.

Historically, particularly in the Marxist canon, the belief was that the proletariat would demand change and overthrow the bourgeoisie. This is a very different story from what is happening in Los Angeles. The unrest here is not primarily a movement of organized working people, but the outgrowth of a heavily racialized politics pushed to the extreme by a small, but militant radical core. This structure has long characterized LA’s disorders. In the city’s past riots, notably the 1965 Watts conflagration and the Rodney King outbreak in 1992, the predominant color of protest was black. This year, it is brown, reflecting the salience of immigration and the fact that Latinos now represent roughly half the area’s population.

LA County, whose population approaches 10 million, is the epicenter of a nationwide demographic shift. Home to over three million immigrants, an estimated one million of whom are undocumented, hailing overwhelmingly from Mexico and Central America. This part of the county’s population is increasingly marginalized, poor, and economically disillusioned.

The economic situation reflects a collapse of opportunity. Once a middle-class haven with a broad industrial base, Los Angeles now suffers the highest poverty rates in the state and among the worst among the country’s big cities.The city, once a manufacturing powerhouse, has lost industrial jobs over the past decade at a higher rate than ALmost ANY major metro areas. Latinos represent the vast majority of the labor force for California’s declining construction and manufacturing industries. In past decades, these industries have provided newcomers with opportunities to gain skills, buy a home, and even start their own business. Now, recent immigrants confront a landscape of failing schools and dilapidated parks. Things are particularly bleak for Latinos; Los Angeles ranks at number 105 out of 107 on the 2020 Latino Upward Mobility Index.

This all comes at a time when Los Angeles, as a recent Chapman University study reveals, severely underperforms the nation in terms of producing high wage jobs. Even Hollywood entertainment, one of the state’s high-end industries, has lost jobs due to technological changes and incentives offered by other states and countries, depriving young Angelenos as well as migrants of high-wage opportunities.

The increasingly multiracial middle class, families, and the upwardly mobile flee the city, leaving Los Angeles divided between the economic underclass, highly paid professionals, and what Harold Meyerson calls the “new middle class” of public employees. In this economic configuration, LA Latino incomes and home ownership rates (adjusted for cost of living) are among the lowest in the nation.

Read the rest of this piece at Compact.

Photo: by Jonathan McIntosh. Immigrant rights march for amnesty in downtown Los Angeles, California on May Day, 2006. Wikimedia under CC 2.5 License.

Global Tally Of Alt-Energy Rejections Passes 1,000

Robert Bryce — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The rejections keep coming. Since the beginning of May, a provincial government in Queensland has rejected an enormous wind project, a county board in Illinois spiked a solar project, and a district council in East Devon vetoed a battery project.

Let’s take those in order.

Last week, a $1 billion wind project in central Queensland was rejected by provincial authorities. The 450-megawatt project, which included battery storage, faced fierce opposition from local residents. According to one news report, 142 residents responded to the government’s request for comments, and 88% opposed the project.

One of the project opponents was a grazier (the Aussie’s word for rancher) named John Ellrott. He told a reporter from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that “the Moonlight Range has got some very significant flora and fauna on it that needs conserving and doesn't need to be flattened...We don't need all our ranges covered in wind towers.” The rejection of the wind project adds more friction to the Australian government’s barmy plan to achieve net zero by 2050. (More on that below.)

Solar projects continue to see fierce opposition. In mid-May, county officials in Will County, Illinois, voted 16-5 to reject plans for a solar facility in New Lenox Township that was opposed by the township and nearby homeowners. According to an article in the Chicago Tribune, “More than 80 residents of the nearby Fieldstone Subdivision signed a petition stating the commercial solar energy facility would negatively impact their property values.”

Battery projects are also being rejected. In mid-May, the BBC reported that planners with the East Devon District Council rejected a lithium-ion battery storage project “after a three-and-a-half hour debate which saw residents raise concerns about fire risks and pollution. Despite the developer stating its equipment was 100% safe, examples of BESS [battery energy storage system] fires around the country were highlighted as evidence about why the scheme should be refused.”

As I have explained many times, these rejections don’t fit the narrative that’s relentlessly promoted by climate activists and their myriad allies in the legacy media about “green” energy. But the numbers are real, the numbers are growing, and they provide irrefutable evidence that land-use conflicts are the binding constraint on the growth of alt-energy. In all, when combining the 814 rejections of wind and solar projects in the US that I have documented in the Renewable Rejection Database with the global rejections of solar, wind, and batteries, the total number of alt-energy rejections or restrictions now exceeds 1,000 — it’s 1,011 to be exact.

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: Queensland cattle rancher John Ellrott has refused to lease his property to Big Wind. Credit: ABC News & Ellie Willcox.

LA Riots Reflect Failure of Progressive Leadership

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Los Angeles has a long, combustible history — and it’s flaring up again. The current unrest, driven in part by political grievances, reflects a deeper dysfunction steadily eroding the city’s foundations. Once a cradle of conservatism and the political home of Ronald Reagan, LA has become a hub of resurgent radicalism, and, to many outside its borders, a symbol of why the country turned to a nativist strongman like Donald Trump.

Now, amid the chaos, there is talk that Trump might go beyond the National Guard and deploy the Marines. It’s a characteristically extreme move, but one that, for anyone familiar with LA’s history of protests spiralling into violence and tragedy (as I witnessed during my 40 years there), may not be entirely out of step with the city’s volatile reality.

Often migrants who come to LA find opportunity but also profound disappointment. African Americans who arrived in large numbers during the Thirties and Forties escaped the overt racism of the South, only to encounter a hostile police force and deeply discriminatory housing practices. Their disillusionment erupted in two of the most explosive racial uprisings in American history: the Watts riots in 1965 and the unrest following the Rodney King verdict in 1992.

For many of today’s immigrants, particularly the undocumented, assimilation into the broader society has been difficult. But unlike African Americans in the Sixties, they are also immigrating to a city that no longer provides a lot of opportunity. Latino incomes, adjusted for cost of living, and homeownership rates are among the lowest in the nation. They also remain largely confined to the low-wage economy, including those who ICE arrested the past two days. The violent conflagration that took place at the Paramount Home Depot, a common gathering spot for undocumented labourers, is something that could be repeated elsewhere in the city.

These people deserve our respect and concern, particularly as they work and do not commit street crimes. But there’s also a large criminal element engaging in impromptu streetside rioting by “smash and grab” gangs that involves crews stripping lights of their copper wire, leaving parts of the city in darkness. In addition, the expansion of the troubled transit system has been slowed by persistent violence and vandalism.

To the delight of people like Trump and his Right-wing supporters, LA reflects the failure of progressive governance. Despite pouring billions into public services, the city is facing a growing budget crisis — all while producing less new housing per capita than nearly every other major US metro. Downtown, once the focus of lavish investment in transit and convention infrastructure, has deteriorated into a cautionary tale: a half-finished skyscraper covered in graffiti, encircled by homeless encampments, and surrounded by hollowed-out buildings, some of which have been set on fire.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo: screenshot from ICE Out of LA protests live stream via YouTube.

The Shifting Geography of US Deep Tech

Nima Sanandaji — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

A systematic mapping of where the world’s global leading companies in deep tech are located shows a massive lead for the USA – however the leading edge of particularly Santa Clara Valley shows signs of gradual normalization relative to the rest of the world.

The vast majority of globally leading deep tech companies are found in North America. North America has particularly strong dominance in the areas of artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robotic & communication, quantum & computing and pharmaceuticals. In these five fields of deep tech, around four out of five of the world-leading deep tech companies are found in North America.

In the USA alone, fully 61.6 percent of the globally leading deep tech companies are located. This is the finding of the Deep Tech Index, conducted annually by the European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform (ECEPR) with the support of Nordic Capital, which maps and evaluates the global deep tech landscape.

However, while the latest data from the end of 2024 shows that close to two thirds of the world-leading deep tech companies are located in the USA, this is less than the previous year. At the end of 2023 fully 68.4 percent of the world-leading deep tech companies existed in the USA.

Santa Clara Valley, Los Angeles, Austin and Chicago are the leading robotic & communication tech regions. Santa Clara Valley, Boston as well as Vancouver in Canada are centers for quantum and computing development.

The share of global deep tech companies in North America has fallen by 5 percentage points since last year, representing a normalization process. Particularly the USA but also Canada remain dominant, but competition is on the rise.

Besides Santa Clara Valley, the USA also has numerous other world-leading deep tech companies. In Boston fully 6.4 percent of the world-leading deep tech companies are located. Also New York (6.0 percent), Los Angeles (3.8 percent), Chicago and Seattle (2.2 percent each), and Austin (1.8 percent) each host significant share of the world´s deep tech companies. These regions have more deep tech companies in them than most European countries individually, as comparison.

There are also numerous other deep tech companies spread throughout the USA outside the main hubs. Fully 18.8 percent of the world-leading deep tech companies exist in the USA outside of the main urban tech regions.

The share of US-based world-leading deep tech companies that exist in Santa Clara Valley has between the end of 2023 and the end of 2024 fallen from 35 to 33 percent. The share of all world-leading deep tech companies in the USA that are located outside the major urban hubs has also been reduced slightly, from 32 to 31 percent. At the same time the share in the other major urban hubs except Santa Clara Valley (Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle and Austin) has grown from 33 to 36 percent.

Two different economic forces are influencing the development. The first is the advantages of specialization. Thomas Edison founded the world’s first industrial innovation laboratory in this valley 150 years ago, and it has since become the most significant region for development of new technologies. The capital, knowledge and entrepreneurship networks needed are in place in Santa Clara Valley, more than any place else in the world. Similarly, the USA is dominant as a nation, compared to the rest of the world.

Yet, the success brings higher costs, for Santa Clara Valley as well as the USA. There are ample talents around the world, at lower prices than the talents of the USA and particularly of the expensive main tech hubs. Current policies relating to trade and international talents is also likely to influence. The trend is that Europe which is second best in deep tech and willing to trade, is catching up somewhat to the USA. Institutional competition will also be significant gradually more from places such as India. Much of globally leading universities in technology and mathematics, as well as global technology firms, are strongly dependent on Indian students and researchers.

The USA retains its dominant leading position, particularly medium-sized regions such as Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle. Yet the global competition is growing, hinting at gradual further normalization. Within the coming years, it is likely that we will pass a milestone where less than half of the global deep tech companies are situated in the USA, while no other single country can catch up all the rest of the world combines will do so within coming years. However, the USA can still remain dominant particularly in specific areas. Deep technology is closely linked to prosperity, lower unemployment and national security. Countries around the world need constructive policies to foster deep tech.

The deep tech index demonstrates that countries with a high density of deep tech firms per million adults typically enjoy robust property rights, low capital gains taxes, strong educational outcomes in PISA tests, and prestigious universities specializing in mathematics and engineering disciplines. Boosting universities remains a key challenge now, given the current development in the USA. It is important to remember that Europe and Asia each already have a higher number of the world´s 100 leading universities in mathematics and engineering, the competition is already underway.

Nima Sanandaji, Director, European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform (ECEPR)

Photo: cover of Deep Tech Index, 2025 edition.

Portland Has the “Worst Housing Crisis Outlook”

Randal OToole — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Portland, Oregon is suffering from the “worst housing crisis outlook” in the country, according to a study published last week by LendingTree.com. The study compared housing prices with household incomes and current vacancy rates to conclude that Portland and three other cities in the Northwest — Boise, Spokane, and Salt Lake — are four of the five worst housing markets out of the top 100 metro areas.

While I appreciate anything that knocks Portland, I have a lot of quibbles with this study. The researcher used data for metropolitan areas, which are political units (being drawn on county boundaries), instead of urban areas, which are economic units (being drawn based on population densities). The researcher compared median housing prices with median household incomes, while median family incomes make more sense because non-family households (such as college housemates) rarely buy homes.

The numbers in the study are based on an average for the five years from 2019 through 2023. Those five years were tumultuous enough that any data from the beginning of that period no longer has any validity. I would have used just 2023 data, which are available for all 100 areas in the study.

A bigger problem is that the researcher apparently gave equal weight to the home price-to-income ratio and vacancy rate (percentage of housing units that are unoccupied). In reality, a high vacancy rate doesn’t mean much if the typical vacant house costs eight times typical household or family incomes. Median prices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose are all well over eight times median household incomes, but the study ranks them as better off than Portland, where prices are “only” 5.5 times median household incomes.

San Jose’s vacancy rate of 5.56 percent is only 17 percent higher than Portland’s 4.76 percent, yet the former’s price-to-income ratio of 8.53 is 53 percent higher than Portland’s 5.57. This makes San Jose’s housing market much worse than Portland’s.

As I say, these are quibbles. Both San Jose’s and Portland’s housing markets are in terrible shape and neither community should be proud to be among the worst in the country.

The Lending Tree study concludes by advising people to “shop around” when seeking to buy a home, to “get your credit in order” before going shopping, and to keep an “emergency fund” to deal with maintenance and repairs after buying a home. These insipid ideas are blindingly obvious, are valid whether or not housing is unaffordable, and will do nothing to make housing more affordable.

This is my biggest problem with the study: it treats unaffordable housing as something that “just happened” independent of state or regional land-use policies. In fact, it took years of hard work on the part of lobbyists and special interest groups to destroy the housing markets of the urban areas where about 40 percent of Americans live.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Graphic: courtesy the Antiplanner

Musk Outbursts Reveal a Deeper Rift in MAGA

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 12:20:36 -0400

The deepening split between Elon Musk and the Trump administration speaks to broader divisions within an increasingly shell-shocked GOP. Musk, who left the White House only last week, has since denounced Donald Trump’s hodgepodge budget bill – the so-called Big Beautiful Bill – as a ‘disgusting abomination’, as it will add almost $4 trillion to the federal deficit. He had previously called Trump’s pro-tariff chief trade adviser, Peter Navarro, a ‘moron’, reflecting the gulf between the populists and the oligarchs in the MAGA coalition. Oligarchs, whatever their party, do not favour tariffs, curbing immigration or raising taxes on themselves.

It turns out that this incoherence, married to one-man rule under Trump, has consequences. MAGA is a coalition based largely on a shared detestation of the ‘progressive’ agenda, but it has little else in common. It includes people concerned about free speech and anti-Semitism, as well as Christian humanists. And it also contains deeply troubling elements that appeal to a stew of authoritarian, nativist, racist and anti-Semitic ideas – tropes long peddled and platformed by Trump supporters such as the pro-monarchist Curtis Yarvin and the ubiquitous, ever-ugly Tucker Carlson.

Not surprisingly, the broader base that elected Trump is now fracturing into its constituent parts. This is not to say that there has been a shift to the self-righteous and rightfully ignored ‘Never Trumpers’ in the GOP. Nor have Republicans suddenly embraced the leftist meme that Trump is a ‘fascist’ with a plan. He is nothing of the sort: lacking any real ideology or disciplined movement capable of advancing a particular programme.

In essence, Trump is a grifting narcissist with a keen sense of how to take advantage of the sustained imbecility of his opponents. But there is no fixed core to Trumpism – only impulses more expected from a toddler with ADHD than a presidential administration. He may have been a builder in his past career, but he appears clueless when it comes to constructing a clear policy agenda beyond revanchism and grift.

This incoherence is now undermining his own coalition. The tariff blitzkrieg, for instance, could be seen as justified in response to the undoubted mercantilism of Canada, the EU and, above all, China. Yet instead of leading to concessions from other countries, the chaotic rollout of the tariffs has the potential to paralyse large swathes of the US economy, including the all-important auto industry – winning few allies beyond a handful of labour-union leaders, many of whom will probably never support him anyway.

One can feel the wheels coming off, as many of the key constituencies that elected both Trump and the GOP Congress resist his impetuosity and persistent dishonesty. Like most political movements, MAGA is a fragile alliance of groups that often have little in common – and in some cases, loathe each other. This is already evident in the widening chasm between Trump’s tech bros, who favour cutting government spending and care chiefly about personal enrichment, and the working- and middle-class voters who twice put him in the White House.

Beyond the loss of Musk, whose support was crucial to his 2024 electoral success, Trump is slowly dissolving one key alliance after another. One critical rupture has occurred with traditional, small-government conservatives, epitomised by the Federalist Society, which played a pivotal role in judicial appointments in Trump’s first term. As strict constitutionalists, they are naturally sceptical of Trump’s federal power grabs. In the future, he is more likely to appoint not principled conservatives but the kind of partisan hacks found in the district courts of blue states – or worse, the judges of the People’s Courts in socialist regimes.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo: Elon Musk speaks at 2025 CPAC, by Gage Skidmore, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

AI Could Turn Democrats Into the New Welfare Class

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The New York Times’s jeremiad last week about AI’s impact on entry-level jobs — particularly in tech — merely underscores trends that have been clear for well over a year. Silicon Valley firms have been slashing jobs despite record profits, and since 2022 California has actually shed positions in the information sector. An astonishing 82% of millennials fear AI will drive down their compensation. They have every reason to be concerned.

This trend could create a political storm of massive proportions. In recent decades the Democratic Party has been able to compensate for its ebbing support among blue-collar workers by winning over college-trained professionals. Almost all college-educated professionals — excluding those in the military and airline pilots — lean overwhelmingly Democratic. College degrees, particularly graduate ones, are among the strongest indicators of a Leftist tilt, yet are becoming ever less salient in terms of garnering higher salaries.

This base is under increased assault, as universities are forced to confront declining enrollments and ever less public approval. At the same time, the supply of entry-level graduate jobs at major firms such as Salesforce, Meta, Amazon and Lyft are dwindling due to the introduction of AI. Google, most notably, has recently laid off 12,000 workers — a number that is expected to grow to 30,000.

The damage may be even greater at the grassroots level. Within months of AI’s emergence, freelance work in software declined markedly, along with pay. In a survey earlier this month, two-thirds of business leaders suggested that ChatGPT will lead to large layoffs of white-collar workers over the next five years. Already, new AI programmes are allowing software firms to do without lower-level programmers, particularly new hires.

To be sure, Americans without college degrees are not immune to the effects of AI. But in the near term, it’s college professors, administrators, lawyers, accountants, and psychologists — largely Democratic-leaning professionals — who are increasingly in the crosshairs. Even Hollywood, a traditional Democratic stronghold, faces mounting threats: as entertainment becomes more digitised, layoffs have accelerated, and studios find it far easier to shift production to lower-cost regions such as Eastern Europe.

Who wins here? It will be those professions that use AI to build things, such as drones, spaceships and robots. These firms are not as heavily concentrated in places like Silicon Valley, which has largely embraced software, social media and consumer services, leaving its once proud industrial heritage behind.

This is a huge opportunity for Texas in particular, since the state has always been oriented towards tangible engineering. Texas may have missed the social media boom, but its industrial legacy has left it well placed to dominate the “deep tech” builder space. This field often requires reliable and affordable energy — something not easy to get in states such as California or New York.

Beyond elite AI engineers, the other likely winners may be those in physical, hands-on jobs — mechanics or oil rig workers — that are much harder to automate. AI pioneer Rony Abovitz told me that the big winner in the coming years will be the “sophisticated, technically capable blue-collar worker”. Young people might be better off ignoring Joe Biden’s famous advice to “learn to code” and instead consider trade schools which teach practical, in-demand skills.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo: Province of British Columbia, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Disruptive Desalination Technology Comes to California

Edward Ring — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The concept of deep water desalination has been around for decades, but only in recent years has the enabling technology been available. Innovations pioneered by the oil and gas industry to better service offshore drilling platforms have matured. These include better ways to protect against corrosion of underwater equipment, and replacing hydraulic with electrical systems. Rapid advances in underwater robotic vehicles also promise to reduce construction and maintenance costs.

By using technology that is no longer ahead of its time, a California-based company, OceanWell, aims to bring deep water desalination to California and the world. Their product has the potential to dramatically reduce the energy cost, the environmental impact, and the financial cost of large-scale desalination.

OceanWell’s design relies on performing desalination at a depth of around 1,300 feet, where they intend to tether pods to the sea floor. Production-sized pods will measure roughly 40 feet long and 25 feet in diameter. Ocean water will enter the pod where fresh water will pass through a filtration membrane, while a circulating pump on the salt water side of the membrane will create a cross flow that expels the brine back into the ocean. The fresh water that collects inside the pod on the other side of the membrane will feed a subsea pump and pipeline to shore that is shared by several pods.

While this description excludes countless relevant details, it is important to highlight the reasons this design has such disruptive potential. It lies in the fact that as the subsea pump pushes the fresh water up through the underwater pipe to an onshore collection facility, it creates lower pressure on the fresh water side of each pod’s interior. On the seawater side of the membrane, undersea pressure at 1,300 feet is about 600 PSI, but on the freshwater side of the membrane the pressure inside the pod is lowered by the subsea pump to around 250 PSI. This is enough to pull fresh water through the membrane at a rate the company predicts will be one million gallons per day per pod.

The expected energy savings are based on a simple but fundamental difference between deep water desalination and onshore desalination: When the membrane performs the desalination process underwater, only the fresh water has to be pumped, whereas in an onshore desalination plant, ocean water – including the eventual brine which is 50 percent of the volume – has to be pumped up from the ocean intakes and pushed through the filtration membranes. OceanWell estimates their energy cost will be approximately 2,250 kilowatt-hours per acre foot of fresh water. This compares to today’s commercial onshore desalination plant energy costs of around 3,500 kilowatt-hours per acre foot of fresh water.

The environmental impact of deepwater desalination is likely reduced due to several factors. The brine is less concentrated and is released from dozens of distributed pods that are deep underwater. The potential for underwater biota such as plankton or fish larvae to get trapped in the membranes is reduced not only from prescreening and cross-flow circulation pumps around the membranes, but also because the membranes perform under lower intake pressure than conventional desalination plants, and also, crucially, because the amount of bioactivity that exists at a depth of 1,300 feet is far less than at or near the surface where typical land-based desalination intakes are located.

None of this is to imply that the environmental impact of conventional desalination plants cannot be managed, which is a topic to revisit and emphasize. Primarily via conventional land-based reverse osmosis filtration, worldwide desalination capacity now exceeds 30 million acre feet per year, which represents about 1 percent of total worldwide freshwater diversions, and an impressive 7 percent of worldwide municipal water consumption – of course, not all of it is for municipal use. As we discuss in WC#83, desalination at scale is already cost-competitive with many water supply options that we take for granted.

It is with construction cost, however, where deepwater desalination may offer its most disruptive opportunity. OceanWell’s approach, using mass produced pods that form underwater “water farms,” could dramatically lower the price of desalinated water.

The company’s current production cost estimates are proprietary and in any case are still dependent on testing results and variables such as the price in the future for construction materials. But imagine if the installed cost for each production pod was $5 million, and that for each pod in a large water farm, the balance of plant – subsea pumps, pipelines, onshore facilities, and so on – there was an equivalent additional cost. This means a 50 pod water farm, producing 50 million gallons per day of fresh water, would cost $500 million. Compared to traditional desalination plants – the proposed Huntington Beach desalination plant was projected to cost $1.4 billion dollars to deliver the same quantity of fresh water – this is barely one-third as much. But until we know how much these pods and other systems are really going to cost, this is speculative.

In partnership with the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, an OceanWell prototype is being tested in a reservoir in the Santa Monica Mountains. While the testing pod is positioned at a shallow depth in fresh water, the abundant biota present in the lake will allow the engineers to quickly evaluate the systems they’ve developed to avoid algae and microorganisms getting trapped on the filtration membrane. The company plans to test pods in the ocean by 2028, and forecast a production-scale water farm could be operating by as soon as 2030.

We may hope California’s regulatory agencies don’t treat OceanWell’s proposals with the same obstructionist zealotry with which they delayed, then killed, the desalination plant that was proposed for Huntington Beach. With any luck, OceanWell’s systems may prove to be leapfrog technologies that silence even the most confirmed skeptics of desalination. This technology, and the company building it, merits close attention in the coming years.

Edward Ring is a co-founder of the California Policy Center and the author of “The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California.”

Photo: Dorothy Lang Martin, via NARA, in Public Domain.

Where Have All the Jews Gone?

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The killing of two young Israeli embassy staffers, allegedly by a college-educated, left-wing activist earlier this month, provided yet more evidence – if any were needed – of the perilous situation in which Western Jews now find themselves. Almost a century after the early rise of the Nazis, it seems anti-Semitism is on a roll again. And it is energised increasingly by campus-minted radicals in academia, the media and the culture at large.

Elias Rodriguez, the suspected assassin, is a case in point. He attended the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois, where he studied English, a shrinking discipline largely captured by ‘progressives’ and their narratives. Rodriguez, as a Hispanic, no doubt felt part of those supposedly ‘oppressed’ by the oppressor white establishment, which now includes Jews.

After his education (or perhaps indoctrination), Rodriguez worked for leftist non-profits, supported Black Lives Matter and later enjoyed a dalliance with the communist Party for Socialism and Liberation, a vehemently anti-Israel group. He epitomises the shift in the sociology of anti-Semitism, from the ill-educated far right to left-leaning college graduates.

Once the beloved object of Jewish ardour, universities are now one of the principal sources of anti-Semitic inculcation. Countless courses actively promulgate anti-Jewish and Israelophobic tropes. This is hardly a surprise given the generous funding leading universities have received from brutal Islamic states, such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Given the extent of ideological indoctrination it’s no surprise that young Americans are far more likely than older cohorts to side with the Palestinians than with Israel. Indeed, the longer young people stay in education, notes a recent Anti-Defamation League study, the more likely they are to adopt anti-Israel and anti-Semitic views. Further research shows that this trend is particularly pronounced among minorities.

The growth of anti-Israel sentiment among young people is not based on any increase in knowledge about the situation in the Middle East. Indeed, the majority of people under 25 wrongly think Israel, not Hamas, has controlled Gaza over the past decade.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo: by Ted Eytan. Capital Jewish Museum - 2 Israeli Embassy employees were killed while leaving an event at the museum, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Nuclear Conversion

Robert Bryce — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

There’s a vast difference between politics and policy. Doing politics — making speeches, giving TV interviews, and drafting talking points — is child’s play. Policy, on the other hand, is where dreams go to die, particularly when it comes to energy.

Over the past few days, the politics and policies around nuclear energy have shifted faster than at any other period in the post-Chernobyl era. Here are a few examples:

Germany, the world’s long-time anti-nuclear poster child, just did a screeching U-turn. Under its new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, Germany will cooperate with France and treat nuclear as a “green” power source under EU regulations. The move comes just 25 months after Germany took its last three nuclear plants offline. As one German official said, the move is a “sea-change policy shift.”

The announcement from Berlin came just days after Belgium’s federal parliament voted by a large majority to repeal a 2003 law mandating the phase out of nuclear energy and banning the construction of new reactors.

Last week, the Danish government announced it was reconsidering its ban on nuclear power, which has been in place since 1985. The country’s former prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told the Financial Times, “Wind and solar are good as long as you have wind and sunshine. But you have to have a non-fossil base-load and it’s ridiculous to exclude nuclear power.”

On May 13, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey (a Democrat) announced a plan to repeal a state law passed by voters in 1982. Healey’s administration is pointing to a recent report by ISO New England, which found that nuclear power can reduce emissions more cheaply than wind and solar (Gee, who would’ve thought that?) Further, the move comes as offshore wind, which a few months ago was the darling of East Coast Democrats, is slowly sinking under the weight of market realities and political headwinds.

In March, Colorado Governor Jared Polis (a Democrat) signed a bill into law that allows nuclear to count as a “clean” resource to meet the state’s decarbonization mandates. As the Energy Bad Boys, Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling, noted last month, Polis signed the bill despite his 2019 campaign promise to run the state solely on wind, solar, batteries, and a soupçon of fairy dust.

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: President Dwight Eisenhower delivered his Atoms for Peace speech at the UN on December 8, 1953. Credit: IAEA/YouTube.

Building the Future: Fixing the Global Housing Crisis

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox — Sat, 31 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

This is the second of a two-part series on the global housing crisis. Read the first part here.

The affordable housing crisis in America and many other advanced countries keeps getting worse because it is largely dominated by the wrong voices talking about the wrong places.

For years the YIMBYs and NIMBYs have debated development in urban centers: While “Yes in My Back Yard” advocates seek to “build, build, build” ever more density in urban centers for environmental reasons, the “Not In My Back Yard” forces want to limit development often to preserve property values and the existing character of neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, housing prices have continued to rise to often unsustainable levels from San Francisco to Seoul, putting the dream of home ownership out of reach for many who are forced to pay much of their salaries in rent. Both YIMBYs and NIMBYs rely on heavy-handed regulation and other policies that discourage and complicate home ownership. Their effects have been particularly severe in California, Canada, Australia, Britain, and other places where policies aimed at funneling more people into dense urban areas by making it expensive to build in the suburbs and exurbs are negatively distorting the market.

There is now a growing pushback to this approach. Even some long-time advocates of forced densification and urban growth boundaries are recognizingthat “sprawl” is not only here to stay, but that it offers a cohesive and market-friendly way to spur greater construction and lower prices. Given enough freedom, the market can do much to address the housing problem.

In the future, the shift from urban centers to suburban and exurban growth will likely be accelerated through the rise of remote work and new transport systems such as autonomous vehicles. A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City noted that demographic conditions, the rise of online work, and migration to less expensive regions create conditions for a family-friendly housing boom. The issue is how to meet this burgeoning demand and build a society where the opportunity for home ownership becomes ever greater.

Market-Based Solutions

Trying to force people to live in dense urban areas against their wishes contributes to the continued outflow of people to suburbs and exurbs, and from highly regulated to less regulated states. It is not enough to simply call for building more houses as a solution to the crisis when regulation-heavy “urban containment” policies have increased land-related costs and made housing affordability impossible in many regions.

Thanks to market forces, peripheral development has long been the way cities have grown virtually everywhere in the world. Contrary to the claim that density represents social and economic progress, wealthier countries are producing ever more decentralized cities. Even in places like Tokyo, London, Paris, and New York, the vast majority of population growth takes place in the periphery. As one report put it, “human settlement has always tended to sprawl out from key urban centres.”

Read the rest of this piece at: Real Clear Investigations.

Photo: Deane Bayas via Pexels.

Locked Out of the Dream: Regulation Making Homes Unaffordable Around the World

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox — Fri, 30 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Next to inflation, Americans ranked housing as their top financial worry in a Gallup survey last May. It’s only gotten worse. January home sales were down 5% from last year’s dismal numbers. Record numbers of first-time buyers are stuck on the sidelines as housing affordability stands at the lowest level ever recorded, while one in three Americans now spend over 30% of their income on mortgage or rent.

The housing crisis is not just an American problem, but a global phenomenon that hits the middle and working classes the hardest. Studies of the Canadian, British, European, and East Asian markets have also found that housing prices have risen far faster than household incomes and inflation. A report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development concluded that “housing has been the main driver of rising middle-class expenditure.” In prosperous and communitarian Switzerland, Zurich studios sell for well over $1 million, and small houses even more, making downpayments unaffordable to affluent people despite the overwhelming financial advantages to homeowners.

Underlying the plight of home buyers worldwide is a sometimes overlooked but profound influence – the spread of restrictive land-use regulations. It’s reshaping political and economic alignments in ways that may further destabilize the social order. Home ownership is strongly correlated with positive social indicators, and as renting grows twice as quickly as buying, this trend poses a threat to Western democracy by deepening economic inequality, depressing demographic vitality, and undermining the upward mobility that has driven Western progress for the past century.

Cost of Over-Regulation

The price increase may seem surprising because there has not been a huge spike in fundamental demand. In California, and most of the United States, as well as Europe and East Asia, population growth is tepid, if not declining. Today’s higher interest rates are below those that prevailed from 1970 to 1995, when housing costs were considerably lower relative to incomes. Nor is this predominantly a technical problem; the rise of remote work, which is connected to migration to smaller metros, as well as new technologies for building, including using 3D printers, actually offers the chance to build more cheaply.

And yet, the principal cause for housing shortages and rising prices stems from the failure to build enough new housing units, particularly the single-family homes consumers most desire. Homebuilders built 1 million fewer homes (including rental units) in 2024 than in 1972, when there were 130 million fewer Americans. One estimate puts the U.S. housing market shortage at an estimated 4.5 million homes, according to Commerce Department data.

The rapid inflation of housing costs stems primarily from ever more constricting land-use regulations. Inflated prices are particularly rife in countries and states with strict regulations like California, where high-income households now utterly dominate the housing market, and more than a third of all real estate transactions in recent years topped $1 million.

Read the rest of this piece at: Real Clear Investigations.

Photo: Travis Saylor via Pexels.

A Look at Satellite Cities

Pete Saunders — Thu, 29 May 2025 15:29:38 -0400

Have you ever given much thought to satellite cities? Cities located close to major metropolitan areas that aren’t the primary city, yet have a strong identity and history of their own? Cities miles away from the central city core but with many strong urbanism elements and with outstanding cost of living affordability? Satellite cities are located near many large metros, but they’re rarely considered as places that people will consider as an affordable urbanism alternative.

I first noticed satellite cities when I moved to one, Muncie, IN, while in high school. Once we moved to Muncie, I saw that there were many other similarly sized communities in central Indiana, anywhere from 30 miles to 60 miles or so away from Indianapolis – Kokomo, Anderson, Muncie, Bloomington, Lafayette – that had long histories of their own, but had relationships with the Indiana’s capital and largest city. Each of these cities started out as agricultural trading centers for surrounding farmers and then became mid-tier industrial hubs in the 20^th century. Each also suffered from deep deindustrialization that set in during the 1980s. Recovery for them has been spotty; Bloomington (home of Indiana University) and Lafayette/West Lafayette (home of Purdue University) haven’t suffered the same decline as the others, thanks to the pull of flagship universities. Ball State has helped Muncie, but it hasn’t gotten the boost that Bloomington and Lafayette did.

Later, I started to notice similar relationships surrounding other large Midwestern metro areas. When our family moved to Chicago, I saw some similarly positioned cities surrounding Chicago – Waukegan, Elgin, Aurora and Joliet – in the same light. However, they were all doing somewhat better than their central Indiana cohorts. I saw the same surrounding other major Midwestern metros, all in various stages of decline or revitalization.

(Note: I find this to be almost exclusively a Midwestern phenomenon, with a few exceptions. Similar satellite cities exist in California, whose settlement owes a lot to the Midwest. California’s versions also seem to be further from the core cities. The East Coast may have once had satellite cities like the Midwest, but a case could be made that metro amalgamation began occurring there even before industrialization really took off, so the region’s cities began evolving into the more familiar Megalopolis. No similar cities appear to exist in the South.)

These are what I’ve called satellite cities. They are midsized cities that experienced a period of growth during an independent phase of development but soon found themselves being pulled toward the gravitational pull of the larger nearby metro area. Some have been fully captured by the larger metro’s pull, others haven’t fully made the transition.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Muncie, Indiana downtown, source: downtownmuncie.org.

The Death of the Family Home is Killing the American Middle Class

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 28 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Once renowned for widespread homeownership, the key Anglosphere countries are reverting to a feudal past, where land is owned by increasingly few. In every major market in Canada and Australia, and in much of America and the UK, house prices have skyrocketed to record levels, with corresponding consequences for home ownership rates.

In a new report, demographer Wendell Cox traces this to the failure to build enough new housing units, particularly the single-family homes that consumers most desire. In the United States, homebuilders built about one million fewer homes (including rental units) in 2024 than in 1972 when there were 130 million fewer Americans. One estimate puts the US housing market short by about 4.5 million homes.

But the housing crisis is a global phenomenon that hits the middle and working classes hardest. In large part due to high housing prices, notes the “OECD in Under Pressure: The Squeezed Middle-Class”, the middle-class faces ever rising costs relative to incomes, so much so that its very survival is threatened. “The cost of essential parts of the middle-class lifestyle have increased faster than inflation,” it notes. Housing prices have been rising “three times faster than household median income over the last two decades.”

Even in prosperous and communitarian Switzerland, Zurich studios sell for well over $1 million, and small houses for considerably more than that. Even affluent people cannot afford down payments, despite the overwhelming financial advantages to homeowners.

This housing shortfall and high prices are seen throughout the Anglosphere. Australia’s historically high rates of homeownership have all but collapsed among those aged between 25 and 34 years old, plummeting from more than 60 per cent in 1981 to only 45 per cent in 2016. The proportion of owner-occupied housing has dropped by 10 per cent in the last 25 years. In the United Kingdom in 2022-23, 39 per cent of 25-34 year-olds owned their home, compared to 57 per cent of the same age cohort in 1995. A rising proportion of British millennials are likely to remain renters for life.

Similarly, US millennials were already less likely in 2015 to be homeowners than baby boomers and Gen-Xers. By 2021, home ownership among those aged 25-34 had dropped from 45.4 per cent in 2000 to 41.6 per cent. Record numbers of first-time buyers are stuck on the sidelines as housing affordability stands at the lowest level for which there are data series, while one in three pay over 30 per cent of their income in mortgage or rent.

Across the board, Wendell Cox’s new report lays the blame for this situation on the British-born idea of urban containment, with its roots in the UK’s 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. This policy sought to steer development towards higher density core cities and away from the lower density periphery, forcing people into “living smaller, living closer” – whether they like it or not.

The results have been dreadful. As early as the 1970s, British planner Peter Hall suggested that the “speculative value” of land with planning permission in the UK was five to 10 times higher than that of land without planning permission. Virtually all the most expensive markets in Cox’s new affordability study – outside number one Hong Kong – operate some form of urban containment, including such cities as Vancouver, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and, of course, London.
All these areas now have prices that are nine times or more higher than median incomes, which is also three times the historic rate. Many of the markets closer to that historic norm – in Texas, the South and the Midwest US – do not have such policies.

Nor does focusing on higher density lower prices, as is sometimes argued. In fact, US data suggests a positive correlation between greater density and housing costs. Among 53 major metros, those with more single-family housing and larger lot sizes (key indicators of lower density) have substantially better housing affordability. One recent study found that the median family in San Jose would need 125 years (150 in Los Angeles) to save a down payment; in Atlanta or Houston the figure is 12 years.

Perhaps most damning, these policies are clearly not effective in creating more housing; Portland, a US pioneer in urban containment, embraces high density housing but high prices have driven multi-family construction to the lowest level in a decade. In California, which has experienced similar stagnation, notes a recent RAND study, policy-driven delays, strict architectural standards, green mandates and the requirement to pay union-level wages have pushed the cost of construction of subsidised apartments twice as high as in Texas.

How do we begin to solve this problem? It should not be too difficult, once urban containment and other policies are effectively scrapped. With relatively low population growth – particularly outside the migrant population – there is no huge spike in fundamental demand as occurred, for example, in the 1950s and 1960s. The rise of remote work, migration to smaller urban areas, as well as new technologies for building, including the use of 3D printers, actually offer the chance to build more affordable housing.

The bad news is that this crisis is largely self-inflicted. The good news is that it can be solved, if our political class can find the will to change and jettison policies that have led to this disastrous situation.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

A British Media Outlet Wants to Censor Anyone Who Publishes “Climate Change Counter-Narratives,” Including Me.

Robert Bryce — Tue, 27 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Last month, a new media outlet called Tortoise Media launched a database called “Hot Air,” which it claims is “making sense of climate misinformation.” The database includes “274 online actors,” a group that includes David Turver, Roger Pielke Jr., Bjorn Lomborg, Jordan Peterson, Alex Epstein, Tom Nelson, me, and many others who are committing the sin of “frequently disseminating climate change counter-narratives.”

How dare me — or anyone else — provide a counter narrative to the orthodoxy around energy and climate! But here’s the real reason for the database: Tortoise says that “pressure on platforms to filter out misinformation has given way to an online ecosystem that favors free speech — sometimes at the expense of leaving falsehoods unchecked and allowing conspiracy theories to become widespread.”

What a load of flaccid piffle.

Above, this is one of the entries from the database about yours truly. It features a short YouTube video I made last December pointing out that the Osage Tribe’s win in federal court over Enel has not received any coverage by legacy media outlets. For reporting on it, the clip has been dubbed “delay.” The database includes 1,475 results for yours truly. Tom Nelson has more than 19,000 results, Alex Epstein has more than 7,000, and Bjorn Lomborg has nearly 1,500.

Let’s be clear: Tortoise, an online outlet based in the UK, is saying there’s too much free speech, and thus, it’s tacitly endorsing censorship for people who don’t toe the line on the official climate narrative. Of course, numerous climate NGOs, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense Fund, claim that they, too, are fighting “climate misinformation.” EDF has even created what it calls the “anti-misinformation brigade.”

But Tortoise’s effort is different because it claims its database is “making sense of climate misinformation” due to its use of AI and the “CARDS2 LLM-based AI system,” which created a “taxonomy” to identify anyone who questions the climate orthodoxy. The database was created by the Centre for Climate Communication and Data Science (C3DS) at Exeter University with funding from a UK company that’s backed by Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management.

Before going further, let me be clear: I ignore critics. There are lots of people in the cheap seats. My critics (and I have a few) don’t deserve a single keystroke. I don’t reply to nasty emails, I block (or mute) trolls, and I immediately delete disrespectful comments on Substack. But the people at Tortoise Media deserve a medal for their mendacity and selective reporting.

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: Jed, via Wikimedia under CC 3.0 License.

Will the Faithful Inherit the Earth?

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 26 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The elevation of the new pope from Chicago may have excited progressive ideologues with hopes for another wokeish papacy. But the rise of little-known Robert Prevost to his new status as Pope Leo XIV comes amid a profoundly unwoke recovery of religious feeling in the West. After generations of decline, Christianity is making a comeback.

To be sure, this revival is still tentative and faces enormous headwinds. The decline of religion remains a fundamental reality in most Western countries, particularly in Europe, where well over 50 per cent of people under the age of 30 do not identify with any religion. In the US, the trajectory has been similar, albeit at a slower pace. In 1965, 70 per cent of respondents to a Gallup poll said religion is ‘very important’ in their lives. Today, fewer than half of Americans – 45 per cent – say religion is ‘very important’.

This decline has led some religious conservatives, like Ross Douthat of the New York Times, to predict a coming ‘age of extinction’ – a world bereft of churches, community and families. Others, like Christian intellectual Rod Dreher, suggest that religious people, like the early Christians, should create their own separate communities – what he calls ‘the Benedict option’ – to cope with an increasingly post-religious world.

Yet the pessimists may be overstating their case. In America, at least, there is evidence of a lingering spiritual hunger: more than half of ‘religiously unaffiliated’ Americans, for example, still believe in God or some kind of universal spirit. Meanwhile, one recent survey shows that young people are increasingly embracing religion, with millennials among the biggest drivers of Christianity’s revival in the US.

There is even evidence of renewal in decidedly secular Europe. France’s Catholic Church claims to have baptised 45 per cent more people this Easter than it did last year. According to the Bible Society, the UK is undergoing a similar conversion. It reports that the number of 18- to 24-year-olds who attend church at least monthly has quadrupled, from four per cent in 2018 to 16 per cent today. The Bible Society said there are two million more people attending church now than there were six years ago.

Religion’s resurgence offers a valuable counterweight to the recent decline in marriage, family, community and civil society – a decline that has been accelerated by technology. Pope Leo, in naming artificial intelligence as humanity’s primary challenge, shows a great insight into these changes. ‘In our own day, the church offers everyone the treasury of its social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour’, he said earlier this month.

At a time when tech elites seem increasingly obsessed with melding humans and machines, Leo’s views matter profoundly. For a growing number of influential people, mortality is viewed as a ‘bug’ to be corrected by technology. This philosophy – ‘transhumanism’ – has gained a number of devotees from Silicon Valley, including the likes of Larry Page, Peter Thiel and Sam Altman. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg has even claimed that the pervasive loneliness of modern society can be addressed by the use of AI-generated avatars assuming the roles of friends and therapists.

But AI, no matter how cleverly developed, cannot replace human contact in the physical world. Indeed, this ‘transhuman’ perspective conflicts with the very human intimacy that is central to religious communities. As the late Jonathan Sacks warned, an algorithm ‘has no space for empathy or fellow feeling’.

The broader rebellion against atheism that we are currently witnessing has been building for some time. The pre-eminence of secularism is now openly opposed by many public intellectuals, such as Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. More remarkable still has been the revival of ‘natural theology’ among a growing number of scientists, drawing inspiration from breakthroughs in such fields as biology and physics to evoke a less random understanding of the universe.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo: Catholic Church England and Wales, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

A Case For The Great Lakes Region As America’s 12th Regional Culture

Pete Saunders — Sun, 25 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

I love the book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard. In it, he outlines the regional cultures of America and the impact that each has had on the development of the United States. I think it’s fascinating, mostly because I’m a firm believer in the Shakespearean phrase “what’s past is prologue.” History tells us so much about what could possibly happen in the future.

But I think Woodard got one thing wrong in his book. There should be 12 American nations, not 11. The Great Lakes should be its own regional culture. Furthermore, it should be recognized as the first purely American culture in American history.

Here are the eleven nations as identified by Woodard:

Yankeedom (New England and the upper Midwest). Settled by English Puritans, they valued education and communal decision-making.
New Netherland (the greater New York metropolitan area). Founded by the Dutch in the 1600s, this nation has maintained a multicultural and commercial perspective since being established.
Midlands (stretching from Pennsylvania to the Great Plains of Nebraska and Kansas, widening as it moves westward). Established first by English Quakers and later the Pennsylvania Dutch, it’s been a “go along to get along” kind of region for most of its existence.
Tidewater (the Chesapeake Bay area). Founded by English who were perhaps most sympathetic to the British Crown, it’s where the plantation economy got its start.
Greater Appalachia (starting in central Pennsylvania and West Virginia and extending southwestward into Arkansas, Oklahoma and north Texas). Settled by Scots-Irish immigrants, who were accustomed to difficult terrain, the region might be the most ruggedly individualist of them all.
Deep South (the lowlands just south of the Appalachian Mountains). Tidewater might be where the plantation economy got its start, but the Deep South took it to another level. Probably the most hierarchical region as a result.
New France (in the U.S., mostly southern Louisiana; in Canada, the most populated parts of Quebec). Not much of this is left in America today, but Cajun culture has left an indelible imprint on the nation.
El Norte (the length of the U.S./Mexico border, extending into southern California). Founded by Spanish Catholic missionaries, once part of Mexico. An influx of settlers from the Deep South and Appalachian nations turned it into a unique transitional region.
Far West (generally the area in the U.S. between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains). The settlers of the Deep South, Midlands and Yankeedom who wanted more land and just to be left alone moved here.
The Left Coast (central California up through the Bay Area, beyond Portland and Seattle, and continuing into southeastern Alaska). Probably owes its northern orientation to being founded by New Englanders and the Midlands. But the influence of El Norte and Greater Appalachia is also felt.
First Nations (the parts of Canada south of the Arctic Circle that include the northern portions of the Prairie Provinces, northern Ontario and northern Quebec). The First Nations influence is much stronger in Canada but can still be felt in the northern Great Lakes.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Michigan City lighthouse by Matt Morse, via Wikimedia under CC 3.0 License.

California's $100BN Railway to Nowhere Exposes the Cost of Democratic Incompetence

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 23 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The latest broadside in the seemingly unending war between President Trump and California Governor Newsom came with a presidential attack on the state’s long-delayed, over-budget high-speed rail project. Trump, who seems determined to stop federal funding for the project, even suggested that its dire problems will pose a challenge for Newsom as he gets ready for a run for the 2028 Democratic nomination.

If Newsom were prone to self-reflection, he’d admit that the line – intended to connect LA and San Francisco – is an embarrassment. The rail authority estimated in 2008, when voters approved $9 billion for the system, that it would cost $33 billion and start running by 2020. The projected cost has since ballooned to over $100 billion.

Governing magazine, hardly a voice for less public spending, placed the blame largely on incompetence – “uncoordinated planning” that ignored basic construction logistics and bent to the need to please political factions. Indeed, the route was in large part sold to people in the state’s hard-pressed interior as an economic boon, which ignores the nature of the area, whose economy is largely based on agriculture, manufacturing and oil. Wider truck lines for congested freeways would make far more economic sense.

Many projects go over budget, but, as the president has suggested, for once plausibly, the California high-speed train may be “the worst managed project” he’d ever seen. Even progressives are aware of this failure. The first to jump off the train, so to speak, was Kevin Drum at Mother Jones a decade ago, who called the project “ridiculous”. He assaulted the cost overruns and absurd ridership projections.

More recently, the train was singled out for infamy by the authors of Abundance. This new progressive bible, which embraces all the memes of the Left, for example on urban density and climate, expresses horror at how the train has been delayed and has escalated in cost. Today, even Democrats like former California State Speaker Anthony Rendon admit that there is “no confidence” in the project and have been far from anxious to pour more good money after bad.

Unless there is an unanticipated flow of state funds, the Legislative Analyst’s Office suggests that the project could grind to a halt within 15 months. There is now only enough money, and perhaps not even that, for a line from agriculture and oil-dominated Bakersfield to even more rustic Merced. Not exactly the glamorous LA-San Francisco route originally mooted, much less something to rival the lines connecting Tokyo to Osaka or Paris to Lyon.

Despite being described by Hoover Institute economist Lee Ohanian as “the greatest infrastructure failure in the history of the country”, the California disaster does admittedly have a great deal of competition. A similar pattern can be seen in the slow pace of repairs to the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore’s Harbour. Boston’s Big Dig (Central Artery/Tunnel Project) was plagued by cost overruns and delays, eventually coming in at nearly $25 billion, $10 billion more than previously reported.

In fact, the entire transit industry, a favourite target for investment among progressives and greens, is stymied by what the Marron Institute at New York University found were “among the highest transit-infrastructure costs in the world” – far higher than not only China, which can ascribe to less cumbersome processes, but the likes of Sweden, Italy, and Turkey as well.

Phase one of New York’s Second Avenue Subway, Marron notes, clocked in at 8 to 12 times more expensive than what the international analysis suggested should be the baseline cost, reflecting strict overtime rules, local union agreements that limit the available labour pools geographically, and an unwillingness to address staffing and labour agreements.

But even in this world of lavish overruns, Newsom’s California stands in a league of its own. Back in 2015, UC Berkeley scholar Karen Trapenberg Frick outlined how the cost of replacing the eastern section of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge rose from an estimated price of $250 million in 1995 to $6.5 billion by September 2013. This was in part due to political pressures from elected officials, according to a report prepared for a state Senate committee.

But nothing quite matches the incompetence and overspending of Newsom’s choo-choo. It has likely undermined support for building a national network of high-speed trains, something promoted in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.

Despite the green visions, high-speed trains seem a bit of a step back – the St Louis Post-Dispatch labelled them “a bridge to the 19th century”. In a world where most people drive, and many commute from home, the idea of sinking tens of billions into high-speed projects seems a poor bet, as Britain has already found with the cancellation of large parts of the HS2 project. Even in China, where political opposition is verboten, the choo-choos have been plagued by corruption, rising costs and massive indebtedness.

Under Biden, Newsom enjoyed large lumps of gravy for his train, but under Trump, he is now likely to have to choose between funding the money-mad rail network or doing such basic things as balancing his budget and facing California’s gargantuan public employee pension costs, as well as paying for healthcare for the state’s estimated 2.5 million undocumented immigrants.

The overpriced choo-choo reflects the ultimate dilemma for Democrats like Newsom. In the 1930s and 1940, under Democrats, American ingenuity produced the infrastructure that underpinned the world’s largest industrial economy – the Hoover Dam, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and countless bridges, roads, and other critical infrastructure.

Today’s presumed heirs of FDR still talk big about infrastructure, but are loath to offend public unions, green lobby groups and progressive non-profits. Most of the successful case studies on infrastructure come from red states like Florida, which built its new train lines at something approaching original costs and deadlines.

If you want to advocate for more government, perhaps it’s best to prove that you can do this efficiently. Newsom’s high-speed rail line proves that, for now, the progressives are prisoners of their own massive incompetence.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Photo: California High-Speed Rail Authority, in Public Domain as a Government Work.

Why I Am the Antiplanner

Randal OToole — Thu, 22 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

In 1997, Metro — Portland’s regional planning agency — issued its 2040 plan to guide the region for the next several decades. The plan was supposed to be in response to a 1995 Future Vision statement written by a group of citizens. Now Metro revising the Future Vision and its plans, but a close look at the region reveals that it should completely scrap the planning process.

The 1995 Future Vision called for “housing affordable for all,” “accessible employment centers throughout the region,” “equitable economic progress,” “public safety,” and reductions in poverty. By all of these measures, the region is worse today than it was in 1997, and this decline is almost entirely due to Metro’s 2040 plan.

As noted in comments submitted to Metro by the Cascade Policy Institute (and which I wrote), Portland housing has gone from expensive in 1995 to unaffordable today — under standard mortgage rules, a median-income family cannot get a mortgage on a median-value home. This has increased wealth inequality. For example, the disparity between white and black homeownership rates grew from 25 to 30 percentage points.

Far from making employment centers more accessible, Metro’s anti-auto stance has increased congestion by 75 percent. Instead of relieving congestion, Metro has been building light rail, which doesn’t adequately serve any employment centers but downtown. While 28 percent of downtown workers took transit to work before the pandemic, less than 5 percent of workers in the rest of the region commuted by transit. Since only about 11 percent of Portland workers worked downtown (and far less today), it is no wonder that transit’s share of commuting has declined and, after Portland’s most recent (and most expensive) light-rail line opened in 2016, total transit ridership dropped.

Meanwhile, public safety has declined and high housing costs have increased poverty and homelessness. To make matters worse, Portland has some of the highest tax rates in the nation thanks to the need to pay for light rail, affordable housing, regional parks, and other Metro schemes.

Worst of all, Metro had a pretty good idea these things were going to happen as early as 1993. In that year, Metro reviewed data for the nation’s 50 largest urban areas to see which came closest to the model for what it planned for Portland. The answer was Los Angeles, which had the highest population density and fewest miles of freeways per capita of any major urban area, and which was also embarking on a program of building or operating nearly 500 miles of rail transit lines.

“In public discussions we gather the general impression that Los Angeles represents a future to be avoided,” commented Metro in that 1993 analysis. Yet “with respect to density and road per capita mileage it displays an investment pattern we desire to replicate.”

Instead of realizing this meant there was something wrong with its plan, Metro decided Portlanders didn’t appreciate how wonderful Los Angeles really was, with some of the worst congestion and least affordable housing in the country.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Photo: Downtown Portland and Mount Hood with the Vista Avenue Bridge — often called the Suicide Bridge — in the foreground. Portland’s quality of life has declined so much in the last 30 years that it is almost as if the city is trying to commit suicide. Source: Spicypepper999 via Wikimedia in Public Domain.

How China Co-opted the Green Movement

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 21 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Rising empires require collaborators to expand their influence and win over adversaries. In this respect, China and other anti-Western regimes increasingly count on green activists, investors, and media to advance their interests. Overall, the greens see China as “pivotal” in the global green-energy transition, as states Sustainability Magazine.

Indeed, over the past decade, the green movement has successfully trolled for big money from groups with strong links to the Chinese Communist Party, as well as some dollops from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which has cynically backed efforts to curb the West’s production of natural gas, the easier to deepen its own energy dominance; and Qatar, known for financing Hamas and other Islamist groups.

Nowhere is the penetration more complete than in the universities, where Chinese and Qatari money are behind the largest proportion of the $29 billion of foreign money sunk into American universities between 2021 and 2024. This, and similar funds flooding Canadian, Australian, and British Universities, buy good will and political influence. Chinese students at institutions like Stanford are also closely monitored by the Beijing regime’s agents in order to stamp out or at least identify dissidents — and when possible, to purloin research for the motherland.

Climate change has emerged as one critical element of this collaboration. The Washington Free Beacon has reported on millions of dollars from a climate nonprofit called Energy Foundation China, run primarily out of Beijing by former Communist Party cadres, flooding campuses. The beneficiaries include the University of Maryland and a professor was arrested for lying to the FBI about his China ties, and then appointed at a Chinese university. The consulting firm Strategy Risks argued Harvard also hosted training sessions for XPCC, a Chinese paramilitary organization, subject to sanctions for being involved in the suppression of the Uyghurs.

The belle of the China ball, not surprisingly, is California. Engagement with the People’s Republic has been long required for elites in the Golden State, whose imports from China are roughly nine times its exports. For China, it is a wonderful place to do business. The country runs a roughly $107 billion trade surplus with California, and the disparities in such things as electronic machinery are immense. California fares better with services, notably software and other tech licenses as well as universities, but this only amounts to $5 billion. As climate policy hurts average Californians through deindustrialization, high energy prices, and climate regulation, it enriches China.

The outreach began under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s predecessor Jerry Brown, who now chairs the legislatively created California-China Climate Institute at the law school of the University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley has been particularly egregious in its embrace of China. So much so that the Government Select Committee on the CCP wrote an open letter to the school, venting “grave concern” about its “joint institute with state-controlled Tsinghua University and the Shenzhen government” and warning that Berkeley is facilitating Chinese espionage of American research.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Homepage photo: Fabrice Florin, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The End of Bourgeois Values

Aaron M. Renn — Tue, 20 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

It’s no secret that America’s working classes - more broadly, those without college degrees and professional jobs - have been living increasingly socially dysfunctional lives. This was documented well by Robert Putnam in Our Kids and Charles Murray in Coming Apart.

Just as one example, America has the highest share of its children living in single parent households of any country in the world. This has profound negative consequences for our country.

One popular culprit for this is a decline in adherence to “bourgeois values” or bourgeois culture. We see these values described well in Amy Wax’s controversial Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed on the subject:

Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. Male working-age labor-force participation is at Depression-era lows. Opioid abuse is widespread. Homicidal violence plagues inner cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic skills, and high school students rank below those from two dozen other countries. The causes of these phenomena are multiple and complex, but implicated in these and other maladies is the breakdown of the country's bourgeois culture.

That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

Failure to valorize and adhere to bourgeois values is part of the conservative theories about the “culture of poverty.”

Bourgeois values are a modernized and secularized version of those of Max Weber’s Protestant ethic. For a deeper exploration of America’s traditional Protestant ethic, see my essay from last year:

Bourgeois values is actually a good term for them because they are associated with the bourgeois economy, that is to say, capitalism, particularly capitalism as it existed prior to roughly the Great Depression.

The problem is that America is now a post-bourgeois country, both economically and culturally. This poses significant challenges to those, such as myself, who want to both reduce social dysfunctions like drug abuse and generally elevate the health, flourishing, and productivity of our people.

I will trace this American post-bourgeois shift across three dimensions:

From a Protestant to a post-Christian culture
From a bourgeois to a managerial economy
From a production to a consumption based society

Read the rest of this piece at Aaron Renn Substack.

Photo: cropped image from portrait of Benjamin Franklin, National Portrait Gallery, via Wikimedia in Public Domain.

The High Cost of California's Green Energy Policies

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 19 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Since the early 2000s, governors and legislators from both parties have signed onto a climate agenda in California that is making energy steadily unaffordable.

Gasoline in California, according to AAA, which tracks national gas prices daily, costs an average of about $4.78, compared with $3.16 nationally. The cost of electricity in the state is now the highest in the continental U.S., at 30.22 cents per kilowatt hour.

You might want to blame the discrepancies on greed — Big Oil practicing price gouging, as Gov. Gavin Newsom has suggested, and utilities lining their shareholders’ pockets. But at the pump and on your light and power bill, California’s high energy prices are better understood as a self-inflicted wound, traceable to the state’s quixotic green energy policy.

The notoriously high cost of gas in the state is the result of a lot of factors — we tax gas to pay for road infrastructure and a less-polluting fuel mix in the summer months. Last year, Sacramento decided to move harder, faster toward its goal of a carbon-less future, adding disincentives for refineries and incentives for EVs that the California Air Resources Board has predicted will add 47 cents a gallon at the pump.

Overall, California’s zero-carbon climate policies — pushing EVs as your next car purchase and heat pumps to cool and heat your house — rely largely on electricity that in turn depends on expensive, and intermittent, energy sources, such as wind and solar. Come hell or high water, California’s leaders are trying to regulate, tax and incentivize their way to electricity that is 100% carbon-free by 2045.

Unfortunately, as green-skeptic energy analyst Robert Bryce notes in books and on his Substack, wherever governments have tried to base their energy supply on a swift shift to renewables — the UK, Germany, California — the result has been huge spikes in energy prices. Germany’s vaunted industrial economy has slowed in part, according to most observers, because of the high cost of renewable energy.

These costs also undermine California’s prosperity in multiple ways. They add to the state’s “energy poverty,” increasing an already extreme divide between haves and have nots, and not just because of how hard it is for low-income Californians to pay their gas and utility bills.

The Air Resources Board’s most recent “scoping plan” — the state framework for achieving carbon neutrality — projects that the shift to renewable energy will result in significant income declines for individuals earning less than $100,000 annually, while boosting incomes for those above this threshold.

“Carbon economy” jobs will dwindle — manufacturing, logistics, oil and gas industry — many of which are well-paying, union jobs. A study by the L.A. Economic Development Commission found that 148,000 direct and more than 350,000 indirect jobs could be threatened by policies aimed at eliminating the industry.

Read the rest of this piece at: Los Angeles Times.

Photo: Noya Fields, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

India Is Asia's Leading Deep Tech Nation

Nima Sanandaji — Sun, 18 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Currently India features in the news due to conflict with neighboring Pakistan. In a time when international trade is shifting, with new trade and tariff deals, India is also a key trading partner for North America as well as Europe. One reason is that while China is the leading manufacturing hub of Asia, India is the main deep tech nation.

The Deep Tech Index, conducted annually by the European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform (ECEPR) with the support of Nordic Capital, maps and evaluates the global deep tech landscape.

The USA has a very significant, and slowly reducing, deep tech lead. There are also three additional nations which hold a significant share of global deep tech, namely the UK, Canada and India.

Strikingly, all four countries which each hold a significant share of global deep tech companies have an Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, as the four are made up of the UK and its major colonies.

A number of other nations in the world also host world-leading deep tech companies. Examples are Germany, Switzerland, China, and Sweden. However, these nations individually have just one or a couple of percent of the world´s 500 leading deep tech companies.

China very likely will rise in the deep tech competition, but while some of the most advanced manufacturing in the world is carried out cost effectively in the country, deep tech progress is still something that China is behind India.

There are five urban regions in India with multiple world-leading deep tech companies. New Delhi and Mumbai are alongside Singapore the leading deep tech centers of all Asia. Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad are other important centers for world leading deep tech development.

Artificial intelligence development is focused to New Delhi and Mumbai. World leading clean energy companies exist in New Delhi, Bengaluru as well as Mumbai. Clean tech, such as recycling, is another important technology area, of which Hyderabad and Jaipur are important global centers. New Delhi also hosts deep tech development of biotechnology.

Photonic and electronic is another strength of India, with Bengaluru, New Delhi and Mumbai all being important global centers in this area. Bengaluru as well as New Delhi excel in robotic & communication deep tech. Pharmaceutical deep tech is centered at Mumbai, while fintech is focused to Chennai. New Delhi, Mumbai as well as Ahmedabad host world leading companies in space & advanced materials. India has a cost-effective space industry.

Currently India hosts 5 percent of the world´s leading 500 deep tech companies. The country is also home to 5 of the world´s top 100 universities in engineering & technology, according to the QS World University Ranking. All five of the top Indian schools in technology are Indian Institute of Technology centers, namely in Bombay, Delhi, Madras, Kharagpur and Kanpur.

India's real strength is that essentially all the world´s leading technology institutes – be it in Stockholm, Santa Barbara, Cambridge or Sydney – are full of students and researchers from India. Similarly, Europe as well as the USA have many Indian talents in technology areas. European decision makers are eager to sharpen their competitive edge compared to the USA, when it comes to attracting top talents from India.

In a way, talents are India's most important export. The universities and tech companies in Europe and North America are full of talented individuals from India. India itself has long had trade relations with the West, with some Indian companies over time becoming global technology leaders. This country with growing population does need numerous policy reforms, such as strengthening private property rights and raising education levels to compete with places such as China, Singapore and South Korea which excel in the PISA school tests.

During coming years India can, if the nation avoids war and conflict, improve these policies and perhaps also open up for more trade with Europe. India's already impressive deep tech strengths are likely to continue growing over time.

Nima Sanandaji, Director, European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform (ECEPR)

Photo: Tech workers in Delhi, by ILO Asia-Pacific, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Why Cities Have Lost Their Appeal

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 16 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Over the past half century, media and academic sources repeatedly suggested that increasingly dense cities would dominate the future. Places such as London, San Francisco and Chicago would dominate an economy.

Today, this assessment seems grossly dated. Even in the pages of the urbanista New York Times there are widespread fears of an “urban doom loop.” But this, too, is a stretch. Great core cities will not go the way of post-imperial Rome, but their role is being recast as the urban frontier shifts increasingly to the periphery.

What we are seeing mirrors H.G. Wells’s vision. He predicted that most economic life, and most families, would shift to the suburbs and exurbs. The urban core would be reinvented: no longer the uncontested center of political and economic life but a vast theater of “concourse and rendezvous,” ideal for the childless wealthy, necessary for their servants and a beacon to the young and the culturally aware.

This would surely represent a major shift away from the idea of the dominant “transactional city,” filled with workers packed in ever-higher buildings, drawn from the vast array of bedroom satellites across a huge geographic area. Office occupancy has been declining since the turn of the century. Covid accelerated that trend.

Although they are no longer the epicenters of economic life, London, New York, Paris, Tokyo and Miami retain an irresistible allure to educated young people, globe-trotting elites and cultural creators. In New York, while the population has declined, the ranks of the ultra-rich have continued to increase. These favored cities have become less economic capitals and more stage props for luxury-brand groups.

Now, the bulk of new urban development takes place outside the core of the city, largely in the suburban and exurban periphery. In 1950, those living in city cores accounted for nearly 24 percent of the US population; today that share is less than 15 percent.

Suburban, and particularly exurban, metropolitan growth has accelerated in recent years. From 2010 to 2017, 91 percent of employment growth among major metropolitan areas was outside central business districts. The 50 highest-growth counties in the US, almost all suburban or exurban, had an employment increase of more than 2.5 times that of the others in 2019.

These changes are generally greeted with horror by our cultural, academic and media elites. But if some analysts still predict a return to urban growth and greater office occupancy, even devoted friends of urban density admit that the urban future will be increasingly shaped by sprawl.

The drivers here are demographic shifts and technological improvements. With the development of instantaneous communication, notes a report from Brown University, neither the size nor density of a city makes it more productive. Indeed, almost all the leading tech centers in the country are primarily suburban in nature.

In New York, while the population has declined, the ranks of the ultra-rich have continued to increase.

The rise of remote or hybrid work is accelerating this shift. According to a study by the University of Chicago, in high-end business services and technology, a third of the workforce can function remotely – as can employees in roughly 50 percent of jobs generated by Silicon Valley.

Demographics provide the most compelling evidence of peripheral ascendancy, which can be seen in the movement of educated young people, particularly as they hit their thirties, away from places such as New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Even before the pandemic, two-thirds of millennials favored the suburbs. The same thing is happening in other countries. Rather than signaling decay, the growth of suburban and exurban communities represents the cutting edge of 21st-century urbanism. These areas are becoming cities of a new sort, serving as domiciles but also places of employment, shopping and the arts.

This process is in its infancy. New exurban areas are being planned, notably by Elon Musk in Texas and Bill Gates in Arizona. Rather than an abandonment of the city, this is a continuing reinvention of it.

The rise of suburban and exurban living reflects a desire for safer, cleaner and less congested environments, and core cities will only be revitalized if they address the quality of life they provide. Donald Trump’s return has been greeted by many urban leaders with about as much enthusiasm as a reprise of the bubonic plague. But a second Trump presidency could also force mostly Democratic municipal leaders to address challenges on their own.

The right’s drive to close off America’s international borders may slow the movement of populations to urban centers. But it could also reduce threats to public order and social cohesiveness. In New York, warns its former governor and mayoral aspirant Andrew Cuomo, the “migrant crisis” has become “the tipping point” of “the urban death spiral.” The challenge for older cities lies not in notions about diversity but in making the streets safe and creating opportunities for business and culture.

A promising sign lies in the election of new, pro-business moderates in cities where crime has been a key issue. In Houston, more than 80 percent of voters listed it as their primary concern. In 2023 the public elected as mayor, by almost two to one, veteran state senator John Whitmire over left-wing firebrand Sheila Jackson Lee.

If traditional cities seek to find their future niche, they will need to enact a political revolution. It will not alter the fundamental dispersion of urban life – but even the old cities can find a comfortable place in the new metropolis if they can find ways to make urban life work.

This piece first appeared at: The Spectator.

Photo: Trey Ratcliff, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The YIMBY Movement's Twists and Turns

Pete Saunders — Thu, 15 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

In recent weeks it seems that the progression of the YIMBY movement is reaching some limits on its growth, causing it to make some unexpected twists in the logic of its supporters.

A month ago, New York Times reporter Conor Dougherty wrote a pretty compelling story in favor of sprawl, or the continued outward expansion of our metropolitan areas. In his article, Dougherty marvels at how the Dallas metroplex has been able to accommodate explosive growth while remaining affordable. While touring the Dallas metro area by air with an exec from Hillwood, a development company owned by Ross Perot, Jr., Dougherty sees how Dallas does it:

“The Dallas area has grown by about three million people over the past two decades, and, he predicted, it would continue to push outward for many decades more — 40 miles from downtown, then 50, until the metroplex bulges across the state line into Oklahoma, surpassing the population of the Chicago region and continuing to expand from there. “I told my kids, ‘All you got to do is fill in this map, and you’ll have a pretty good business,’” Perot said.

The executive took me around one of the firm’s projects, quaintly named Pecan Square, which has a faux downtown complete with parks and pickleball courts; a co-working space on the square has been built with exposed ductwork, to give it an industrial vibe. Once finished, Pecan Square will have 3,100 homes, starting around $415,000 for a three-bedroom.”

Relatedly, there’s growing support for the use of publicly-owned land for the development of housing, particularly affordable housing, to reduce costs. Strangely, this idea has found common ground between many YIMBYs and the Trump administration. Who would’ve thought that:

“Federal officials have estimated that 400,000 acres of federal land could potentially be made available for housing development, said Jon Raby, the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management. The estimate, which will continue to be refined, was determined after officials looked at land within 10 miles of cities and towns with a population of 5,000 or more,” he said.

The effort could be most impactful in states like California, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Wyoming, Oregon, Idaho and Colorado, Mr. Raby said. Officials said the lands vary widely and range from deserts and grasslands to mountains and forests. The lands are generally uneconomical or difficult to manage because of their scattered or isolated nature and ‘must meet specific public interest objectives.’ ”

Many supporters of YIMBYism, like I assume Dougherty is, have focused for years on reforming zoning legislation to increase housing production, especially in high-cost housing cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. And they’ve had some high-profile successes, such as the elimination of purely single-family home zoning districts in Minneapolis a few years ago, allowing the construction of 2-4 unit dwellings where none could be built before. California YIMBYs have made great strides statewide in passing legislation making it faster and easier for homeowners to produce accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in single-family zoning districts. YIMBYs have also been successful at implementing transit-oriented development near transit stations in cities like Portland, Denver and Arlington, VA, just outside of Washington, DC.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: aerial view of Dallas suburbs by Alfred Twu, via Wikimedia under CC 1.0 License.

Donald Trump has Scrambled the Old Class Allegiances

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 14 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

US president Donald Trump has disrupted the nature of class politics. In a reversal of long-standing allegiances, working-class Americans – including many minorities – have shifted towards the MAGA right. Meanwhile, the well-educated, the corporate elites and the government-dependent have generally veered leftwards.

Rather than the relatively simple Marxist notion of a proletarian conflict with the bourgeoisie, we are seeing a more splintered and nuanced class politics across the West. These divisions are not simply driven by income, race or education, but increasingly also by how people earn their living, and how tariffs, policies and regulations impact their daily lives. These new class tensions threaten to push politics towards the fringes, both left and right. As society frays, the era of consensus politics is firmly at an end.

Until last year, the oligarchy that dominates much of the world economy (and that of the US) reliably allied with the political establishment, whether in Davos, Washington, London, Ottawa or Brussels. They embraced many of the woke positions on gender, race and especially climate, while largely disdaining MAGA as well as more traditional Republicans.

As a result, in the US, the main beneficiaries of the much-discussed oligarchic ‘dark money’ have been, contrary to the general media perception, the Democrats. Big-spending oligarchs like Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman and Marc Benioff helped Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris raise well over $1.5 billion – the highest figure in history – for her losing campaign.

Now that some oligarchs, like X owner Elon Musk and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, have come out for Trump, the woke left has started to finally push back against their power over US politics. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have launched a ‘fighting oligarchy tour’ to wild applause in the largely oligarch-owned mainstream media. In the same vein, the Atlantic, owned by Steve Jobs’s widow, has denounced Musk’s oligarchic embrace of ‘strongman politics’. Progressives were far less concerned when Google camped out at the Obama White House (visiting 427 times during his administration) or when Harris scooped up big cash from oligarchs.

Perhaps the biggest political divide between the oligarchs comes from how they make their money. Many of those rallying to Trump actually build things and compete directly with China. Most obviously, this includes Elon Musk, who sources from China but also competes with its industrial machine at both Tesla and SpaceX.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo: White House Archive, via Flickr under Public Domain.

Demographia International Housing Affordability – 2025 Edition Released

Wendell Cox — Tue, 13 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

This annual report assesses housing affordability in 95 major markets across eight nations (Australia, Canada, China, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, United Kingdom and the, United States). The 2025 edition covers the third quarter of 2024.

Key Points

Ratings: The report uses a median price-to-income ratio (“median multiple”) to determine affordability.

Affordability Categories: Housing markets are rated from “affordable” to “impossibly unaffordable” based on their median multiple (Table ES-1).

Geography: Housing markets are labor markets (which are also metropolitan areas or functional urban areas), largely defined by the “commuting shed.” Housing affordability comparisons can be made, (1) between housing markets (such as a comparison between Adelaide and Melbourne) or (2) over time within the same housing market (such as between years in Adelaide).

Variations within Nations: The report emphasizes that affordability often varies significantly between markets within the same country. National averages aren’t always representative.

Housing affordability in 2024 is summarized by nation in Table ES-2.

Details on housing affordability for all 95 markets, displayed by median multiple, are provided in Table 3 and by geography in Table 4 of the full report.

For the fifth year in a row, Pittsburgh (PA), in the United States, was the most affordable market in Demographia International Housing Affordability. This year the Pittsburgh median multiple was 3.2, which is moderately unaffordable.

The least affordable market in Demographia International Housing Affordability in 2024 was Hong Kong, with a median multiple of 14.4, followed by Sydney at 13.8, San Jose, at 12.1, Vancouver at 11.8, Los Angeles at 11.2, Adelaide at 10.9, Honolulu at 10.8, San Francisco at 10.0, Melbourne at 9.7, San Diego and 9.5, Brisbane at 9.3 and Greater London at 9.1. All of these markets are rated impossibly unaffordable.

Existential Threat to Middle-Income Households

Among high-income nations, middle-income homeownership was once widespread, with house prices aligned with incomes. Since the 1990s, however, prices have surged —especially in
markets governed by urban containment strategies early (e.g., San Francisco, Sydney, London)— with homes now costing 9–15 times household income.

This shift is linked to the international planning orthodoxy, which restricts urban expansion through greenbelts, urban growth boundaries (UGBs), rural zoning, and compact city policies. While intended to increase density and sustainability, these policies have severely limited land supply, raising land and housing costs and making housing unaffordable for the middle class.

Nearly all severely unaffordable housing markets follow the urban containment model. The resulting land scarcity inflates prices, particularly near UGBs. This pattern, rooted in the UK’s 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, has spread virtually around the world.

Purpose of Urban Planning: Urban planning is meant to improve lives. As Jane Jacobs said: “If planning helps people, they ought to be better off as a result, not worse off.” Yet urban containment has made many people worse off, by virtue of its association with substantially worsened housing affordability.

Current planning approaches emphasize multifamily housing and other densification while restricting new detached homes at the fringe—strategies that helped create today’s crisis.

Counterurbanization: Middle-income households are increasingly leaving expensive markets for more affordable places—a trend especially visible in Canada and the U.S. These moves reflect long-term structural problems. People are “voting with their feet,” to obtain the housing denied them in markets with deteriorated housing affordability. Without major reform, this migration seems likely to continue.

Elaboration and sources are in the full report. Click here to read and download the full report.

Image and charts are from the report. Charts by the author; cover image for the report from the GPA Archive, Carol M. Highsmith collection and used under CC 2.0 License.

Chinese Influence Is Leaving California Dangerously Exposed

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 12 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Recent revelations that the University of California received massive donations from organisations linked to China’s Communist Party — including a $220 million investment in Berkeley’s joint research project with Tsinghua University — may have elicited a harsh reaction from the Trump administration. But it should not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the state’s increasingly dependent relationship with China.

For a generation, California’s political and economic elites have been eager to abase themselves for Chinese money. This started under Jerry Brown, who assiduously worked to maintain close ties, but his successor, Gavin Newsom, has gone further, welcoming links with groups controlled by the Communist Party.

Newsom, of course, was the first US Governor to visit China in four years. In 2023, the Governor went to Beijing to kiss the ring and explore “collaboration” with the Communist regime, pleading for statewide carveouts from China’s tariffs. Then a month later, Xi Jinping visited San Francisco, where Newsom and the rest of the state establishment gave him a standing ovation.

This royal treatment might seem odd considering how critical Newsom has been of other “dictators”. Over the last eight years, the California governor has repeatedly attacked Trump over his alleged threat to democracy. But he remains curiously silent on the world’s most powerful — and fascistic — authoritarian regime. To this day, the California Governor has continued to send fraternal missions to China, partnering with organisations controlled, like much of everything, by Communist Party operatives. Clearly, there are some double standards here.

Such subservience makes sense given an economic relationship that already resembles a classic colonial tie. China runs a roughly $107 billion trade surplus with California, and the disparities in such things as electronic machinery are immense. California fares better with services, notably software and other tech licenses as well as universities, but this only amounts to $5 billion.

This dependency may alarm some in Washington, but it conforms to the preferred style of many California progressives. Free trade plays to the state’s deindustrialisation and climate agendas, raising prices inexorably on California companies and households. Even during the Biden years, California greens opposed tariffs on Chinese EVs and some have sought to “take out” Tesla, the only EV-maker producing in the state.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo: California Governor's office, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Do Blacks Deserve to Have Money Wasted on Them Too?

Randal OToole — Sun, 11 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Critics of plans to build more light-rail lines in Charlotte, North Carolina say that proposed new lines will fail to serve the neighborhoods of blacks who “need it most.” Blacks are more likely than whites to ride transit, they say, so black neighborhoods need to have light rail too.

They are wrong about black’s use of transit. According to the 2023 American Community Survey, 1.5 percent of both black and white workers who lived in Charlotte took transit to work. In 2019, blacks had been more likely to ride transit — 4.5 percent vs. 2.5 percent — but since then the rise of remote working has allowed most former black Charlotte transit riders to work at home.

History also shows that Charlotte’s light rail has significantly harmed its transit system. In 2005, before Charlotte’s first light-rail line opened, 3.3 percent of workers living in Charlotte took transit to work. By 2019, when Charlotte had 19 miles of light rail plus a 4-mile streetcar line, transit share had fallen to 1.8 percent.

Charlotte’s first light-rail line opened in 2007. Between 2006 and 2019 total transit ridership in Charlotte grew by 15 percent and transit passenger-miles grew by 18 percent. While that sounds good, in the same time period the Charlotte urban area’s population grew by 70 percent and driving grew by 64 percent.

What’s most painful is that transit passenger-miles were gaining market share before Charlotte built light rail. Between 1996 and 2006, the region’s driving grew by 109 percent but transit passenger-miles grew by 138 percent. Transit ridership grew by only 80 percent, but the average transit trip was longer as people as average trip lengths increased from under 4 miles to more than 5 miles. Even 80 percent ridership growth in the 10 years before light rail is stunning when compared with the 15 percent growth in the 13 years after 2006.

Thus, Charlotte is just one more example of light-rail failure. Charlotte residents should support more rail transit only if they want to pay high taxes to make transit even more irrelevant than it is today.

This piece first appeared at The Antiplanner.

Photo: Charlotte rail, screenshot from WCNC video (embedded above).

The Changing Politics of Oligarchy

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 09 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

In American politics, the main beneficiaries of “dark money” have in recent years tended to be Democrats. Google representatives were reported to have visited the White House at least 427 times during Barack Obama’s two terms. And in 2024, big spenders like Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, Marc Benioff, Alex Soros, James Murdoch, Michael Bloomberg, and various donors from Wall Street helped Kamala Harris raise over US$1.5 billion for her campaign, the highest figure in history. This may be starting to change, as a number of powerful Silicon Valley billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have shifted their money to the populist Republican Party.

However, political shifts like these are less important than the unprecedented degree of control that a handful of people and institutions enjoy over our communications, finances, consumer choices, and culture. In recent decades, the influence of billionaires on both of America’s two main political parties has grown. The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which essentially ended any meaningful control over campaign spending, only accelerated this trend. In 2024, election spending, in real dollars, is estimated to have been more than twice what it was two decades ago.

Political shifts...are less important than the unprecedented degree of control that a handful of people and institutions enjoy over our communications, finances, consumer choices, and culture.

According to Pew Research, eighty percent of Americans now believe that wealthy donors have too much power, and they are right. Google and Apple account for nearly ninety percent of all mobile browsers worldwide, while Microsoft, Android (Google), and iOS (Apple) account for roughly the same share of all operating-system software. Three tech firms now account for two-thirds of all online advertising revenue, which in turn accounts for the vast majority of all ad sales. To find historic parallels for this kind of dominance, you have to go back to the Gilded Age, an era of money men and monopolists that lasted from about 1870 until the early 1900s.

The rise of very wealthy liberal tech entrepreneurs caused many commentators on the Right to worry that American politics would soon be dominated by an alliance of the Democratic Party and major tech firms such Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. That convergence of interests, they feared, would impose a radical progressive agenda on much of America and close down dissent across the internet and social media. Even the ex-wives, siblings, and children of tech oligarchs were now accruing enough money to become reliable funders of the Left’s agenda.

Read the rest of this piece at: Quillette.

Photo: screenshot of front row at 2025 Trump inauguration, via YouTube.

Pipe Dreams

Robert Bryce — Thu, 08 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

In the early 1990s, Ken Lay and his colleagues at Houston-based Enron, were, as one veteran of the energy business told me, “the kings of the American pipeline business.” Enron owned valuable pipelines across the US, and it moved or sold about 17% of all the natural gas consumed in the country.

But Lay and his top lieutenant, former McKinsey consultant Jeff Skilling, didn’t believe in pipelines. As I explain in my 2002 book Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron:

Skilling’s brain was too big for pipelines...The only thing that mattered to Skilling about Enron’s pipelines was that they kept providing him with cash that he could use elsewhere. For Skilling, elsewhere meant only one place: the trading business.

Lay and Skilling were sure they could go “asset light” and turn Enron into a trading powerhouse. To help fund that effort, they began selling the company’s pipelines. One of the buyers was Lay’s former second-in-command, Rich Kinder. In 1996, after Lay reneged on an agreement to make him the CEO of Enron, Kinder quit the company. Kinder told another Enron executive that he had no choice. “If you aren’t the lead dog,” he said, “the scenery never changes.”

In early 1997, Kinder and a colleague, Bill Morgan, bought a natural gas liquids pipeline from Enron for $40 million. It was an asset that Enron had determined wasn’t profitable enough to keep. The two men parlayed that bet, and many others, into a pipeline colossus called Kinder Morgan, which now has a market capitalization of $56 billion. Kinder, a lawyer by training, is the company’s largest shareholder. Forbes estimates his net worth is $10.4 billion, and thanks to Kinder Morgan’s annual payout of about $1.16 per share, his income from dividends alone likely exceeds $250 million per year.

Enron filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on December 2, 2001. At that time, it was the biggest bankruptcy in US history. The legacy of Enron is still reverberating in the US energy and power sectors. Given the tumult of the last few weeks, and in particular, the losses that happened last week in global equity markets, it may be profitable for investors to consider the lessons that can be learned from Enron’s demise and Kinder’s success. As I noted in Pipe Dreams:

The pipeline business is more akin to the utility business than the energy business. Pipelines carry a product from one spot to another and the owner of the pipe gets paid a fee for the service. It’s a straightforward, profitable business. As one former Houston Natural Gas executive said of pipelines, “All they do is make money. It’s boring, but it’s dependable.” (Emphasis added.)

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: Wikimedia in Public Domain (Government Work).

Bad News for American Doomers

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 07 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

It’s once more springtime for America doomers, those who believe the United States will soon lose its global top-dog status. Much of this is in reaction to the poorly considered ramblings of President Trump. The Economist, for example, suggests that “the actual land of the free” has moved from America to Europe, with the Continent epitomizing “moral norms” on the climate, free trade, and rule of law.

These prophecies — or dreams — of America’s downfall conflate the United States, a people and place, with the US government. The difference between the two things isn’t well-understood, especially in Europe. Whoever controls the White House and Congress has an effect, to be sure, but the true power of America lies not with its elected leaders, but in the ambitions of its people, its remarkable physical endowment, and the constraints of its constitutional order (Trump is learning about that last — to his chagrin).

Great empires don’t fall easily. Often, they rebound from the worst setbacks. Rome suffered under the misrule of Caligula, Nero, and Commodus, but resurged under more enlightened leaders well until the fifth century AD. In the East, the Roman imperium lasted for almost a millennium longer than that. Britain, too, didn’t fade after losing American Revolutionary War; the country simply moved on, incorporating much of the world into its imperial system for the next 150 years.

Likewise, the United States emerged as the victor in the Cold War a couple of decades after the disaster of Vietnam, the social upheavals of the Sixties, and mass deindustrialisation.

Today, Europeans, having permanently lost their empires, may be tempted to console themselves with thoughts of inevitable American decline. Hence, the new talk about Europe being the best place for the “pursuit of happiness”. Yet in the real world, Europeans are far from happy. As Gallup International found in 2022, the world’s top-five most pessimistic populations are all in Europe, including Italy and France; others like Britain are similarly distressed.

This may reflect the fact that Europe has consistently lagged behind the United States in adjusting to changing economic trends. Over the past 15 years, the eurozone economy grew about 6%, measured in dollars, compared with 82% for the United States, according to International Monetary Fund data.

To view this another way, consider that the most powerful economy on the Continent, Germany, is barely bigger than that of my adopted home state, California. America’s industrial giants have faded, victims of their own incompetence and shortsightedness in Washington. But they were replaced in large part by aggressive new firms, something Europe hasn’t produced in a long time.

Two decades ago, one could legitimately see Europe as a determinative third force on the global stage. But this is no longer the case. The most obvious weakness is in technology: of the top 50 tech firms, only three are based on the Continent. The rest of the list is dominated largely by the United States, including in artificial intelligence, with China coming in a firm and ascendant second. This gap may widen as massive new chip and computer plants open up in Texas and Arizona, steps encouraged under both Joe Biden and Trump.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo: Chris F.

Winning Suburbs is the Key to Winning Elections

Tue, 06 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

There’s a great line from the comedy show Kath & Kim, where the very suburban Kim expresses her desire to be like affluent city people. “I want to be effluent Mum," she says. "You ARE effluent, Kim," replies the equally suburban Kath.

The new political geography of affluent inner urban residents viewing life differently (and voting differently) to suburban and regional voters was proven again in the recent Australian Federal Election of 2025. The geographic pattern has previously been obvious in booth-by-booth results for recent State and Local Government elections, and the same happened for the Federal poll.

Inner city areas of our major urban areas are two things at the same time: they are much wealthier than suburban city dwellers, and more inclined to vote for far left/Green causes. The concentration of affluence in inner cities has been underway for many years, as inner urban areas were gentrified. Whether it is Sydney’s Balmain, Melbourne’s Richmond, or Brisbane’s New Farm, once working class/industrial areas are now home to the wealthiest people, living in the most expensive real estate, enjoying the highest levels of urban amenity and living the highest standards of living. They’re increasingly oblivious to the lives and issues of their fellow Australians.

This graph shows how it looks for Brisbane’s New Farm and West End, compared to middle and outer suburban areas. The same story is repeated across other cities in the country.

This level of income disparity also explains why voters in these areas view life differently to the suburbs. Worried about waiting lists for health care? Nope, they have the highest levels of private health cover. Worried about school class sizes or education generally? Nope, their kids attend the best private schools. Worried about the cost of groceries? Nope, they shop at Harris Farm markets in trendy areas. Worried about the cost of fuel? Nope, they probably have a taxpayer subsidised Tesla (soon to be traded in protest at Elon Musk’s MAGA conversion). Worried about crime and personal safety? Not really, they have private security or live in impenetrable apartments. Worried about being told you have to return to the office and can no longer work from home? Not really, the office for them is very close to home, plus they probably have managerial positions. Worried about immigration, housing shortages and the housing affordability issue? Not really, they can afford to live in high end areas and will outbid others if that’s what it takes. Worried about the cost of electricity? No, they can afford it - but are more worried about carbon emissions and climate change – so the very high cost of energy transition is worth it.

It's the irony of modern politics though that these affluent inner-city residents are also the ones most likely to vote for leftist/Green causes – many of which are anathema to their own interests. There would not be too many suburban superannuation accounts with over $3million that will be subject to an unrealised gains tax, for example.

Read the rest of this piece at The Pulse.

Photo: New Farm Riverwalk, Brisbane River views from Bowen Terrace by Chris Olszewski, under CC 4.0 License. Graphs: courtesy author.

We Must Not Take Our Eyes Off the True Threat — China

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 05 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

By his supreme idiocy, U.S. President Donald Trump has stirred up anti-American sentiment, but largely to the benefit of America’s archrival, China. Although Prime Minister Mark Carney is European in his manners and predilections, he is a charter member of the cadre of useful idiots who seem intent on imposing Chinese vassalage on Canada.

The Euro-centric economist has proposed that Canada strengthen ties with the European Union, but Europe is, for now, a spent force. Canada is more delectable for China. It has many of the raw materials that Beijing craves, with rising oil imports at the fore. Canada also has a large Chinese diaspora community, roughly 1.7-million people of Chinese descent, that Beijing seeks, with some success, to manipulate to its ends.

One would expect some Canadians to resist these trends but Carney epitomizes an establishment, including American corporations and Wall Street, that remain remarkably untroubled with Beijing’s stated aim of becoming a global economic superpower by 2049. So, while assaulting Trump for his trade policy, Canadian political leaders seem to be missing that the West’s greatest long-term challenge is the relentless Sinic mercantilism.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s attempt to appease China in order to “Trump-proof” and revive the country’s moribund economy seems more like the road to ever great irrelevancy, as is the case for much of Europe. China is trying to build a mega-embassy in London that will help it surveil and harass those who fled Communist rule for the assumed safety of Great Britain.

Trump may be a posturing maniac, but the China challenge is of a more considerable magnitude. China already dominates the industrial world; it now boasts roughly as many factory exports as the U.S., Japan and Germany combined. It is the world’s the world’s largest automobile market and the biggest steel producer. It is also investing heavily to take over the aerospace industry from leading companies like Bombardier, Boeing and Airbus.

Carney and other members of the elite cannot address these threats as long as they adhere to notions like “net zero,” an obsession of Carney and his fellow poobahs. For all his talk about building energy infrastructure, Carney’s green obsessions could instead lead Canada into a dependent relationship with solar and electric vehicle manufacturers based in China, a country that emits more greenhouse gasses than the U.S. and the EU combined.

Read the rest of this piece at: National Post.

Photo: Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

They Don't Care

Randal OToole — Sun, 04 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Minnesota legislators are not only considering shutting down the Northstar commuter train, they are raging at the Metropolitan Council, which is the Twin Cities’ regional planning agency which also runs its transit agency, for its light-rail cost overruns. At issue is the Southwest light-rail line, which when Metro first asked the federal government for funding was supposed to cost $1.25 billion but now, according to a state legislative audit, is costing $2.86 billion.

Even after adjusting for inflation, that’s roughly a 100 percent cost overrun. By the time the federal government agreed to share half the costs, the projected cost had risen to $2 billion. From that point on, the state or local government is responsible for all cost overruns, so what they thought was going to cost state and local taxpayers $1 billion is ending up costing them almost $2 billion.

The Southwest Line is expected to open this year and will be the Twin Cities’ third light-rail line. “The Met Council on all three of your light rail projects has come in so far over budget,” one legislator observed, “it’s like you don’t care.” Of course they don’t care so long as legislators willingly fund the cost overruns.

The Met Council may have reason to care in the future if they ever want to build more projects. “I don’t think the citizens of Minnesota have comfort enough to, if they had a choice, allow the Met Council to take on another rail project,” said another legislator.

Such comments would be expected coming from Republicans, and they did. What should worry the Met Council is that even Democrats (or, as they are called in Minnesota, DFL for Democratic-Farmer-Labor) are upset with the cost overruns. “There is always a rationale or an excuse,” complained one DFL legislator. “Reform is necessary . . . on how the council does business or how it’s structured.”

There’s no indication that the legislators commented on ridership trends, but currently Twin Cities light-rail ridership is less than 55 percent of what it was before the pandemic. Downtown Minneapolis is one of the slowest downtowns to recover, and unless a miracle occurs, ridership on the new line will also be well below expectations.

Before the pandemic, a third of downtown workers took transit to work, but only 3.4 percent of workers in the rest of the region commuted by transit. Fewer than 7.5 percent of jobs in the region were located in downtown Minneapolis, and at some point legislators will realize that a downtown-centric transit system does a disservice to the 92.5 percent of people who don’t work downtown.

This piece first appeared at The Antiplanner.

Photo: Twin Cities light rail via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.

Gavin Newsom’s California Has Become a Neo-feudal Nightmare

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 02 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Never one to miss a reason to crow, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, was out in front of the media at the weekend, bragging about how his state now boasts the world’s fourth largest GDP, surpassing Japan. This is a natural posture for a potential presidential candidate, a chance to show how under his leadership California has thrived.

Unfortunately, few are likely to believe him. Newsom must realise that the notion that California is a model for the rest of the United States – the rationale for the Newsom-led “resistance” against Donald Trump – is no longer widely accepted. In a national 2024 survey, only 15 per cent of respondents felt that California is a model other states should copy; 39 per cent said the state should not be emulated. Barely one in three state residents – and only one in four younger voters – now thinks of California as a good place to achieve the American dream.

Even the GDP news has to be taken with a grain of salt. For one thing, Japan’s downgrade is likely to be partly a result of the decline of that country’s currency, which has been weakening against the dollar for several years.

But beyond GDP, the illusion of Californian success is also a product of high asset values, like real estate, exacerbated by regulatory policies, with house prices typically more than twice as high as the national norm. Add to this the huge capital gains accruing to a handful of tech firms, who over the past decade have doubled their share of the S&P, and you have a large part of the explanation for California’s asset boom.

Rather than the exemplar of a new “progressive capitalism”, or a model for social justice, as Newsom and his cadre assume, the beneficiaries of the state’s growth have been very much concentrated on the upper crust. It may be springtime for Apple, Google, Nvidia and Meta (formerly Facebook), but the prospects for most Californians are anything but sunny. In reality, modern California increasingly resembles a feudal country – like Qatar, Brunei or the United Arab Emirates – where fantastic wealth is largely owned by a small elite.

Once an example for upward mobility, today California manages to be both home to the highest number of billionaires and the highest cost-adjusted poverty rate. The state’s poverty rate continues to worsen. Seven in ten Californians say economic inequality is getting worse, according to a recent survey. The Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) estimates nearly a third live in poverty or near-poverty – roughly 13 million people in total.

Even the geography of growth since 2017 has been highly concentrated in three Bay Area counties, bolstered by four of the world’s seven companies with trillion dollar valuations. By some counts, real GDP in these counties rose at four times the rate of the US average while the rest of the state, home to the vast majority of the population, has grown well below. The same can be said about race; California may talk boldly about “equity” but in reality, its economy is remarkably unequal, with majority black or Hispanic counties growing well under the national average.

Overall, California today is one of the worst states in the nation when it comes to creating jobs that pay above average, while it is at the top of the heap in creating below average and low-paying jobs. Between 2008 and 2020, the state created five times as many low wage jobs as high wage jobs. In the past three years, the situation worsened, with 78.1 per cent of all jobs added in California from lower-than-average paying industries versus 61 per cent for the nation as a whole.

As tech stocks and housing in Montecito (home of Meghan and Harry) soar in value, Californians suffer the nation’s second highest rate of unemployment, lagging in job creation in comparison to its chief rivals, like Texas and Nevada. In the past year, its GDP growth has also been among the lowest in the country.

This will be in no small part because California has the highest energy prices in the continental US, double the national average, which has also exacerbated “energy poverty,” particularly among the poor and those in the less temperate interior.

Much of this reflects the impact of climate policy, a favourite hobby horse of the state’s dominant elite. But these same policies increase poor and working family costs, and shift billions of dollars to the wealthy, in the relentless pursuit of unilaterally modelled emission targets that even advocates admit cannot possibly “fix” the global climate.

It’s working class jobs – construction, logistics, manufacturing, energy – that have been most severely hit. Even without adjusting for costs, no California metro area ranks in the US top ten in terms of well-paying, blue-collar jobs. But four – Ventura, Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Diego – sit among the bottom ten. They are also far more negative about the future of the economy than those nationally, and particularly compared to people in competitor states such as Texas.

Rather than the land of entrepreneurial opportunity, California increasingly presents a picture of medieval inequality. Huge wealth is concentrated within in few hands while around a quarter of the nation’s homeless population lives in the Golden State, many concentrated in disease and crime-ridden tent cities in Los Angeles or San Francisco.

If this is the model of Newsomian capitalism, it’s unlikely to have many buyers in 2028.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Photo: GetArchive in Public Domain.

Did Over-Reliance On Solar & Lack Of Grid Inertia Cause Spain’s Blackout?

Robert Bryce — Thu, 01 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Less than two years ago, climate activists in Spain celebrated after a utility announced it would close the country’s largest coal plant, the 1,468-megawatt As Pontes facility. According to an activist at Beyond Fossil Fuels, the closure of the coal plant was demonstrating “how much renewables are outperforming fossil fuels on price, energy security, and desirability.”

Earlier this month, renewables looked good. On April 16, Spain’s electric grid ran on 100% alternative energy. And on April 21, as David Blackmon noted on his Substack earlier today, solar production in the country set a new record of 20,120 megawatts, which, for a few hours, met nearly 79% of demand.

That was last week.

Today, Spain, Portugal, and other parts of Europe were hit by a massive blackout that Red Electrica, Spain’s state grid operator, is blaming on a "very strong oscillation" on the electric grid. The outage has resulted in “transport chaos” as traffic lights went dark and subway and train service was halted. Mobile phone networks went down. Spain has declared a state of emergency and some regions are now begining to restore power. While it’s too early to blame any particular cause, there is reason to believe that Spain’s electric grid, which now produces the second-most solar energy in Europe (after Germany), has been weakened by its heavy reliance on solar. A few minutes before the blackout, some 60% of the electricity on Spain’s grid was coming from solar.

Understanding how solar and wind energy weakens the grid requires understanding the physics of electricity, grid inertia, and what a University of Queensland professor has dubbed the “pressure cooker” effect of renewables.

The easiest way to comprehend grid inertia is to think of electricity like water. Unlike the water system, which can tolerate significant changes in pressure and flow rates, the electric grid operates under very tight tolerances that require voltage and frequency to stay within narrow ranges regardless of load or power production changes.

Since the days of Edison, the grid has relied on large generators with a lot of mass. The weight of the spinning parts inside the generators has a lot of inertia that keeps the flow of electricity — think of it as pressure — on the grid at steady levels. The mass of those large generators acts as shock absorbers that allow the grid to absorb sudden changes in load or generation. Using a garden hose as A Question of Power:

The amount of electric power (which is measured in watts, but in this case, think liters) that can be pushed through that hose is the product of the amperes (flow rate) multiplied by the voltage (water pressure). The more pressure (volts) applied to the water in the garden hose, the greater the flow rate (amperes) that can be pushed through it. The higher the pressure and flow rate, the more liters of water (watts) that can be delivered to your house.

I continued:

Just as the local water utility uses its pumps to deliver tons of water at high pressure and volume to its customers, the electric utility uses spinning generators — think of them as electron pumps — to push huge volumes of electrons (water molecules), at high pressure, into the local grid. The key difference between the water grid and the electric grid is that the water grid is far simpler. For instance, if the pressure in the water grid drops, it only means that customers must spend a little more time filling up their coffee pots or swimming pools. On the electric grid, voltage (again, think water pressure) must be kept stable regardless of how many customers are using electricity...The grid must be continually tuned so that electricity production and electricity usage match. Matching generation and consumption helps assure that voltage on the grid stays at near-constant levels. If voltage fluctuates too much, blackouts can occur.

The challenge that wind and solar bring to the grid is that they do not provide the same type of spinning mass (read: inertia) that the electric grid has relied upon for decades.

To understand what happened in Spain, I called a friend of mine. He is an electrical engineer who has worked all over the world selling hardware that detects problems on the electric grid and helps improve grid reliability. He has worked in the field for decades. Given the early stage of the investigation, he was reluctant to be too definitive. Still, he said it is “highly likely” that Spain’s heavy reliance on solar and wind contributed to the blackout. “What we are seeing across all power systems is that they are more brittle. They don’t have enough inertia. They have far less spinning reserve and margin for error. Earlier in my career, it was common to have a 15% minimum spinning reserve.” (Emphasis added.)

By spinning reserve, he referred to the backup power plants operating in case they are needed. Today, he said, electric grids are “running on thin margins with very little spinning reserve.”

The best explanation of grid inertia and its importance was published in 2016 by University of Queensland professor Simon Bartlett. In a paper written for the Energy Policy Institute of Australia, “The ‘Pressure Cooker’ Effect of Intermittent Renewable Generation on Power Systems,” Bartlett declared that the “practical upper limit for renewables is around 40% of total electricity generated.” He continued, “The scale-up of intermittent renewables not only diminishes the robustness of a particular power system but can also magnify the short and long-term risk of investing in non-renewable generation assets and the power grid itself.”

Here's the critical section, in which he explains that in a conventional electricity system:

Rotating kinetic energy in heavy turbines and generators is immediately available and is automatically converted into electricity the instant the power system starts to slow down following an unexpected generator breakdown anywhere in the power system. Electrical and magnetic energy from electrical generators is instantaneously released following a fault on the network, playing a critical role, along with rotating inertia, in power system stability and high speed power system protection. Both wind-power and solar PV are technically incapable of storing, controlling, and releasing energy in any of these ways, and simply convert the available wind or sunshine into electricity depending on the prevailing weather conditions.” (Emphasis added.)

Bartlett went on to say that batteries could, in theory, meet some of the demands of the electric grid, but they “have limited utility compared to conventional methods.”

Again, it’s too early to say why Spain and Portugal got hit by a blackout. However, the outage provides a few key reminders. First and foremost, it shows how disruptive widespread blackouts can be. Second, it demonstrates how fragile our electric grid is. Third, it’s another reminder that we assume the reliability and integrity of the electric grid at our extreme peril. The electric grid is the Mother Network. It is the life-support system upon which our entire civilization depends.

It may be too early to blame alt-energy for the blackout, but it’s clear that Spain’s heavy reliance on solar energy is one of the prime suspects.

This piece first appeared at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: courtesy Robert Bryce Substack.

YIMBYism Goes Big With the Abundance Movement

Pete Saunders — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Can the movement we’ve come to know as the YIMBY (Yes-In-My-Back-Yard) movement level up to address our nation’s inability to get things done? There are a growing number of people who believe so. But just as I have reservations about YIMBYism, I’m concerned about how implementing its principles on a national scale could work.

I haven’t yet read the new book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. I realize I owe it to the authors, and to my readers, honestly, to read the book in full and offer my thoughts. But I just don’t have the time to do that now, and I want to make a point even as the book seems to be spinning itself into a movement.

Here’s what I know – or believe to know – about the book. Klein and Thompson argue that for the last 50 years or so, America’s most liberal and progressive places have made it nearly impossible to think big and take on the daunting challenges before us. Whether it’s affordable housing, or infrastructure, or addressing climate change, the regulatory structure we’ve established since the 1970’s has so many checks and balances that the structure opens projects up to detailed scrutiny, substantially increases project costs, and ultimately disincentivizes builders to build. America hasn’t been able to get what it needs today because the regulatory environment from an earlier era expressly prevents it.

Again, I haven’t read the book, but I have viewed Klein’s video on its theme, posted in the New York Times. You can see that here:

As an example, Klein and Thompson explore the failed implementation of California’s proposed high-speed rail project, first supported by Governor Jerry Brown in 1982. The high-speed rail line would connect the cities on the California coast, from San Diego to San Francisco, and still northward to Sacramento, and do so in the same time as a flight. As Klein explains in the video, high-speed rail is nothing new; it’s been in much of Europe and in Japan for at least 60 years.

Forty-three years later, a much smaller version of high-speed rail is being constructed, in an area that serves none of the people originally targeted to benefit from it (the San Diego, LA and San Francisco metros), at a super-inflated cost. Why? In a word, process. The releasing of bids for construction. Contract negotiations. Environmental reviews. Lengthy public review and comment periods. Union considerations. Property acquisition for rail right-of-way.

All of this takes time, adds to the cost, and ultimately diminishes the scale of the project. According to Klein, the $33 billion cost estimate set for the San Diego-to-Sacramento high-speed rail line in 2008 is already at $110 billion now, at least. Because of process delays, the line has been reduced to a segment between Bakersfield and Merced, and the earliest that project could be completed would be somewhere between 2030-2033.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: courtesy of The Corner Side Yard.

The Sun Belt Will Save Europe

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Florence. No city on earth is a more miraculous testament to what entrepreneurs can do, and how hard work and grit can build beauty that endures. Yet as he looks out, over the red roofs and graceful churches of the Tuscan gem, Mattia Guidi sees less a glorious past, and more a stagnating present. “Tourism has a dual effect,” the political scientist at the University of Siena tells me. “Some benefit but there’s not a lot of opportunity.”

It’s a fair point. For if tourism powers the bloc’s otherwise torpid economy, more galleries and restaurants is not what Europe needs. Squeezed by a conservative business culture, and an elephantine welfare state, genuine entrepreneurs increasingly seek exile in the Anglosphere, while the workers that remain wallow in low-paying service jobs. Especially as the shock of Trumpism forces the continent to defend its fading interests, it’s a recipe for economic catastrophe, with the EU expected to encompass just one tenth of global GDP by 2100.

Yet if the Old World needs to reclaim the magic of the Medici, the continent’s redemption will come far from Florence. Rather, Europe’s periphery is leading the way, with places like Portugal and Greece offering sunny business prospects dashed with pleasant weather. Combined with similar dynamism in the former communist states of eastern Europe, it’s increasingly possible to talk of a European Sun Belt. For just like the former Confederacy, once disdained and now booming, the continent’s future will be made on its edges — if, that is, the EU’s reactionary status quo can finally be vanquished.

Europe’s economy is broken. Over the past 15 years, the Eurozone has grown about 6% in dollar terms. The US has jumped 82%. The biggest gap is in tech: of the top 50 tech firms, only three are located in Europe, with the list unsurprisingly dominated by Silicon Valley. Not that Europe’s entrepreneurial deficit is not only in ones and zeros. MIT researcher Andrew McAfee has shown how, over the last 50 years, the US has created “from scratch” companies with market cap of over $10 billion five times faster than the EU. No wonder some observers now quip that Europe is “a museum as a continent and a museum as a stock market”.

Faced with this malaise, and geopolitical upheavals from Kyiv to the White House, it’s little wonder that Europe’s leaders, in Paris and Berlin, are rushing to reindustrialise. That’s clear enough militarily, with the Bundestag promising €500 billion for new tanks and missiles. Yet if the German defence minister claims his countrymen have an “erotic relationship” with weapons — and we agree that bolstered self-sufficiency is necessary given Trump’s rising isolationism — it’s unlikely that Europe can thrive in the 21st century through force-of-arms alone.

Certainly, you shouldn’t count on Brussels, prime mover of the continent’s decline, to reverse the slide to irrelevance. Mario Draghi’s much-ballyhooed response to the current crisis followed the old patterns of green obsessions, social “inclusion” and ever greater conformity with Brussels edicts. Europe’s grandees believe that money fleeing Trumpian chaos will head to a permanent economic shift towards the Old World. But that ignores the fact that Europe is far more dependent on exports than the US, and lacks new industries that can compete with either America or the rising powers of the developing world.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo: Architas, via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.

Abundance for Whom?

Jennifer Hernandez — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Kudos to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson for pointing out that states and cities ruled by Democrats continue to demonstrate their failure to get anything built—even as they continue to insist that they are dead set on solving the “housing crisis” and the “climate crisis.”

In their new book, Abundance, California comes in for an outsized—and deserved—share of the blame. The state has expended over $20 billion on a train to nowhere with nary a mile of track completed. The city’s budget to build one public toilet on a pre-plumbed pad in an existing San Francisco city park topped $1.7 million. Government fees to build a single apartment in San Francisco top $150,000. And the cost of building one small apartment for a low income household in Silicon Valley and the westside of Los Angeles routinely exceeds $1 million (more than $900 per square feet).

Business as usual in California means delays measured in decades (including lawsuits that can be filed by anyone against anything for any reason), and an “Everything Bagel” regulatory regime that denies, then delays, and then adds multiple millions in fees and mandates to every housing, energy, infrastructure, and industrial project that endures the indefinite torture and actually gets approved. As a result, California had no “shovel ready” clean energy, infrastructure, or advanced manufacturing and chip facilities ready to begin construction when the Biden administration was doling out billions to the mostly red states that actually got their act together and issued permits to build.

Meanwhile between 2019 and 2024, California tax collections rose by 58% from $140B to $222B, and the state’s employee roster expanded by 58,000 – even though the state’s population decreased by more than half a million people. State employees do not teach school, or provide health care outside prisons. They don’t build housing or factories or solar farms. But they can look forward to a pension that pays 90% of their salary and guaranteed deluxe health care for the multiple decades between retirement and life expectancy.

In their defense, California’s ruling progressives have achieved “abundance” in a few categories. We have the nation’s highest poverty rate, the highest homeless rate, and a million people without safe drinking water in their home. This is the deep dysfunction that Abundance argues must be corrected by Democrats (and the socialist left) to regain any semblance of voter trust in deep blue states like California if they wish to build a lasting governing majority nationally.

So thank you Klein and Thompson for pointing out that the Democrats’ policy choices, fetishization of regulatory proceduralism, and failure to make housing, energy and the cost of living affordable to working households, has been a governance catastrophe—and for urging Democrats to actually prove the party is still committed to the working class by getting stuff done (and built).

But the ugly elitist underbelly of Abundance, in what I hope is just version 1.0, is that it only seems to apply to those of us who live in cities, can afford renewable electricity and electric vehicles, or are content to get around by bike or bus. Klein and Thompson, like many YIMBYs, swoon about the joys of city life as the launching pads of upward mobility, as capitals of arts and culture, as pantheons for smart people who dine, drink, and complain about daycare costs, schooling costs, public safety, and the need for deeper income redistribution. I get it: been there, done that.

Read the rest of this piece at: The Breakthrough Journal.

Jennifer Hernandez is a land-use and environmental lawyer and Breakthrough Institute Board Member.

Photo: courtesy Breakthrough Institute.

Gavin Newsom's Grid Impossible

Robert Bryce — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Make no mistake, California Governor Gavin Newsom is running for the White House in 2028. In February, he launched a podcast with the uncatchy name, “This is Gavin Newsom.” His first guest was conservative activist and commentator Charlie Kirk, the head of Turning Point USA. Newsom claims he wants to have “honest conversations” with people on both sides of the political aisle.

Whatever you think of Newsom, you have to admire his cheekiness. Recall that last December, the too-handsome-by-half politico convened the California legislature for a special session designed to “protect California values” during the second Trump term.

How are those California values working out?

People are leaving the Golden State in droves. According to U-Haul, California has come in last place for one-way traffic for five years in a row with more people moving out than moving in. Poverty in Newsom’s state — which already has the highest poverty rate in the country — is increasing. Here’s the key finding from a September report by the California Budget & Policy Center:

California’s poverty rate increased to 18.9% in 2023, up from 16.4% in 2022 and 11.0% in 2021, according to new Census data. The state’s poverty rate was particularly high among Black and Latinx Californians and California continued to have the highest poverty rate of the 50 states. California’s high poverty rate means that 7.3 million state residents lacked the resources to meet basic needs last year — more than the populations of California’s four largest cities: Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, and San Francisco.

Thanks to Newsom and California’s vast climate-obsessed bureaucracy, the state’s affordability crisis will get worse between now and 2028. California’s motor fuel prices are among the highest in the country. Gasoline in California now costs about $4.84 per gallon, 53% more than the US average. Those prices will soon be much higher. Last October, Phillips 66 announced it would shutter its 139,000 barrel-per-day refinery in Los Angeles by the end of 2025. The company announced the move shortly after Newsom signed a law aimed at preventing gasoline price increases.

On Wednesday, San Antonio-based Valero, which owns two refineries that produce 14% of the state’s gasoline, said it will permanently shutter its Benicia refinery by April 2026. That refinery handles 145,000 barrels of crude per day. In addition, the company may close its 91,000 barrel-per-day refinery near Los Angeles. This is not surprising. Last fall, Valero’s CEO, Lane Riggs, said, “California is increasing its regulatory pressure on the industry, so we’re really considering everything.” Last August, supermajor oil company Chevron (formerly Standard Oil of California) decamped from San Ramon for Houston due to California’s policies that, as CEO Mike Wirth said, “raise costs, that hurt consumers, [and] that discourage investment.”

Whether it is gasoline or electricity, Californians — and in particular, low-income Californians — are getting mauled by Newsom’s energy policies. Under state law, California must get 60% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, and its grid must be 100% carbon-free by 2045. Last month, Pacific Gas and Electric, the state’s biggest utility, asked the California Public Utility Commission for another rate increase. Rate increases are business as usual at PG&E. Last year alone, the CPUC approved six rate increases for the giant utility.

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: California Governor Gavin Newsom met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing in 2023, via California Governor's office in Public Domain.

The Dangers of a Political Gender Gap

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Throughout history, poverty, class and economic self-interest have driven radical political movements. The Bolsheviks harnessed the anger of impoverished workers and peasants to create a movement that controlled the world’s biggest country for seven decades. The Nazis came to power due to both the Great Depression and resentment towards a small but economically nimble Jewish community.

Today, extremist politics is not bubbling up primarily from the economically disaffected, as occurred both in medieval and modern times during periods of upheaval. The self-professed radicals of our age seem more driven by their own inner cultural angst and disturbed psychology.

This angst is now expressed increasingly with violence, from the well-funded campaign against weirdo-genius Elon Musk, which includes arson attacks on Teslas, to the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, the most destructive outbreak of civil disorder in US history, as well as the awful ‘January 6’ riots. Blood-curdling rhetoric now comes even from the once respectable political class. Democratic congresswoman Jasmine Crockett wants Musk ‘taken down’ and says that Democrats have to be ‘okay with punching’. One study suggests that nearly 38 per cent of respondents and over half of ‘progressives’ would see the assassination of Donald Trump as ‘justified’.

At the core of today’s political extremes lies a deep-seated social anxiety, fuelled by atomisation and alienation between the sexes. This is particularly true for the young women who have become the vanguard of so-called progressives. This can be seen in leftists’ support for Luigi Mangione, who allegedly murdered healthcare executive Brian Thompson. In California, a centre of lunacy, there is even a pending proposition on healthcare reform named after Mangione. Taylor Lorenz, a former star reporter at the Washington Post and New York Times, has called the alleged murderer ‘a morally good man’. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins was promoting a defence fund for Mangione before being shamed into taking it down. There is even a controversy about his ‘fangirls’, the young females who dominate the crowd at hearings about the case.

This division between men and women comes at a time when females are outpacing men in school and careers, leaving them with fewer potential partners, and are increasingly sceptical of marriage. Over 28 per cent of young US women, notes Gallup, identify as LGBTQ – more than twice the rate for older millennials. Over five per cent of US high-school students struggle with their gender identity, according to the CDC.

Alienated from traditional familial ties, young, educated and unattached women have become ever more prominent across the far left. Some even embrace violently homophobic and anti-feminist movements like Hamas and see no contradiction with their own supposedly progressive beliefs. A large, highly disproportionate segment of anti-Israel activists, notes researcher Eitan Hersh, consists of LGBTQ-identified people.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo: David Stanley, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Europe is Second Best in Deep Tech and Willing to Trade

Nima Sanandaji — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

A systematic mapping of where the world’s global leading companies in deep tech are located shows that the US continues to have a significant advantage. However, Europe is catching up somewhat and is clearly the part of the world that is second best in having world leading deep tech companies. There is also a close connection between technological success in business and academia.

The number of world leading technological institutions in mathematics and engineering that are located in Europe is slightly higher than in North America. Now that Europe is open to trade with the outside world while the US is not as open, there is a particular global relevance to the technological competence that is located in Europe.

The US in particular, but also Canada, is currently leading in deep tech. A full 67 percent of the 500 global leading companies in advanced technology are located in North America. However, Europe is a clear second with just under 19 percent of the companies, followed by Asia with 11 percent. Oceania, Africa and South America have a total of approximately one percent each of the world's leading deep tech companies. Compared to last year, Europe has increased, and the US has declined, with Santa Clara Valley in particular losing some of its previously towering lead.

Europe currently has particular strengths in clean tech, fintech, and computers and quantum computers. London, Zurich, Eindhoven, Stockholm and Cambridge are examples of regions in Europe with world-leading deep tech companies.

There is a clear connection between technological progress in academia and in business. Countries that have a higher proportion of the world’s top 100 universities in mathematics and engineering per million adult population also tend to have more world-leading deep tech companies per capita. High PISA scores are also clearly linked to having more successful deep tech companies.

Here, Europe’s advantage is clear. Europe has 31 of the world’s top 100 universities in mathematics and engineering. Just under 32 in Asia, but more than 23 in the US and 27 in North America including Canada. Now that the US is becoming somewhat less easy to do business with and travel to for academics and experts, there is an increased opportunity for Europe to grow as a leading technology partner to the world.

In Sweden, school results according to the PISA measurement are now about as good as in the USA. However, in Estonia, Ireland and Switzerland we find European countries with good school systems where high taxes do not undermine the value of education – here the school results of pupils in 9th grade are according to the global comparison clearly higher than in the USA.

A global benchmark shows that countries with stronger property rights, lower taxes on corporate profits and lower taxes on capital gains tend to have a higher concentration of world-leading deep tech companies per million adult inhabitants. Europe's large economies need growth reforms, so they stop punishing growth through excessive tax burdens.

While China is a world leader in the efficient production of, for example, cars and batteries, the country is still somewhat behind in deep tech. China and the rest of Asia are investing heavily in technology, but Europe still has an important lead that should not be underestimated.

Many global value chains will also in the future include Europe, the US and the rest of the world. To the extent that countries seek alternative trading partners than the US, however, Europe has a unique position. The fact that Europe now tends to have lower salaries for experts compared to the US is a competitive factor.

In institutional competition, it was long the case that the US could grow faster than the major European economies through lower taxes and more business-friendly regulations. With changed economic policies on both sides of the Atlantic, with an increased focus on growth in Europe and protectionism in the US, conditions are allowing for Europe to catch up.

The US alone currently has 62 percent of the world's leading deep tech companies. Four of the leading regions in the world with the most world-leading technology companies are Santa Clara Valley, Boston, New York and Los Angeles in the US. The fifth, London, is in Europe, however. The fact that Europe is second only to the US in advanced technology means that the expertise exists in many tech areas, while prices are typically lower. From a global perspective, this is an important competitive advantage. As economic policies in Europe are more focused on growth than before, this is Europe's chance to catch up.

Nima Sanandaji, Director, European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform (ECEPR)

Graphs: courtesy the author. Lead photo: ETH Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich) is an engineering, science, technology, mathematics and management university. It is consistently ranked among the top universities in the world, currently ranked 4th in Europe overall, and 3rd best university in the world in engineering, science and technology. Photo by Dennis Jarvis, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Trump’s Chaos has Brutally Exposed the EU’s Fatal Flaws

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

I thought crack-smoking had lost its appeal, but perhaps it is still a regular pastime among journalists determined to take down Trump’s America. The Economist, for example, has suggested that “the land of the free” has moved across the Atlantic, from America to Europe. The continent, the magazine claims, is now the best place to enjoy the “pursuit of happiness”, while embracing “moral norms” on following climate edicts, fostering free trade and preventing oligarchal overreach.

Really? They certainly can’t be thinking of the “pursuit of happiness” in terms of economic opportunity. Even The Economist cannot hide the fact that Europe is an economic laggard compared not just to America, but to China and increasingly India, now estimated to be the world’s fifth largest economy. Over the 15 years to 2023, the eurozone economy grew by about 6 per cent, measured in dollars, compared with 82 per cent for the US, according to International Monetary Fund data.

To put it another way, the most powerful economy on the European continent is barely larger than my adopted home state of California. Two decades ago, one could legitimately see Europe, with its own regime of protectionist policies, as a third force in the world economy. Today this is no longer the case.

The most obvious weakness is in tech, whose oligarchs The Economist seems to dislike. Of the top 50 tech firms in the world, only three are located on the continent, with the list dominated largely by the United States and China a firm second. But the entrepreneurial gap is deeper than tech. Even at the grassroots level, as American entrepreneurs have flourished in the past decade and self-employment has grown, those in Europe have actually declined.

Rather than meet this competitive challenge, the European, and British, default seems to be battening down the hatches. Too many insist that the priority should be to preserve both their massive welfare states and the draconian climate regime. Mario Draghi’s much ballyhooed response to the EU’s current crisis focuses on doing more of all the things that bedevil Europe, notably its green obsessions, devotion to social “inclusion”, and ever greater control from Brussels.

Hope springs eternal in London, Paris, and Brussels. Some believe that money fleeing Trumpian chaos will turn their fortunes, but it’s unlikely that investors will go long-term to a place with little in the way of entrepreneurial opportunities or to economies far more export dependent than the US. Perhaps more attention should be paid to the surge of investment – estimated now at as much as $7 trillion – from companies seeking to relocate or expand in the US.

The current European regime is wasting its enormous stockpile of talented and creative people. Many move abroad or find themselves tied to an economy increasingly dependent on tourist dollars. Tourism has a dual effect: some benefit but it doesn’t provide a lot of opportunity.

Even as they disdain Trump, Europe’s leaders might consider embracing some of his policies. For example, there appears to be no way to follow “net zero” strictures – now largely gone in America – without facing “energy suicide”. High energy prices, combined with electrical vehicle mandates, surely all but guarantee that Europe will lose its grip on the car market to Chinese producers. Germany’s entire industrial structure seems likely to decline: it could lose upwards of 400,000 of its estimated 800,000 auto jobs by 2030.

China, not a tariff-imposing America, is eating away at Europe’s fading industrial economy. Europe’s “net zero” policies play right into the hands of a country that seeks to export its batteries and EVs, but is still massively reliant on coal, making it by far the world’s largest emitter of CO2. China also has an interest in speeding Britain’s already rapid deindustrialisation, as the recent scandal at the Scunthorpe steelworks showed so vividly.

Europe might also seek to pick up on Trump’s tight control over the US border. European leaders seem disdainful towards their own citizens, even though they are already voting for anti-migrant, nationalist and culturally conservative candidates, such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni. At the same time, the role of unvetted migrants in undermining order on the streets of the continent’s cities simply undermines one of Europe’s great assets, its uniquely beautiful and formerly safe urban centres.

Remarkably, some Europeans think that, as a way to get back at America, Europe should seek to pivot to China. Britain’s Keir Starmer, as a way to “Trump proof” his declining realm, has appeared especially willing to embrace this notion. A huge new Chinese embassy near the Tower of London looks increasingly likely to be built, the largest such diplomatic mission in Europe. Some fear it will prove a convenient base to snoop on Britain’s Chinese population and influence its political elites.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Photo: Picryl, Government Work/Public Domain.

After Pope Francis, The Vatican Must Embrace Energy Humanism

Robert Bryce — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Pope Francis was a historic figure. He was the first Jesuit pope and the first from the Americas or the Southern Hemisphere. He was the first pope to take the name Francis, a nod to St. Francis of Assisi, a mendicant who espoused the ideal of poverty and service to people. (He was also the patron saint of the environment, animals, and birds.) Francis had considerable charm and humility, two qualities that the Catholic Church needed in the wake of his imperious predecessor, Pope Benedict. He worked until the very end of his life. Despite a long illness, he appeared in St Peter’s Square on Easter Sunday and died on Easter Monday.

But before we begin the beatification process, let’s take a sober look at what Jorge Mario Bergoglio said about energy while serving as the 266th pope. Doing so shows that the late pontiff’s views weren’t just naïve. They were anti-human.

His 2023 apostolic exhortation, “Laudate Deum,” reads like it was written by Greta Thunberg and a horde of Brussels-based bureaucrats. Francis claims that “millions of people are losing their jobs due to different effects of climate change: rising sea levels, droughts, and other phenomena affecting the planet have left many people adrift. Conversely, the transition to renewable forms of energy, properly managed, as well as efforts to adapt to the damage caused by climate change, are capable of generating countless jobs in different sectors.”

Millions are losing their jobs due to climate change? Where, exactly, is that happening? If the transition is “properly managed,” it could create “countless jobs”? Really? Doing what? Putting solar panels on convent rooftops? Who will ensure “proper” management? Germany? Francis didn’t back up any of those extravagant claims. Laudate Deum contains 44 footnotes. That paragraph doesn’t have a single citation.

Francis’ main felony appears in paragraph 55, where he claims, “the necessary transition towards clean energy sources such as wind and solar energy, and the abandonment of fossil fuels, is not progressing at the necessary speed.”

Let’s ignore the foolishness of attempting to run the global economy on the incurably intermittent energy provided by the wind and sun. Let’s also ignore the landscape-obliterating, bird-and-bat-killing, farmland-paving energy sprawl that comes with large alt-energy projects. Instead, let’s focus on hydrocarbons. Claiming we should give up coal, oil, and natural gas — which, according to the latest IEA data, provide 80% of all global energy — ignores physics, economics, and the needs of the world’s poorest people.

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: Catholic Church (England and Wales), via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Slightly Higher Speed Rail

Randal OToole — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

New York University’s Marron Institute just released a report saying that Amtrak and commuter-rail lines could improve their service by making what the institute believes are low-cost changes to their operations. Specifically, the report suggests that railroads replace Diesel locomotives with electric, place platforms at all stops so passengers don’t have to go up and down stairs, and widen the doors on their cars so multiple passengers can board at one time. Based on this report, Bloomberg concludes that “America’s railroads are losing ground when it comes to infrastructural innovation, especially compared to other countries.”

Because wider doors and level platforms would allow people to board more quickly and electric locomotives accelerate faster than Diesels, the report estimates that making these changes would save an average of 2 minutes per commuter stop and 4 minutes per intercity rail stop. This means that Amtrak’s trains between, for example, Seattle and Portland, which have six intermediate stops, could go the distance in 24 fewer minutes.

It’s worth noting that the state of Washington recently spent more than $700 million improving the Seattle to Portland line and managed to cut all of five minutes from the route’s travel times. So there may be some merit to the Marron Institute’s ideas.

The Marron Institute has done a lot of research on why transit projects cost so much in the United States. This is their idea for some supposedly low-cost projects that could be more successful.

Color me skeptical. On one hand, electrification is enormously expensive. California recently electrified the 51-mile double-tracked route between San Francisco and San Jose at a cost of $2 billion. Doing the same for the Seattle-Portland route would cost several times more — especially since Amtrak would not be happy changing locomotives for trains going through Seattle and Portland, which means it would want to electrify the entire 467 miles between Eugene and Vancouver.

Raising platforms also means substantially altering existing cars to install automatic doors that are wider than the cars are now designed for. Frankly, it would probably be less expensive to simply buy all new cars, but that would still amount to tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars per route.

On the other hand, subtracting a few minutes from the schedules of these trains will not make them significantly more attractive than they are now. The real problem with trains is not that they are slow but that they don’t go where people need to go. That won’t be fixed by widening the doors.

For what it’s worth, Caltrains completed its electrification on September 21, 2024, and monthly ridership since then has been about 30 percent more than the year before. But ridership in August and September was 30 percent more than the year before as well, so it may be that the increase in ridership is due more to people returning to work in downtown offices than to slightly faster trains.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Photo: MTA Long Island Rail via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

5 Reasons Why I'm Cancelling My Subscription to The New York Times

Robert Bryce — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

We have lived in Austin for 40 years. And for nearly all of that time, Lorin and I have subscribed to the New York Times. For decades, we took the paper version. When that got too pricey, we switched to the digital-only subscription. Last week, we got a notice of a price increase. Instead of paying $18 monthly, the Times wants us to pay $33!

That’s the last straw.

I love newspapers and the smell of newsprint. I grew up with newspapers. My parents took the Tulsa World, delivered in the mornings, and the Tulsa Tribune came in the afternoon. I read them both religiously. Early in my career, I published articles in both. I’ve been a reporter for four decades. I’ve long considered the Times to be essential to my job. I’ve written for the Times. In the 1990s, I worked as a stringer for the paper and briefly (very briefly) had hopes of landing a job there. I’ve published op-eds in the Times, including one on the silliness of carbon capture and another on N2N, natural gas to nuclear.

But the Times has lost its credibility and its relevance. Its credo was once “all the news that’s fit to print.” That slogan is now almost a laugh line. The Times has devolved into an agenda-driven outlet that refuses to cover anything that doesn’t fit its agenda. Of course, the same could be said of many — or perhaps most — news outlets. The difference is that the Times has long been considered the paper of record. Given that, it should, in theory anyway, strive for evenhandedness. However, the paper no longer publishes anything close to what might be considered “fair,” particularly when it comes to reporting on energy and climate issues.

Here are five reasons why I’m canceling our subscription.

Yes, inflation is here. Prices are rising for everything from eggs to copper, and Tariff Man’s on-again, off-again gyrations are likely to mean higher prices on a whole lot of things. But for the Times to nearly double its price with no increase in access or quality? That’s insulting. And it’s particularly insulting given the myriad of other outlets available at lower cost or for free. (The Times trades under the ticker NYT. It has a market capitalization of about $8 billion and booked a $294 million profit last year.)

The most likely cause of the pandemic was a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But the Times, which prides itself on its investigative work, has never published a complete analysis of exactly what happened and why. To be clear, last year, the oped section ran a piece by Alina Chan on five reasons why the pandemic “probably started in a lab.” (In late 2021, Chan and Matt Ridley published Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19. In 2023, Chan was on the Power Hungry Podcast.) In January, the Times ran a piece by Julian E. Barnes acknowledging that the CIA now favors the lab leak theory. (Barnes covers security and intelligence-related issues for the paper.)

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: The New York Times building in the early 1900s, via The New York Public Library in Public Domain.

The "Great Bones" of Rust Belt Cities

Pete Saunders — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

I went to St. Louis over the weekend, and I was reminded how much I love the way St. Louis neighborhoods look. The city has wonderful vernacular architecture that leads to beautiful neighborhoods at a human scale. That’s not true everywhere, since St. Louis has lost a lot of character through abandonment and demolition, and the scars of highway construction exist throughout the city. But St. Louis is perhaps the quintessential city with “great bones”.

If you’re not familiar with St. Louis, take a look at the image above, and this one below:

A view of homes in St. Louis’ Shaw neighborhood. Source: stlouisneighborhoodsguide.com

Over the years I’ve heard urbanists of all types say that Rust Belt cities were primed for a comeback, someday, because they have “great bones”. But how can we define “great bones” and make it a strategy for growth? This is an especially good question given the work-from-home era we live in now, and where we work and live aren’t necessarily connected anymore.

As for me, I view “great bones” as the quality of the built environment of a city. It’s subjective, yes, but there’s some agreement among people about community quality. Given a chance, people will choose neighborhoods (and I think we all choose neighborhoods or communities, not entire cities or metro areas) that provide us with the housing we like, good schools for our children, parks, shopping amenities, social gathering spaces, and a welcoming environment. The desire for public transit, walkability and multimodal accessibility, and the mix of housing will vary with each person, as would the level of public-facing or private-facing view wants to give.

I laid out my so-called “Big Theory” of American urban development several years ago, and brought it up again last month. I think how people look at whether a place has “great bones” or not falls somewhere into the Big Theory framing. Essentially, people prefer the kind of built environment of particular times in history, and the infrastructure and amenities that come from them, and I think they come in a general order. The strongest preferences are for new places among the public because they’re, well, new. Contemporary housing and commercial development designs, upgraded roadway and utility infrastructure that’s not in danger of deterioration. There’s also a preference for much older places that have a development character that’s difficult to replicate in our cities today. Lastly there’s a vast middle type of built environment. It’s new enough to be missing the character of older places, and old enough to be missing the contemporary comforts you might want.

For me, a good proxy for assessing development quality and character is looking at U.S. Census housing data. A table that’s been included in the Census and American Community Survey data for decades is Table S2504: physical characteristics of occupied housing units. I look specifically for Census estimates on when housing structures were built, and that gives me a sense of what kind of “bones” a place may have.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: A view of St. Louis’ Central West End neighborhood. Source: stlouisneighborhoodsguide.com, courtesy of The Corner Side Yard.

Train in Vain

Thomas Buckley — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Ten thousand years from now, future archaeologists will be allowed back into the wasteland that was once known as California.

They will find many wonderous things but what they come across in Central Valley will astonish them – mile after mile after mile of concrete pillars, crumbling decks, arched bridges seemingly connecting nowhere to nothing and straight line after straight line.

Some will state that it must have been an attempt to create an alien spaceport, others will note that the various segments point to different constellations in the night sky and posit that it was an effort to tap into the great universal presence.

Digging will uncover broken fragments of bronze plaques, leading one archaeologist to insist that all of the structures need to be looked at as one monument, a vast linear temple to the god Hi-Spe.

Then another will neuralink into the tattered and tawdry remains of what is now called the internet and, after months of searching, find the California High Speed Rail Authority’s 2008 Business Plan read it and say:

“Are you kidding me? Really? No wonder the civilization collapsed.”

Wednesday, the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office drove the 48^th final nail into the coffin of the project, stating categorically that if the project cannot find another $7 billion dollars by next June it completely and utterly grinds to a halt.

“There is no specific plan to meet that roughly $7 billion gap, we also think there is some risk that gap could grow,” Helen Kerstein of the LAO told legislatures Wednesday. “This isn’t a way out in the future funding gap. This is a pretty immediate funding gap.”

She added that the project “could come to a complete halt in 15 months without the funding increase.”

The latest news even shocked some Sacramento Democrats. Well, not shocked (they already know) but at least caused them to actually criticize the project.

“The timing of the project review seems totally out of whack with when we need to be making decisions,” said Assemblywoman Cottie Petrie-Norris (D–Irvine.) “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.”

The rail Authority – which was supposed to present a fully updated business plan to the legislature but hasn’t yet - has exactly zero practical suggestions as to how to to find the money, saying under its breath that maybe the state (which already has a $76 billion deficit this fiscal year) should help or that maybe it could get some federal funding (actually, the feds are looking for ways to get their $4 billion back) or that private funding will finally – after 17 years of beating the corporate bushes to find anyone to invest and failing – come to fruition.

Read the rest of this piece at The Point.

Thomas Buckley is the former Mayor of Lake Elsinore and a former newspaper reporter. He is currently the operator of a small communications and planning consultancy and can be reached directly at planbuckley@gmail.com. You can read more of his work at thomas699.substack.com.

Photo: courtesy The Point.

Can Democrats Exploit Trump's Tariff Chaos?

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

As with many political movements, MAGA represents a fragile coalition of groups that often have little in common — and, at the extremes, may even detest one another.

This tension has been brought into clearer focus by Trump’s recent exemption of tech products from tariffs, a decision likely influenced by the oligarchs in the President’s corner. After all, firms like Apple depend largely on Chinese manufacturers, while Wall Street investors still see the Middle Kingdom as a potential source of future profits. In contrast, smaller firms — such as those who import toys or furniture —enjoy no such protection.

Clearly, the tariff proposals are far less popular than Trump’s moves on such things as the border, gender and the crackdown on universities. Indeed, tariffs are opposed by most Americans and are clearly eroding his support base even as many back protecting US manufacturing.

It is too early to see the impact of tariffs on ordinary people, but it’s not hard to see that higher prices for household utensils, clothing and even food are likely to affect them. Perhaps most disruptive will be the cost of imported cars — a mainstay of many families — which could rise several thousand dollars. Inflation did much to undermine Biden’s Administration, and Trump could suffer a similar fate.

Of course, these exemptions might be mitigated over time as companies adjust to domestic manufacturing or even break their dependency on China. Some companies — such as Nvidia — are already responding by promising to build up to $500 billion worth of artificial intelligence infrastructure in the US over the next four years. The problem, though, may be timing; it takes three to five years to build a new semiconductor plant, and the results may not be felt for several more.

Nevertheless, with these exemptions, Trump risks appearing as though he is giving preferential treatment to his wealthy donors. In theory, this should provide an opening for Democrats. Trump’s great achievement over the last decade has been to win over working-class voters; for the first time in decades, Americans are more likely to identify the GOP with the people than the Democrats. But Trump’s polling on his handling of the economy — a proxy for tariffs — is now underwater, and the Democrats have an opportunity to reassert themselves as the party of common sense.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Photo: White House, Public Domain.

The Profoundly Misunderstood Housing Affordability Crisis

Wendell Cox — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Over the last half-century, more restrictive urban planning policies have been associated with undermined housing affordability for the middle class. Given the primacy of housing costs in household budgets, this also means that these restrictive policies, especially urban containment, have been associated with greater overall poverty. Some research even suggests that rigid regulation has taken a heavy toll on the economy.1

Unfortunately, much of the present housing affordability discussion profoundly misses what is probably the biggest issue — metropolitan area (market) restrictions on urban fringe development (the theological term is “urban sprawl.” Instead we here about smaller lot sizes (as if lot size matters much), parking (as if people will give up their cars and walk), historic preservation and a host of minutia that cannot hold a candle to the effect of blocking development in the one part of the market) that defines the land value base for the entire enclosed area — the urban fringe.

Fundamentally, urban containment seeks to stop the expansion. of urban areas (sprawl) and increase urban population densities. The international planning orthodoxy uses strategies such as greenbelts, urban growth boundaries, rural (large lot) zoning on urban peripheries, and compact city policies.

Generally, land values in the physical city (built-up urban area) increase toward the urban center and stronger commercial centers (all else equal).2 Urban containment disrupts this pattern, causing abrupt land value spikes at urban growth boundaries and greenbelts — as well as higher land prices throughout the encircled area, including the inner city. This drives up land prices, which tend to become the most expensive factor of production where there is urban containment (Figure 1), as is indicated in Vancouver and Toronto, compared to Winnipeg.

It’s rather like eggs. When there is a shortage of hens, the prices of eggs rise. When there is a shortage of land the price of housing rises, often at very high rates.

Much of this can be traced back to the British Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, which established large greenbelts around urban areas, in which it was illegal to build houses, leading land and house cost escalation.

London School of Economics professor Christian Hilber told The Wall Street Journal: “What is striking is that the countries at the top [of home-price growth] are all Commonwealth countries that copied elements of the restrictive British planning system.” This is evident not only London, but also Vancouver, Toronto, Auckland, and all of Australia’s major markets. This also extends to many markets throughout the world where similar policies have produced similar consequences (Portland, Seattle, Denver, Miami and virtually all of California and a number of European markets).

Each of these strategies reduces the land available for development of middle-income housing in the forms most households prefer (ground-oriented, such as detached, semi-detached, or row houses).

The impact of urban containment on land values is illustrated in Figure 2. The land value increases within the urban growth boundary (UGB) are the “urban containment effect.” These regulations make it all but impossible to profitably build tracts of housing affordable to middle-income households in many markets.

According to prominent urban planners Arthur C. Nelson and Casey J. Dawkins: “Urban containment programs can be distinguished from traditional approaches to land-use regulation by the presence of policies that are explicitly designed to limit the development of land outside a defined urban area while encouraging infill development and redevelopment inside the urban area.”

They also emphasize that: “If a gap in land values on both sides of the boundary does not emerge, either the boundary is too large in the near term or there is too much development potential remaining in rural areas regardless of any land-use restrictions.”

Regrettably, proponents of the international planning orthodoxy were right—urban containment is associated with materially higher land prices. The planning retort is that people can live at higher densities, such as in high rise apartments or condos. The problem is that’s not how most households prefer to live and many consider this a lower standard of living. Households are leaving the most expensive areas not only because of the high price to income ratios, but also because of an association (perceived or real) between higher crime rates and higher densities, not to mention pathetic education performance.

The preference for lower densities is illustrated by the much lower urban densities in major metropolitan counties attracting net domestic migrants between 2020 and 2023 (2,150 per square mile), compared to the much higher urban densities of major metropolitan counties losing domestic migrations (11,500 per square mile)

More than five decades ago, legendary planner Sir Peter Hall (London School of Economics) concluded that “perhaps the biggest single failure” of British urban containment had been its failure to prevent losses in housing affordability.3 Notably, this was before the comprehensive urban containment policies were adopted in Portland and many other markets in Canada, Australia, the United States and elsewhere.

This is consistent with economic principle. Former principal urban planner at the World Bank, asserts that Alain Bertaud: “arbitrary limits on city expansion” (such as urban growth boundaries and greenbelts) result in “predictably higher prices.”

Worse off due to planning? Ultimately, the purpose of urban planning should be about people. Fabled urbanist Jane Jacobs offered the test: “If planning helps people, they ought to be better off as a result, not worse off.” Paul Cheshire, Max Nathan, and Henry Overman of the London School of Economics put said “The ultimate objective of urban policy is to improve outcomes for people rather than places; for individuals and families rather than buildings.”

In recent years, the densification agenda of urban planning has become more evident. The solution, say some planners is (to repeat The New York Times headline) “Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build.” No matter how many “builds” in a headline,” it does nothing to reform the regulations in Portland, Seattle, California and elsewhere where houses that are affordable cannot be legally built where it matters. Moreover, in many markets land prices have been driven up so much that houses cannot be profitably built at prices affordable to middle-income households

Meanwhile, households are taking housing affordability policy into their own hands, by leaving the dysfunctional urban containment markets and heading to where housing and the standard of living is more affordable.

In Canada, between 2019 and 2023, large markets (Census Metropolitan Areas) experienced a net loss of nearly 275,000 domestic migrants. Smaller markets (Census Agglomerations) gained nearly 110,000, while the rest of the country gained 165,000 (Figure 3). This contrasts sharply with 2004–2018, when large markets gained 19,000 and smaller markets 77,000, while the balance of the nation gained 97,000.4

In the United States, since 2010, large metropolitan areas have experienced increasing out-migration. Between 2020 and 2023, all metro areas over 1 million people lost net domestic migrants, while all classifications below 1 million gained them (Figure 4).

The bottom line is that without material reforms to urban containment regulations, such that the competitive market for land is restored, any serious improvement in housing affordability is unlikely. The housing markets of California and Australia, as well as Vancouver, Toronto, Portland, Seattle and so on and so on seem likely to deteriorate, and certainly not to materially improve.

Addendum: As this article was in production, The New York Times published an article by well-known housing reporter Conor Dougherty suggesting the need for more “sprawl” to solve the US housing crisis. Long friendly to density advocates, he has now admitted that densification alone would not solve the problem. He is right.

1. For example, see: Hsieh, Chang-Tai and Moretti, Enrico, Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation (May 2018). CEPR Discussion Paper No. DP12912.

2. William Alonso (1964), Location and Land Use: Toward a General Theory of Land Rent (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press).

3. Peter Hall, et al (1973), The Containment of Urban England, Volume 2.

4. See: Financial Post.

Photo: Vancouver, BC (by author).

‘American Oasis’ Review: The Lure of the Desert

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Hating the Southwest, particularly its burgeoning cities such as Phoenix, is de rigueur in American media. Jon Stewart has called Arizona “the meth lab of democracy.” Hunter S. Thompson described hell as an “overcrowded version of Phoenix.” Fran Lebowitz, the epitome of New York progressive arrogance, said: “I don’t think anyone needs Arizona. . . . Putin: here take Arizona, leave Ukraine.”

It’s a tendency that Kyle Paoletta rightfully finds annoying. In “American Oasis,” Mr. Paoletta, a journalist and critic, focuses on the region spanning California to Texas and argues that the Southwest, if not a mistake, is poised for ecological and social dislocation.

Having grown up in Albuquerque, N.M., the son of affluent professionals, Mr. Paoletta now questions whether newcomers “who have sought to master the Sonoran Desert with air conditioning and aqueducts” can really call the region home.

Yet these are precisely the people who continue to migrate to this supposedly miserable corner of the continent, building what amounts to a new America. Budding sophistos such as Mr. Paoletta may move to the dank Northeast, but since 2010 Arizona’s population has grown by more than one million—the eighth-fastest growth among U.S. states. More than two-thirds of that growth has been attributable to people moving to Arizona from other states, primarily far-more-temperate California.

The reasons are clear. These migrants are not coming to exploit cattle, cotton or copper but to find opportunities in industries, such as aerospace and semiconductor manufacturing, that were once dominated by California. Exploiting the indigenous population is not high on the agenda of someone moving from Los Angeles or Long Island, N.Y. In most cases, their contact with native peoples is limited to the casinos.

Nor are the newcomers uniformly ignorant or unskilled, as many on the coasts would believe. California and New York may be hemorrhaging recent college graduates, but Las Vegas, Phoenix and Tucson—once seen as retirement cities—are now attracting more people, especially millennials, who are ready to buy homes and start families.

Mr. Paoletta’s narrative also misses the fact that many people moving to the Southwest are themselves minorities. He only has eyes for the activists and the cultural rebels—the advocates of Chicanismo, for instance, or the National Welfare Rights Organization and Black Lives Matter—who complain about the encroachments of the diverse newcomers. His focus is not on the upwardly mobile minorities but the “Latino and Indian underclass living without utilities along gravel roads.”

It’s not surprising, then, that Mr. Paoletta praises the “sanctuary movement,” even though most Americans, including many Latinos, were not so happy with the Biden open border. Somehow the pushback against unvetted mass migration missed the author except as proof of racism. In his view, the promise of equal rights and opportunities offered by the Statue of Liberty is “illusory” and immigration status should not matter.

In reality, despite the hoary racist past, minorities are moving en masse to Arizona and other Southwestern areas. Most either choose or hope to settle in the suburbs. Rather than fighting “the man,” they are more likely to look into how they can become him and have more in common with their middle- or working-class white neighbors than the professional ethnic progressives.

Typically, Mr. Paoletta despises master-planned communities. But these are the places where many minorities reside or hope to reside. More than 95% of all U.S. suburban growth since 2010, notes Wendell Cox, a demographer, has been driven by people of color — hardly fodder for a woke revolution. Almost half of Latinos in Arizona voted for Donald Trump. As the number of second- or third-generation Southwesterners increase, they could easily move further to the right, as is already happening in Texas.

“American Oasis” quite rightly closes with a discussion of water. As the old saying goes, “whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.” Ever since the Hohokam people settled in Arizona some 2,000 years ago, growth and survival in the Southwest has been about access to water. Droughts are always a threat; one that occurred early in the previous century lasted a decade.

Mr. Paoletta regards the water issue as being related to “climate,” although it’s long been obvious that the region would have to learn to live with less. The author correctly salutes efforts, both in Phoenix and Las Vegas, to curb per capita water consumption, but then denounces dispersed developments and favors density. Never mind that steel-and-glass towers create a heat-island effect, generating more heat than low-rise landscaped development.

Discussions of climate issues have become a distraction, a barrier to addressing the region’s real challenges. Mr. Paoletta, for instance, rejects the idea of desalinization, something that has been impactful in other dry regions, notably the Middle East.

Yet there are reasons to be hopeful. As the region grows, Southwestern culture will evolve. The treatment of ethnic minorities in the past may have been horrendous, but that’s only part of the story. The days of quasiracist politics in these states have largely passed; Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada repeatedly send left-leaning senators to Washington. Mr. Paoletta concedes the region is becoming “a pluralistic society already in full flower.” Today you can find Turkish or Vietnamese food in Tucson, a city once known largely for taco and burger joints.

The Southwest has many problems. But it is also where millions of Americans are forging the nation’s future. Multiracial suburbs are eclipsing ghettos and reservations. New ways of building houses and communities to deal with heat and water conservation are emerging. Rather than sunbaked oddballs or brutal exploiters, the people of the Southwest are creating a new multiethnic society in the desert. For this, they deserve a far more balanced depiction than found in “American Oasis.”

This piece first appeared at: Wall Street Journal.

France and America's Cold War

Gary Girod — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

French president Emmanuel Macron had an unusually good relationship with US president Donald Trump during the latter’s first term. There are numerous photos of them smiling and laughing together as the businessmen-turned-presidents coordinate global policy. During a visit to Paris, Mr. Trump watched a Bastille Day military parade and later decided he wanted a similar event at home.

The ‘bromance’ did not last. Mr. Trump increasingly acted without, and even against, European interests in his economic and foreign policy dealings. In late 2019 the US president supported the Turkish military’s operations against the Kurds in Syria; a move which frustrated other NATO members as the Kurds were a crucial ally in the fight against ISIS. Mr. Trump’s decision led Mr. Macron to say that NATO was suffering “brain death.” While the French president did not mention the United States, everyone knew what he meant, given the US’ traditional role as leader of the military alliance. The next time the two met in London Trump quipped that he would give ISIS fighters to European countries to deal with, prompting Macron to respond, “Let’s be serious,” and urge the US not to abandon the fight in Syria.

In hindsight the two look practically chummy compared to their current relationship. The returned president has entered the White House with fire and fury, launching (and quickly abandoning) trade wars against multiple countries and even threatening to annex some of America’s allies.

Even before Mr. Trump returned to power Mr. Macron had originally called for a pan-European army in September 2017, to muted response. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 eleven countries joined the French-led European Intervention Initiative, a military organization meant to coordinate European forces. On 28 February 2025 the French president used some of his strongest language yet, saying that Europeans cannot accept a “happy vassalage” from Washington. This statement was in reference to the longstanding Cold War order wherein Washington dictated world policy and Europeans nodded along as the US defended Western Europe from the USSR. Furthermore, America’s high military spending allowed Europeans to allocate their money to infrastructure and generous welfare states, ensuring that they enjoyed the highest living standards in the world.

Mr. Trump’s isolationist policies, combined with Russian threats to European security, have finally woken sleeping Europeans to the reality of their situation. A poll taken in March found that three-quarters of Germans do not believe the United States is a trustworthy partner (an all-time low). A similar poll found that 73% of French citizens no longer consider the United States an ally. There is widespread sentiment across Europe that America is at best an untrustworthy partner, possibly a rival, and potentially an enemy.

How abysmal are relations between America and Europe? One shocking (and under-reported) incident tells a dramatic story. In a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on 7 January, Mr. Trump refused to rule out using military forces to annex Greenland. In response, the French government quietly began negotiations with Denmark, asking if the European country would allow French troops to station themselves on the island to deter an American invasion. The Danish government ultimately rejected the idea. However, the fact that French officials seriously believe the United States may invade their allies and fellow NATO members demonstrates that Europeans have lost all faith in the US as a partner.

After spending roughly eighty years under the American aegis Europeans may finally have the will to defend themselves from foreign threats. Defense spending across European Union member states remained level between 2005-2014 at around €150 billion. Following the Russian annexation of Crimea that spending more than doubled to €326 billion and is expected to increase another €100 billion by 2027. This alone is not enough in the face of a nuclear threat. Russia currently possesses an estimated 5,889 nuclear weapons, something which President Vladimir Putin has regularly reminded his adversaries.

This is where France takes center-stage, as Mr. Macron jockeys to replace the United States with France as the shield of Europe. In a speech given on 5 March the French president declared that “France has maintained a nuclear deterrence since 1964,” and “that deterrence needs to apply to all our European allies.”

Since taking office Mr. Macron has adopted a similar stance to foreign policy as Charles de Gaulle, the legendary leader of Free France during World War 2 and president of the republic from 1959-1969. De Gaulle famously urged the French nation to pursue its own independent foreign policy. He famously vetoed Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community because he believed the island nation was too dependent on the US. The old general did not oppose the United States but firmly believed that France could not be subject to another country’s power. Under de Gaulle France developed an independent strike force for its nuclear weapons, something which US President John F. Kennedy openly mocked (when France lent the Mona Lisa to the United States, Mr. Kennedy quipped that the US would address its woeful gap in culture by developing an ‘independent artistic force’).

De Gaulle’s foresight seems more prescient than ever. With the fourth-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, France has the ability to rattle any other power and has clearly done so, given Putin’s icy response to Macron’s proposal to create a nuclear shield for Europe. What separates France from Britain, the other non-Russian European country with nuclear weapons, is that France has a fully-independent military whose Rafale jets, Triomphant-Class submarines, missiles and detection technology are all manufactured within the country.

While Britain builds its own nuclear warheads, the Trident II D5 missile bodies are leased from the US and maintained at Kings Bay Naval Base in Georgia. Britain’s dependence on US defense manufacturing is currently a major cause for concern in London given how much of its military capacity relies on a currently unreliable partner.

Given its military strength, France is a natural choice for leader of Europe as Russia threatens the east and the US retreats from the world. While many French voters will tell you Mr. Macron is no de Gaulle, the president is currently attempting to draw upon Gaullism to create a new order. The former general dogmatically asserted that a united Europe was the only defense against dominance by the United States and the Soviet Union. His calls to arm and oppose greater cooperation with the US were often met with derision from a younger generation tired of the old man stuck in a World War 2 mindset. Now his cryptic words appear prophetic: “No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent.”

In an increasingly divided world, France aims to become the military leader of a strong Europe. Though Europeans themselves might wish to live under ‘happy vassalage,’ the threats posed by the United States under president Trump and Russia under President Putin are forcing a continent to remake itself. It is Mr. Macron’s aim to make France the preeminent leader of this emerging Europe.

Dr. Gary Girod is an assistant professor of history at Oklahoma Panhandle State University. He is the author of Domestic Surveillance and Social Control in Britain and France during World War I (Routledge: 2024) and host of The French History Podcast, a large-scale digital and public history project with over 200,000 followers on social media.

Photo: White House Archive via Flickr in Public Domain.

Trump is Right to Take On the Free Trade Fundamentalists

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

It’s easy to dismiss Donald Trump’s haphazard tariff barrage as silly and self-defeating, especially after so many days of global market turmoil. But critics among liberal Democrats and Republican free traders still need to address the overriding goal behind the seeming madness. The key strategic objective of Trump’s approach is simple: restoring American industrial power. Opponents of the US president ignore this at their peril.

It is true that the American economy continues to outperform those of Europe and the UK, especially in terms of tech, communications and finance. Yet the situation for blue-collar professions and working-class communities has not improved with the pace of globalisation. Between 2004 and 2017, the US share of world manufacturing shrank from 15 to 10 per cent. Since 2000, notes an Economic Policy Institute study, China’s export barrage has cost as many as 3.7million US jobs.

The ‘China shock’ is not just an American but a global phenomenon. Today, China boasts nearly as many factory exports as the US, Japan and Germany combined. Overall, Europe’s industrial sector continues to decline, losing 850,000 manufacturing jobs between 2019 and 2024. Germany could lose around half of its 800,000 auto jobs to Chinese competition by 2030.

To be sure, the early stages of globalisation reaped enormous benefits, both for Western consumers and for developing countries. But China’s admission into the World Trade Organisation in 2000 changed the dynamic. Here was a huge country, with enormous human capital, which adopted a highly mercantilist drive to dominate industries, first at the lower end of manufacturing and then, increasingly, in the most sophisticated sectors.

Wall Street bankers and tech oligarchs may be untroubled by the consequences of Beijing’s mercantilism, as they have little contact with America’s working and middle classes. The poorest have increasingly been forced to subsist on expanding welfare benefits which, in turn, subsidise the affluent for whom they work for a pittance as nannies, gardeners and day labourers.

For the working classes, manufacturing and related fields, like energy and logistics, represent an escape from economic marginalisation. Overall, manufacturing jobs pay $54,000 annually on average, well above the $47,000 average in services. These jobs also come with health insurance and steady employment.

Geography plays a role here. Apologists for the outgoing trade regime often ignore that its impact was felt most acutely in particular regions, like the American Midwest. Researchers John Russo and Sherry Linkon describe how the closure of a steel mill in Youngstown, Ohio – the first of a wave of closures in the region – undermined the sense of worth and optimism among residents. Many can still recall better days, when employment was high, jobs paid well, workers were protected by strong unions and industrial labour provided a source of pride – not only because it produced tangible goods, but also because it was recognised as challenging, dangerous and important.

Similar tragedies have occurred all over the West, away from the elite college towns, leafy suburbs and urban haunts of the upper classes. You can see this in places like England’s Midlands. The UK, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, now produces less wealth from manufacturing than countries like Mexico, Russia and Taiwan. Deindustrialisation has also blighted much of the former East Germany and Japan’s Kansai region.

Read the rest of this piece: Spiked.

Photo: Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian, via Flickr, in Public Domain.

Big Business At The (Inflation Reduction Act) Trough

Robert Bryce — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The late economist Milton Friedman famously declared that “nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”

Friedman’s line comes to mind because a lobbying frenzy is underway in Washington, DC. Some of the city’s most powerful special interests are working to prevent a repeal or reduction of the lavish energy-related tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act. No lobby group is working harder than the American Clean Power Association.

Why is the ACPA pushing so hard? The answer is simple: Its members have collected tens of billions of dollars in federal subsidies, loans, and loan guarantees over the past few years to install solar energy, wind energy, batteries, and other forms of alt-energy, and they don’t want that geyser of federal money to stop. As the Wall Street Journal noted in a recent editorial, “Republicans for the Green New Deal,” thanks to the IRA’s expansion of the investment tax credit (ITC) and production tax credit (PTC), solar and wind developers can “offset as much as 70% to 80% of their costs.” Given that giveaway, it’s no surprise that the ACPA and its members are spending millions of dollars to persuade Congress — and in particular, Republican members of the House of Representatives — to keep the corporate cash flowing.

According to Subsidy Tracker, an excellent database maintained by one of my favorite NGOs, Good Jobs First (annual revenue: $1.9 million), the companies now on ACPA’s board of directors have collected $47 billion in subsidies, loans, and loan guarantees. Most of that sum has been collected over the past decade or so. But that figure represents only a fraction of the public money that the group’s members have vacuumed up over the past few years. Furthermore, and perhaps most galling, is this: About a third of that $47 billion is going to foreign corporations, including companies like Iberdrola, Shell, and Equinor.

Why does this matter? First and foremost, the ITC and PTC are, to use the title of Meredith Angwin’s excellent 2020 book, shorting the grid. The massive subsidies for weather-dependent forms of generation are distorting electricity markets and contributing to the premature closure of the thermal plants needed to assure the affordability, reliability, and resilience of our electric grid.

Second, these subsidies are fueling the landscape-wrecking, bird-and-bat killing, property-value-destroying energy sprawl that comes with the expansion of Big Solar and Big Wind. They are also fueling the insane expansion of offshore wind energy into the known habitat of the critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whale and other marine mammals.

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: Windtech via Wikimedia under CC 3.0 License.

Are the Democrats Drifting Further Left?

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The Democrats are at a historic ebb and now is a good time to examine what the party believes in, who its main protagonists are and what their agenda is. Amid the fraught divisions in the party, however, one faction is emerging strong: the Big Red One.

That the Left of the party is in the ascendancy is evident at both the local and national level. Rather than let the fallout of Donald Trump’s tariffs speak for itself, the new head of the Democratic National Committee engaged in mad fighting talk. Ken Martin said: “We’re coming. This is a new Democratic Party. We’re taking the gloves off.” Martin draws his support from the likes of prominent anti-Israel figure Attorney General Keith Ellison. He is also a close ally of Left-leaning Minnesota Governor and Kamala Harris running mate Tim Walz, who just released a textbook for students that echoes Critical Race Theory, including an attack on “racial capitalism”.

Martin’s elevation took place in an atmosphere that seemed to one veteran Democrat “like outtakes from a humanities seminar at a small liberal arts college”. And in place of the donor-dominated DNC leadership of the past, Martin has been lionised in the Leftist press, as a “pro-labor progressive” whose positions may offend the party’s donor base. The progressive stranglehold was made even more evident with the election of anti-gun activist David Hogg as Vice Chair of the DNC. Hogg has previously called for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), defunding police and has expressed hostility towards Israel. This will no doubt alienate more moderate Democrats.

The true leaders of the Big Red One are not party apparatchiks, but populist firebrands like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who also tend to be those with far higher numbers of social media followers than more conventional party leaders. Last year, for example, AOC became the first politician to amass over a million followers on Bluesky, the liberal alternative to X.

The President’s alliance with Elon Musk and other libertarian tech bros no doubt bedevils Democrats of all stripes. But it plays into the hands of those on the Left like Sanders and AOC, who, as Vanity Fair notes, are “packing arenas” with their “oppose oligarchy tour”, where they accuse Trump-aligned oligarchs of being precursors to a new authoritarian, even fascist, regime. Some politicians feel safe enough to cheer Tesla’s decline while being reluctant to oppose the blowing up the cars among their own supporters.

The key threat to the Big Red One’s success will be at the local level. It is here — in Californian cities like San Francisco, Oakland and even Los Angeles — that moderate Democrats have scored wins against progressive regimes. But cities, and particularly their reliable Democratic primary voters, still favour the Left, as we can see in the rise of New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdami, who is a part of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). He has proposed massive expansion of the city’s welfare state.

Another Leftie, Ras Baraka, the Newark deputy mayor running for governor in New Jersey, has indulged in anti-Israel rhetoric and has links to the overtly antisemitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Leticia James, New York’s firebrand Attorney General who won the civil lawsuit against Trump due to the overvaluation of his property, may also seek to win the governorship.

Read the rest of this piece: UnHerd.

Photo: Gage Skidmore, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Forever 20

Thomas Buckley — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

If you let the popularity of an idea – no matter how silly - dictate your stance, then you are not a very good elected official.

If you completely ignore and shoo-away and disparage overwhelming public sentiment on an issue, then you are not a very good elected official.

And, in the latter case, doing so used to mean your job at risk. But that, in the large and depressing part, is no longer the case.

And that is a result of voting districts, at every level.

You can be consistently on the “20% side” of an issue, as it were, and defy the remaining 80% of public sentiment and not be too worried about losing your seat because the district you represent has been drawn in such a way as to make it nearly mathematically impossible.

You can be in favor of paying for trans surgeries, in favor of illegal alien criminals staying in the country, in favor of massive slush fund spending that only goes to your political cronies, you can be in favor of government censorship, and on and on and not worry even though the vast majority of the public – probably even your district – are opposed to them.

In other words, rotten districts are licenses to be crazy because you only have to get through the primary where the 20% miraculously becomes 50% because they are far more obsessed with their issues…they vote…or are voted for…or paid to vote…

Let’s start with Congress.

Out of the 435 seats, about 190 are Democrat automatics. If a combination of Albert Einstein, Cary Grant, and the Buddha challenged the incumbent in any of these seats he would lose, even if he ran as an independent (Run as a Republican? Don’t even bother.)

The same can be said for the 190 ribrock reliable Republican seats.

That leaves 55 seats, or only 13% of the entire House of Representatives, in play in any given year. (Note – if only legal residents and citizens were counted when creating congressional districts, it is estimated that at least 10 Democrat seats would slip at least into the “contestable” pile.)

And if you are in one of those safe seats you can do anything you want, no matter what the public thinks.

On the Senate side, it’s slightly different as they are statewide elections that far more closely represent the actual will of the voters. At this moment in time, about 15 states can reliably predicted to return two Democrats, about 18 to return two Republicans.

That leaves about 34 seats or so theoretically in actual play, a far larger percentage than in the House.

Read the rest of this piece at The Point.

Photo: courtesy The Point.

If Carney Brings Canada Closer to Europe, Financial Ruin Would Follow

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

U.S. President Donald Trump’s mindless, and frankly pointless, comments about Canada becoming the 51st state have stirred up latent Canadian patriotism. But it also may result in Canada, which is already economically moribund, further aligning itself with the permanent European Union bureaucracy.

A tilt towards Europe would be natural for Liberal Leader Mark Carney, the former pre-Brexit head of the Bank of England. He’s an advocate of the very environmental, social and economic policies that have led the EU — and, to some extent, Canada — into economic and social decline.

Carney is the ultimate product of the Euro-Atlantic elite, with affiliations with the World Economic Forum, the Bilderberg Group and the Group of Thirty. Recently, he travelled to Europe in a search of “reliable allies” — that is, people who think alike. He has identified as a “European” in the past, and holds British and Irish citizenship.

In office, we can expect him to epitomize the bureaucratic spirit of the profoundly dysfunctional EU. The central organizing principle of the EU is disregard for nation-states. Recent antidemocratic moves to remove troublesome populists in Romania and take out a leading presidential aspirant in France suggests Europe’s most outspoken defenders of democracy frequently toss out results when disappointed.

The rest of the European agenda is no bargain, either. It prioritizes an ever-expanding welfare state, as well as climate, social and immigration policies now rejected in the United States. Its politics, and economics, centre on stasis.

This is a swan song Canadians need to resist. Under the government of former prime minister Justin Trudeau, Canada was already succumbing to the essentials of Euro-politics: high trade barriers, net-zero climate policies, essentially open borders and the systematic undermining of the country’s past.

Climate is a particular challenge. Carney has a long history, including as United Nations special envoy for climate action, of being at the forefront of steering investment to preferred “green sectors.” American investors have already moved away from such commitments.

Read the rest of this piece at: National Post.

Photo: Michael Wuertenberg, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Governor Targets More Apartment Construction, So of Course Fewer Are Built

Randal OToole — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

On her first day in office, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek signed an executive order calling for the construction of 36,000 new homes per year. She was especially hoping for lots of new apartments because, as everyone knows, driving is evil and people who live in apartments drive less than people who live in single-family homes.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who understands how well central planning works that apartment construction in Portland, where close to half of Oregonians live, is now at its lowest level in more than a decade. There are several reasons for this, but among them are several idiotic government policies that have discouraged more construction.

For example, Portland passed an inclusionary zoning ordinance requiring that developers of projects with 20 or more apartments set aside at least 20 percent of them for low-income families or 10 percent for very low income families. As a result, developers are building 19-unit apartments on land that could support 20 or more.

Another is that, in 2019, the Oregon legislature — with strong support from Kotek, who was then speaker of the house — passed the nation’s first statewide rent control law. As every economist knows, rent control is one of the best ways to create a housing shortage.

The Atlantic recently cited an economic study that found that when the number of progressive (read: central planning) voters in a city increases, the number of housing permits falls. As another Atlantic article noted, the five states with the highest rates of homelessness are all run by Democrats.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Photo: CoStar via Willamette Week.

Ways Out of California's Forest of Problems: Part 2

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The second of two reported essays on the issues facing California. Read the first installment here.

California’s wide range of problems – including declining schools, widening inequality, rising housing prices, and a weak job market – show the urgent need for reform. The larger question is whether there is the will to change.

Although the state’s remarkable entrepreneurial economy has kept it afloat, a growing number of residents are concluding that the progressive agenda, pushed by public unions and their well-heeled allies, is failing. Most Californians have an exceptional lack of faith in the state’s direction. Only 40% of California voters approve of the legislature, and almost two-thirds have told pollsters the state is heading in the wrong direction. That helps explain why California residents – including about 1.1 million since 2021 – have been fleeing to other states.

Unhappiness with the one-party state is particularly intense in the inland areas, which are the only locales now growing and may prove critical to any resurgence. More troubling still, over 70% of California parents feel their children will do less well than they did. Four in 10 are considering an exit. By contrast, seniors, thought to be leaving en masse, are the least likely to express a desire to leave.

In some ways, discontent actually erodes potential support for reform. Conservative voters, notes a recent study, are far more likely to express a desire to move out of the state; the most liberal are the least likely. “Texas is taking away my voters,” laments Shawn Steel, California’s GOP National Committee Member.

New Awakenings

Given the demographic realities, a successful drive for reform cannot be driven by a marginalized GOP. Instead, what’s needed is a movement that can stitch together a coalition of conservatives, independents (now the state’s second-largest political grouping), and most critically, moderate Democrats.

Remarkably, this shift has already begun in an unlikely place: the ultra-liberal, overwhelmingly Democratic Bay Area. For years, its most influential residents – billionaires, venture capitalists, and well-paid tech workers – have abetted or tolerated an increasingly ineffective and corrupt regime. Not only was the area poorly governed, but the streets of San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and other cities have become scenes of almost Dickensian squalor.

Over the past two years, tech entrepreneurs and professionals concerned about homelessness and crime worked to get rid of progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin. Last year, they helped elect Dan Lurie, scion of the Levi Strauss fortune, as mayor, as well as some more moderate members to the Board of Supervisors. Lurie, of course, faces a major challenge to restore San Francisco’s luster against entrenched progressives and their allies in the media, academia, and the state’s bureaucracy.

Similar pushbacks are evident elsewhere. Californians, by large majorities, recently passed bills to strengthen law enforcement, ditching liberalized sentencing laws passed by Democratic lawmakers and defended by Gov. Gavin Newsom. Progressive Democrats have been recalled not only in San Francisco but also in Oakland (Alameda County) and Los Angeles, with voters blaming ideological-driven law enforcement for increasing rates of crime and disorder.

Read the rest of this piece at: Real Clear Investigations.

Photo: Redwood National and State Parks/California.

Climate Change Is Driving California’s Golden Road to Decline: Part 1

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

This is the first of two essays on issues facing California.

“From the Beginning, California promised much. While yet barely a name on the map, it entered American awareness as a symbol of renewal. It was a final frontier: of geography and of expectation.”

— Kevin Starr, “Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915”

California’s economic, academic, media, and political establishment still embraces the notion of the state’s inevitable supremacy. “The future depends on us,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said at his first inauguration, “and we will seize this moment.” Others see California as deserving and capable of nationhood, a topic that has resurfaced with Trump’s presidency as it reflects, as a New York Times column put it, “the shared values of our increasingly tolerant and pluralistic society.”

Critics say this vision is at odds with the facts on the ground. Rather than the exemplar of a new “progressive capitalism” and a model for social justice, California both accommodates the highest number of billionaires and the highest cost-adjusted poverty rate. It has the third highest gap, behind just Washington, D.C., and Louisiana, between middle- and upper-middle-income earners of any state. Nearly one in five Californians – many working – lives in poverty (using a cost-of-living adjusted poverty rate); the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) estimates another one-fifth live in near-poverty – roughly 15 million people in total.

“California” is a model that no longer delivers. To be sure, California has a huge GDP, paced largely by high real estate prices and the stock value of a handful of huge tech firms. It retains the inertia from its glory days, particularly in technology and entertainment, but that edge is evaporating as tech firms flee the state and Hollywood productions are shot around the world. For all its strengths, California has the nation’s second-highest rate of unemployment with lagging job growth, particularly in comparison to its neighbors and chief rivals, notably Texas, Arizona, and Nevada.

The signs of failure are evident on the streets. Roughly half the nation’s homeless population lives in the Golden State, many concentrated in disease- and crime-ridden tent cities in Los Angeles or San Francisco. Barely one in three state residents – and only one in four younger voters – now considers California a good place to achieve the American dream. Increasingly, California is where this dream goes to die.

‘San Francisco Gentry Liberalism’

The roots of California are long and deep. In August, for example, the New York Times reported how its development into a one-party state controlled by progressive Democrats has made it the country’s center of political corruption. “Over the last 10 years,” the Times reported, “576 public officials in California have been convicted on federal corruption charges, according to Justice Department reports, exceeding the number of cases in states better known for public corruption, including New York, New Jersey and Illinois.”

Read the rest of this piece at: Real Clear Investigations.

Photo: Jill Siegrist via Flickr under CC 2.0 License

Coal Coal Baby

Robert Bryce — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Net zero and decarbonization pledges are a dime a dozen.

Earlier this month, the Australian government released an update to its “Net Zero in Government Operations Annual Progress Report.” The 65-page document is a marvel of bureaucratic navel-gazing. It takes a deep dive into the “Australian Public Service Net Zero by 2030 target,” including discussions of “emissions factors,” as well as scope 1, scope 2, and scope 3 emissions on everything from airplane flights to rental cars. The document has some laughably precise numbers. It claims electricity-related emissions totaled exactly 1.697 million tons of CO₂ and that “38.29% of electricity consumed in 2023-24 was certified renewable electricity.”

Numerous other countries are touting their net zero plans. The German government has a target of net zero emissions by 2045. The UK’s net zero target is 2050. Canada plans to hit net zero by 2050. So does the EU, Japan, and South Korea. The Biden administration — remember them? — pledged that the US would achieve net zero “no later than 2050.” Notably, China and India also have bold decarbonization plans, with India targeting net zero by 2070, and China claiming it will hit net zero “before 2060.”

Of course, California has an aggressive decarbonization scheme. It is committed to a “just and equitable transition to carbon neutrality by 2045.” Making that happen, the state says, will require “significant” reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, removing CO₂ from the atmosphere, and “working across all sectors.” California is hardly alone. According to the Clean Energy States Alliance, 24 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia, have “100% clean energy goals.”

But there’s a China-size gap between these decarbonization pledges and the ever-increasing global demand for hydrocarbons. According to the International Energy Agency’s Global Energy Review, which was released today, hydrocarbon growth again exceeded the growth in renewables last year. The report also shows that oil, natural gas, and coal provide more than five times as much primary energy to the global economy as the political darlings of the moment.

According to the IEA, oil consumption increased by 0.8%, and natural gas use jumped by 2.7% in 2024. While oil and gas are pivotal fuels, the global climate story continues to be defined by coal. Last year, global coal use increased by 1%, and power generation from coal plants totaled 10,700 terawatt-hours, a new record. The IEA’s reports show that soaring coal use and electricity demand in China (population: 1.4 billion) and India (population: 1.4 billion) is swamping all the climate policies and decarbonization efforts in the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, and South Korea.

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: A mine in the Jharia coalfield near Dhanbad, a city known as the “Coal Capital of India.” Source: Nitin Kirloskar via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

California's Population Bump Won't Make Up for Its Long-term Slide

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

When the U.S. Census Bureau recently revealed a small increase in California’s population, it came as a welcome sign to some that the state was growing again. The data even showed a slightly reduced level of out-migration.

Good news, right? Unfortunately, not good enough.

Last year’s count still leaves the state’s numbers below where they stood in 2020, and its growth rate is below the national average and well below that of key competitor states: Comparing census numbers from 2010 to 2024, California’s population has increased by less than 6%; in Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia and Utah, the increases range from 15% to nearly 30%.

And the prognosis for California’s future growth is not good, given that most of the recent uptick seems to have been the result of the historic immigration surge during the Biden years. Under President Trump, the door for many foreign-born newcomers has been slammed shut.

Although some businesses and immigration proponents rue Trump’s actions, it’s not as if large numbers of immigrants are always a plus. The Congressional Budget Office in 2024 noted increases in immigrants in the U.S. as favorable to the economy overall, but the current newcomers appear to come from poorer countries, many are undocumented, and in the short term at least, that could put stress on local economies and on the salaries of low-income workers who compete with them for living space, jobs and social services.

Worse for California, the slight decrease in out-migration last year doesn’t come close to fixing what’s been a decades-long exodus.

The numbers tell the story. From 2020 to 2024, the state added 934,000 international migrants, compared to a net domestic migration loss of 1.46 million residents. California’s out-migration has come to resemble the pattern long associated with Rust Belt states. Over the last 24 years, more than 4 million net domestic migrants, a population about the same as the Seattle metropolitan area, have moved to other parts of the nation from California.

State planners don’t see a turnaround in the offing, either. Consider that in 2007, demographers projected that California’s population would grow from 36.5 million to 60 million by 2050. But today, the 2050 projection is for just 40 million Californians.

People are leaving, or not coming to California, for rational reasons — and most of them are economic. One 2020 study showed that minorities, including Asian, Latino and Black people, generally enjoy higher real incomes and home ownership in Southern or some heartland cities than in the East or West coast metros. These groups have been flocking to Dallas, Houston, Atlanta or Miami rather than California in search of opportunity. Even given the influx of immigrants to California, the foreign-born population of cities in Texas, Florida and parts of Ohio, North Carolina and Tennessee has been growing faster than San Francisco’s, and L.A.’s foreign-born numbers are declining.

Read the rest of this piece: Los Angeles Times.

Photo: David Herrera, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Fix the Subways in Hours?

Randal OToole — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

Donald Trump famously said he could end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, yet the war is still raging more than two months after he took office. In the same way, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy recently said that New York City could solve all of the problems with its subway system “in hours, not days” (he generously allowed the city 36 hours instead of just 24) if it just had the will to do so. Note that Trump promised to stop the war himself while Duffy is demanding that someone else save the subways.

This is the level of naïveté that we’ve come to expect from the Trump administration. New York City subways have problems with fare evasion, homelessness, drugs, property crime, vandalism, and violent crime that stretch across 472 stations, 850 miles of track, and nearly 6,800 subway cars. The idea that it could solve all of these problems by simply flooding the system with police for 36 hours is so ludicrous it isn’t even funny.

Even if those problems were solved, they are really just symptoms of the real problem, which is that transit agencies have no incentive to operate efficiently or even to attract riders. Instead, all of their incentives are to increase costs as much as possible while doing as little work as possible. These perverse incentives are not the fault of the New York MTA or any other transit agency but are due the federal government, which began throwing money at transit in the 1960s and responds to every transportation issue by increasing the flow of money.

I understand why Trump appointed non-experts to run his departments and agencies. You can’t fight the Deep State by putting members of the Deep State in charge. At the same time, the people fighting the Deep State need to understand the real problems or they are just going to flounder around.

Last November, I urged Musk to take a scalpel to the federal budget, cutting wasteful programs and making sure such cuts are sustainable by combining them with new policies that will give government agencies incentives to operate efficiently. Instead of a scalpel, he is using a chainsaw, and the cuts he is making are not going to solve the government’s problems.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Photo: EmperorOfNYC via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.

Blue States Could Be Biggest Beneficiaries of Trump’s Policies

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

Donald Trump is unlikely to win a popularity contest or an election in America’s deepest blue states. But, ironically, his administration could prove a long term boon to these places, where self-imposed policies are turning them into the caboose of American progress.

To be sure, politicians in declining states like New York, California and Illinois will lament anything Trump does, including many needlessly stupid and cruel acts. But on many levels the Trump regime offers the blue states a way out of their own destructive approach which has chased away businesses and individuals at a staggering rate. No wonder, then, that even some blue state Democrats are questioning their own party’s #Resistance tactics.

Even DOGE and Trump’s assault on the feds is less a problem for blue states than many red ones. Local and state governments in New York, California, Massachusetts and Colorado are far less dependent on transfers from Washington than deep red Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, West Virginia and Alaska. The pain may be greater in the Appalachian hollows than in the urban centres.

Perhaps the biggest Trump influence, though, will be on issues like climate change — a major factor in blue state decline. Wherever Net Zero has been adopted, it has raised energy, housing and building costs. We already see some backtracking in California, where nuclear and natural gas plants are being kept past their supposed termination. At the same time, Trump’s removal of EPA regulations may also help relieve cost pressures too.

There are some potential opportunities for Massachusetts, New York and particularly California in the space and high-tech defence sector, where the Trump administration has encouraged investment. California retains the strongest array of space, aerospace, missile, and drone companies, which should thrive under Trump. Meanwhile, the “defence bros” may be powerful in Texas, but leading edge firms, such as Anduril in Orange County and Palantir in blueish Colorado, also could be big beneficiaries of a shift to tech-based warfare.

Another key Trump break could come in housing. Trump officials are looking at allowing leases for housing on federal lands. The federal government is the nation’s biggest landowner, holding a third of all property — an area six times that of California. In Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque, and other metro areas, federal lands brush up against the suburban periphery. In California, the federal government owns roughly half of all state land, including properties on flat land near cities. Considering that urbanisation covers only 5.3% of the state’s land, Newsom could make inroads here — with federal assistance.

Read the rest of this piece: UnHerd.

Photo: California Governor's office, Public Domain.

A Pro Family Housing Agenda

Wendell Cox and Lyman Stone — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

There is considerable concern about housing affordability in the United States. Housing is the most expensive element of the cost of living, which makes it an important issue to both households and governments. Indeed, the high cost of housing relative to income (i.e. the degree of affordability) is an existential threat to the future of the middle-class in some housing markets (metropolitan areas), and even threatens to jeopardize the demographic future of the republic. While the housing situation has not become a crisis everywhere—and for older Americans remains relatively affordable—for young Americans, housing has become crushingly expensive in most of the country, crippling their economic and family futures.

Highlights

Americans across all demographic groups and political persuasions prefer single-family housing to apartments.
For young Americans, housing has become crushingly expensive in most of the country, crippling their economic and family futures.
The American dream of owning good housing at a good price is increasingly unobtainable, especially for Americans under age 35.

Whereas in 1969, the price of a median home cost about five years of a young adult’s income, today it costs nearly nine years. As we show in a new Institute for Family Studies report, Homes For Young Families: A Pro-Family Housing Agenda, since 1970, the share of young adults who own the home they live in has declined from 50% to around 25-30 percent. Moreover, across metro areas, the share of housing markets we define as “Seriously Unaffordable” or worse (i.e. median homes worth 10 years or more of a young adult’s income) rose from 1% to 37 percent. By far, these increases were the most severe in large coastal markets, which is why Americans are increasingly migrating away from these markets in pursuit of affordability.

Many factors have conspired to worsen housing affordability for young adults, but two sets of policies in particular have dramatically boosted housing costs without producing economic benefits to offset cost: 1) local land-use rules limiting housing supply, and 2) urban growth boundaries preventing greenfield development. We find that the most unaffordable housing is overwhelmingly likely to have both urban growth boundaries and very strict local land-use rules. As a result, it is no exaggeration to say that the housing affordability crisis facing American young adults has substantially been caused by bad urban and regional planning, and bad local land-use policies.

Since the housing affordability crisis facing young adults is largely policy-induced, we propose a wide range of policy fixes for every level of government, including: extremely local HOAs; municipal zoning related to parking, ADUs, renovations, policing priorities, and lot size; state rules governing municipalities and educational programs; and federal housing programs and housing assistance. Our proposals are focused on ensuring that obstacles to new housing supply are removed, and especially on encouraging policymakers to focus on the regulations that substantively burden the transition into family life.

Read the rest of this piece at: Institute for Family Studies.

Lyman Stone is the Director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. He is also the Director of Research for the population consulting firm Demographic Intelligence, a Senior Fellow at the Canadian think rank Cardus, and a PhD Candidate at McGill University. His work on demography and fertility has been covered widely in most papers of record in North America, as well as many in Europe and Asia.

Photo and chart courtesy of Institute for Family Studies.

Ignore the Bluster — Donald Trump is Not an Imperialist

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

US president Donald Trump’s MAGA brand of foreign policy has been treated with contempt and consternation by much of the world. He has incited the ire of neoliberal theorists like Francis Fukuyama, as well as many European intellectuals, who rarely have much positive to say about America anyway. To them, Trump epitomises a destructive American arrogance and imperial delusions.

Whatever he may think of himself, Donald Trump is no Augustan figure, no colossus ready to conquer the known world. He is a phenomenon borne of concern about American decline, ranging from failing education levels and massive debt to frayed national coherence and fading industrial, even military, supremacy. He is driven not by imperial ambitions (despite his absurd claims about acquiring Greenland and Canada), but rather in response to the consequences of recent imperial overreach.

The old US foreign policy, argues secretary of state Marco Rubio, is ‘obsolete’. Attempts to reshape the world through unrestrained globalisation and foreign interventions have not only failed, he says, but are now also a ‘weapon being used against us’.

Even the name of Trump’s movement, MAGA, says it all. Make America Great Again implies that it is not so great now. Trump’s promised ‘golden age’, if it arrives at all, will be forged in a new mercantilist era that has been gradually embraced as well in Europe and supercharged by China’s drive to world preeminence.

Right now, America looks dominant largely because its traditional competitors – like the UK, Japan and the EU – are all suffering markedly worse economic and demographic crises. By 2050, the populations of Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea and Spain are all expected to drop significantly. Even China suffers from a diminishing workforce, an overreliance on manufactured exports, mass alienation among the young and educated, a massive real-estate collapse and capital flight.

However, other nations’ problems do not make America less vulnerable. The US’s own population growth has also slowed, and recent economic trends have mostly benefitted the affluent and those working for the government. The top 10 per cent of all earners now account for half of all spending. This is well above the roughly one-third of three decades ago. Partially this comes as many of the companies historically tied to high wages – US Steel, General Motors, RCA, Xerox, Intel and Boeing – have either disappeared or markedly declined.

Read the rest of this piece: Spiked.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr under CC0 2.0 License.

The Geography of Generative AI

Pete Saunders — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

A couple weeks ago, I purchased a new laptop. The laptop has Microsoft Copilot, the Microsoft AI tool launched in 2023. For kicks I thought I’d try it out. I asked Copilot to provide me with a draft on a topic for a future post. Now, I’ve tried ChatGPT in the past, so I had an idea of what to expect. However, I was blown away when Copilot immediately came back with a three-page, almost 1,000-word draft on the topic. The Copilot draft needed work; it was a factual statement rather than an essay, written in a voice that wasn’t targeted toward any particular reader or audience. Still, it formed the foundation for what I would later publish. It was definitely the kind of quick-serve research on a topic that can cut my writing time down significantly. Suddenly I saw the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) in a new light.

AI is moving so fast, it’s challenging everything we think we know about how automation affects work.

With each passing day, the global economy is moving closer to integrating AI into the economic fabric. Broadly, workers understand that it will impact work, just as earlier efforts at automation have impacted work in the past. We also understand that some places will be impacted more than others. Researchers at the Brookings Institution are putting some thought into this, and their findings so far are interesting.

Some recent research conducted by Mark Muro, Shriya Methkupally, and Molly Kinder of the Brookings Institution’s Brookings Metro research center is finding that AI will impact work more deeply and broadly than previously considered. Gains in generative AI are being made at a fantastic rate, with AI compiling and generating content that was once the purview of humans. Whereas earlier automation efforts targeted routine tasks usually handled by low-skilled, low-wage workers, generative AI is showing itself to be well-suited to take on work that relies on cognitive skills today. For example, as the Brookings report says, “think coders, writers, financial analysts, engineers, and lawyers.”

The quote above is immediately followed by this:

“And while generative AI puts at risk the “routine” tasks of customer service and clerical work (often handled by female-staffed call centers, customer service lines, and HR teams, for example), it is currently not equipped to handle the manual work of manufacturing, the skilled trades, construction, and many in-person service industries.”

In other words, generative AI is coming after knowledge workers.

This led to Brookings Metro taking another tack on AI’s economic impact – what exactly will be the geography of generative AI? What metro areas would have the greatest exposure to generative AI, meaning the possible displacement of workers?

The Brookings Metro researchers reviewed occupation-specific “exposure” data supplied by ChatGPT creator OpenAI. They found that AI exposure increases (positively or negatively) as wages increase. The team made it clear that “exposure” doesn’t necessarily mean “worker displacement”. They allow for the fact that some jobs will be “augmented” by generative AI, enhancing the productivity and capability of many workers. Still, there’s a strong correlation that as education levels and the need for cognitive skills rises, so does potential exposure to generative AI.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: A map showing job exposure to generative AI across US counties. Source: Brookings.

Does Gavin Newsom Believe In Anything?

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

Gavin Newsom’s new podcast reveals not only a media-savvy politico seeking more exposure to a bigger audience. It also reflects a concerted drive by the onetime self-anointed leader of the #Resistance to reinvent himself as the unique progressive breaking through to MAGA World, as evidenced by his decision to invite Right-wing firebrands like Charlie Kirk, Michael Savage, and Steve Bannon as his initial guests.

This shift away from liberal orthodoxy has shocked Newsom’s long-time progressive allies, who see it as an act of treachery. Yet if they had been paying attention to Newsom’s career — above all, his willingness to morph into whatever identity best serves his quest for power — this wouldn’t be so surprising.

Conservatives, too, will discover that Newsom isn’t a tool of the progressive Left, or a typical California progressives with “communistic” policies, as one conservative outlet described them. On the contrary, Newsom, unlike his predecessor, Jerry Brown, has been a committed, shameless sniffer of political winds throughout his career.

That’s not to say that Newsom doesn’t have a lodestar. He does: namely, the monied elite of the Bay Area, particularly the Getty family. It explains his ease in discarding Left-of-centre dogmas on law and order, and likewise why he has emerged as an unofficial political spokesman for the “abundance” agenda, which is how neoliberal Democrats are rebranding themselves these days. (In a display of virtuoso flexibility, however, Newsom in his conversation with Bannon called out Trump for his closeness with the tech oligarchs — talk about the pot calling the kettle black.)

His oligarchic allegiance has funded, and shaped, Newsom’s career. He projected himself as a relative moderate as mayor of San Francisco. Later in 2011, as lieutenant governor, he challenged the rigid Brown, suggesting pro-business reforms. That year, amid a weakening Golden State economy, he travelled to arch-rival Texas to discover the secrets of the Lone Star State’s boom — much to the consternation of progressives.

Then, as the winds shifted to the Left, Newsom decided to re-centre his appeal to progressives in California and nationwide. He became a fervent advocate of such things as early transgender treatments and banning schools from informing parents about their own kids’ sexual identity issues. His heiress wife, Jennifer Siebel, made a documentary film embracing the transgender cause.

As governor, he could dispense the blessings of full-spectrum progressivism thanks to a massive accumulation of capital-gains revenue during the tech boom. The economy, about which he repeatedly bragged, may have hurt the middle and working classes, but it allowed Newsom and his legislative allies to build a vote-catching “blue welfare state”, as The Nation magazine enthused.

Read the rest of this piece: UnHerd.

Photo: California Governor via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

California Tyranny, Part 2

Christopher LeGras — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

Lawmakers in Sacramento recently upped the ante in their ongoing assault on local democracy in the Golden State. Earlier this year State Senator Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco) introduced a bill called SB 79. If passed, it would all but eliminate local authority over zoning, land use, and development. It would place the fate of thousands of neighborhoods not in the hands of the people who live in them and want to live in them, but in the hands of for-profit real estate speculators and the financial class behind them. The bill is part of an assault on the foundations local democracy that, as I wrote two weeks ago, trace their origins back 800 years to Magna Carta itself.

SB 79 would allow real estate speculators to cram five, six, and seven story luxury apartment and condo buildings into single-family neighborhoods and neighborhoods currently characterized by small multifamily buildings (duplexes, fourplexes, and smaller apartments and condos). If a speculator takes advantage of other recent laws, including so-called “density bonus,” they could build 10 or even 20 stories in a single family neighborhood. The only requirement is that the new structures be within one half mile, and in some cases a quarter mile, of a bus stop. That’s it. Doesn’t matter where the bus goes. Doesn’t matter if that bus doesn’t go anywhere near your workplace, your kids’ schools, your local grocery store, and so forth. Just has to be a bus.

What’s more, some city officials are on the same page, hell bent on self-immolation. For example, multiple sources have told me that officials at the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro) have rerouted segments of bus routes and changed the locations of bus stops in order to make existing “transit oriented development” incentives applicable to specific parcels. Some California transit agencies aren’t serving the people, they’re bowing to the whims of for-profit real estate speculators, many of whom aren’t based in California and could care less about neighborhood character or quality of life.

This is how local democracy dies

It’s madness. This is how local democracy dies. Agencies like LA Metro increasingly are in the land use business. This is how mass transit functioned in the Soviet Union, in which housing and mass transit were inextricably linked (because, of course, none but the most privileged and powerful owned their own cars).

It’s almost impossible to overstate the threat SB 79 poses to neighborhoods. It would all but eliminate local governments’ power to control their own communities’ destinies. City councils and boards of supervisors, the members of which most closely reflect the people they represent, would be reduced to bystanders as rapacious developers — many of whom in this context are less than scrupulous — literally bulldoze hundreds of thousands of homes, irreversibly transforming and destroying countless neighborhoods. It’s the state dictating where and how 39.8 million will live. The state dictating to cities what kind of housing they must approve, under penalty of crippling fines, legal action, even a complete state takeover of local zoning, land use, and construction decisions. Sounds an awful lot like tyranny.

Read the rest of this piece at The All Aspect Report.

Chistopher LeGras is an attorney, journalist, muckraker, and Californian.

Photo: California State Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), in an unintentionally perfect picture. Courtesy The All Aspect Report.

The Massachusetts Backlash Against Forced Housing

Howard Husock — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

The Town of Needham is a picture-perfect Boston suburb on the Charles River, replete with a classic downtown main street with a coffee shop, a commuter rail line to the city and old New England knitting mill buildings. But, since last fall’s Town Meeting — whose 240 elected members control the budget and zoning — Needham has become an unlikely ground zero in a battle over how, or if, to allow higher-density housing construction to help address the Massachusetts combination of housing shortage and high prices. It’s come to exemplify, in the process, what can happen when an overly-prescriptive state government tries to override a history of local control — and creates more backlash than the new homes the state needs, Or, as Kevin Keane, chair of the Needham Board of Selectman puts it, “when you talk density in the suburbs, people get hesitant.”

That understates what happened here, when a plan to permit construction of 3296 new apartments in a town of 32,000 sparked a referendum that rolled it back, and called into question the practicality of a state law aimed at forcing “upzoning” in 177 towns. The phrase “forced housing” comes to mind. It’s a case study in how not to do YIMBY.

The background is a consensus that Massachusetts needs more new housing, if it is to attract and retain newcomers to provide the talent for its biotech and financial services industries, and research universities. A February report released by Democratic Governor Maura Healy found that “the state needs to increase its year-round housing supply by at least 222,000 units from 2025 to 2035.” Said Healy, “High housing costs are holding too many of our residents and our businesses back.”

One can imagine lots of ways to address that problem, including allowing newcomers to keep more of their earnings by lowering the state’s 8.5 percent capital gains tax rate or permitting new pipelines to bring in more natural gas that powers the state’s electricity grid. But the Commonwealth had a very specific approach in mind: through its “MBTA Communities Act”, a law requiring every town in or near the Boston transit system to “have one district of reasonable size in which multifamily housing is permitted”, “that must have a minimum density of 15 dwelling units per acre” and “must be located within .5 miles of a rail station”. In other words, green, “transit-oriented”, mid-rise development or bust. What’s more, new housing would also subtly force Needham and other towns to permit more subsidized “affordable” housing somewhere — thanks to a state law requiring every community to have at least 10 percent of its residences in that category. Not just green development, in other words, but “inclusionary” development, based on the social engineering premise that all communities should include an income mix.

It would all mean no small change for a town such as Needham, with a population of just 32,000 and almost exclusively single-family zoning. When its Town Meeting last October went even further — backing a plan permitting more than 3200 new apartments — the backlash began.

It was led by Town Meeting member Gary Ajamian, who says that the “extremely controversial plan” led to “anger and distrust”. Ajamian, however, did more than speak out; he helped start and lead “Needham Residents for Thoughtful Zoning”. In the dead of New England winter, the group had 20 days to gather enough signatures to force a referendum on the 3200-unit plan, the first such vote to overturn a Town Meeting decision in decades. They did it, and the vote in January was decisive: 6,904 residents opposed the zoning changes, 4,914 in favor—passing the required bar not only for a majority vote but a majority of registered voters. “If I were a betting man, “says Selectman Kevin Keane, “I wouldn’t have bet that they’d get the signatures, or bet they’d get enough turnout. As it turned out, there were more voters than in the presidential primary” (7635). The perceived threat to the New England tradition of local control mattered.

In Massachusetts, this is an issue that goes well beyond one town. Another near-in Boston suburb, Milton, has also voted against a Communities Act rezoning plan — a vote which led to litigation at the state’s Supreme Judicial Court testing the law’s. constitutionality. Although the Court upheld the law in January, it deemed its regulations as written to be “legally ineffective and must be repromulgated in accordance with state law,” throwing the situation into limbo. The backlash has, perhaps most surprisingly, has split the progressive Democrats who run the state. State Attorney General Andrea Campbell has backed the law, including before the state’s highest court, while state auditor Diana DiZiglio has deemed it an “unfunded mandate” in response to a protest by yet another town, Wrentham, over the costs involved with redoing its zoning laws. Her office is conducting a broader review of costs the law will impose on municipalities; in Needham those costs were seen as including a potential need for new water and sewer lines or school classrooms.

The town manager’s office in the Town points out that, even if a plan is ultimately adopted — it will be on the agenda at the upcoming May Town Meeting — land costs in the Town are so high, that it’s far from inevitable the rezoning will actually mean new building. Or that the current owners of the land will choose to sell. Market forces, in other words, can’t be repealed, even in Massachusetts.

The Bay State and the whole Northeast needs new home construction. But there are many ways imaginable to spark it, including such historic expedients as permitting two and three-family homes in single-family districts. Or accessory dwelling units in large, empty yards, as even California is encouraging. Rolling back local control for a bureaucrat’s idea of what historic towns should look like today seems destined to lead to resistance, not construction. Exclusionary zoning has, without doubt, stood in the way of home construction and pushed prices artificially high. But overcoming it must be handled with political care.

Howard Husock is a senior fellow in Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he focuses on municipal government, urban housing policy, civil society, and philanthropy. Before joining AEI, Mr. Husock was vice president for research and publications at the Manhattan Institute.

Former Needham Center Station Building, repurposed as a cafe, Wikimedia, under CC 3.0 License.

The Middle Class and Striver Divide

Aaron M. Renn — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

One of the important distinctions to understand in our society is between the middle class and the striver class.

Being middle class is about building a life. It's primarily about the material elements of the American Dream : a house with a backyard for grilling in a nice neighborhood, a car, family vacations, retirement savings, a social life with friends and neighbors and people from church, children who are able to build a life with even better material success.

Being striver class is about the desire to move up in the world. There are material aspects to that, but also the key element of social status . The striver wants to get into the right schools, to move to the right city or neighborhood, to vacation in the right destinations, to have intellectual or artistic ambitions, to run in the right circles, to be recognized and accepted by people at higher social levels.

The difference between middle class and striver class is not money. People with a middle class orientation can make a ton of money and be wealthier than many striver class people - even be rich, typically through some prosaic business or " sweaty startup ", or even by becoming a partner in an accounting firm or a successful doctor.

What distinguishes the striver class person is a desire to move up socially, not just economically. This doesn't have to mean trying to join some exclusive country club. It might also mean wanting to become a tenured professor at a good university, or to own an apartment in a fashionable NYC neighborhood, or to get an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal.

The difference is also not strictly about ambition level. Some people with middle class mindsets really want to get rich. Strivers can have as shallow or low ambitions as any middle class person. The difference is in the kind of ambition.

Both are completely legitimate ways to live. But these groups have very different orientations toward life. I don't think a striver class person would feel at home in a predominantly middle class environment, or vice versa.

Pete Buttigieg and Vivek Ramaswamy are archetypal strivers. It’s no surprise that both of them managed to get on TV during two separate 2003 MSNBC presidential town halls.

Read the rest of this piece at Aaron Renn Substack.

Photo: screenshot from 2003 presidential town hall.

The Climate has Changed on Climate Change

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

Like the Marxist dialectic, or the predictions of the Gospels, the green movement has long seen its triumph as preordained. Yet sometimes the inevitable turns out to be not so.

Over the past few years green policies — notably the drive for “net zero” — have been failing. Both markets and politicians have seen the light. What
Joe Biden’s treasury secretary Janet Yellen once called “the greatest business opportunity of the twenty-ﬁrst century” has revealed itself to be something of a disaster.

The new American President is likely to be blamed for the implosion of the green agenda, but its collapse long pre-dates his re-ascension. Well before November the opportunity of the century was going bust — not least because the policies were having little apparent impact on the actual climate. On Wall Street, ESG-approved (environment, social and government) stocks have been tanking, according to leading studies, shackling ﬁrms with massive losses.

Climate activists still insist that Trump’s departure from the green mantra is hubristic, like an ostrich sticking its head in the ground as the inevitable climate apocalypse comes closer. But many voters in America as well as Europe have had second thoughts about spending upwards of $6 trillion annually for the next thirty years on green largesse. It doesn’t help that these spending pledges are so often advocated by jet-setting billionaires.

Well-funded campaigners will continue to try to shield Europe’s environmental policies from Trump, but this is not a passion among voters on either side of the Atlantic. Most people don’t want to huddle in smaller dwelling units, enjoy less mobility, more costly home heating, no air-conditioning, and a more austere diet. Already a growing economic dislocation — such as the energy-driven decline of the German industrial machine — is sparking opposition to green policies throughout the West, ﬁrst expressed by the gilets jaunes movement in France in 2018, now spreading further across an increasingly distressed Europe. Even some on the left are reconsidering their policy agenda. In ultra with-it Berlin, a referendum on tighter emissions targets recently failed to win over enough voters.

The decline of the greens is a clear sign of change. Once seen by Foreign Affairs as “reshaping global politics,” the greens have suffered devastating defeats across Europe. There are now moves to boost fossil fuels in eastern Europe and Japan.

Read the rest of this piece: View/download PDF file.

Photo: illustration from the Spectator

Mine, Baby, Mine – Right Here in the USA!

Paul Driessen — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

President Trump’s Executive Orders have ended U.S. participation in the Green New Deal and Paris climate treaty. He’s also terminated mandates, programs and subsidies that would have changed our reliable, affordable energy systems to wind, solar and battery power for all-electric homes, schools, hospitals, businesses, factories, farms, transportation and shipping.

His actions will benefit wild, scenic and agricultural lands in America and worldwide.

Wind, solar and transmission line installations would have sprawled across tens of millions of acres, impacting habitats, farmlands and scenic vistas, onshore and offshore; interfered with water flow, aviation, shipping and other activities; and killed whales, birds and other wildlife.
These “clean, green” technologies require far more raw materials than the equipment they replace: electric cars need 4-6 times more metals and minerals than gasoline counterparts; onshore wind turbines require 9 times more raw materials than equivalent megawatts from combined-cycle natural gas turbines; offshore wind requires 14 times more materials than gas turbines; solar panels are just as resource-intensive. And we’d still need gas power plants or grid-scale batteries for windless/sunless periods.
Those raw material needs would require mining at levels unprecedented in human history. Just meeting “green energy” plus “normal” needs for copper would require more than twice as much copper mining as occurred throughout human history up to now. That would mean mine shafts and open-pit mines; ore removal, crushing and processing; and land, air and water pollution – on unprecedented scales.
Converting those raw materials into finished technologies, and transporting, installing, maintaining and ultimately removing the turbines, panels, transformers, power lines, batteries and other equipment would require unfathomable quantities of materials, equipment and energy.
All this mining and processing, equipment damaged and destroyed under normal operations and from extreme weather, leaching from non-recyclable components in landfills, and huge infernos when batteries ignite would send massive quantities of toxic chemicals into air, soils and water worldwide.
U.S. mining, processing, manufacturing and waste disposal would be done under tough environmental, workplace safety and human rights standards. Not so in despotic regimes in the rest of the world.
A large portion of the cobalt, lithium, rare earth, graphite and other exotic and strategic materials still come from China, which has monopoly control over mining and processing them. That puts U.S. and Western energy, transportation, communication, AI, defense systems and national security at great risk.

Simply put, humanity would have had to destroy the planet with green energy mining and systems, to save it from GIGO computer-modeled climate cataclysms.

Read the rest of this piece at Townhall.

Photo: James St. John via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

We Don't Need Policy When Practice Will Do

Pete Saunders — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

I’ve been a big fan of Alan Mallach of the Center for Community Progress for years. I first met him at a Cleveland Fed conference in Cincinnati in 2017, and later interviewed him at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy regarding his book The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America. I’m grateful to have him as a regular reader of this newsletter. And, since he said I could use this quote as a blurb, let me add that via email he said the Corner Side Yard is “consistently interesting and often thought-provoking.” Thanks!

Anyway, he reached out to me last week after I’d written about the lack of research on Rust Belt-to-Sun Belt migration in America, and its impact. He noted, quite correctly in my opinion, that there’s also been little research on white flight as well – the migration of whites from cities to suburbs throughout the latter half of the 20^th century, while a major influx of Blacks into Northern cities was also taking place. In his email, he said that “from a social/cultural perspective, it's clearly problematic, and thus not an acceptable topic for research. The fact remains that, in round numbers, while the Great Migration led to 5 million Black people moving to northern cities, simultaneously 15 million white people left those cities.” (Note: this is something I first saw documented in an academic paper by Leah Platt Boustan published in 2007).

“White flight” all along

Mallach wrote and published his own academic paper last year on a similar topic. Mallach’s paper entitled Shifting the Redlining Paradigm: The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation Maps and the Construction of Urban Racial Inequality resulted in some fascinating findings. From his paper abstract:

“While it is important to recognize the racist roots of contemporary urban conditions and Black disadvantage, the focus on the HOLC redlining maps of the late 1930s, which have become a staple of both research and popular literature, is misplaced. Despite statistical associations between the maps and contemporary measures of racialized disadvantage, extensive research has found no evidence to support a connection between them. Instead, the Second Great Migration and white flight, both acting in the context of the exclusion of Black buyers from the growing suburbs, led to the spatial and economic bifurcation of urban Black populations within cities and the reconfiguration of the formerly predominately white ethnic redlined areas as segregated areas of concentrated Black poverty.”

In other words, redlining didn’t segregate American cities. White flight, fed by the Second Great Migration that brought millions of Black people to Northern cities between 1940-1970, did. White flight perhaps wasn’t always racist in its intent, but it was definitely racist in its practice.

That’s too bad, because redlining, and a whole host of other policies, did a lot of heavy lifting in the 2010s to describe racial inequality. Turns out America didn’t need a racist federal policy to resegregate Northern cities; it just needed an economy in need of workers, and a housing development industry finally willing accommodate the needs of a housing-starved public. Sound familiar?

Mallach says that the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s “residential security” maps, developed between 1935 and 1940, assessed sections of cities on a scale of A to D, with associated color codes: A (green, meaning excellent residential security), B (blue, for good residential security), C (yellow, for fair residential security) and D (red, indicating poor residential security). Neighborhoods with higher grades were deemed safer for bank investments; lower grades were considered “hazardous”.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: A map showing Black and Latino segregation in the nation’s 100 largest metro areas in 2010. Source: https://metroplanning.org/the-cost-of-segregation-2/

Housing Affordability Is Killing the Aussie Dream – And Our Birth Rate

Rob Burgess — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

The steady decline of fertility rates in Australia presents a multifaceted challenge with wide-reaching implications for the nation’s social, cultural, and economic future.

Fertility rates are a critical indicator of societal health, influencing inter-generational stability, economic growth, and family dynamics. Sustained low fertility leads to shrinking workforces, increased dependency ratios, and growing financial pressure on public services such as healthcare and pensions. These systemic strains hinder productivity and innovation, making it imperative for Australia to address the factors contributing to its fertility decline.

At the heart of this issue is the growing gap between Australians' aspirations for family life and the realities imposed by financial and systemic constraints—chief among them being housing affordability. Despite a consistent desire for family formation, young Australians are finding it increasingly difficult to achieve their ideal family size due to rising property prices and limited access to suitable housing. This phenomenon is reshaping Australia’s demographic landscape, particularly in major cities like Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane, where fertility rates have dropped to historic lows.

Australia stands at a pivotal moment, with its largest demographic cohort of individuals in their prime childbearing years poised to shape the country’s demographic future. Failure to implement meaningful policy reforms that enables access to affordable, family housing will only deepen the demographic and economic crisis for generations to come.

Fertility Decline in Australia

Healthy fertility rates are fundamental to the functioning of society, influencing its cultural, economic, and social structures. It therefore follows that any prolonged decline will impact these systems, reshaping family dynamics and slowing national economic growth. As Richard Reeves, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution observed, “You don’t upend a 12,000-year-old social order without experiencing cultural side effects.”

As already evidenced in countries such as Japan and Italy, the economic impacts of sustained fertility declines are significant. As the workforce shrinks, the tax base needed to fund essential services like healthcare, pensions, and aged care diminishes, even as demand for these services grows due to an aging population. Over time, this strains resources and fosters systemic inefficiencies. With a reduced future labour force, economic growth slows, limiting innovation and productivity.

Furthermore, weakening birth rates erode intergenerational ties and increase dependency on government institutions to provide support that families once provided while undermining personal responsibility and individual rights. Any shift from family-based support to government dependence poses several risks and challenges, a concept perhaps best summed up by Ronald Reagan when he quipped that "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

Separate to the societal effects of declining fertility, yet no less severe, is the more personal and deeply emotional impact associated with the profound grief being experienced by those facing involuntary childlessness. The subject of increasing research, childlessness often proves to be not only isolating but acutely painful, not just for the individuals directly affected, but also their parents who often grieve the absence of grandchildren. With childlessness on the rise, these impacts will only worsen creating long-term repercussions for family cohesion and societal well-being.

Given these far-reaching consequences, it is crucial to examine the factors driving fertility decline. While cultural and lifestyle shifts play a role, financial barriers—particularly housing affordability—have emerged as the dominant constraint on family formation.

Read/download the rest of this piece (PDF opens in new tab or window).

Rob Burgess is a town planner with over 25 years of experience, having worked in both the public and private sectors. Applying evidence-based insights, Rob’s expertise lies at the intersection of population dynamics, town planning, and property markets. He is regularly engaged to undertake market research, provide strategic advice to clients, and sharing his thoughts on current and future trends. Rob is a Principal with Quantify Strategic Insights.

How Federal Lands Can Be Used to Ease the Housing Crisis

Joel Kotkin and Michael Toth — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

Next to inflation, Americans ranked housing as their top financial concern in a Gallup survey last May. Since then, it’s gotten only worse. January home sales were down 5 percent from last year’s dismal numbers. Record numbers of first-time buyers are stuck on the sidelines as housing affordability stands at its lowest level in 40 years.

President Trump must follow through on his campaign pledge “to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction.”

The housing market depends largely on interest rates and zoning — factors outside any president’s direct control. But the massive federal land portfolio gives middle- and lower-income Americans a better shot at homeownership. The federal government is the nation’s biggest landowner, holding one-third of all property — a land mass six times the size of California.

In Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque and other metro areas, federal lands brush up against the suburban periphery. Since President Trump launched the idea of “Freedom Cities” on federal land, the opening of federal lands for development has entered the policy mainstream. House Budget Committee Republicans have floated the sale of federal lands as an option for closing the deficit.

To create affordable homes on federal lands, the federal government shouldn’t sell lands for development — it should lease them. The sale of federal lands requires the buyer to comply with state and local regulations once the land is privatized, likely with the same awful result. Leasing the federal lands, on the other hand, cuts through the red tape.

Local land-use policies that make housing a luxury good in many parts of the U.S. — such as California’s solar mandate and the state’s aversion to suburban developments that rely on “car-oriented transportation” — do not apply on federal lands. Anti-growth locals and density-obsessed planners stay sidelined.

For more than a century, federal law has long authorized federal leases for commercial purposes such as mineral extraction. Congress should update its land-use laws, including the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, to authorize federal leases for housing development, subject to standard public health and environmental protections. Call it the New Homestead Act after the 1862 legislation, which — in Lincoln’s words — was enacted “so that every poor man may have a home.”

Building homes on leased federal lands will make homeownership more affordable. Instead of buying the house and the land, the homebuyer buys only the house and leases the land. To protect homeowners, Congress can require 99-year leases that can be automatically transferred to new buyers. Critics will warn that land rent can be hiked after the lease term expires, but Congress can put limits on these increases.

Federal policies that cut through the red tape by allowing new home construction on leased public lands would alleviate the undersupply of single-family homes. Homebuilders built 300,000 fewer homes in 2024 than in 1985 when there were 100 million fewer Americans.

The U.S. housing market is short an estimated 4.5 million homes. Freeing up land and reducing regulatory burdens would allow market forces and consumer preference to exercise their magic, which we can see in Texas metros like Austin, where housing costs are plummeting due to an epic home-building spree.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Michael Toth is a resident fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity and a research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin Civitas Institute.

Photo: Great Valley Center, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

SLAPPed

Robert Bryce — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

My, oh my, how the worm has turned.

Thirteen months ago, in the op-ed pages of the New York Times , University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann and his lawyer, Peter J. Fontaine, were crowing about their victory in federal court a few days earlier. They were thrilled that a jury in Washington, DC, had decided that the defendants in the case, Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn, had defamed Mann. The jury awarded the combative academic $1 in compensatory damages from Simberg and Steyn. It also awarded Mann punitive damages of $1,000 from Simberg and $1 million from Steyn.

Mann claimed the jury’s decision was “ a victory for science and it’s a victory for scientists. ”

In their February 15, 2024, op-ed, Mann and Fontaine said, “We hope this sends a broader message that defamatory attacks on scientists go beyond the bounds of protected speech and have consequences...However, we lament the time lost to this battle. This case is part of a larger culture war in which research is distorted and the truth about the climate threat is dissembled.”

Yes, well.

It turns out that Mann — who is the “presidential distinguished professor of earth and environmental science and director of the Penn Center for Science Sustainability, and the Media” as well as Penn’s “inaugural vice provost for climate science, policy, and action” — and Fontaine, were the dissemblers.

As reported here on Substack by Roger Pielke Jr., a federal court in Washington, DC, ruled yesterday that Mann and his lawyers acted in “bad faith” and “made false representations to the jury and the Court regarding damages stemming from loss of grant funding.” As Pielke explains:

This ruling follows closely on the heels of the same court reducing the punitive damages awarded to Mann against one of the defendants from $1,000,000 to $5,000 . That reduction follows the Court’s order that Mann pay $530,820.21 of legal expenses that his lawsuit resulted in for The National Review — which Mann had also sued, but whose case was dismissed.

In his ruling , the judge on the case, Alfred S. Irving, Jr., said that Mann and his lawyers:

Each knowingly made a false statement of fact to the Court and Dr. Mann knowingly participated in the falsehood, endeavoring to make the strongest case possible even if it required using erroneous and misleading information. (Emphasis added.)

The 46-page decision is a blistering takedown of Mann and his legal team. Judge Irving, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush in 2008 , writes that:

Dr. Mann makes several arguments against the imposition of sanctions, all of which are unavailing. First, Dr. Mann’s assertion that there was no falsehood or misrepresentation in his testimony or his counsel’s conduct borders on frivolity. (Emphasis added.)

Irving ruled that Mann’s lawyers’ “bad faith misconduct is an affront to the Court’s authority and an attack on the integrity of the proceedings warranting sanctions.”

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: Stanford's Mark Jacobson and Penn's Michael Mann, tried to use the courts to silence or intimidate their critics. They failed. Both men have been ordered to pay more than $500,000 in legal fees to the defendants. Source: Robert Bryce Substack

Surging LNG Exports Show US is a Global Natural Gas Superpower

Robert Bryce — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 17:33:20 -0400

Two decades ago, the accepted wisdom in the energy sector was that the US was running out of natural gas. In 2005, Lee Raymond, the famously combative CEO of Exxon Mobil, declared that “gas production has peaked in North America.” Raymond, who retired from the oil giant in 2006, said that his company was intent on building a new pipeline that would bring Arctic gas from Canada and Alaska south and that more natural gas supplies would be needed “unless there’s some huge find that nobody has any idea where it would be.”

It turned out that huge finds were right under our feet. Over the past two decades, thanks to private ownership of mineral rights, entrepreneurial capitalism, extensive pipeline infrastructure, and ongoing technology improvements in drilling and hydraulic fracturing, US gas production has more than doubled.

The result is a stunning turnaround in energy geopolitics. The US has gone from a natural gas weakling that would have been heavily dependent on LNG exporters like Russia, Australia, Nigeria, and Qatar to a global gas behemoth. More evidence of the turnaround came on Thursday when Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum visited Louisiana to celebrate the ongoing construction and expansion of Venture Global’s Plaquemines LNG export terminal. Venture Global announced an $18 billion expansion of the plant, making it the largest LNG export facility in North America.

In a speech in front of more than 1,000 workers, Wright, who pioneered hydraulic fracturing, said that 15 years ago, the US was the world’s largest LNG importer. Today, he said, it “is the largest net exporter of natural gas in the world and growing.”

Last year, Doomberg, everyone’s favorite green chicken and Substack writer, got it right when he/she/them/they wrote that “Cheap natural gas is the bedrock of the US economy. It explains much of the country’s economic resilience.”

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: courtesy Robert Bryce Substack

In Southern L.A., These Cities Are Making a Comeback

Joel Kotkin and M. Andrew Moshier — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 15:01:30 -0400

Like many older industrial towns, Paramount, a mostly Latino city of 50,000 located 18 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, has been through hard times. In 1981, the Rand Corporation described it as “an urban disaster area.” In 2015, it was named among the worst cities in America, based on 22 measures of affordability, economics, education, health, and quality of life. In 2019, Business Insider ranked it near the bottom along with several other nearby cities. Founded as a largely agricultural community in 1948, the city eventually transformed itself into a manufacturing hub but was then devastated in the 1980s as aerospace and car companies exited.

Yet today, walking along Paramount Boulevard, one sees not broken-down storefronts but a thriving downtown, full of attractive restaurants and shops. The city has adopted a “broken windows” approach to policing. While crime rates remain above average for the state, they have been trending down. Homicides, down two-thirds from 1990s levels, are well below the L.A. city average and almost half of those in nearby South L.A. neighborhoods. Paramount has also gotten its city finances on a more solid footing than those of its peers. Whereas L.A. was flirting with huge deficits even before the wildfires, Paramount maintained budget surpluses over the past decade.

Perhaps even more remarkable, one sees no signs of the homelessness, graffiti, and urban disorder that’s so common throughout Southern California—a remarkable shift from conditions just a decade or two ago. “In places like Paramount people get things done because that’s where they live,” says former Paramount city manager Pat West. “In L.A., they have meetings.”

Much of Paramount’s relative success comes from paying attention to little things. The city has focused on parks, urban space, and landscaping, helping local neighborhoods improve their look by subsidizing flower beds and white picket fences to improve the curb appeal of homes.

Under its elected leadership, Paramount has seen job growth in the hospital, education, small industrial, and retail sectors. The city’s income levels are significantly higher, and unemployment lower, than the L.A. County average. Unlike the dysfunctional L.A. school system, Paramount’s independent school district has improved its graduation rate from 71 percent to over 90 percent in recent years, according to city manager John Moreno.

Much of this success stems from the city’s strong community spirit and close collaboration between local government, businesses, and schools. Moreno notes that Los Angeles operates in a more “siloed” manner. In contrast, Paramount’s tight-knit community—now increasingly led by young families, many of them homeowners or aspiring to be—has driven its turnaround. “We went from a place with shootings and murders to one that attracts young families who see this as an up-and-coming place,” Moreno says. “We had a lot of blight, but the citizens and churches brought it back. When I go to L.A., I’m amazed they’re not doing these basic things.”

The turnaround in Paramount and a host of other South L.A. cities may seem like an obscure data point in the vastness of the Los Angeles Basin. Spreading 1,200 square miles, the basin encapsulates an immense area stretching from Hollywood to Orange County. The area is home to roughly 10 million people and 80 cities, including some of the country’s best-known locales like the Hollywood hills, Santa Monica, downtown Los Angeles, Venice, Koreatown, and East Los Angeles. In the recent fires, several of these communities, notably in the Pacific Palisades and Hollywood, went up in flames.

Read the rest of this piece at City Journal.

M. Andrew Moshier is Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Chapman University, where he recently served as the Dean of the School of Communication.

Photo: Ken Lund via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

High-Speed Snail

Thomas Buckley — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

The last few days have not been good ones for California’s high speed rail project.

In fact, very very few days in its entire existence have been good ones for the odious debacle.

Come to think of it, there has probably only been one, ever – the day it was approved by voters and while that was good for the project it was terrible for the state.

Thursday, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy announced a federal audit of the project and its finances. And Friday, the project’s own inspector general (IG) released a report that can only be called, um, less than complimentary.

The IG’s report noted that there have been massive problems with land acquisition and figuring out what to do with existing utilities and water canals and such. In fact, it turns out the project has been designing and building things that – once those issues are finally settled – will almost certainly have to be ripped up and replaced.

The report also noted other gaps in the system, such as this 400 foot space that has no approved plan to be fixed despite years of “work”:

One supposes the passengers could get out and walk around it, but that would defeat the purpose of it being “high speed” rail.

Note also that the high speed track is just yards from the existing freight/Amtrak rail line, lending an even greater level of superfluity to the entire project.

And just to make sure everyone knew this was a California project, the IG recommended hiring more lawyers and having the legislature pass a law forcing land and utility owners to come to terms more quickly.

As to the feds, a $4 billion dollar payout to the system planned under the Biden administration was supposed to take place soon – Duffy said that will not happen until they can figure out where the money has actually been going (the feds already have a billion or so sunk into the project.)

Read the rest of this piece at The Point.

Photo: courtesy The Point.

Liberals Riding Anti-Americanism to Re-election Would Be Tragic

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 20:28:38 -0400

U.S. President Donald Trump’s imbecilic and unnecessary suggestion that Canada should become the 51st state has led some of my own family members — on my wife’s side, who are Canadian — not to travel to the United States, even in the midst of winter. Now this is personal.

The dislike that some Canadians feel toward Trump, and America in general, is something I experienced at a wedding of one of my wife’s cousins, shortly after Trump’s first term. At what should have been a non-political event, one of the speakers attacked the United States with such vehemence, it made me want to leave the room — and I’m no Trump supporter.

Trump’s recent pronouncements have also led to informal boycotts of U.S. goods and cancelled vacations to the U.S. Also witness the almost un-Canadian nationalist celebrations over the recent defeat of the U.S. hockey team.

Although Trump’s national security advisor, Mike Waltz, has dampened “invasion” talk, Canadians have reasons to be outraged by Trump’s threats, and perhaps there’s something good about restoring Canada’s beleaguered sense of national pride. Yet as nationalist surges tend to do, it has led to greater support for the current Liberal government. If this allows the Liberals to stay in power, it would be tragic for both countries.

What Canada needs, more than even good relations with the U.S., is a dramatic shift from the ruinous policies that have made it an economic laggard with a stunted military, and now a global partner in the anti-Israel jihad of the global left.

Sadly, if Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre were prime minister instead of Justin Trudeau, perhaps Trump’s rhetoric wouldn’t be so vociferously belligerent. Trudeau is everything Trump hates — a would-be European with typically progressive positions on everything from COVID lockdowns to internet censorship, net-zero policies and racial abasement. He may not be an authoritarian of the Putin mould, but he’s hardly someone you would rely on in the trenches.

Yet to my Canadian extended family, I would say this: there are lessons to be learned from Trump’s attacks. Nowhere is this clearer as in areas like immigration, defence and protectionism. For many Canadians, the threat of high tariffs is the most pressing danger, as it threatens to unravel the last remaining stronghold of Canadian industry, automobiles, and could also hit the country’s resource industry, notably oil. In terms of merchandise trade, Canada had a $100-billion trade surplus with the U.S. last year.

Read the rest of this piece at National Post.

Photo: White House 45 via Flickr, under Public Domain.

Will We See the End of Children?

Aaron M. Renn — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 20:28:38 -0400

What I’ve been reading: Saving the Protestant Ethic: Creative Class Evangelicalism and the Crisis of Work by Andrew Lynn.

For those of you in the Indianapolis area, I want to highlight a great upcoming event. Farah Stockman, author of the great book American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears, will be in town speaking about her book on March 19th at 6pm at the Carmel Clay Public Library. (Registration required).

Stockman’s book is about the lives of workers in a bearing plant in Indianapolis that closed and moved to Mexico. I hosted her for a discussion about it on my podcast last year.

The New Yorker has a long and fantastic piece on falling fertility rates in its new issue. There’s a particular focus on South Korea.

Today, declining fertility is a near-universal phenomenon. Albania, El Salvador, and Nepal, none of them affluent, are now below replacement levels. Iran’s fertility rate is half of what it was thirty years ago. Headlines about “Europe’s demographic winter” are commonplace. Giorgia Meloni, the Prime Minister of Italy, has said that her country is “destined to disappear.” One Japanese economist runs a conceptual clock that counts down to his country’s final child: the current readout is January 5, 2720....

It will take a few years before we can be sure, but it’s possible that 2023 saw the world as a whole slump beneath the replacement threshold for the first time. There are a couple of places where fertility remains higher—Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa—but even there the rates are generally diminishing. Paranoia has ensued....

Anyone who offers a confident explanation of the situation is probably wrong. Fertility connects perhaps the most significant decision any individual might make with unanswerable questions about our collective fate, so a theory of fertility is necessarily a theory of everything—gender, money, politics, culture, evolution. Eberstadt told me, “The person who explains it deserves to get a Nobel, not in economics but in literature.”...

South Korea has a fertility rate of 0.7. This is the lowest rate of any nation in the world. It may be the lowest in recorded history. If that trajectory holds, each successive generation will be a third the size of its predecessor. Every hundred contemporary Koreans of childbearing age will produce, in total, about twelve grandchildren….Portents of desolation are everywhere. Middle-aged Koreans remember a time when children were plentiful. In 1970, a million Korean babies were born. An average baby-boomer classroom had seventy or eighty pupils, and schools were forced to divide their students into morning and afternoon shifts. It is as though these people were residents of a different country. In 2023, the number of births was just two hundred and thirty thousand. A baby-formula brand has retooled itself to manufacture muscle-retention smoothies for the elderly. About two hundred day-care facilities have been turned into nursing homes, sometimes with the same directors, the same rubberized play floors, and the same crayons. A rural school has been repurposed as a cat sanctuary….Outside of Seoul, children are largely phantom presences. There are a hundred and fifty-seven elementary schools that had no new enrollees scheduled for 2023. That year, the seaside village of Iwon-myeon recorded a single newborn....

The after-school program was about to start. It featured two options: 3-D printing and something Lee called “a new sport.” She could give me no details on the new sport, which was played on Tuesdays. In the past, they had offered volleyball, badminton, and soccer, but such extravagances required a critical mass. She let me wander the school, which felt like a museum of childhood artifacts: an unlit but well-stocked gymnasium, a darkened cafeteria outfitted with a little proscenium stage, enormous forsaken playgrounds, ballfields gone wild. The only apparent concession to the demographic reality was a robotic apparatus for playing Ping-Pong by yourself....

Korea’s demographic collapse is mostly taken as a fait accompli. As John Lee, the political analyst, put it, “They say South Korea will be extinct in a hundred years. Who cares? We’ll all be dead by then.” The causes routinely cited include the cost of housing and of child care—among the highest in the world. Very little in Korean society seems to give young people the impression that child rearing might be rewarding or delightful. I met a stylish twentysomething news reporter at an airy, silent café in Seoul’s lively Itaewon district. “People hate kids here,” she told me. “They see kids and say, ‘Ugh.’ ” This ambient resentment finds an outlet in disdain for mothers. She said, “People call moms ‘bugs’ or ‘parasites.’ If your kids make a little noise, someone will glare at you.” She had recently vacationed in Rome, where adults drank at bars while their kids ran amok. She said, “Here, people would say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ ”…The reporter said, “When I write about this, I think, Well, what would change my mind? The answer is nothing. It’s the norm not to want kids.” Like many Koreans, she dotes on her dog. Finding gifts in Seoul for my two little soccer fanatics at home required deliberate planning—I schlepped all over town looking for national-team jerseys in child’s sizes and had to settle for black-market knockoffs—but there is a pet depot on practically every block. Last year, strollers for dogs outsold those for babies. She said, “I’m not saying people value dogs more than they value children.” She paused to gesture to the other patrons: “But all you have to do is look around.”...

Koreans cite the pressures and costs of excessive education as a large part of their reluctance to have children. (American parents in liberal enclaves might share a version of these misgivings.) An auspicious Korean childhood culminates in acceptance to one of Seoul’s three most prestigious universities. Admission is primarily based on a student’s performance on the national collegiate entrance exam, or Suneung, which is administered every year on a Thursday in November. The opening of the stock market is delayed that day, and many construction sites are closed. Bus and metro services are increased to ease traffic congestion. Students running late may avail themselves of a police-motorcycle escort. During the English-comprehension section, which requires absolute silence, air-traffic control suspends all takeoffs and landings.

Read the rest of this piece at Aaron Renn Substack.

Photo: Picryl, in Public Domain.

The Democrats' Coming Civil War

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 20:28:38 -0500

At a time when the world press is obsessed with US president Donald Trump and his often imbecilic machinations, perhaps a more consequential struggle is taking place on the other side of the aisle. Trump and his minions may completely control the GOP, but the future of the Democrats is uncertain. The party’s left is locked in battle with those who embrace the party’s traditional values, like support for economic growth and enforcing the law.

Right now, on a national level, the Democratic Party seems to be continuing its movement leftwards. Kamala Harris is still its front-runner for the 2028 presidential election and representatives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jasmine Crockett, who are further to the left, are widely seen as rising stars. Looking at the behaviour of the Democrats and their media allies, they seem to be reprising Talleyrand’s quip that the Bourbon kings of France ‘learnt nothing and forgot nothing’ after the revolution.

At the recent Democratic National Committee election for the party’s new leadership, there was an enduring obsession with race and gender. Veteran Democrat Ruy Teixeira described it ‘like outtakes from a humanities seminar at a small liberal-arts college’.

We saw similar scenes in November, with the backlash received by Massachusetts congressman Seth Moulton when he dared to share concerns about his young daughter potentially having to compete against male athletes. As a result, he faced the resignation of key staffers, as well as threats from one university to cancel an internship program associated with his office.

Yet even as the national party drifts off the reservation, there are hopeful signs of growing anti-woke pushback in the Democrats’ modern heartlands – namely, in America’s big cities. There have been successful revolts against the progressives in such unlikely places as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Seattle. These kinds of insurgencies could prove the best hope for the party to revive itself in the coming elections and recover more moderate voters.

It’s important that the Democrats get their house in order, as the MAGA movement may be more short-lived than many anticipate. Having won by only a modest margin against an awful candidate, Trump and his conspiratorial, rightist supporters may already be pushing away some voters who supported him last year. His popularity, never strong, is showing some minor decline as he picks unnecessary fights, such as with Canada. His willingness to allow his billionaire bro, Elon Musk, to take such a prominent role in government, despite his frequent buffoonish online outbursts, appears amateurish to many. Even some Trump allies fear that Musk and the other MAGA oligarchs are undermining the president’s populist appeal.

Given Trump’s unsteadiness, by 2026 and even more so by 2028, whoever controls the Democrats has a good shot of winning the presidential sweepstakes. If I were a partisan Republican, I would be rooting for continued the ascendency of the progressive ideologues. At the moment, the Democrats seem intent on continuing to lose. The new party head, Minnesota’s Ken Martin, is a close ally of failed vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz. Walz himself has even mooted running for president in 2028.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Photo: FDL via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Get Your Rust Belt Education, Right Here

Pete Saunders — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0500

During its run, I absolutely loved the HBO series The Wire. It was a fascinating show that provided deep insight into the institutional corrosion that felled post-industrial cities like Baltimore. Each season featured institutions – the sad ubiquity of the illegal drug trade; Baltimore’s port system, and the union desperately trying to remain relevant; government bureaucracy and corruption; troubled public school systems; and the declining influence and resources of the newspaper print industry – trying to make the city better, or simply make a way to survive.

Baltimore is not a city I include in my focus group of Rust Belt cities, but it’s undeniably Rust Belt in its experience. And The Wire spoke to what happens in cities where the foundational economy disappears and nothing enters to replace it, far better than any show I’ve seen.

A lot of people who care about cities saw the series full of metaphors, an opportunity to dig deep into the problems of the inner city without getting too close to them. It was an intellectual journey, or worse yet, lurid entertainment. The Wire’s viewers generally weren’t exposed to the issues of the show’s characters, unless they lived in similar conditions in a similar city. Viewers could watch drug deals and drug hits from the security of their living room, or ponder the moral complexities of political corruption without paying a direct cost. For many, watching The Wire was like watching a trainwreck slowly unfold from a safe distance, or riding a wild rollercoaster ride with the certainty that they would never be thrown out.

Many television shows aim to reach the kind of blunt authenticity displayed in the The Wire, but never reach it. Much of The Wire’s authenticity is attributed to David Simon and Ed Burns. Simon was the creator, executive producer, head writer and showrunner of The Wire, with Burns being Simon’s his long-time collaborator in writing and production. Burns, a Vietnam War vet, got a first-hand look at Baltimore’s streets as a detective in the Baltimore Police Department. Upon retirement he later taught 7^th and 8^th grade students in the Baltimore City Public Schools. Simon gained this authenticity from his years working the city desk for the Baltimore Sun.

Rust Belt Reporter, the wonderful memoir by former Detroit Free Press journalist John Gallagher, reminds us that we need more writers who can accurately depict this aspect of the American urban experience.

As the book’s title suggests, Gallagher’s journalism career is almost entirely centered on Rust Belt cities. He starts as a young reporter with the City News Bureau in Chicago in the 1970’s, before moving on to newspaper gigs in Rochester, NY, and later in nearby Syracuse. However, the bulk of Gallagher’s career was spent in Detroit, where he worked for the Detroit Free Press for 32 years before retiring in 2019. This was the job that gave him as he said “the catbird seat over America’s greatest urban story – the rise, fall, and rise again of a great American city,” and led to most poignant and meaningful writing of his career.

It’s odd how much of Gallagher’s career touches on themes brought to the screen in The Wire. He’d covered drug-related murders; he’d written on United Auto Workers and Teamsters union negotiations with Detroit’s Big Three automakers, and even on his own union experience as part of a devastating newspaper strike; he’d published investigative stories exploring local government corruption. If anyone were to write the Motor City version of The Wire, Gallagher would have the cred to do it.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: courtesy Pete Saunders.

California Now at the Heart of the Battle Against Woke Anti-Semitism

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0500

When affirmative action, the predecessor of DEI, was first implemented in the early 1970s, the goal was to address cruel centuries of oppression of African Americans. It was widely supported by many white Americans, who saw it as a short-term palliative.

But in recent years, affirmative action has merged with a more radical academic dogma known as “critical race theory”. At its core, this belief system deplores America as a racist confection, a country that will never be able to address its evils without abandoning the merit system and the notion of fair play. Critical race theory (CRT) has grown into a lucrative industry, as schools, companies and governments raced to implement DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) policies and imposed Mao-like struggle sessions on employees to hold the party line.

Today, thankfully, CRT now faces a serious decline. Theoretician Ibrahim X Kendi recently closed his Boston University “anti-racist research” centre, moving it to Howard. President Trump seems determined to wipe out CRT and DEI among anyone in the federal orbit, which could include the very universities that nurtured it. The administration is perfectly aware that DEI and CRT policies are widely unpopular among most Americans.

One contributor to the backlash has been how CRT ideology has shifted activists towards ever more radical politics, particularly with regard to Israel and Jewish Americans. In California, an incoming new “ethnic studies” curriculum for schools has been accused of categorising all white people, no matter their origins, as enjoying “white privilege”. In this world-view, groups like Jews do not suffer discrimination, which might have come as a surprise to our immigrant forebears as well as to those who are still facing anti-Semitism today.

Throughout academia, DEI and other race-based programmes have emerged as fulcrums of anti-Israel, and often anti-Semitic action. Even on my normally sane campus, our DEI unit at Chapman awarded this year’s Dr Martin Luther King Jr Community Service Award to the university’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).

Given numerous instances of harassment of Jewish students and the SJP’s celebration of the October 7 pogrom, this was clearly absurd. Our President, Daniele Struppa, effectively rescinded the order, apologising to Jewish students and faculty, to the horror of many at the school’s ultra-woke Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

In California, Jewish legislators are campaigning to keep CRT’s pernicious influence contained, and to mitigate the worst consequences of the new “ethnic studies” guidelines. But the CRT radicals remain deeply entrenched and well-placed within school bureaucracies and the teacher’s unions. Many blue states still embrace policies that discriminate on the basis of race and gender. The Biden administration to its shame promoted critical race theory. Much the same has occurred in the likes of Minnesota.

So even as Trump and his allies seek to counter DEI and CRT, it’s going to be a tough struggle at some elite universities. In some cases, anti-Jewish sentiment is widespread. Jewish students face professors hectoring against Israel and demonstrators who have blocked off access to school buildings for “Zionists”. Erwin Chemerinsky, Berkeley’s Law School dean and well-known progressive, wrote in the LA Times that “nothing has prepared me for the anti-Semitism” now clearly evident at Berkeley and other campuses.

Despite these outrages, it won’t be easy to remove these antics. Already some universities are rallying to keep discriminatory practices, even in red states. Their oligarchic funding is unlikely to run out in the near future. At least until Trump, Leftist activism was often subsidized by federal taxes, something the public had little notion about.

In the long term, however, the decline of CRT should mark a step towards a society closer to Dr King’s ethos, particularly critical for a country that may become predominantly non-white by mid-century. Crowing about the end of “the US white majority” might be popular in ethnic studies departments but has not translated into a better life for most minorities. America’s great strength is that it was not founded on the basis of any particular ethnicity and has successfully evolved to become more inclusive; a fundamentally racist society would not be such a lure for new Latin American, African or Asian immigrants.

Getting rid of DEI, CRT and their offsprings is one step towards this new post-racial future. It represents the rejection of the sectarianism preached by “racial justice” activists in the West, Hamas and other jihadis, and by far-Right sectarians across the West. America, indeed, all of Western society, needs not more separation but more unforced integration.

CRT needs to be returned to the obscurity of its origins in the university hothouse. What is needed instead is a commitment to help raise people from poor circumstances, whichever race they happen to be. True social justice cannot be accomplished by turning people against one another.

This piece first appeared at Telegraph.

Photo: N. Papes, USA Today

Britian is Committing "National Economic Suicide"

Robert Bryce — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0500

If you want to know what’s happening in a place, ask a cab driver.

On a Sunday afternoon, during a short ride to the British Museum, I asked our cabbie about his energy bills and what he thinks of the British government. For the next 12 minutes, we got an earful. Our driver, Adrian, who was in his 50s, ranted about the British government and its climate policies.

He explained that over the past four years, his energy bill has gone “from three hundred pounds a month to now a thousand pounds a month...Yeah, a thousand pounds a month just to keep the lights on in my house.” When I asked why the prices were increasing, he replied, “It’s the energy policy on green renewables right? It's not letting the market dictate things. We've got, I think, we've got the most expensive energy in the world now. It’s a suicide policy.”

Adrian isn’t far off. As Matt Ridley pointed out last month on Twitter/X, Britain now has the most expensive electricity in the OECD. “That’s what happens,” Ridley said, “if you try to rely on using the landscape to try to extract useful energy from the thin, weak, dispersed and unreliable source that is wind.”

Adrian, the cab driver, isn’t the only Briton talking about suicide. At the ARC conference on Tuesday, Sir Paul Marshall delivered a scathing assessment of Europe’s infatuation with alt-energy. He said Britain’s push for net zero -- and the staggering energy costs that have come with it -- are “acts of national economic suicide.”

After spending a week in London, the signs of the country’s decline and the frustration of Britain’s citizens are apparent.

Near the entrance to the British Museum is a room that discusses the museum’s future. Near an impressive model of the envisioned additions, a placard on the wall talks about the museum’s “ambitious cultural redevelopments” and notes that among the next steps is to “build a new Energy Centre to make the Museum more sustainable and pave the way to reach net-zero targets.”

While Britain’s elites are talking about net zero, the country’s industry is heading for the exits. And despite massive oil and gas resources, the British government refuses to allow more drilling and continues its idiotic ban on hydraulic fracturing.

Last September, Tata Steel closed the last two blast furnaces in Britain. The shuttering of the Port Talbot steelworks in Wales resulted in the loss of 2,800 jobs. However, the symbolism may be as significant as the job losses. By closing the blast furnace, Britain, the home of the Industrial Revolution, will no longer be able to produce virgin steel from iron, coal, and limestone. Instead, it must now rely on electric arc furnaces that recycle scrap steel. The union that represented many of the workers at Port Talbot called the closure of the blast furnaces “industrial vandalism.”

In mid-January, INEOS closed the Grangemouth synthetic ethanol plant in Scotland, which resulted in the loss of several hundred jobs. The facility was one of only two in Europe that produced synthetic ethanol, which is used in the production of numerous pharmaceuticals. Here’s how one trade publication described the closure:

High energy prices and high carbon taxes have forced the closure of this strategic UK asset. The UK, which used to be a major force in chemicals, employing a large and highly skilled workforce, has seen the closure of ten large chemical complexes in the last five years alone and, in complete contrast to the USA, has not had one new chemical plant built for a generation. Energy prices have doubled in the UK in the last five years and now stand five times higher than those in the USA. The UK cannot compete with such a huge disadvantage.

When the plant closed, the chairman of INEOS, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, said, “We are witnessing the extinction of our major industries as chemical manufacture has the life squeezed out of it.”

Britain has enormous oil and gas resources and could quickly reduce its energy prices if it began drilling. Earlier this month, Deloitte published a study commissioned by Egdon Resources, which estimated that the shale formations in Lincolnshire, in a formation known as the Gainsborough Trough, could contain 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, enough fuel to supply all of Britain’s gas needs for several years. Deloitte estimated the gas field could generate some $180 billion in GDP for Britain and dramatically reduce its need for imported gas.

The Labour government quickly pooh-poohed the idea of producing domestic shale gas. A spokesman for the government said, "We intend to ban fracking for good and make Britain a clean energy superpower to protect current and future generations. The biggest risk to our energy security is staying dependent on fossil fuel markets and only by sprinting to clean power by 2030 can the UK take back control of its energy and protect both family and national finances from price spikes.”

This is national insanity. As seen above, 20 years ago, thanks to drilling in the North Sea, Britain was self-sufficient in gas. Since then, production and consumption have been falling, and the country now relies on imports for nearly half of its gas needs.

Further, the idea of “sprinting to clean energy” is not working. As I reported here on February 5 with the launch of the Global Renewable Rejection Database, rural Britain is in an uproar over the encroachment of massive alt-energy projects. Local regulators rejected four solar projects in January alone, including ones in Wakefield, Springwell, Norfolk, and Kelham.

At the ARC conference on Tuesday, Marshall, who owns GB News, The Spectator, and Unherd, said Britain and Germany are “the patsies of Net Zero.” (My speech at ARC on energy humanism was also on Tuesday. The video has not been posted on YouTube yet.)

Marshall noted that electricity prices for British industry are five times higher than those in the US and seven times China’s. He said renewables are “essentially a parasitic form of energy.” In the 1990s, he said, nuclear energy provided a quarter of Britain’s electricity, “but now Britain only has five remaining plants, four of these are slated for closure in the next five years.” And this: Britain and Germany, he said, are “the patsies of Net Zero.”

Britain, he noted, has “enough gas reserves in the North Sea to cover 35 years of consumption, yet since 2019, the UK has refused to grant any new oil and gas licenses and we’ve even levied a specially designed windfall tax on the existing producers.” He concluded that net zero is immiserating and its main victims are the poor...Cheap and abundant energy is the foundation that underpinned our prosperity. Industry knows this. America knows this. Nations in the Gulf know this. And China knows this.” He went on, saying that unless Britain changes course, it will “simply continue down the path to unilateral economic disarmament.”

During our stay in London, I have asked numerous people about energy costs. In nearly every instance, the response has been a shake of the head or a raising of hands in despair. A bartender at the pub across from our hotel said his energy bill has doubled over the past four years, Our friend, Maddie, who is in London studying journalism, told us she is paying $150 per month to heat her tiny flat.

British citizens understand what is happening to them but feel powerless to do anything about the situation. They have been betrayed by the current Labour government and the Tories. In November, the Labour Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, traveled to Azerbaijan to the UN climate meeting to declare that Britain would aim to cut its emissions by 81% by 2035. The BBC noted that the new “target updates a 78% pledge by 2035 under the previous Conservative government.” Starmer claimed that the British government would not “tell people how to live their lives” and that the “race is on for the clean energy jobs of the future.”

What total and utter bullshit.

While the rest of the world is awakening to the disaster that is alt-energy, Starmer continues to push the discredited notion that “clean energy” creates jobs. It doesn’t. It destroys jobs. Britain is now losing jobs at the fastest rate since the 2008 financial crisis.

While at the British Museum on Sunday, I struck up a conversation with an American who lives in Britain. He runs a private equity firm and splits his time between New York and his place in the English countryside. I asked him about Britain’s economy. He replied, “The last place people are putting money these days is in central Europe. The second-to-last place they are putting it is in Britain.”

London, of course, is as charming as ever. The pubs and shops seem busy, and there appear to be plenty of tourists on the streets, even in the gray days of February. The manager at our hotel told me that 90% of his rooms are booked. But tourism doesn’t create durable, high-paying jobs.

Britain became a world power by making ships, steel, and automobiles. Today, it’s becoming a place that has to rely on sales of pub grub and hotel beds. Short of a massive course correction on energy – that exceeds what President Trump is doing in the US -- it’s clear that Britain’s days as an industrial and economic power are finished.

‘Tis a pity.

This piece first appeared at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: courtesy Robert Bryce Substack

Jewish Geography Points South

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0500

You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler, he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!”

The Ottoman sultan Bayezid II is said to have made this disparaging remark about Spain’s Catholic king upon the latter’s expulsion of Jews and Muslims in 1492. Knowing what an asset the Jewish community of al-Andalus had been to the Arab kingdoms there, the sultan was astonished at Ferdinand’s edict and welcomed the Jewish refugees from his Christian foe.

Jewish history has been defined in large part by expulsions, and the search for places that accept them. In the past this included Muslim rulers. In 1940, Mohammed V of Morocco famously refused to implement the antisemitic edicts of the French Vichy regime allied with Nazi Germany. Considering himself Amir al-Mu’minin (Commander of the Faithful) like his namesake the prophet, Mohammed V saw the Jews not as the wandering people as portrayed in Christian legend, but as People of the Book deserving of protection. “There are no Jews in Morocco. There are only Moroccan subjects.”

His firm act of defiance — understood by scholars today to have been on political as well as religious grounds — in support of his country’s quarter of a million Jews stood in starkly heroic contrast to the impotence and inaction (at best) of Pope Pius XII, later nicknamed “Hitler’s Pope” for his secret back channels of communication with the Nazi regime.

Sadly, more recent history has been one of ever fewer safe places for Jews. The Middle East, once a haven, has become largely Jewless (Israel excepted).

Through a mixture of expulsions, voluntary and semi-voluntary emigrations, and everything in between, the Jewish population of Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East has gone from a million in 1948 to an estimated 15,000 today. (Israel currently has approximately 1.7 million Muslim citizens.)

The recent history of Christians in Muslim-majority countries hasn’t been much better. The Christian population of the Middle East has declined precipitously in the past 100 years as well. In 1910, Christians made up 13.6 percent of the population. Today they constitute between 3 and 5 percent. Europe itself is becoming less and less Christian over time — 95 percent in 1900, projected to be 65 percent by 2050 — and more Muslim. Africa, on the other hand, is expected to be home to 40 percent of the world’s Christians by the year 2060. All these changes in the monotheistic world suggest that, as at the time of the Spanish Inquisition, Jewish demography is undergoing enormous changes.

What distinguishes the Jews from other monotheistic faiths in this massive transformation is that while the Christian and Muslim worlds are becoming geographically more diverse, the once wildly diverse Jewish Diaspora has become dramatically less so. Jewish migration in recent decades has been almost entirely to Israel and the United States, such that 90 percent of world Jewry today are American or Israeli citizens, some both. Over 70 percent of the Jewish Diaspora resides in North America, the vast majority in the United States.

Read the rest of this piece at Sapir.

Map: Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.

The Revival of Black Town Centers

Pete Saunders — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0500

In honor of Black History Month, I annually write some piece that honors the significance and impact of the contributions of Black people on the American urban environment. In the past I’ve written about the people, historical and in the present-day, who made our communities better through their research, their professional endeavors, their political acumen, and their art, advocacy and activism. Taken together, the contributions of individuals has led to a distinct view of how Blacks can and should live in cities – what I call Black Urbanism.

Today, however, I won’t focus on the people and their contributions to the American urban environment. Instead, I will focus on the significant physical imprint that Blacks had on cities, as they moved from the rural South to the urban North throughout the 20^th century, despite the constraints placed on them by segregation.

Black Town Centers

As a kid I often heard many older Black people say that Blacks lost as much, if not more, through integration than we gained. Most referred to the strength and cohesiveness of their segregated neighborhoods, by saying things like, “we saw Black success all around us,” or “we had everything we needed right where we were.” They were talking about how segregation ironically created tight-knit, self-sufficient, mixed-income communities that were walkable – the things urbanists and planners seek in communities today. Unfortunately, as Blacks became more geographically dispersed by income and wealth, the strength of those communities was eroded.

But for roughly two generations, between the 1910s and the 1960s, the influx of Blacks into major cities led to the creation of Black town centers that served the needs of a community that had to become self-reliant. Despite barriers, Blacks created thriving business hubs that provided goods, services, and cultural sustenance to their communities. These commercial districts were not just economic centers but also social and cultural hubs, fostering a sense of solidarity and identity among its residents.

The mid-20^th century Black town centers had everything we urbanists talk about today when referring to “15-minute cities”. There were grocers, clothing shops, and restaurants. There were doctor’s and lawyer’s offices, banks, and insurance companies. There were bars, jazz clubs and venues that attracted the top names in Black entertainment. And the town center’s amenities were predominantly owned by Black entrepreneurs.

The decline of black-owned commercial districts began in the mid-20th century, influenced by several factors. The most significant was urban renewal policies, which often resulted in the displacement of African American communities. Highways and new developments were frequently constructed through thriving black neighborhoods, leading to the destruction of these commercial districts.

Additionally, the desegregation of the 1960s, while a monumental step towards equality, had unintended economic consequences. African Americans gained access to previously white-only businesses, leading to a dispersal of their economic power. The rise of large chain stores also undercut smaller, black-owned businesses, which struggled to compete.

Economic recessions, discriminatory lending practices, and lack of access to capital further exacerbated the decline. The 1968 Fair Housing Act aimed to address some of these issues, but the damage to black-owned commercial districts had already been severe.

By the 1980s, many Black town centers had been so decimated that their presence had largely been lost to history.

However, they were never completely forgotten. My first planning job assignment, with the City of Chicago in the early 1990s, was to work on what we called the Mid-South Plan, covering the city’s south lakefront communities. Residents attending community meetings remembered the vibrancy of the area’s heyday in the 1950s when it was referred to as Bronzeville and sought to revive that long-forgotten name.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Hollywata via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Tech Bros Have Stolen Austin's Soul

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

It looms, all glamour and glass, like a strange Wellsian monster. Floor by floor it comes, casting the Colorado River in shadow as it goes. By the time it’s finished, sometime next year, it’ll be the tallest building in Texas, at 74 storeys beating Houston’s JP Morgan Chase Tower by almost 20 feet. Yet even more than its scale, it’s the amenities at the Waterline Apartments that really impress.

This, after all, is a place that promises a new Austin, one, its marketers say, that offers “serenity in the sky”. There’ll be restaurants, and retail, and a hotel complete with swimming pool and spa. Far from a repeat of The War of the Worlds, then, the Waterline speaks to another H.G. Wells fantasy, one the writer envisaged as “a great gallery” where people could meet and live in harmony. Nor is it alone. There are 13 similar high-rises coming right across Austin, as its population rises and GDP soars.

This emerging urban Austin, a place of towers and cocktail bars, is fundamentally different from the established centres of the East and Midwest. In beehives like Wall Street or The Loop, office workers historically came in to work, then retreated back to the suburbs each night. Downtown Austin, though, puts residents at its hearts, focusing less on offices and more on lifestyles. Yet if that means amenities galore, this tidy vision risks redefining American cities for the worse — even as the old problems of urban dysfunction always loom.

For decades, the Texan capital was synonymous with a single word: weird. Unlike the conservative countryside, or else oil towns like Dallas, the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Austin was a place of lively bars and soul-filled clubs. There was Rainey Street, too, a charming Latino neighbourhood filled with pretty tree-lined cottages. When I first came here, almost half a century ago, I was reminded of nothing less than Haight-Ashbury — the San Francisco neighbourhood so beloved among artists and hippies.

Now, though, this older, shabbier Austin is slipping away. Quite aside from landmark developments like the Waterline, that’s clear enough in the numbers. Since 2000, downtown’s population has tripled to 15,000. In large part, in fact, Kevin Burns argues the ultra-modern vibe can be understood by sheer demand, with the rising forest of towers appealing to young professionals tired of life in the suburbs. “The driver is quality of life,” says the bearded 47-year-old real-estate developer, sipping a coffee as the sound of construction echoes around us.

It’s not hard to see what he means. Life by the Colorado, still feverishly in the making, is pleasantly walkable. There are yew-scattered parklands, and bike lanes and creeks. It’s all surely a step up from the convention centres and stadiums that once got urban developers excited. There’s also plenty to do: dozens of bars and restaurants open in Austin every month, dovetailed by yoga studios and comedy clubs. Yet if the new Austin promises paradise for wealthy hipsters, the hippies of yore seem far less welcome. Downtown, after all, is expensive, hardly surprising when so many of the new arrivals are tech workers, “empty nesters” with far fewer children to feed than their peers elsewhere. An apartment in the sky here will set you back $170,000 more than other parts of Central Texas, doubtless explaining why so many new downtowners are white.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Photo: Randy von Liski via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Let Them Eat Solar Panels (and Efficiency)

Robert Bryce — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

In 2013, the World Bank declared it would stop funding coal projects and would only “in rare circumstances” provide financial support for new coal plants. It also said it would “scale up efforts to improve energy efficiency and increase renewable energy.” Rather than support coal projects, the bank said it would “scale up its work helping countries develop national and regional markets for natural gas, the fossil fuel with the lowest carbon intensity.” But two years later, the bank backtracked on natural gas and said it would stop all lending for oil and gas projects “except under exceptional circumstances.”

Since then, the bank, which claims its “role is to reduce poverty by lending money to the governments of its poorer members to improve their economies and to improve the standard of living of their people,” has lost its collective mind.

Rather than lending money to poor countries so they can develop more coal, oil, and natural gas projects — and, in doing so, grow their economies and improve living standards — the bank, which gets the biggest chunk of its funding from the United States, has become one of the world’s biggest carbon colonialists. As Todd Moss explained here on Substack last fall, the World Bank and other international lenders are trying to impose decarbonization policies on some of the world’s poorest countries, a tactic Moss rightly calls “obscene.”

Exhibit A in the World Bank’s parade of obscenities is its decarbonization plan for Guinea-Bissau, which the bank itself says is “one of the world’s poorest and most fragile countries.”

Let’s take a look.

On December 19, the World Bank posted a note on Twitter about its report on Guinea-Bissau, a tiny country with only 2.2 million people on the west coast of Africa.

The bank touted its new “country and climate development report” for Guinea-Bissau, which it says is aiming “to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 30% by 2030.” In the posting on Twitter, the agency explained, “With only 31% of the population having electricity, Guinea-Bissau faces challenges in achieving universal access. Yet, huge potential is ahead!” (Note the exclamation point!)

Telling a poverty-stricken country like Guinea-Bissau to cut its CO₂ emissions is akin to pushing diet pills during a famine. Or maybe it’s like selling lawn sprinklers during a flood. Whatever the analogy, the entire notion is Total Bonkers Crazytown™.

Why should you care about a country whose main export is cashew nuts? Why care about a place where the poverty rate is over 70%? Why care about a country so small that few people could find it on a map?

Maybe you don’t need to care about Guinea-Bissau, but you should care about US funding for the World Bank, an agency that has been hijacked by climate catastrophists. Last November, President Joe Biden announced that the US would contribute $4 billion to the World Bank's International Development Association fund over three years. As Reuters explained, Biden’s pledge was “a record and substantially exceeds the $3.5 billion” the US pledged in 2021.

Before the US gives any more money to the World Bank, it should examine its lending policies and, in particular, its decarbonization plan for Guinea-Bissau.

That report is something to behold. It’s a 78-page demonstration of everything wrong with how elite technocrats think about poverty in developing countries. The report repeats the same message nearly two dozen times: Guinea-Bissau should be using more solar. Or rather, it should be “Accelerating the deployment of solar PV with storage.”

The report notes that Guinea-Bissau’s “offshore territories harbor oil reserves.” Nevertheless, it declares that the country “needs an integrated energy policy that includes a mandate to phase out heavy fuel oil-based generation and sets clear targets and timelines for renewable energy development and energy efficiency.”

Right. The technocrats at the World Bank want the country’s residents to use solar and batteries, and they should be using less energy, not more.

The technocrats want this in a place where 7 out of 10 people don’t even have electricity. They want this in a place where the per-capita GDP is less than $1,000! They want this in a place where, according to the bank, “Wood, charcoal, and agricultural biomass make up about 90% of primary energy consumption.” They want this in a country where the unemployment rate is nearly 26% and the country’s GDP is about $2.1 billion.

For comparison, consider this: the World Bank’s administrative budget is $3.5 billion! Thus, the World Bank, which employs 10,000 people, spends about 50% more every year on salaries, office space, and Cheez-Its than all of the money generated by all of the people of Guinea-Bissau. And yet — and yet — the World Bank is so opposed to hydrocarbons that it thinks Guinea-Bissau should rely on the two-legged stool of renewables and efficiency.

The Guinea-Bissau decarbonization plan is just one of numerous reports the World Bank has produced over the past few years offering the same alt-energy prescription. Here’s one published in 2023 for Côte d'Ivoire, another impoverished African country. In his Substack piece from last October, titled “Ridiculous decarbonization,” Todd Moss wrote about how cabinet ministers from yet another impoverished country, São Tomé & Príncipe, were presenting their decarbonization plans to officials from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. He said the meeting embodied “everything wrong about climate policy toward the poorest countries.” He continued, saying, “Extremely poor, low-emitting countries like São Tomé & Príncipe do not need decarbonization plans. They need growth plans.”

Moss is right.

So, too, is Vijaya Ramachandran of the Breakthrough Institute, who, in 2021, declared that “Pursuing climate ambitions on the backs of the poorest people in the world is not just hypocritical — it is immoral, unjust, and green colonialism at its worst." (Ramachandran was on the Power Hungry Podcast in 2022.)

Now that DOGE and the Trump administration are scrutinizing all federal spending, they should examine the money the US gives to the World Bank and other lenders. The United States should not give money to international entities that oppose the use of hydrocarbons. Instead, it should promote a global agenda that embraces energy realism and energy humanism.

Modern economies aren’t built with solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. They are built with hydrocarbons. It’s time for the World Bank to accept that hydrocarbons are essential for economic growth and human development. It should return to its mission of reducing poverty and improving living standards. And if the World Bank refuses to embrace a pro-energy, pro-human stance, the US shouldn’t fund it.

This piece first appeared at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: courtesy Robert Bryce Substack

DOGE is Waging a Class War on America’s New Clerisy

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

The ever-mounting hysteria over Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) seems to largely be coming from that large sector of Americans who work for, or in other ways feed from, Washington’s seemingly bottomless trough. As government employment and spending have cascaded in recent years, this has created not so much a ‘deep state’, as the right-wing paranoids suspect, but a huge and expanding protected class of people who are anxious to defend their livelihoods.

Most anti-DOGE jeremiads avoid questions of class or self-interest. Predictable Democratic allies, like the Atlantic, accuse Musk of presiding over a ‘reign of ineptitude’ and waging war on defenseless civil servants. Some suggest that this reflects a deep-seated desire by GOP neanderthals to remove objective ‘empiricists’ from Washington – presumably the same ‘experts’ who led the nation into mounting debt, high inflation, increasing class divisions and a chronic inability to get things built at reasonable cost.

Many have resorted to the tired, old ‘fascist’ meme. Anne Applebaum sees Musk’s disruption of the federal bureaucracy as nothing less than the arrival of authoritarian ‘regime change’. As if auditing the bureaucracy is now the first step towards totalitarianism. Even some populist conservatives have warned that the fallout from DOGE’s cuts will ultimately harm vulnerable working-class people the most.

The class dynamics at play in DOGE are not as straightforward as some would have it. It’s not simply a case of Musk, the billionaire oligarch, ruthlessly attacking the lowly administrator. The impetus for DOGE is primarily driven by a conflict within the middle class. On one side are public workers whose pay, and pensions, well exceed those in the private sector. On the other, there are millions who pay tax and feel harassed by regulations, particularly among Trump’s base of small business owners. Millions of middle- and working-class families not sucking the federal teat are falling ever behind the affluent elites, who seem to control the state whichever party is in power.

Throughout the Biden years, government employment and related sectors, notably in health services, have emerged as the only consistently growing high-wage sectors, a pattern evident both in the last month of his administration and Trump’s first. In contrast, material sectors, like manufacturing and mining, have slumped. In the first three years of Biden’s presidency, the ranks of government workers, at all levels, expanded by 1.5million. In 2024, the federal government reached its highest worker count in two decades. President Biden’s budget for 2025, signed in March last year, envisaged total spending to be more than 60 per cent higher than it was in 2019.

This public-spending surge has sparked the growth of a ‘new class’, to adapt former Yugoslav communist theoretician Milovan Djilas’s term for the elite bureaucrats of the Soviet system. Another useful analogy is the ‘clerisy’. Indeed, America’s version operates much as the pre-revolutionary French clergy did. This was a powerful and protected segment of society, but it was not monolithic. It had its bishops, but also parish priests, who often barely lived any better than their parishioners.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Photo: FMT under CC 4.0 License.

Ohio's Gritty Fight to Reverse Decadence

Nora Kenney and Tim Rosenberger — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

Last week, at the AI Action Summit in Paris, Vice President J.D. Vance reaffirmed the Trump administration’s commitment to ensuring that advanced AI systems are developed domestically using made-in-America chips—remarks that boosted Intel’s stock by six percent. Vance also warned against excessive AI regulation, urging international partners, particularly in Europe, to prioritize innovation. Vance’s stance aligns with a rising “techno-nationalist” movement, associated with right-leaning tech figures like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, that emphasizes innovation, defense, and global competitiveness.

Meanwhile, Anduril, an AI-driven military startup with a techno-nationalist edge, is nearing a deal that would value the company at $28 billion. This underscores AI’s growing role in national defense—and a shifting geographic locus of technological power in the U.S. Notably, both Anduril and Intel share a connection with Vance: Ohio.

Though Anduril’s roots are in California, its ambitions—and investments—are expanding. Nowhere is this more evident than in Ohio’s capital, Columbus, where Anduril plans to build a $1 billion factory, Arsenal-1. This move cements central Ohio as a hub for the kind of manufacturing that defines techno-nationalism, a movement that champions industrial grit as much as technological progress—and which might reverse America’s drift into cultural decadence.

Columbus lacks mountains, beaches, Hollywood glamor, and New York City lights. Yet last year, it topped Realtor.com’s list of hottest housing markets. Attracting talent from across Ohio as well as major urban hubs like San Francisco and New York, the city has experienced growing pains but is quietly redefining what it means to rise—particularly in artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing.

Anduril’s decision to anchor a major facility in Columbus signals more than just economic development—it represents a broader shift in where the future is being built. Arsenal-1 will produce tens of thousands of autonomous systems and weapons annually, supporting Anduril’s mission to meet the demands of a modern military. The company also promised to create over 4,000 jobs in Ohio—and soon.

Speaking with Bloomberg, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey praised Ohio: "It was a state that told us, 'We have the workforce; we have a million people who are capable of working in this facility within a 45-minute drive. We’re willing to work with you on higher education to help train people so that they come in and they can work with you.'" He contrasted Ohio with his home state: "Speaking candidly as someone who is from California, there are some states that are really good at pushing you out and slowing you down, and there are others that are great at pulling you in and speeding you up."

Anduril’s announcement follows Ohio’s landmark 2022 deal with Intel to build a $20 billion semiconductor manufacturing facility outside Columbus—the largest private-sector investment in the state’s history. Intel’s “Ohio One” project includes two fabs producing advanced chips for electronics, AI, and defense. It’s expected to create 3,000 Intel jobs, 7,000 construction jobs, and tens of thousands of indirect jobs, positioning Columbus as a rising player in the semiconductor industry.

Read the rest of this piece at The American Conservative.

Nora Kenney is director of media relations at the Manhattan Institute. Tim Rosenberger is a lawyer in New York.

Photo: M, via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.

How Do YIMBYs Respond To Housing Markets With No Demand?

Pete Saunders — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

I’ve had my differences with the YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) movement. Over the years I’ve written multiple pieces raising a position on zoning reform that rarely gets discussed – upzoning can open up the floodgates for new housing in cities that don’t need new housing in the way that overpriced coastal cities do, and disrupt a fragile housing market equilibrium in slow-growth, less expensive cities like those in the Midwest. In fact, I raise the counterintuitive argument that zoning reform in slow-growth metros can potentially lead to higher prices and rents, as developers seize on the opportunity to appeal to the most affluent buyers and renters.

Just prior to moving the Corner Side Yard to Substack last April, I wrote a five part series offering dissents to the YIMBY movement:

Rethinking the Affordable Housing Crisis, Part 1

Rethinking the Affordable Housing Crisis, Part 2

Rethinking the Affordable Housing Crisis, Part 3

Rethinking the Affordable Housing Crisis, Part 4

Rethinking the Affordable Housing Crisis, Part 5

The series probably didn’t get the attention it deserved because it straddled the old platform and Substack, and my following isn’t necessarily the same as it was. Still, I encourage you to read it.

However, if you don’t read it, here’s a very brief summary. In my view, there are six conventional explanations for our housing affordability crisis:

The post-Great Recession collapse in housing production;
Zoning, specifically widespread single-family zoning;
High interest rates, low inventory;
Excessive government regulation, raising the cost of housing production;
Household incomes haven’t kept up with housing costs; and
A reliance on “filtering” tcreate affordable housing.

These are indeed explanations that drive the efforts of YIMBYs. But I’d argue there six less-considered, yet equally important explanations as well:

The dramatic decrease in average household size in the last 60 years;
The reluctance of banks tmove on from their financial models that favored single-family home development;
General aversion tsubsidized housing;
General aversion tthe displacement caused by gentrification; and
A growing sense that younger, urban-oriented people “want what we want, where we want it,”; and
Geography. There simply are physical limits to construction in some metros, and they’re costly to overcome.

I also referred to three socio-cultural causes for the housing crisis:

Housing exuberance, when property owners have expectations of higher prices and rents even before new development increases demand;
Segregation, in the sense that it drives down demand in portions of a metro area while driving up demand in others, pushing up costs; and
Inventory mismatch, with a greater demand for a development type (often pre-WWII style development) that’s declining in inventory.

I concluded the last entry in the series with a comparison between Los Angeles County and Cook County, the home counties of Los Angeles and Chicago, respectively.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: A street view looking south of the intersection of 68th and Emerald Avenue in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood. Source: google.com.

Families and Transportation

Randal OToole — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 21:55:33 -0500

On his second day in office, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy directed federal transportation agencies to “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average,” to which my friend Bob Poole responded with a profound “huh?” Matthew Yglesias, meanwhile, fretted that this policy could backfire, erroneously claiming that directing funding to low-density communities with higher birth rates would make housing in such communities even more expensive, which would reduce birthrates.

As I noted in an article published by the Institute for Family Studies, it may seem strange for the Department of Transportation to get involved in family policy, but in fact it already has been involved in such policy for many years through the Federal Transit Administration. That agency’s transit capital grant program (which was specifically cited in Duffy’s memo) favors grants to communities that provide “transit-supportive land use,” meaning zoning and subsidies favoring high-density housing.

Recent economic research has found that the Baby Boom was due, in large part, to federal policies that promoted homeownership. The report didn’t say so, but 94.3 percent of owner-occupied homes in the United States are single-family homes (including mobile homes), while only 5.5 percent are multifamily, so increasing ownership of single-family homes appears to be a good way of increasing fertility.

FTA’s housing policies were based on the explicit assumption that high-density housing in transit corridors would lead to more transit ridership and the implicit assumption that more transit ridership would save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Neither of these assumptions are true.

Research by the Cascade Policy Institute showed that people living in transit-oriented developments in the Portland area were not significantly more likely to ride transit than those living elsewhere. This is confirmed by the fact that, despite building hundreds of transit-oriented developments, Portland-area transit ridership was declining in the five years before the pandemic.

Data in the National Transit Database also shows that transit is hardly green. Outside of New York and one or two other urban areas, transit uses more energy and emits more greenhouse gases (including emissions from the power plants that supply electricity for electric-powered transit) than the average car or light truck.

Transit-oriented housing is also sometimes claimed to be more affordable housing, but that is a complete lie. As I’ve noted here many times before, the elevators, steel, concrete, and interior non-living areas such as lobbies and hallways all increase the costs of multi-story housing, so the four- to six-story buildings going into most transit-oriented developments cost about twice as much, per square foot, as single-family homes.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Photo: Darker colors show higher fertility rates measured in births per thousand women. CDC.

More on Rust Belt to Sun Belt Migration

Pete Saunders — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

Three weeks ago I wrote a piece about the role that a “Rust Belt Diaspora,” or the people who relocated from Rust Belt to Sun Belt states over the last 50 years, could play in Rust Belt revitalization. In that piece I noted that there are many people who seek to maintain a connection with where they (or their parents) used to live, and that’s partly expressed by fan support in major professional sports leagues. I used the example of Detroit Lions fans nearly equaling the number of hometown fans in Phoenix, Houston and San Francisco last season, reckoning that they weren’t all traveling from Michigan to see the Lions.

Also in that piece, I did a back-of-the-napkin estimate of Rust Belt to Sun Belt migration from 1970-2020. My estimate, if accurate, would outpace any significant domestic migration pattern ever seen in the U.S. – dwarfing the Great Migration, Dust Bowl, perhaps even America's westward expansion following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and continuing for the next century.

It’s worth posting here again so you can understand the scope:

_________________________

For the past few weeks I’ve been trying to find research that quantifies Rust Belt to Sun Belt migration. Seems to me there’s an academic or PhD candidate who wrote a paper on the outflow of residents from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and Southwest from, say, 1970-2020, but I haven’t found it. So I decided to make a crude estimate. Let’s see how it works.

I set out to look at population growth figures for all 50 states between 1970-2020. I classified all 50 states by what I determined to be their Rust Belt, Sun Belt and non-Rust/Sun Belt type. Using my judgement I categorized 13 states as Rust Belt, 15 states as Sun Belt, and the remaining 22 as neither. You can see how I designated them on the map below. It’s one version of a Rust Belt/Sun Belt framing at a state level; your map may look different:

My next step was to analyze decennial population growth for the designated Rust Belt and Sun Belt states, and compare their growth rates with the total growth rate of the U.S. over the same period. In this step I found that between 1970-2020 the total population of the U.S. grew by 63%, from 203.4 million to 331.4 million. That works out to a 10.3% increase per decade.

Of course, we know that the nation’s growth wasn’t distributed equally, so I grouped the states by their designated categories and analyzed their growth rates. The Sun Belt-designated states grew by 119% over the same period, averaging a 17% increase per decade. Non-Sun/Rust Belt states grew by 67% over the period. Their growth rate of 10.9% per decade is essentially the same as the 10.3% rate for the U.S. overall. The Rust Belt states? They grew by just under 19% between 1970-2020, or about 3.5% per decade.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: A black swan in Australia, via wikimedia.org Credit: Flagstaffotos, under CC 3.0 License.

Immigration the American Way

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

As the U.S. southern border begins to function once again, it’s time to consider what kind of immigration policy we should adopt. President Trump’s move to deport huge populations, upwards of 10 million just since 2021, could prove to be among the most decisive actions a president has taken in decades.

The Biden Administration’s oddly permissive policies ironically have stiffened Americans’ opposition to immigration across the board. According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who wish to reduce all immigration has soared from 41% just two years ago to over 55% in 2024, although many still embrace legal migration.

Even among Latinos, Pew notes, half of those polled associate the current wave with increased crime in their communities, including the growth of Venezuelan gangs and the takeover of large blocks of housing in some urban areas. Today a majority of Latinos support mass deportations, as do most Americans.

The Coming Conflict

Given the national mood, some conservatives—and roughly half of all Republicans—might like to end all or most immigration, but this could prove damaging to the national interest. Progressives are not making this argument, however. Instead, they are indulging in their usual racial rhetoric, even openly supporting criminal migrants and talking of resisting “mass expulsions,” with some suggesting that migrants will be victims of government “atrocities.”

Denver Mayor Mike Johnston has already advanced plans to block federal agents with a “Tiananmen Square” style occupation, something that could land him in jail. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Tim Walz suggested that if Trump built a wall, he would build “a ladder” so migrants could go over it. Some progressives even seek to grant the undocumented free college, education, and access to driver’s licenses.

Automatic defenses for all undocumented immigrants are commonplace in Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles, the latter of which has nearly a million undocumented immigrants alone. California is even allegedly threatening to take pensions from—and even imprison—police who help federal agents. However, it does not seem like such things as blocking freeways, which a mob waving Mexican flags did recently in Los Angeles, is the best advertising for leniency. But these actions may be paired back soon, as the system of federal transfers California and big American cities use to pay for migrant housing and other needs has fallen into jeopardy under Trump.

Read the rest of this piece at American Mind.

Photo: Jeff Myers via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

European Stagnation Will Lead to Policy Shifts

Nima Sanandaji — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

There is currently a significant shift happening in the USA, with cuts to government expenditure, and ambitions to reduce the regulatory burden. This creates institutional pressure for reforms of taxation, government spending and regulation also across the Atlantic.

The large European countries which are today stagnating, have in fact numerous reasons to reform their tax and regulatory burdens.

The first reason is that stagnation is the result of the high tax levels. During the 2010s, those advanced economies that had a lower tax burden had more economic growth. The same was true in the 2000s, the 1990s, the 1980s and the 1970s. The pattern that low taxes stimulate growth is a common theme in human history.

In accordance with this pattern, none of the high tax European economies are thriving with prosperity growth currently.

Compared to the USA, the large European economies have stagnated in prosperity growth for a couple of decades already. They are expected to keep behind in growth until 2029, yet this is not true of all European countries.

If we focus on the Mediterranean nations indeed Italy, France, Greece and Spain all are expected to lag behind the USA in growth also in the coming years. Portugal is however estimated to grow similarly to the USA while Slovenia and Croatia are expected to outpace it. Malta and Cyprus are expected to significantly outpace the USA in growth.

The pattern is that the smaller European economies, which are the ones offering low taxes and business friendly policies, are growing. In this column this is shown for the Mediterranean regions, but the same holds true in northern Europe – where for example Estonia and Ireland are growing while Germany and the UK are stagnating.

The large European economies are being stressed by the USA growing faster than them, while also their smaller neighbors are attracting talents, businesses and investments. The smaller European nations typically have more nimble government sectors reducing the taxation burden. Also, less public expenditure means less crowding out of private sector activity.

European nations are competing to attract knowledge intensive jobs. A comparison of the Mediterranean region shows that Greece, where Plato created the first Western institution of higher learning 2,400 years ago, has the lowest share of adults employed in very knowledge intensive jobs. Spain and Italy also have low rates, as does France. Many of the great universities through history have developed in the three latter countries, and they are home to some of the greatest artists in history - but these nations are despite their deep history of human civilization behind in the Mediterranean knowledge intensive race.

Croatia and Portugal have a relatively high share of adults employed in highly knowledge-intensive jobs. Cyprus and Slovenia have an even higher share. Malta is the leading knowledge intensive hub of the Mediterranean. The smaller European countries, with lower taxes and more business-friendly policies, are attracting more knowledge intensive jobs.

The European nations with higher taxes are falling behind in growth, and in the knowledge intensive jobs race. They are not benefiting from better welfare, as a result, though. In fact, even in this regard the lower tax countries tend to fare better.

As we show in an up-coming book with Professor Stefan Fölster, systematically today the pattern is also that countries with a lower tax burden have the best welfare results. Particularly education and labour market welfare are better in low tax countries, health is similar but the top ranking countries with longest life spans are today low tax nations. In Europe Malta is leading the healthy life expectancy league. High tax Denmark, on the other hand has least healthy life years expected for women and amongst the least for men.

This is probably interesting for Americans, who are interested in comparing the welfare outcomes of different European systems. Denmark has the advantage of having been a rich developed economy for long and having high taxes. Malta has the benefit of good climate combined with low taxes, despite historically being behind in development it is catching up in prosperity as well as welfare outcomes. The Mediterranean climate might help, but nonetheless the pattern is that low taxes might give more for less burden. Malta with lower taxes is leading the healthy life expectancy, while the high tax Danish welfare state is at the bottom.

The large economies in Europe are stressed, since they are being outrun by the USA in growth and reform pace, and since they are in Europe being outrun in prosperity, knowledge jobs and welfare outcomes.

This stress is ultimately good, since it will allow for growth inducing reforms, for the large European economies to escape stagnation. Europe already has a thriving free market model, it works great in the smaller nations in delivering welfare, prosperity and knowledge intensity. Through the institutional competition that through the millennia has the hallmark of European success, growth-inducing policies will spread.

Nima Sanandaji, Director, European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform (ECEPR)

Graphs: courtesy the author.

California’s Housing Problems Require a Better Solution than Densify, Densify, Densify

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

The Palisades and Eaton fires represent thousands of personal tragedies, but they also constitute a collective disaster, adding new housing shortages to California’s already massive shortfall — a catastrophe that stems not from acts of nature but from human policy blunders.

Gov. Gavin Newsom bought a new $9-million house in November, but too many of his fellow Californians may never own a home or find an affordable rental. Under Newsom, the state has tried reforms designed to increase building and affordability, but precious little has changed.

Home prices in coastal California are nearly 400% above the national average, and statewide, the median cost of a home is 2.5 times higher than in the rest of country. California has the second lowest homeownership rate in the nation, 56% (New York’s is lowest, 54%).

As for renting, the average cost of a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles is just shy of $3,000 a month, according to apartments.com, about $1,000 more than the national average.

Of course, these statistics aren’t bad news for everyone. Many California baby boomers — who bought into their neighborhoods long ago — have made out like bandits through escalating home prices. Along with Gen Xers, they have home ownership rates similar to those in the rest of the country. But the rate is half the national level for Californians under 35, and they are precisely the group that is deserting the West Coast for “cost of living” reasons.

The state’s housing crisis has its roots in excessive construction regulations and litigation aimed at developers — for decades, too few residential units were built. Unfortunately, the cure Sacramento is pushing — policies that favor dense, apartment development near transit corridors in the state’s biggest cities — isn’t helping.

For starters, high-density “infill” construction in cities — some call it YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) development — is costly. City land is expensive, materials costs are high, “prevailing wage” labor rates and onerous permitting, zoning and planning processes and fees add to the bottom line. New multistory apartment buildings packed in along Sunset Boulevard or the Wilshire corridor may add to L.A.’s total housing stock, but even when affordable rental units are required in these buildings, the trickle-down benefit is minimal.

As UCLA and London School of Economics professor Michael Storper’s research shows, forced densification is a “blunt instrument” that brings little in the way of substantial cost savings for housing.

Renting and high-density living is also out of sync with what most people in California want. A recent Public Policy Institute of California survey found that 70% of the state’s adults preferred single-family residences. Not surprisingly, a large majority of Californians, according to a poll by former Obama campaign pollster David Binder, opposed legislation signed by Newsom in 2021 that in effect banned single-family zoning in much of the state. (The law, Senate Bill 9, was overturned in L.A. County court last year, and that ruling is on appeal.)

Climate goals have been a big part of the reason California policies favor multistory, multiunit new construction in cities. The idea is that housing more people in, say, taller buildings will be more energy efficient. And encouraging dense developments near transit is supposed to lower greenhouse gas emissions. But new studies show that the size of buildings doesn’t necessarily correlate with more sustainability, and many Californians are choosing to endure longer and longer commutes to buy a home rather than rent in town. Or leaving altogether. According to a new study by land use attorney Jennifer L. Hernandez, climate-based housing rules have contributed to too few houses being built at too high a cost.

What should the state do?

Some may wish that we could subsidize an expansion of public housing, adding more projects such as the ambitious renewal of Jordan Downs in South L.A., but this will be difficult in a nearly broke city and a state with budget problems as well, and again it won’t match the aspirations of most Californians.

One way out of this crisis would be to expand the streamlined permitting and regulatory processes that Newsom and local leaders are fast-tracking for fire reconstruction, incentivizing rather than punishing townhome and single-family home construction. Instead of laws all but mandating high-density units, usually rentals, in the state’s biggest metros, Sacramento needs to encourage market-driven projects based on consumer preferences.

Peripheral development, away from the high-cost coast, could open opportunities for first-time home buyers. The state could take advantage of technological trends — remote work, for example — to allow for more population dispersion. Master planned communities in inland Southern California or the Central Valley, with local employers, can be part of the solution.

California’s mounting housing problem requires more alternatives, especially for people seeking lower rents and affordable single-family houses. If the state wants to maintain its upwardly mobile chops, it must refashion its housing policies.

This piece first appeared at Los Angeles Times.

Image: Multiunit housing is under construction by the Metro light rail station at Jefferson and La Cienega boulevards in Los Angeles. Source: Mel Melcon, Los Angeles Times.

California Governor Newsom has Positioned the State to be a National Security Risk for the Entire USA

Ronald Stein — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

California is home to 9 International airports, 41 Military airports, 3 of the largest shipping ports in America, as well as more than 30 million registered vehicles, all of which cannot operate without imported foreign oil from other nations like Saudi Arabia, Ecuador, Iraq, Columbia, and Russia. Thus, California is a serious national security risk for America.

In his nearly six years in office, Governor Newsom has aggressively moved to shut down oil production in California. Statewide production has fallen by more than one-third under his watch.

Because California is an isolated energy island market with no incoming oil pipeline connections from other states, Newsom’s shutdown agenda has increased dependence on waterborne crude imports – sourced primarily from foreign countries like Saudi Arabia, Ecuador, Iraq, Columbia, and Russia.

The West Coast gasoline, diesel, and aviation fuels market is isolated from other supply/demand centers as California is an energy island isolated from the States East of the Sierra Mountains. The Sierra Mountains are a natural barrier that prevents the State from pipeline access to any excess oil from fracking. As such, the West Coast is susceptible to unexpected outages of West Coast refineries as it is unable to backfill an unexpected loss in supply by quickly supplying additional products from outside of the region.

Newsom’s administration policies and combative approach have led California to a precarious position as the world’s fifth largest economy now exists in a perpetual supply crunch for crude oil, aviation, gasoline, and diesel fuels, leading to high costs, price volatility, and an increased risk of shortages.

California’s aggressive shift towards unreliable solar and wind for electricity, coupled with its move away from fossil fuels, has made the State more vulnerable to fuel shortages and blackouts. This not only affects the daily lives of Californians but also impacts critical infrastructure and industries that are essential for national security.

California uses 1.45 million barrels of oil each day, or well over 520 million barrels of oil per year, for the aviation, gasoline, and diesel fuels manufactured from crude oil, as well as the oil derivatives manufactured from oil that are the basis of more than 6,000 products in our society.

California transportation fuel demands have staggering numbers:

With all its airports, California is the largest consumer of jet fuel in America.
For its 30 million vehicles, California is the second-largest consumer of motor gasoline among the 50 states, just behind Texas.
Diesel fuel is the second largest transportation fuel used in California, representing 17 percent of total fuel sales behind gasoline.

California continues to reduce in-state oil production, which grows its dependency on other nations for crude oil, to its shrinking in-state refinery capabilities to meet the in-state demands for aviation and vehicle transportation fuels. With a reduction of California refinery capabilities, the State is heading in the direction of growing its importation of manufactured aviation fuels, diesel, and gasoline, and for the oil derivatives that are the basis of virtually every one of the more than 6,000 products in our society.

Read the rest of this piece at America Out Loud.

Ronald Stein is an engineer, senior policy advisor on energy literacy for the Heartland Institute and CFACT, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book "Clean Energy Exploitations."

Photo: courtesy America Out Loud.

RMI Led the Push to Ban Gas Stoves

Robert Bryce — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

Since 2020, the Rocky Mountain Institute has been hyping bogus claims about the alleged danger of natural gas stoves. That year, the Colorado-based group claimed that gas stoves “release toxic pollutants that can damage human health, but governments have done little to educate the public or accelerate the transition to all-electric cooking.”

In early 2023, RMI published a report that claimed that 12.7% of childhood asthma cases in the US “can be linked to gas stove use. In some cases, that number is much higher.” That report got widespread news coverage. But just a day or two after those stories were published, the group walked back its claims, with one RMI official telling the Washington Examiner that the new study "does not assume or estimate a causal relationship" between childhood asthma and natural gas stoves.

That RMI study conveniently ignored a definitive study published in Lancet Respiratory Medicine, which followed half a million schoolchildren in 47 countries over a multi-year period. The 2013 study concluded, “We detected no evidence of an association between the use of gas as a cooking fuel and either asthma symptoms or asthma diagnosis.”

While the kerfuffle over gas stoves has largely died down, the Colorado-based outfit remains one of the biggest and most influential climate NGOs. Furthermore, RMI is aggressively pushing efforts to implement building codes across the country that outlaw gas stoves and appliances.

RMI is pushing these policies even though 69% of voters oppose bans on gas stoves. However, the gas bans are only one aspect of RMI’s radical agenda. In 2023, it published a report with the Bezos Earth Fund, which claimed, “the fossil fuel era is over.” Furthermore, RMI says it aims to “identify and scale energy system interventions that will cut greenhouse gas emissions at least 50 percent by 2030,” and claims it is “transforming the global energy system to secure a clean, prosperous, zero-carbon future for all.”

Given its promotion of quack science, as well as its anti-consumer-far-left agenda, why is RMI getting federal funding? According to its latest annual report, RMI gets funding from the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Department of State, Department of Transportation, General Services Administration, and the US Trade and Development Agency. It is also getting funding from the International Finance Corporation and World Bank.

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: courtesy Robert Bryce Substack

Sheds and Living Life On the Street

Samuel J Abrams — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

I had the privilege of seeing the gorgeous photography show Out on the Street: The Dining Sheds & Empty Streets of New York, 2020-2024, in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. The show showcased the work of Dutch photographer Wijnanda Deroo, who wandered New York City for four years, taking close to 400 vibrant photographs of dining sheds built during the COVID-19 pandemic. The sheds were ubiquitous across the city; they were unique and often reflected both the culture of the restaurants and the communities in which they were embedded. Some structures were “simple lean-tos banged together out of a few hundred dollars’ worth of lumber to small, lovingly detailed odes to verdigris Beaux-Arts winter gardens, sleek Streamline Moderne luncheonettes and sunset-pink Old Havana arcades.”

The dining sheds are only a memory as the city mandated their demolition and removal by the end of 2024 for a host of reasons, including noise, safety, and issues with mobility. While it appears that New York has an expensive and limited plan to allow for fairly uncreative, sterile outdoor sheds to return for specific periods of time once again, it is unlikely many sheds will re-appear due to the proposed regulations and costs.

The sheds were not loved by many; as the New York Times notes, “to some urbanists, they were a bold experiment in rethinking public space. To others, they were an eyesore. Restaurateurs saw them as an economic lifeline. Opponents saw a land grab.” However, their impact was significant. They were “structures that so completely changed the appearance of our city for four brief years.”

With the pandemic behind us, Deroo’s photographs are a reminder of what is common in other cities around the world but absent in New York—life lived on the street in the company of others. Instead of making outdoor dining a challenge, the city should incentivize ways to make the streets of New York more friendly to pedestrians. The appetite is there. Congestion pricing took effect earlier this year, and there are plans to help Fifth Avenue become more like Paris’s Champs-Elyséss.

When Americans travel abroad to popular environs in Europe, many feel a connection to their surroundings because the people in cafes, bars, and restaurants pour outside onto the sidewalks throughout the day. Throughout Europe, visitors will find people are still outside and enjoying the company of others even in the cold and rain; this is so entrenched in French culture that you will see Parisians in heavy coats and hats sitting outside just to watch and be with others. The excitement and the energy of being around others is tangible, and seeing part of life lived in public and on the sidewalk is something many, if not most, Americans will never regularly experience.

Café culture in Europe is a choice; so is how we as Americans opt to interact in the public sphere. We need to think more seriously about our spatial choices and decide if our preferences reflect what we want as a society. We shape our cities and then our cities shape us through how we build and zone which in turn helps structure how we engage with others be it through texting and apps remotely or in person, in a café surrounded by others.

Roughly four years ago, my family and I returned to Manhattan in the winter of 2021, having left during the pandemic. Upon our return, sheds and outdoor spaces of congregation were everywhere. Our stretch of First Avenue in midtown east was incredible; despite the frigid temperatures and some tough days, the stretch of blocks from the upper 40s through the 50s was alive and exciting. People were distanced but socializing throughout the day, taking advantage of the spaces to gather, socialize, and simply be in the public sphere. Today, the temperatures are as cold, but First Avenue is nothing like what it was; the same area is desolate, uninviting, and empty. The sheds and spaces to gather are long gone, and the residential area of midtown east toward the river feels like a shell of its former pandemic self.

If New York City wants to improve safety, fight rising trends of loneliness and isolation, create spaces of shared interest, spark and foster connections, and help bring life back to neighborhoods that lost businesses during the pandemic shutdowns, the city should incentivize social and connective spaces like the restaurant sheds and public gathering spaces created during the COVID-19 pandemic. They have their flaws, but the sheds can dynamically transform streets and communities and provide spaces that foster a fundamental human need: connection with others. New York should help provide businesses with the incentives to rebuild sheds and other gathering spaces; by doing this, the city will help businesses thrive and promote social capital and architectural creativity along the way.

This piece first appeared at AEI.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Photo: 2021 outdoor dining sheds, 9th Ave. NYC - by Brecht Bug, via Flickr underCC 2.0 License.

Why Jews Are Fleeing the West

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

Jewish history has long been defined by migratory movements away from trouble and towards safer places. Over the past half millennia, the safest harbours for ‘the world’s foster children’, as David Mamet put it, have generally been English-speaking countries, first Britain, then especially the US, Canada and Australia.

This is increasingly no longer the case. The British Jewish community is being battered by a rising tide of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish agitation from both the left and segments of the UK’s much larger Muslim population. In Australia, Jewish childcare centres and an MP’s office have been attacked. Even the United States and Canada, where over 70 per cent of the Jewish diaspora resides, are showing signs of increased anti-Zionist and openly anti-Semitic sentiment. Indeed, in the US, anti-Semitic hate crimes now dwarf hate crimes against Muslims, blacks or Asians. No wonder many Jews are thinking of departing for safer pastures new.

The potential decline in the Jewish Anglosphere has been presaged by a more precipitous fall in Europe and throughout Asia. The Jewish population in Europe stood at 3.5million in 1950, after the Holocaust. Today it has fallen to well under 1.5million. France is home to the world’s third-largest Jewish community, but it’s shrinking. Since 2000, nearly 50,000 Jews have left France, mostly for Israel. Even more shocking has been the virtual annihilation of Jews in Islamic countries – one million strong until the 1960s, there are fewer than 15,000 Jews living in these places today.

Anti-Semitism, driven by attacks from Islamists and their leftist allies, has been a prime driver of this decline. A survey found that barely 13 per cent of anti-Semitic attacks in Europe were traceable to right-wingers. To be sure, there’s cause to worry about some right-wing anti-Semities within the ranks of Austria’s Freedom Party (founded by former SS officers), the AfD in Germany and Jobbik in Hungary. But right now, the immediate danger lies elsewhere.

Until recently, the Anglosphere provided a bulwark against anti-Semitism. As Barbara W Tuchman explains in Bible and Sword, Jews have long had ties to Britain, reaching back to before Roman times. In 1290, Edward I did announce the expulsion of Jews, but many returned largely at the behest of Oliver Cromwell in the 17th century. Cromwell’s Roundheads drew a lot of their inspiration from the Old Testament. Of course, at the same time, Britain’s Jews have suffered considerable discrimination over the past half millenia, and were unable to vote in parliament until 1858.

In the late-19th century, Britain’s Jewish population swelled thanks to migration from Russia-dominated regions in Europe’s east, notably Poland. Many helped shape the British left, and the Labour Party, while others went off to participate in Britain’s robust economy, including as migrants to the colonies, notably South Africa, Australia and Canada.

But over the past half century, the Jewish population in Britain has declined. Today, with central London often resounding to the sound of pro-Hamas demonstrations, a vibrant centre of Jewish life has been turned into a no-go zone. As secular Jews migrate or intermarry, one study predicts that England’s Jewish community will largely be Orthodox by the century’s close.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Photo: D. Berkowitz via Wikimedia under under CC 2.0 License.

Will Trump's Electric Vehicle Order Kill EV's?

Randal OToole — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

One of the executive orders President Trump signed on Monday calls for ending federal subsidies to and preferences for electric vehicles. With numerous media reports that EV sales were already tanking, some think that Trump’s order will kill the market for electric vehicles. It won’t, but it will shift things around.

Curiously, Trump’s order is supported by Elon Musk. He claims he simply opposes all subsidies, but some think that he hopes an end to subsidies will benefit Tesla by discouraging other automakers from developing new electric vehicles. But there is a hidden cost to this order that could severely impact Tesla’s bottom line.

Trump’s order does not immediately eliminate any of the subsidies, some of which would require an act of Congress, but it directs his administration to work towards that goal. The most obvious subsidy is the $7,500 tax credit for buyers of electric cars. This subsidy is not as substantial as it could be since roughly half of American families don’t earn enough income to pay $7,500 in federal taxes, and thus can’t take full advantage of this tax credit.

There’s a hidden subsidy, however, known as regulatory credits in which various state and national governments require all automakers to sell a certain percentage of zero-emission vehicles. Those who don’t sell enough can buy credits from those that sell a surplus. Since Tesla sells only electric vehicles, it can sell regulatory credits to companies such as Chrysler that don’t sell enough.

In recent years, Tesla has earned close to $1.8 billion a year, or more than 40 percent of its profits, from selling regulatory credits. This revenue represents a subsidy from buyers of petroleum-fueled vehicles to buyers of electric vehicles and is a major reason why Tesla has been able to sell electric vehicles for less money its rivals among the traditional car companies.

A decade or so ago, Ford was skeptical of electric vehicles, but now it trails only Tesla in the number of such vehicles it makes each year. It seems likely that Ford entered the EV market on such a large scale mainly so it could avoid paying credits to Tesla. That bet didn’t turn out well for Ford.

In the United States, the regulatory credits market was created by California and 13 other states that had required manufacturers to make electric vehicles. Trump’s order revokes the ability of states to impose different emissions requirements from the rest of the nation, thus essentially killing regulatory credits. Some European countries are also ending their EV subsidies and regulations.

Prior to Trump’s order, the EV market wasn’t dying, but it wasn’t doing great either. Tesla’s worldwide sales dropped by just 1 percent in 2024, but its sales in the U.S. dropped by 23 percent. However, Tesla’s decline was probably due to the growth of EV sales by other companies, notably Ford.

As a share of the U.S. car market, pure EVs grew from 2 percent in 2019 to around 8 percent in 2024 while hybrids grew from around 2 percent in 2019 to 13 percent in 2024. More than one out of five automobiles sold in the U.S. in 2024 were one form of electric or another.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Photo: Avda, via Wikimedia under CC 3.0 License.

The Democratic Bourgeoisie is Fighting to Take the Party Back from the Left

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

For generations, the ultra-rich in big American cities have been willing to go along with progressives and their policies. But now, as urban areas across the country depopulate and lose jobs, some of those oligarchs – from San Francisco and Los Angeles to Boston – appear to be increasingly willing to take on the Left. And in some places, they have already had considerable and surprising success.

These efforts contradict the prevailing Democratic trend, as evidenced by the recent choices for the leadership of the party. The Democratic National Committee’s obsessions with race and gender seemed to one party veteran “like outtakes from a humanities seminar at a small liberal arts college”. While moderates still represent a larger group, a growing proportion of Democrats identify as being on the Left, as the party shrinks.

Progressive stances taken within the party, and parroted by clueless Biden operatives, have much to do with Democrats’ high disapproval ratings. But the party’s heart still belongs to the favourites of the Left – Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Elizabeth Warren.

Yet when it comes to running cities, it’s clear to many in the commanding heights of the party – particularly donors – that the passions of the heart have led to a less effective brain. Once strong backers of progressives, taking the knee during the George Floyd era, the Democratic bourgeoisie – aghast at urban decay – have decided to try to save their cities.

Nowhere is this clearer than in San Francisco, the epicentre of progressive insanity. There, tech entrepreneurs worked to get rid of Left-wing prosecutor Chesa Boudin, and last year helped to elect as mayor Daniel Lurie, scion of the Levi Strauss fortune, as well as some more moderate members of the Board of Supervisors. Lurie’s candidacy reflected growing concern even among the city’s famously progressive business elites with the almost Dickensian lunacy on the streets.

Lurie, of course, faces major challenges in his efforts to restore San Francisco’s lustre and risks being labelled by progressives as promoting interests that are fundamentally selfish. But one has to be blind, or perhaps a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, to not see the ruination of a great city that, in recent years, has lost branches of national businesses like Safeway, Old Navy, Anthropologie, Whole Foods, Nordstrom and H&M. San Francisco’s office vacancy rate has reached record highs – and this in a city that not long ago seemed to be among the best positioned for the digital age.

Critically, Lurie, who spent almost $9 million of his own funds on his campaign, will run an administration less connected to progressive non-profits and the powerful public employee unions. In a place like San Francisco, it greatly helps to fund your own campaigns.

Yet “Baghdad-by-the-Bay” is not the only city suffering from progressive-generated decline and its consequences, such as wealthy individuals bailing to low-cost places such as Florida. Traditional big blue cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are also those whose workers are most likely to have embraced hybrid or totally remote working, while more jobs of all kinds are headed to much faster growing suburbs and exurbs. Over the past five years, finance, business services, business management and even tech have shifted from New York, LA, Chicago, Boston and San Francisco to places such as Austin, Dallas, Salt Lake and Raleigh-Durham.

Read the rest of this piece at Telegraph.

Lead photo: Thomas Hawk, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

America Needs to Reestablish its World-leading Manifestation of Nuclear Generated Electricity

Ronald Stein — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

American ingenuity advanced nuclear technology to a world-class innovation to benefit all. Interestingly, the methods used in the rest of the world are copies of the American innovations.

Now, America seems to be fading into the wallpaper of greed and propaganda. It slinks to massive subsidies to support ancient power generated from breezes and sunshine, like wind and solar. America needs to reestablish its world-leading manifestation of this technology through our secret weapon called free enterprise.

To meet increasing demands for electricity, China, Russia, Japan, and Poland are building additional nuclear power-generated electricity, while the USA focuses on weather-dependent wind and solar.

Russia and China are currently leading the world in nuclear electricity generation and account for 70 percent of additional nuclear power capacity. Today, about 60 reactors are under construction across the world. A further 110 are planned.

Today, nuclear power generated electricity is being added around the world:

The nuclear power systems developed for the Navy have functioned well for over seven decades. All U.S. Navy submarines and aircraft carriers are nuclear-powered.
France has more than 50 nuclear power reactors producing more than 70% of France’s electricity.
Japan / New Energy Policy Will Set Nuclear Share Target Of 20% By 2040, Japan’s industry ministry is making final amendments to a policy that will significantly increase nuclear power from the estimated 8.5% that the reactor fleet provides today. Fourteen nuclear power plants have restarted in Japan since the 2011 Fukushima disaster.

Today, about 440 nuclear power reactors are in operation in 32 countries and Taiwan, with 62 new reactors under construction. As of August 1, 2023, the United States had 54 nuclear power plants with 93 operating commercial nuclear reactors in 28 states.

Nuclear power has the competitive advantage of being the only reliable, available, and clean power source that can accommodate the desired expansion of a clean electricity supply to the end users. In fact, nuclear power could supply all the capacity the US needs.

The United States invented and perfected nuclear power as early as the late 1940s. Are we willing to regress while other countries progress? To understand this concept better, let’s review the US nuclear energy development through the years.

As Nazi Germany began to eat away at civilization, the discovery of nuclear fission, the powerhouse of nuclear reactors, was coming of age. Like the uranium born from stardust as the ultimate energy storage, the secret to unlimited electric power for the world exploded upon the scientific community. You have heard of the heroes of this miracle: Curie, Einstein, Meitner, Hahn, Frisch, Bohr, Teller, Fermi, Oppenheimer, and many more. In a strange quirk of fate, the first use of nuclear fission came in the form of a bomb. As bad as war can be, it spurred the invention of radar, jet engines, and nuclear fission devices which all went on to make life better for humans. Nuclear fission became the flowers that grew after the thunderstorms of WWII....

Read the rest of this piece at America Out Loud.

Ronald Stein is an engineer, senior policy advisor on energy literacy for the Heartland Institute and CFACT, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book "Clean Energy Exploitations."

Photo: courtesy America Out Loud.

Why Call It "The Rust Belt"?

Pete Saunders — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

There’s a question I get every so often in social media – “why do you use the term “Rust Belt”?“ Usually it comes from people who live in the region, who dislike the term and wish for some kind of rebranding. I agree. But what’s better?

Before I discuss options, let’s talk about the term “Rust Belt” itself. There are many thoughts on the origin of the term. Many people cite the term gaining popularity in the 1970’s and 1980’s as manufacturing plants closed in the Northeastern and Midwestern cities. It was at that time when factories began their relocation to the South or Southwest (which would later earn the term “Sun Belt”) in search of lower labor costs and lower taxes. Anne Trubek, the founder of Belt Magazine in 2013 and an avid user of the term, says the term really became popular during the 1984 presidential election:

“It was largely created in 1984 by, of all people, Walter Mondale. At a campaign stop during the presidential election, Mondale made a speech to steelworkers at the LTV plant Cleveland in which he decried Reagan’s position on trade, particularly the lifting of quotas on steel imports, which had sent the industry into crisis. As he put it: “Reagan’s policies are turning our industrial Midwest into a rust bowl.”

The press tweaked Mondale’s dust bowl reference into “Rust Belt,” to make it play off the “Sun Belt,” another new term for an American region, this one coined in 1969 by Kevin Phillips in his book The New Republican Majority, to describe a happier set of shifting demographics and economic policies.

There is a sizable contingent — mainly baby boomers who remember the moment the term was coined — who consider it derogatory and strive to have it replaced (recent attempts to rebrand the region include the “Trust Belt” and the “Freshwater Region”). But the term sticks, resoundly trumping “America’s Heartland,” with its whiffs of nostalgia and rural idyll.”

This makes a lot of sense. If you talk to Boomer-aged people from the region, especially those employed in the manufacturing sector, the period from about 1968-1984 was the period when things changed dramatically for the industrial Midwest. Racial unrest in major cities, rapid growth in suburbia coupled with extensive decline in inner city neighborhoods, the loss of automotive and steel manufacturing jobs in cities like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and St. Louis, and inflationary and recessionary cycles, culminating with the 1981-82 Recession, hit this region, however defined, particularly hard. How hard? There are Boomers who maintain that the 80’s recession was far worse on the Midwest than the Great Recession of 2007-09. And I believe them.

It was also around this time that general perceptions about the makeup of American geography and demographics was changing. I’d argue that prior to the Civil Rights Movement, the nation was still defined by a North/South split, with states as diverse as California and New York included with Midwestern states in the North. Southern states included the old Confederacy, with the most rural areas being referred to as the Deep South.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: courtesy The Corner Side Yard

How Sydney CBD Became a Capital of Luxury Urbanity

John Muscat — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

With a great deal of success, urban development elites have been able to sustain the illusion that Central Business Districts or downtowns are still the functional metropolitan centres they were five decades ago. In The New City’s new feature report, Rise of Luxury Urbanity as a System: Sydney CBD, we set out to explain how the truth is different. Opinion leaders seem content for people to assume CBDs have changed in only cosmetic ways, essentially the same but with taller skylines. But since at least the 1980s, they have drifted far from the standard functional definition proposed by geographer Raymond Murphy in 1971: a region “draw[ing] its business from the whole urban area and from all ... classes of people.”

The mid-twentieth century was a time of tensions between booming suburban peripheries, driven by mass motorisation, and stagnating post-industrial inner-cities. After the 1980s, however, these former industrial-mercantile junctions or ‘classic’ CBDs were fitted up as global high-amenity enclaves. Some call this a “shift from the city as a site of production to one of consumption.” Over recent decades Sydney CBD has evolved in a more exclusive and upscale direction, hosting around a tenth of metropolitan jobs compared to nearly half in the 1950s. The pandemic forced some belated acknowledgement of this reality but notions of natural centrality persist.

In today’s post-material economy, the CBD’s status comes from a disproportionate share of public infrastructure rather than any inherent productivity advantage. Where the spatial order of the old industrial-mercantile CBD was arranged around functions, the contemporary ‘centre’ is laid out for amenities. Called ‘luxurification’ by some scholars, the new urban logic takes form as an upward spiral of amenity enhancements feeding off surging land values, gentrification and ‘sustainable urbanism’. Scaled up amenities make premium grade development more feasible as they amplify the capital that developers can substitute for land on high-priced sites. Luxurification is thus sweeping through most features of the CBD landscape, including all types of building stock and the streetscapes in between.

Using concepts proposed by urban geographers, at least five internal trends have been converging to make Sydney’s ‘post-CBD’:

Breakdown of the unipolar ‘core-frame’ structure made up of service and industrial functions arranged in concentric rings, and rise of multipolar high-amenity precincts, each resembling a walkable resort-style campus.
Spread of the upmarket ‘primary retail core’ as a general feature beyond the ‘Peak Land Value Intersection’ into other functional zones.
Decline of the downmarket ‘secondary retail zone’ in conjunction with gradual restrictions on motor vehicle access and confinement of entry to passenger rail corridors and bicycle paths.
Reshuffling of workspace across emerging precincts, inside and outside the traditional office core, offering amenities like harbour views, landscaped foreshores, green-rated buildings and revamped streetscapes around transit-hubs.
Penetration of residential development into the CBD, even the former retail and office cores, from the peripheral ‘zone of transition’.

The classic CBD was functionally and socio-economically diverse

In the wake of advancing post-war suburbanisation, there was a surge of interest in the CBD amongst American geographers during the 1950s. Based on their field work in nine mid-sized US cities, researchers Raymond Murphy and James Vance conceived the Land Value Method of delimiting outer CBD boundaries. They pinpointed the district’s Peak Land Value Intersection (PLVI) and traced the values of lots or blocks spreading outwards in concentric circles until values declined to five percent of PLVI value. In most cases the PLVI was “located within a few hundred feet of the [district’s] geographic center”, and from there “land values decrease rapidly at first as one leaves the peak intersection.” A city’s “maximum pedestrian concentration and … greatest vehicular congestion” were typically found at the PLVI.

Read the rest of this piece at The New City Journal.

John Muscat is a co-editor of The New City Journal.

America First Can't Be America Alone

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

Like others, Canadians now know there’s a new sheriff in town, and he’s neither polite nor gentle. The question is how to co-exist with a raging bully whose economy absorbs nearly three-quarters of Canada’s exports and one trillion in two-way trade.

What his fans call Donald Trump’s drive for “muscular pax Americana” is not exactly warming hearts around the world. In December, Britain sent an ambassador with a well-expressed disdain for the new president to Washington. The Guardian predictably calls for Europeans and Brits to fight to preserve the continent’s disastrous welfare and climate regime. Trump’s alienated not just Canada’s New Democrats, but also Conservatives who share something of a common agenda with Trumpism.

Ironically, this is occurring when many citizens in Europe are already voting for anti-migrant, nationalism and culturally conservative candidates, producing leaders like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni who already has an amicable relationship with Trump. Canadians and other foreigners need to understand that, for Trump, everything is about making a deal, starting with outrageous demands and threats.

In the end, Trump will make the best deal he can strike, and, under the Conservatives at least, there’s hope that some common ground can be struck. Ignore the imbecilic statements about taking over Canada, Greenland or the Panama Canal, and look to strike a deal that makes sense.

But let’s be honest here: you can’t blame Trump for the current chaotic state of the world. The world “rules-based” system was falling apart — as seen in the Red Sea, Palestine, Ukraine, and throughout Africa — when the supposed “adults in the room” were in charge.

What Trump lacks, at least so far, is a strategic sense of how to build an alliance against the China-Russia-Iran-Venezuela-North Korea axis. Recently, Doug Ford proposed such an “Am-Can” alliance that would leverage the power of our huge continent’s huge resource base.

The cultural fit is not perfect, but our binational ties make us, as the Chinese would say, as close as teeth and lips. We share a huge border, similar resource bases — much of our cross-border trade consists of oil, lumber as well as some cars — and for the most part, a common language as Canada does with Britain and our fellow commonwealth countries, Australia, and New Zealand.

Read the rest of this piece at National Post.

Photo: C.P. Swire, under CC 2.0 License.

Climate Change, Insurance, and the LA Fires

Randal OToole — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

Scientific American blames the Los Angeles fires on climate change. A Yale University publication agrees. An article in Quartz predicts that climate change is going to make housing “uninsurable.” Instead of insurance, a New York Times op-ed by a former California insurance commissioner argues that oil companies should be forced to pay for fire damages.

It’s a neat argument that appeals to homeowners eager to blame the loss of their houses on anything other than their own decisions to buy or build flammable homes with flammable landscaping in a fireplain. Yet there are valid reasons to believe that climate change is not the issue, and that even if climate change is occurring, it won’t make homes uninsurable. In fact, people who believe climate change is the problem should be all the more interested in making sure that homes and landscaping are fireproof.

A key weakness in most of the arguments for anthropogenic climate change is that they rely on data that goes back only about 55 years or so. The 1970s were one of the coolest decades in the 20th century, so any data that start from there will make it appear that temperatures are rising. The Yale article cites one study that uses data back to 1971 and another that goes back to just 2001.

Both of those studies are also not of climate change but of fire data, but that’s problematic because the Forest Service and other wildland fire fighting agencies dramatically changed how they fight fires since the 1990s. Where they once risked firefighter lives by having them directly attack the fire fronts, they now do huge amounts of back fires and rely more heavily on aerial drops of water and retardant. This, not climate change, has increased acres burned and the sizes of the largest fires. Acres burned are a symptom of climate change, but they can also be a symptom of other factors as well.

Relying on actual climate data, rather than symptoms, climatologist John Christy has shown that heat waves in the West, the number of days over 100 degrees in California, and southern California rainfall have not particularly changed over the last 110 years. If anything, some of these indicators have cycled up and down, with the 1970s, as mentioned above, being a cool, wet period.

Even if you believe that climate change is the problem, blaming the oil companies is the wrong answer. For one thing, the oil that has been burned over the past century was burned by us, not the oil companies, who only sold it to us. More important, as Bjorn Lomborg showed in the Financial Post last week, recent studies have estimated that climate change is going to reduce global GDP by only 2 to 3 percent, while the actions climate activists want os to take to slow climate change will reduce it by 25 percent, both increasing poverty and making us less resilient to any changes that come about as a result of increased temperatures.

As I’ve noted here before, the main reason I am suspicious about the whole climate narrative is that most of the things that activists want us to do, such as spend more on mass transit or increase urban densities, won’t really reduce greenhouse gas emissions and are simply part of an agenda that existed long before climate was thought to be a problem.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Photo: The Palisades Fire on the evening of January 7, via Wikimedia by Toastt21.

The Return of American Class Politics

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

In his farewell address, mere days before leaving the White House, Joe Biden made a dramatic intervention. Warning about how an oligarchy of “extreme wealth, power and influence” risked the basic rights of every citizen, he even suggested it could threaten American democracy itself. Given how late Biden’s intervention came, to say nothing of his typically stumbling delivery, it’s tempting to dismiss his comments as the rantings of a tired old man.

In truth, though, I think the speech matters. For in its populist appeal to Main Street over Wall Street, it reflects the revival of something we haven’t seen in years: class politics. Rather than appealing to racial subgroups, or sex or gender identity, Biden instead spoke, however fleetingly, to those many millions of Americans who care more about their paychecks than the colour of their skin.

Nor, of course, is the 46th president alone. Increasingly, both main parties realise that to win at the ballot box, they must appeal to the middle- and working classes, as proven by Trump’s roughly 10-point lead among those two-thirds of Americans without a college degree. Yet, if that speaks vividly to radical shifts across US socioeconomic makeup, it remains unclear if politicians on either side of the aisle are truly willing to back blue-collar workers — especially when the oligarchs continue to have such a grip over them all.

For all Biden’s warnings about oligarchy, the elite did very well during his tenure. Consider the numbers, with the wealthiest Americans increasing their collective net worth by a remarkable one trillion dollars over his time in office. The monopolists, for their part, have been generous in their turn. In 2020, to give one example, Biden received 25 times as much funding from tech companies than Trump, and over three times as much from Wall Street. Among electronics manufacturing firms, many of whom build their products outside the country, the margin was a remarkable $68 million to $4 million.

All the while, American business continued to consolidate, just as it has for a generation. The Review of Finance notes that three quarters of industry has become more concentrated since the late Nineties. This has been most notable across finance, where big banks have doubled their market share since 2000. The same is true elsewhere: a coterie of tech firms now account for a record 35% of market cap. No wonder only 22% of Americans were optimistic about the economy by the end of Biden’s term, even as confidence in his economic leadership had fallen to just 40%.

Taken together, then, Biden’s fall stemmed from an enormous miscalculation. Elected as a moderate, he ignored polls that suggested most Americans were more concerned with their economic prospects than issues like climate change and foreign affairs, let alone social justice manias around trans rights. Nonetheless, the Democrats followed the lead of their oligarchic funders, many of whose biggest contributions have been focused on exactly these side issues.

When the election came, no wonder so many blue collar Americans tried their luck with Trump: including a remarkable number of minority voters. Once again, the statistics here are clear, with 40% of Asians voting for him, well above the 30% in 2020, even as some African Americans headed to the GOP as well. Blue-collar Latinos went heavily for Trump too. The point is that this realignment largely happened on economic grounds, with minorities ignoring Trump’s past litany of racist comments because he offered them a more expansive economy, particularly in blue collar professions. All the while, they saw little promise in the tsunami of promises offered by Harris and her bozo vice-presidential partner Tim Walz. Knowing a winner when they see one, America’s billionaires duly came out for the Republicans too. That included Elon Musk, of course, but also prominent investment bankers like Bill Ackman.

Taken together, what does this revolution show? That class and economics now play a greater role in American politics than skin colour or national origin. If you want to secure minority voters, the new President clearly understands, you appeal to them not as identity groups but as individual people, and families, looking out for their own self-interest. Nor is this really revelatory. America’s working-class remains more aspirational than those in other Western countries. That’s equally true of non-white voters, many of whom appreciate that the politics of race is an impediment to the American Dream. Most of the middle-income people who lately lost their homes to fire, in the minority LA suburb of Altadena, hardly benefited from a city government more obsessed with race and gender than protecting property. No less telling, Democratic policies on water and climate have created what attorney Jennifer Hernandez calls a “green Jim Crow” — where working-class minorities face increasing headwinds in terms of jobs and housing.

“Class and economics now play a greater role in American politics than skin colour or national origin.”

Read the rest of this piece at Unherd.

Photo: Jagz Mario, under CC 2.0 License.

Rust Belt Expatriates And The Diaspora

Pete Saunders — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

So the Super Bowl is set, and the Detroit Lions are not in it.

It was tough watching my Detroit Lions go down two weekends ago to the Washington Commanders in the NFC divisional round of the playoffs. However, the Lions, historically one of the National Football League’s sad-sack teams, had a spectacular season. The team had an explosive, high-scoring and entertaining offense, and could make a case for being the nation’s most popular team during the 2024 season.

That kind of popularity isn’t something that Detroiters are accustomed to, but it’s something that played out over the course of this season, and last season as well. The Lions’ success meant fans were willing to pack visiting stadiums across the country. The picture above shows Lions fans cheering their team in Glendale, AZ, but there were similar takeovers at games in Houston and San Francisco as well.

I noticed this, and it got me thinking. Yes, there are plenty of Detroiters who love traveling to follow their winning team. For the first time in a generation, the Lions are playing well enough for their fans to follow them. But there are plenty of former Detroiters in the country who moved away and proudly retained their fan cards. What’s more, there are children of former Detroiters who inherited their fandom from their parents, and religiously follow them today.

Take my brother, 14 years younger than me. He was barely two years old when our family moved from Detroit. Since then my brother’s lived in central Indiana, Chicago and New York City over the next 40+ years. He’s a New Yorker now, having been in Brooklyn for 17 years. He married a Brooklyn native. They have a child together. But my brother’s a die-hard Detroit sports fan.

My point is, Detroit ex-pats and the broader Detroit diaspora is out there. There’s a Detroit diaspora because there are so many Detroiters who left for other places. In 1970, Detroit’s six-county metro area had 4.4 million people. Fifty years later in 2020, Detroit’s six-county metro area had… 4.4 million people. There were plenty of people who were born, lived and died there, and people who migrated there as well. Yet the only way that an entire metro area can go 50 years with virtually no change in population, without a substantial decrease in births or increase in deaths, or both, is for there to be a huge net loss in migration.

Members of the Detroit diaspora can be found anywhere.

This leads to an interesting proposition for Rust Belt cities like Detroit. From an economic and social standpoint, the narrative around the Motor City is perhaps better than at any other time in my (long) lifetime. And as the narrative about the city continues to improve, it’s conceivable that there’s a portion of the diaspora that might be willing to return. If they did, they could figure prominently in Detroit’s long-term revitalization prospects. The same can be said for Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and other Rust Belt cities.

Sound crazy? It’s not.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Detroit Lions football fans at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, AZ, September 22, 2024, via facebook.com

Growing with Energy

Nima Sanandaji — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

Energy is vitally important for economic growth, particularly those forms of energy that can be used for planned power delivery. It is evident for example that Germany is currently suffering from the past decisions to shut down rather than upgrade nuclear energy.

To better understand the trans-Atlantic patterns, it is possible to look at how many megajoules of energy that are used to create the equivalent of one $ of economic value, in different economies. At top we find Ireland, Malta and Switzerland, where less than 2 megajoules are used to create on average each dollar of economic value. All three are low tax and free market economies, attracting investments, finance companies, and knowledge intensive jobs.

Switzerland has the highest share of adults employed in so-called brain business jobs in Europe, a metric of knowledge intensive jobs in technology, advanced services, IT and creative professions. Ireland ranks second while Malta has climbed fast up to fourth rank. The Netherlands is the third most knowledge intensive economy in Europe, and has somewhat higher energy usage per produced value– which makes sense since there is more manufacturing and transport trade reliance in the Netherlands.

Denmark is flourishing thanks to pharmaceutical exports, which does require some energy per employee, but create such high value creation per employee that also the energy input is low. The UK has a strong finance sector reliance, again where high values are created for limited energy input.

Germany and Spain have a bit higher energy output per produced value, France even more. Sweden and Belgium with export-oriented manufacturing sectors have higher than that. The USA has a higher energy input than most of Europe, except Finland – and by wide margin Iceland. More energy is needed in Nordic countries, due to the cold weather. Nordic countries such as Sweden and Finland have water power supply, and are currently focused on expanding nuclear power to get more energy supply and less fluctuation in prices.

Europe. USA & Canada: Energy usage per economic output Energy intensity level of primary energy Megajoules (mJ) per 2024 $
Ireland	1.2	France	3.6
Malta	1.5	Latvia	3.7
Switzerland	1.9	Hungary	4.0
Denmark	2.3	Poland	4.0
United Kingdom	2.6	Slovenia	4.0
Romania	2.7	Norway	4.1
Italy	2.9	Sweden	4.2
Portugal	3.0	Belgium	4.4
Cyprus	3.0	Slovak Republic	4.9
Germany	3.2	Czechia	5.1
Netherlands	3.2	Estonia	5.3
Spain	3.2	United States	5.3
Greece	3.3	Finland	6.2
Lithuania	3.3	Canada	8.3
Croatia	3.5	Iceland	15.3
Sources: World Bank. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Inflation Calculator and own calculations. Energy intensity level of primary energy is the ratio between energy supply and gross domestic product measured at purchasing power parity. Energy intensity is an indication of how much energy is used to produce one unit of economic output. Lower ratio indicates that less energy is used to produce one unit of output.

Looking at the rate of change, it is the top-performing countries Ireland and Malta, alongside Lithuania and Romania, which have reduced energy usage for economic output by more than half between 2004 and 2022. Sweden, the Netherland and Estonia are amongst those to reduce by 40 percent the energy needed in economic production.

Germany has essentially same level of change in energy usage for economic output as does France. This is relevant, for while Germany has shifted from nuclear power – with significant effects on economic progress – France has been more oriented towards retaining and expanding nuclear power. Energy efficiency in terms of output for growth has not been significantly better in Germany, despite the costly energy decisions.

The economy of the USA has become 33 percent more energy efficient between 2004 and 2002. This means that the same energy that produced before two dollars of real value, now produce three dollars of real value. This rate of change is slightly lower than 35 percent in France and 37 percent in Germany.

Some European countries, such as Spain, Italy and Greece have reduced energy output of production less than the USA. In Canada the level has decreased by 19 percent since, lower than all of Europe except Iceland where it has increased by more than a fifth. Iceland combines the need for heat with geothermal energy, which can explain its unique energy situation.

Percentage change in energy usage per real economic output 2004-2022
Ireland	-64	Latvia	-36
Malta	-61	France	-35
Lithuania	-56	Belgium	-34
Romania	-55	United States	-33
Slovak Republic	-48	Croatia	-33
United Kingdom	-45	Cyprus	-32
Poland	-43	Hungary	-32
Estonia	-41	Portugal	-31
Netherlands	-41	Spain	-30
Sweden	-41	Finland	-29
Switzerland	-39	Norway	-26
Czechia	-39	Italy	-23
Denmark	-39	Greece	-22
Slovenia	-38	Canada	-19
Germany	-37	Iceland	+21
Sources: World Bank. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Inflation Calculator and own calculations. Energy intensity level of primary energy is the ratio between energy supply and gross domestic product measured at purchasing power parity. Energy intensity is an indication of how much energy is used to produce one unit of economic output. Lower ratio indicates that less energy is used to produce one unit of output.

Knowledge-intensive jobs tend to rely on energy. Therefore, investing in the infrastructure of energy production and delivery, is relevant for growth of brain business jobs. Indeed, a comparison shows that those countries which have a higher share of adults employed in brain business jobs, also tend to use more total energy per adult. For each percent higher share of adults in these knowledge-intensive job, 9.1 gigajoule more energy is used per capita.

Energy supply is needed to thrive economically, to grow with knowledge intensive jobs. Yet the most knowledge intensive economies of Europe have progressed to higher energy efficiency. So, while energy is crucial for growth, the efficiency of converting energy to economic value is highest in growing and business friendly economies.

Market driven growth of in particular knowledge intensive jobs is closely related to energy supply, as the same time that the best performing knowledge intensive economies are best at creating value for a lower level of energy usage.

Nima Sanandaji, Director, European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform (ECEPR)

Trumps Assault on DEI Will Bring Us Closer to a Post-Racial America

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

It’s hard to picture Donald Trump as a civil-rights hero in the mould of Abraham Lincoln or even Lyndon Johnson. Yet through his orders to dismantle the ubiquitous regime of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), he may have accelerated America’s evolution into a post-racial society.

DEI ideology has been around for years, but it was given a significant boost after the police killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. In response, many government and business leaders chose to embrace DEI as means to placate those calling for a new American regime in which people would be divided and advantaged according to race.

But DEI initiatives have been flailing recently – even before Trump’s election. Indeed, think-tank research from last year showed that over half of company executives were already anticipating pushback against DEI initiatives. Among the firms to have recently stepped back from DEI are Boeing, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Black + Decker, Target and, the biggest of all, Walmart. Over the past two years, corporate DEI departments have been slashed, with one third of DEI professionals losing their jobs in 2022 alone.

Trump’s dismantling of DEI in the federal government no doubt thrills the various factions who support him, from the libertarians to the traditionalist conservatives to the white-nationalist fringe. Yet over time, perhaps the biggest winner from the dethroning DEI may be ethnic minorities themselves.

Drawing in part on critical race theory, DEI advocates maintain that racial characteristics largely determine people’s lives in America. These new racialists claim that any shortfalls in income, status or professional credentials stem from racial discrimination. In response, they call for ‘people of colour’ to work together to relentlessly undermine so-called white privilege.

Rather than seek greater integration, as was the cause of the old civil-rights movement, these racialist radicals embrace a kind of re-segregation. This can be seen from their involvement in schools. There they advocate indoctrinating young children in DEI ideology. On occasions, they have been known to get third-graders (eight- to nine-year-olds) to separate themselves by race and ask them to rank their ‘privilege’.

In attacking DEI, Trump is taking a widely popular position. The idea that, say, President Obama’s children should be given an edge against someone from a poor Appalachian hollow seems unjust to the vast majority of Americans of all races.

In thrall to the racial identitarianism of the DEI crowd, Democrats hoped that working-class voters would turn their way as more became increasingly non-white. After all, minorities currently make up over 40 per cent of America’s working class and will likely constitute the majority by the next decade.

But many minorities, including the young, seem more concerned with their immediate economic prospects than gaining unearned advantages through DEI programmes. Indeed, minority and poor white Americans are mainly concerned about inflation, rising crime, poor schools and the threats to their livelihoods posed by draconian green policies. Little wonder nearly half of all Latinos voted for Trump, as did growing numbers of Muslims and black males. Asian voters’ support for Trump rose from 27 per cent in 2016 to roughly 40 per cent this year.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Photo: White House, Public Domain.

4 Reasons To Be Skeptical OpenAI’s $500B Stargate Project

Robert Bryce — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

The numbers are nothing short of gobsmacking. On Tuesday, in a splashy announcement at the White House, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed a new company called The Stargate Project that intends to “invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure” in the US. The new company will “begin deploying $100 billion immediately.”

The numbers are so big that it’s easy to lose context. How much is $500 billion? It’s roughly equal to the GDP of entire countries, including — take your pick — Ireland ($529 billion), Israel ($522 billion), and the United Arab Emirates ($507 billion).

With the announcement, Stargate becomes one of the world’s most expensive infrastructure projects. Last month, China announced it would build a massive hydropower project on the Yarlung Tsangpo River in Tibet at an estimated cost of $136 billion. The price tag for California’s beleaguered high-speed train to nowhere is now $128 billion. Of course, those projects are dwarfed by Neom, the city-in-the-desert project now underway in Saudi Arabia, which is expected to cost $1.5 trillion.

Elon Musk immediately trashed the Stargate deal. Musk, who’s in a legal spat with OpenAI and Altman, claimed that the initial equity funders in the deal (OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX, a tech fund based in the United Arab Emirates) “don’t actually have the money.”

Musk also claimed that SoftBank had secured less than $10 billion for the project. On Wednesday, the ever-charming Musk (net worth: $426 billion) upped the ante by calling Stargate a “fake” and Altman a “swindler.”

Arm, NVIDIA, Oracle, Microsoft, and OpenAI are the “initial technology partners” in Stargate. Asked about the funding for the deal on CNBC, Microsoft CEO Satya Nardella replied, “All I know is, I’m good for my $80 billion.” Such is the staggering power and wealth of Big Tech that its bosses can casually affirm that they are ready and willing to spend such massive amounts of money on AI.

In an announcement posted on X, OpenAI claimed the Stargate Project will “create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world.” It also said it would support the “re-industrialization of the United States” and “provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.”

Those are mighty big claims. Spending $500 billion on an infrastructure project of any kind — and doing so in just four years — is, um, ambitious. Add in the never-ending hype around artificial intelligence, and it appears we may be in the midst of what a former Fed chairman dubbed “irrational exuberance.”

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: courtesy Robert Bryce Substack

These Mayors Understand How to Run a City

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

Urban leaders have greeted the return of Donald Trump with about as much enthusiasm as they would have for a reprise of the bubonic plague. The National Urban League imagines an “extreme right-wing” administration that will ban abortion, threaten the civil service, and end both immigration and racial quotas. Trump has even proposed building new planned cities—so-called freedom cities—that could compete with the existing urban landscape. Some urban leaders fear Trump’s actions will force them to “go it alone”—to grapple with their cities’ problems without the benefit of federal funding. But perhaps this is less of a problem than it seems. After all, cities have declined over the past four years with a Democrat in the White House. Weaning cities from federal assistance may be just what’s needed to spur change.

Indeed, several mayors seem ready, if not eager, to go it alone. These include Houston’s John Whitmire, Fort Worth’s Mattie Parker, and San Francisco’s newly elected Mayor Dan Lurie. They are seeking to adjust to harsh urban realities by discarding the often-dreamy progressive notions that tend to dominate urban political discourse. They are keenly aware how cities have lost much of their appeal in recent years to fast-growing suburbs and exurbs and are intent on fighting a patient battle against these tides.

As we know from the 1990s and early 2000s—under reform mayors like New York’s Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, Houston’s Bob Lanier, Indianapolis’s Steve Goldsmith, Philadelphia’s Ed Rendell, and Los Angeles’s Richard Riordan—good governance can restore urban vitality. Some of these mayors were nominal Democrats, others were Republicans, but all were effective in enacting regulatory reform, restraining taxes, and, most importantly, increasing public safety.

Unfortunately, many were succeeded by progressive mayors like Bill de Blasio in New York, who undermined the reformers’ achievements, notably in law enforcement. The new generation of urban leaders is today epitomized by Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, who is rapidly driving his once-great city, the nation’s third largest, into financial ruin. Johnson’s formula for destruction: borrowing massively to fund big raises for his teachers’ union backers while driving away many of his most productive citizens.

The nation’s second-largest city, Los Angeles, is engulfed in a wildfire catastrophe whose end has still not been reached. Critics across the political spectrum have ripped Mayor Karen Bass for her ineffective and inattentive leadership. But even before the wildfires, Bass, like many of her predecessors in the mayor’s office, had rejected sensible policies, especially the pro-business, pro-public-safety approach of Republican Richard Riordan, who left office in 2001. City government has become progressively dominated by left-wing politicians and divisive ethnic activists, as well as corruption, leading to multiple arrests of city councilmembers and commissioners. Despite massive public expenditures, the city has the nation’s second-largest homeless population and faces a deepening budget hole, while building less new housing per capita than many other large U.S. metros. Its downtown, beneficiary of billions of dollars in spending on transit as well as a convention center, has devolved into something of a disaster zone, including a graffiti-strewn, uncompleted high-rise.

America’s new realist mayors, by contrast, look to restrain spending while focusing on the increasingly stiff competition for companies and workers. They recognize that downtowns in particular have lost almost half their working population in the past three years, a trend that seems unlikely to change dramatically anytime soon. Worse still, the very jobs that cities rely on, such as those in finance and professional services, are also the most likely to be hybrid or fully remote.

Read the rest of this piece at City Journal.

Photo: Davide Ragusa, under CC 1.0 License.

Midwest Metro Musings #1

Pete Saunders — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

I’ve said for years that the issues that plague Midwestern cities, and the successful strategies they’ve employed, have gone unnoticed as the cities of the east and west coasts have pulled away economically and culturally. What’s hurting Midwestern cities isn’t always the same thing that’s hurting coastal cities; what works in the Midwest isn’t always what could or would work on the coasts, either.

In my last post on Christmas Eve, I said I would endeavor to produce more content on activities in the major metros throughout the Midwest. I want to draw attention to what’s happening the region that is America’s middle ground.

Today, I’m starting a new series I’m calling Midwest Metro Musings. It’s the start of my focus on what’s going on in the 17 largest combined statistical areas (CSAs) with more than one million people in the Midwest. This isn’t intended to be comprehensive; it’s a glimpse, a snapshot of things happening in so-called flyover country. This piece will cover the nine smallest of the 17 major metros I’ll cover. This weekend I’ll highlight the eight largest, in ascending order: Columbus, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Cleveland, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Detroit and Chicago.

Please offer your comments on these musings. Are they representative of what’s going on in your metro? Please let me know. Here we go.

Omaha: A spurt in the development of arts, entertainment and recreational activities in downtown Omaha is leading to better post-pandemic recovery than many of its peer Midwestern cities:

“O)verall, Omaha’s downtown has bounced back better than most others since the pandemic, according to a University of Toronto study of 55 American downtowns.

“What’s leading its recovery is actually this nighttime weekend activity … arts, entertainment, restaurants, residents,” said Karen Chapple, director of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto.

Local officials and researchers credit ongoing development with aiding Omaha’s post-pandemic resurgence, even as some have raised concerns about the incentives used to spur much of that redevelopment.

In the past three years, downtown has welcomed a new concert venue, a state-of-the-art science center and three renovated parks spanning 72 acres between the riverfront and historic Old Market. Once dormant office buildings are becoming condos and several massive development projects are underway.”

Dayton: Dayton (and its neighbor Cincinnati) are seeking ways to add to the housing inventory they’ll need to support an expected population growth of 500,000 over the next 25 years. Addressing blighted and abandoned structures is a big part of Dayton’s strategy:

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo:Cincinnati Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License

LA Fires Extinguished Gavin Newsom's Presidential Dream

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

Two years ago Gavin Newsom was widely seen as a rising Democratic star and likely future presidential candidate. Meanwhile Donald Trump, facing massive legal troubles and the results of his own intemperance, seemed to many, like those at CNN, a fading figure.

How quickly things change. Over the weekend, Trump met with the California Governor as they toured parts of California devastated by the wildfires. As Newsom was forced to greet the President with his cap in hand, Trump wasted no time in attacking the state’s progressive policies. On his arrival, Trump called on Newsom to change the state’s water policies, blaming the spread of the fires on deficient supplies. This is partially accurate: although water policy has been poorly implemented, the immediate issue lay in the city’s failure to maintain fire spending and key infrastructure like water pressure for hydrants and keeping the local water reservoir filled and operable.

Trump’s demands have drawn attention to the state’s self-inflicted wounds, and its pattern of astounding incompetence. In 1971, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith described the state government as run by “a proud, competent civil service,” and enjoying among “the best school systems in the country”. This year Wallet Hub ranked the state last in terms of return on investment for taxpayers.

There are signs that the state’s residents are taking note and growing tired of the progressive regime. Only 40% of California voters approve of the legislature and almost two-thirds have told pollsters the state is heading in the wrong direction. Today less than one in three Californians approve of Newsom’s handling of the fires.

Much of the problem can be traced to Newsom’s green allies who have erected barriers to effective fire management, as the Little Hoover Commission found as far back as 2018, which discouraged such things as controlled burns and brush clearance. Even as the state reacted to major fires in 2020, its policies on such practices have been hampered by environmental lawsuits that delay implementation of such policies, as well as fire management budget cuts.

The emergence of Trump makes things all the more difficult for Newsom’s climate policies. Now he must cope with a new president whose campaign slogans is “drill, baby, drill.” So while Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Ohio are ready to get richer, Newsom is taking California in the opposite direction. He has pledged to shut down California’s once expansive energy industry, getting its oil from such progressive bastions as Saudi Arabia instead. This is not a good look to much of the country.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Photo: California Governor's office, Public Domain.

The Big Reversal

Robert Bryce — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

It took the re-election of a battered Republican candidate — and a milestone rejection of the Democratic Party’s climate and energy policies by the American electorate — to stop the years-long assault on rural America, our landscapes, and our wildlife by Big Wind and its many allies.

But yesterday, in a landmark executive order, President Donald Trump ordered that all federal agencies must immediately assess “the environmental impact of onshore and offshore wind projects upon wildlife, including, but not limited to, birds and marine mammals.” For over a decade, Big Wind has dodged and weaved, and denied responsibility for its impact on everything from eagles to North Atlantic Right Whales. It has also repeatedly steamrolled rural communities and coastal communities in its pursuit of federal tax credits. No longer. There’s a new sheriff in Washington, and it’s clear that things are changing.

As I predicted in November, Trump immediately went after the offshore wind sector. But his executive order on wind, titled “Temporary Withdrawal of All Areas on the Outer Continental Shelf from Offshore Wind Leasing and Review of The Federal Government’s Leasing and Permitting Practices for Wind Projects,” goes beyond offshore wind. Trump also ordered a halt to the controversial Lava Wind project in Idaho.

As I reported in September, the entire state of Idaho opposes the Lava Ridge project, which is owned by New York-based LS Power. In 2023, the Idaho House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution stating its opposition to the proposed 1,200-megawatt facility, which could be built on federal land near the Minidoka National Historic Site. Shortly after Trump signed the order, Senator Jim Risch (R-ID) praised the move, saying, “Lava Ridge has been the embodiment of liberals’ disregard for the voices of Idahoans and rural America. Despite intense and widespread opposition from Idaho and the Japanese American community, the previous administration remained dead set on pushing this unwanted project.”

The executive order on wind energy was part of the biggest one-day turnaround in energy and climate policies in American history. Here are some of the specifics.

In a first-day blizzard of executive orders, the new Trump Administration reversed, eliminated, or suspended Joe Biden’s energy and climate policies on everything from the Paris Agreement to banning gas stoves. In an order withdrawing the US from the Paris deal, Trump said that any federal official that “plans or coordinates international energy agreements shall henceforth prioritize economic efficiency, the promotion of American prosperity, consumer choice, and fiscal restraint in all foreign engagements that concern energy policy.”

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: Wind turbines in Idaho, Bureau of Land Management, in Public Domain.

How Governable is Los Angeles?

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

Los Angeles is being investigated, pilloried and derided over the horrific loss of life and property in the 2025 fires. Certainly, Mayor Karen Bass, the City Council and the county Board of Supervisors, and many of their recent predecessors, have not convinced the world that L.A. is a governable city.

Fire preparedness isn’t the only problem. In recent years, Los Angeles has been losing residents right and left. Census data show that its poverty rate is among the highest in the state, and that it’s in the top 10 nationwide. South L.A., roughly the area between the 10 Freeway south to the city boundary, locale of two of the worst riots in U.S. history, is now poorer in relation to the rest of Los Angeles than it was before those upheavals — the Watts riots, in 1965, and the Rodney King unrest in 1992. The city and county of Los Angeles has the second-highest unhoused population in the U.S., behind New York, and yet L.A. builds far less new housing than almost every other large “metro.” It has a deepening budget hole.

The news is far better if you look at smaller cities in the county: Downey, Lakewood, South Gate, Cerritos, Bellflower and Paramount. As you drive through downtown neighborhoods toward these southeastern suburbs, you’re likely to encounter broken pavement, battered buildings, empty storefronts and sidewalks crowded with vendors and food stalls reminiscent of the developing world. But just past the city limits, the reality changes.

In South Gate, for example, the main streets are well-maintained and landscaped, and there’s a dearth of the graffiti and homeless camps that scar so much of Los Angeles. A study by Chapman University researcher Bheki Mahlobo — to be published later this year — found that these cities generally outperform the city in many important economic, social and educational markers.

The overall office vacancy rate in downtown L.A., 31.5% in mid-2024, is more than three times higher than in the smaller cities to the south. Mahlobo’s comparisons show that the unemployment rate and poverty rate are lower in Bellflower, Cerritos, South Gate, Paramount, Lakewood and Downey than in adjacent parts of Los Angeles. All have violent crime rates below Los Angeles as a whole, and less than half of that endured in adjacent city neighborhoods.

These suburbs’ livability has been hard-won. Two decades ago, Paramount was written off as among the worst suburbs in the country. Rand described it as an “urban disaster area.” Many were “devastated” by factory layoffs and plant shutdowns in the 1970s, recalls Hector De La Torre, executive director of the Gateway Cities Council of Governments, a joint-powers authority of 27 cities and several unincorporated areas. “Their economic base was torn from them,” he added, “but these places figured how to adjust.”

Read the rest of this piece at Los Angeles Times.

Photo: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times.

Recycling for Sustainable Electricity is the Key for Future Generations

Ronald Stein — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

Our planet has numerous resources, but they are NOT unlimited resources. What’s the future of humanity 100 to 500 years from now, after humans have extracted the oil, coal, lithium, and cobalt resources from the 4.5-billion-year-old Earth?

Worldwide crude oil consumption is currently estimated at roughly 96.5 million barrels per day. According to OPEC, global demand is expected to reach 109 million barrels per day. Estimations vary slightly from other sources as well, but it is predicted that we may run out of global oil from known reserves in about 50 years.

Nothing lasts forever, even the abundant coal on this planet. For coal, we may run out of global coal from known reserves in about 130 years.

As the world’s population depletes the earth’s natural resources over the next 50, 100, or more years, our grandchildren may be unable to enjoy the more than 6,000 products of our materialistic society being enjoyed by the current residents on this planet. These are products that people need and use every day without even realizing that they come from the refining process. Without oil, we are back in the stone age.

To continue the preservation of human life on earth, it’s time to get serious about conservation, efficiency improvements, and recycling the waste that humans are generating.

One of the primary areas of focus is the recovery of electricity from waste streams such as tires and plastics.

Tires: The United States generates around 280 million waste tires each year, which is roughly one tire per person. Globally, an estimated 1 billion to 1.8 billion used tires are discarded annually.
Plastic: The world produces around 400 million tons of plastic each year, which is more than double the amount produced at the beginning of the century. Growth: Since the 1970s, plastic production has grown faster than any other material. If current trends continue, global production is projected to reach 1,100 million tons by 2050.

As billions of tires and millions of tons of plastic waste are disposed of annually, these materials represent a vast, untapped source of electricity. Traditional disposal methods often lead to environmental pollution and health hazards. Waste-to-energy technology offers a sustainable alternative by converting these materials into clean electricity while reclaiming valuable products like recovered steel, coke, and carbon black.

Read the rest of this piece at America Out Loud.

Ronald Stein is an engineer, senior policy advisor on energy literacy for the Heartland Institute and CFACT, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book "Clean Energy Exploitations."

Photo: courtesy America Out Loud.

Europe Faces Green Energy Immiseration. Trump is About to Offer it a Lifeline.

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

Teddy Roosevelt believed in speaking softly and carrying a big stick. Donald Trump will never speak softly, or even politely, but he will soon pack the power inherent in presiding over the world’s number one producer of oil and gas.

Fifty years ago, the US was the world’s largest importer of oil, as demonstrated by the pain suffered during the Arab oil embargo. Now, largely due to fracking, any such future threat is moot while Texas’s Permian basin, in effect the world’s fifth largest oil producer, is expected soon to be responsible for half of all US oil output.

The question now is whether other western countries will embrace this development as a way to break dependence on autocratic regimes like Russia, Iran, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Particularly promising is natural gas, which provides reliable energy that produces an estimated 40 per cent less carbon dioxide (CO2) than coal and 30 per cent less than oil.

A shift to natural gas, as an intermediate step in reducing emissions, makes sense – that is until politics and climate theology come into the picture. In Europe and in the UK, politicians insist that we will soon be able to get along just fine without evil fossil fuels.

In Britain, such efforts have succeeded in securing a two thirds drop in UK energy production, while demand has fallen only by a third; once a net energy exporter, the UK increasingly depends on imports, even while an estimated 25 billion barrels of oil remain untapped. Studies have shown that oil imported into the UK produces more carbon emissions per delivered barrel than oil produced in the UK.

Now with the highest electricity prices in Europe, and with particularly punishing rates for industry, manufacturing has cratered. Since 1990, the manufacturing share of GDP in Britain has dropped by roughly 50 per cent.

But this misery is not confined to Britain. In the EU, nearly a million industrial jobs have been lost over the past few years. Many will have gone to China and some developing countries.

The primary case study is Germany, a fading industrial power amid high energy prices. The country’s economy is now utterly vulnerable to changes in the weather. Imagine this: Germany’s companies are forced to endure ruinous price increases at times of dunkelflaute – a combination of cold weather, cloud cover and light wind.

Yet even as energy supplies are constrained, the EU and the UK are insisting on a rapid transition to electric vehicles. If kept in place, this will cause Germany’s entire industrial structure to decline, resulting in the potential loss of upwards of 400,000 of its estimated 800,000 auto jobs by 2030.

The only clear winner in this ideology-driven kabuki show is China, which seeks dominion over EVs and other renewable technologies even while it is accused of emitting more greenhouse gases than the entire developed world put together. Now apparently on a coal plant building spree, China’s state-directed economy cynically uses cheap, reliable fossil fuels, and control of critical minerals, to dominate both EVs and the solar-panel industry. Meanwhile, western “green companies”, like Swedish battery maker Northvolt, file for bankruptcy while others suffer massive losses, particularly EV startups.

Even if you accept that China’s dominance is worth the price of “saving the planet”, current energy policies will not create an electrical grid to power it. As demand for EVs and reliance on renewables grow, we could see brownouts even in energy rich Canada and the US in the coming years. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation has found that a deep cold snap would cause outages in swathes of the country.

Across the pond, Europe and the UK are already struggling to build enough capacity to support their relatively small number of electrical vehicles. In Britain, in 2021, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee admitted that there was a “mountain to climb” to meet transition targets, and doubted that the UK government had “sufficiently thought through” its EV roll-out plans.

The shift to artificial intelligence is likely to intensify this crisis. Microsoft is reported to be opening a new data centre globally every three days. These often loud, intrusive and power-hungry operations could grow from 4.5 per cent of energy demand to 10 per cent by 2035. Firms like Google, a long-time ally of the UN in promoting draconian climate orthodoxy, now admit they are spewing out far more greenhouse gases – about 50 per cent more than in 2019. Microsoft and Google are already estimated to consume as much energy as whole countries, including Ghana, Iceland and Tunisia.

The needs of the tech oligarchs could prove a final push towards energy realism. There has been a growing movement among tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft to encourage the development of nuclear power, although sometimes stymied by the objections of Biden officials. Microsoft even pushed to reopen the shuttered Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania.

Whatever the political class decides, reality suggests that the dominance of fossil fuels, even coal, will persist for the foreseeable future. Trump’s “drill baby drill” policies could further entrench this pattern, and offer, in the short-term, a solution to the West’s energy shortfalls. For Europe, reversing President Biden’s ill-considered attempt to stymie the growth of LNG exports, as is now likely, should be seen as manna from heaven.

Energy realism, open to a diverse and changeable mix of sources, is imperative if the United States is to avoid the fate of the last industrial vestiges of Britain and the rest of the green West. If we continue to place all our bets on the sun and wind, we could soon be enjoying living standards consistent not with an abundant future, but more akin to those of the Middle Ages.

This piece first appeared at The Telegraph.

Photo: Carol Highsmith, via Library of Congress in Public Domain.

Smart Growth Burns Thousands of Homes

Randal OToole — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

Los Angeles city and regional planners are just as responsible for the Palisades, Eaton, and other fires that have burned in the past few days as if they had poured gasoline on the homes and lit the matches. The destruction of these homes, including, for what it is worth, homes owned by Jeff Bridges, Billy Crystal, and Paris Hilton, among other celebrities, is a direct result of so-called “smart-growth” policies that call for establishing greenbelts around cities and packing people in high-density housing within those cities.

Pacific Palisades is on the edge of the Santa Monica Mountains, most of which have been locked up from development in various regional parks, including 72,000 acres protected by the Santa Monica Conservancy, 157,700 acres in the Santa Monica National Recreation Area, and various smaller parks. These have severely limited the amount of land available for housing and other developments, driving up housing prices.

Although homes in Pacific Palisades sell for millions of dollars, the lots are small, generally between 5,000 and 7,500 square feet. Many of the larger lots are long and narrow, so the lot widths are often only about 50 feet. This means that homes tend to be built no more than about 20 feet apart and sometimes as little as 10 feet apart.

One of the standards for building fire-resistant communities is that homes and other structures should be at least 50 and preferably 100 feet apart from one another, meaning homes should be built on around 1-acre lots. The two multi-million-dollar homes above are not only too close to one another, one of the homeowners has planted a tree and other tall vegetation between them. Unless the home on the right is built entirely of steel and concrete, once the home on the left catches fire, the radiant heat from that fire would be certain to ignite its neighbor. These homes were two lots away from parklands, so it is likely that they have burned to the ground. This is the same situation found in Colorado’s Marshall Fire as well as fires on the edge of Santa Rose and other California cities.

It’s not like this should surprise anyone in Pacific Palisades. The hills of southern California are some of the most fire-prone landscapes in North America. The first modern development in Pacific Palisades was Inceville, a movie studio that opened in 1911, which was mostly burned by a fire in 1916, and finished off by another fire in 1922.

There have been plenty of fires since then. The most recent was a 2018 fire that burned 97,000 acres and more than 1,600 structures, killing three people and forcing the evacuation of nearly 300,000. Despite these experiences, Los Angeles urban planners remain more intent on their dreams of compact development than on fireproofing their city.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Photo: Google Streetview, via the Antiplanner.

This is Not the Dawn of a New Fascist Era

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

Is the US on the edge of a new fascist epoch? To listen to much of the media, progressive politicians and many academics, Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday will usher in a politics we have not seen since the days of Mussolini, Franco and, worst of all, Hitler. In her presidential campaign, vice-president Kamala Harris openly called Trump ‘a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist’.

The Democrats and their media allies believed these accusations would be the key to electoral success, hoping to scare Americans into voting for Harris. Some even suggested Trump would throw Democrat politicians and commentators in jail once in office. Liz Cheney, the one-time rightist turned anti-Trumper, warned Americans this might be ‘the last real vote you ever get to cast’.

Yet these accusations did not ring true for most Americans. Similar nonsense charges have been hurled at far less worthy targets, like George W Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney. Perhaps this has desensitised Americans to Democrats crying ‘fascism’. In any case, a recent Gallup poll showed that only three per cent of voters described ‘elections / election reform / democracy’ as a key issue in 2024, well behind economic problems or immigration. Notably, voters in swing states said that Harris, not Trump, was a bigger threat to democracy.

MAGA and similar movements, such as the National Rally in France, the AfD in Germany and Reform in the UK, have grown in stature by leading a rebellion against unrestrained immigration, rising crime and the post-nationalist ethos of contemporary capitalism. To be sure, they display some worrying, right-wing tendencies.

Yet in economic terms, at least, Joe Biden, Keir Starmer and other progressives are closer to embracing corporatist ideas, which any fascist might recognise, than Trump or his doppelgangers. Critical here is the central notion of fascism. ‘At its fullest development’, writes Robert Paxton in The Anatomy of Fascism, fascism ‘redrew the frontiers between private and public, sharply diminishing what had been untouchably private’.

Under Mussolini, for example, private property remained and powerful corporations thrived. But only, as Il Duce himself suggested, if they pledged, ‘formal adherence to the regime’. Mussolini relied heavily on large landowners and companies to help finance the March on Rome. Once in power, Mussolini, who viewed himself as a ‘revolutionary’ transforming society, saw the state as ‘the moving centre of economic life’. He successfully co-opted Italian industrialists to build new infrastructure, as well as the military, which he used to fight off Italy’s historically militant and socialist-oriented unions.

In contemporary times, the most powerful corporatist economy can be found in nominally Communist China. Here, concentrated wealth, governmental power and control of information, even about the past, has echoes of fascism. In China, as one scholar observes, corporatism is ‘a socio-political process’ where monopolies flourish with the assistance and connivance of state agencies. They follow state strictures by embracing the party ideology, celebrating the CCP’s vision and enforcing ideological conformity among employees and even foreign business partners.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Photo: White House Archive via Flickr in Public Domain.

Even Hollywood is Turning on LA Mayor Karen Bass

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

After her election as mayor of Los Angeles in 2022, Karen Bass was a heroine of California’s Left. A former backer of Fidel Castro, she decisively defeated billionaire businessman Rick Caruso, who spent more than $100 million to try and defeat her. With a struggling economy, rising crime, and a high cost of living, Bass’s election seemed to confirm LA’s final transition from a place of political diversity to a single-party city dominated by a well-organised Left and funders from the public unions.

Now, though, Bass “is a dead woman walking”, as a union organiser friend told me this week. The revelations of incompetence, poor planning, and awful communication, combined with the fact that the LA mayor was partying in Ghana when wildfires started in her city, have worked against her, and yesterday angry protestors gathered outside her home. Some charges made by Donald Trump and Elon Musk tying the disaster to DEI and climate policies are exaggerated. But Bass’s lack of interest in public safety mirrors the new progressive script which prioritises “social justice” over actual justice, racial quotas over merit, and climate alarmism over common sense.

Naturally, Bass, Governor Gavin Newsom and their media supporters reject conservatives’ accusations of incompetence. They say opponents are using the fires as a political “piñata”, and blame the damage on climate change. Yet Steven Koonin, a respected physicist and advisor in the Obama administration, has argued that the real responsibility lies with a slew of bad policies which left the city unprepared for the scale of the disaster. Fires have been a regular feature of life here in Southern California for at least 20 million years. Given recent weather conditions, the city should have known what was coming.

Rather than help save our piece of the planet, proponents of the green movement have been consistent barriers to effective fire management. As far back as 2018, the Little Hoover Commission found that controlled burns and brush clearance were necessary to avoid catastrophic wildfires, yet not enough was done. Even as the state reacted to major fires in 2020, attempts at controlled fires have been hampered by environmental lawsuits that delay implementation, as well as fire management budget cuts. Bass also cut the fire budget.

California has been running huge deficits in recent years, but not enough of those funds have gone towards fire preparedness. Those in charge never made sure that fire engines were in place beforehand, that there was sufficient water pressure in hydrants, and that reservoirs were filled. To her credit, the LA council member who represents the Palisades, Traci Park, has consistently made these arguments.

Unsurprisingly, there has been a groundswell against Bass and the city’s bureaucrats. Some Hollywood stars — a group which has historically been the bulwark of the progressive movement — have even joined in. Celebrities including Maria Shriver, Justine Bateman and Dennis Quaid have now called on Bass to resign, as have the 150,000 signatories of a petition launched last week. As the journalist Michael Shellenberger notes: “They didn’t imagine their vote would result in their homes burning down.”

Read the rest of this piece at Unherd.

Photo: Los Angeles Fire Department via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

New Report: Bad Climate for Housing

Jennifer Hernandez — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

From the start, California’s “landmark” climate law recognized that because global warming is a planetary wide phenomena , the state could only have “far-reaching” effects by “encouraging other states, the federal government, and other countries to act.” To achieve this goal, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and leaders, charged with crafting climate policy, could have chosen to preserve the state’s quality of life – the “California Dream” – while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving climate resiliency.

Instead, state climate leaders ended up sacrificing the California Dream and made California’s housing affordability, arguably the state’s greatest challenge, even worse. This has helped spur a record outmigration and the nation’s highest levels of poverty and homelessness. Far from inspiring others, the state’s housing failures provide an ideal reason for other states and countries to be leery of embracing California climate policy as a global “model.” In fact, huge majorities won’t even consider moving to today’s California.

This rolling disaster has occurred in plain sight and for an extended period of time. CARB had six years to design the state’s inaugural climate strategies and cut emissions by about 10% from 2012 to 2020. It could have examined how new emission controls might erode housing affordability in light of the state’s high housing and cost of living market realities.

As in the rest of the country, Californians, including millennials, overwhelmingly desire to own single-family homes. Homeowners have 40 times the net wealth of rented households. But under the current regulatory regime, they have fewer opportunities to buy their preferred places to live. Belying its reputation for sprawl, single family detached homes account for 57% of California’s housing, less than the national average (61.1%) and the 10th lowest in the country. About 19% of state housing consists of multifamily buildings with 10 or more units, above the national average (14.8%) and the sixth highest of any state.

View/download the full report (PDF opens in new tab or window)

Jennifer L. Hernandez (author) has practiced land use and environmental law for 40 years, and leads Holland & Knight’s West Coast Land Use and Environmental Group. Ms.Hernandez is the longest-serving minority board member (23 years) of the California League of Conservation voters, was appointed by President Clinton to serve as a trustee for the Presidio National Park in San Francisco, serves on the board of directors for Sustainable Conservation, and teaches environmental justice at the University of Southern California Law School. Ms.Hernandez graduated with honors from Harvard University and Stanford Law School. She and her husband live in Berkeley and Los Angeles. The opinions and recommendations in this Article are the authors’ and should not be attributed to any other person or organization, to Holland & Knight, or to any client of the firm.

The Great Dumbing Down of American Education

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 12:27:17 -0500

America’s universities may be a disgrace, but the deeper problems with our education system lie with grades K-12. Higher education still ranks as a U.S. strength that other countries might admire—but our grade schools might even be inadequate for poor, developing countries.

The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as The Nation’s Report Card, found that barely a quarter or less of students are proficient in reading, and even less are proficient in math, geography, and U.S. history. U.S. 4th and 8th graders are performing worse not only compared to East Asian countries, but also to such places as Poland, the U.K., South Africa, Turkey, and Sweden, all of which have boosted their scores.

Some of this can be blamed on the pandemic, but not all of it can. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, between pre-pandemic 2019 and 2023, the average score for 4th graders on standardized math tests dropped by 18 points, while scores for 8th graders declined by 27 points. Overall, some 40% of all U.S. public school students fail to meet standards in either math or english, up 8% from pre-pandemic levels.

The lockdowns may have accelerated the deterioration in testing, but scores have been dropping since 2015, and have continued to decline since the pandemic ended. In math, the OECD’s 2018 Program for International Student Assessment found that 36 countries outperformed the United States, including China, Russia, Italy, France, Finland, Poland, and Canada. This backs up the notion, recently expressed by Trump advisor Vivek Ramaswamy, that American kids lack the skills to compete with foreign workers.

But we are not just talking about elite skills. A recent federal survey suggests that 28% of Americans now occupy the lowest level of literacy, up from 19% in 2017. Schools have abandoned phonics and other effective approaches for “whole language” and other trendy theories, producing a population where 60% of 4th graders are poor readers. Attempts by parents to learn what their kids are actually experiencing in school creates problems, including the possibility of incurring large financial costs; in states like California, it is actually illegal for schools to inform parents about their children’s gender issues.

Progressive educrats have reasons to fear disclosure at a time when we are seeing the first reduction of the average American IQ in 100 years while China dominates STEM fields. In the lower grades, it’s now common to hear talk of “zombie schools,” which happens when more than 20% of a school’s pupils are “chronically absent.”

California’s K-12 system, which serves nearly six million students, fails to educate the majority: less than half meet national standards for literacy, and only one-third for math. No surprise then that many parents and some states are looking at alternatives, notably school choice and charter schools. This year alone 20 states expanded their charter programs. Overall, publicly funded charter schools have doubled since 2005, while the student count has grown by more than threefold. These schools have consistently outperformed their traditional public school rivals.

Yet, better performance seems barely a priority for many who run public schools, particularly in the deepest blue states. In California, charters are under unremitting attack. The Los Angeles Unified School District is working overtime to prevent new charters while harassing those that already exist. All this despite a plurality of Californians who think that their schools are getting worse.

The biggest losers are the students, particularly minorities. According to the latest California testing results, only 36% of Latino students met or exceeded state adopted ELA proficiency. Only 22% met or exceeded proficiency standards in math. The harsh reality is that nearly 70% of black students failed to meet state standards for english language arts in the 2021-2022 school year, while about 84% didn’t meet math standards.

Read the rest of this piece at American Mind.

Photo: Pexels in Public Domain.

Here's the Real Hockey Stick

Robert Bryce — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

In 2005, Scientific American published an article saying that the hockey stick graph published a few years earlier by Michael Mann, an academic who now works at the University of Pennsylvania, had become “an iconic symbol of humanity’s contribution to global warming.” The article continued, saying the image, which shows a looming spike in temperature, has become “a focal point in the controversy surrounding climate change and what to do about it.”

That was an understatement.

Mann and the hockey stick have become defining examples of the politicization of climate science. The hockey stick played a prominent role in Mann’s defamation lawsuit against author and journalist Mark Steyn. Last year, a jury in Washington, DC, awarded Mann $1 million in that case. During the trial, Canadian journalist Terence Corcoran declared the hockey stick has become “a powerful and effective piece of supposed evidence for makers of climate policy and a near-religious icon that activists continue to revere.”

This is the hockey stick graph Mann et al. published in 1999. Credit: Wikipedia

While scientists and journalists can argue about Mann’s hockey stick, his methods, greenhouse gas emissions, and temperature forcings, there can be no argument about the staggering cost of the subsidies Congress has given to Big Wind, Big Solar, and other alt-energy outfits in the name of climate change. In late November, the Treasury Department published the newest edition of its annual report on tax expenditures, which it says are “revenue losses attributable to provisions of Federal tax laws.”

What do those Treasury reports show? A hockey stick.

The Inflation Reduction Act, which became law in 2022 thanks to a single vote cast by Kamala Harris, has turned into a run on the Treasury. As seen at the top of this article, the IRA has fueled a hockey stick of gradual — and then exploding — federal tax expenditures for the investment tax credit and production tax credit. Those credits, which are the principal drivers behind the deployment of wind and solar energy, and a handful of other forms of alt-energy, are, by far, the most expensive energy-related provisions in the federal tax code. Between 2025 and 2034, the ITC and PTC will account for more than half of all energy-related tax provisions. And that total does not include the tax credits for electric vehicles.

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: courtesy Robert Bryce Substack.

LA Fires are the Horrifying Consequence of Democratic Misrule

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

Los Angeles authorities’ poor preparation for and lamentable response to the wildfires now devastating the city capture a broader problem – namely, the failure of governance across America’s Democrat-controlled regions. This pattern of incompetence has accelerated the shift of American economic and political power to regions outside the long dominant north-east and West Coast.

The reason for this shift lies in the clear failure of Democrats, writ large in the inferno now consuming large swathes of LA. In states like California, Democratic politicians no longer prioritise such things as public safety and key infrastructure, including roads, ports and, most importantly at the moment, water systems. Indeed, today’s ‘progressives’ generally shy away from things like building dams or maintaining water pressure in the name of protecting the environment. They are far more focused on climate change and ‘social justice’.

Of course, California progressives will justify this by blaming the fires on climate change, even though a leading fire expert at the US Geological Survey suggests this claim is unsupported. Fires have been a regular feature of life in southern California for at least 20 million years. Moreover, given the recent extremely dry weather conditions, LA should have been prepared for a conflagration. It was not. A councilperson representing the Palisades has noted the ‘chronic underinvestment in our critical infrastructure’.

Indeed, the devastating impact of the fires is largely a result of environmental policies that discouraged such safety practices as controlled burns. California governor Gavin Newsom has cut funding for fighting wildfires by over $100 million this past year, while demanding subsidies for electric cars. At the same time, California’s roads are among the worst in the US, and a planned high-speed railway continues to gobble up tens of billions of dollars.

There’s one word for this: failure. Unsurprisingly, conservative activists, Elon Musk and Donald Trump have all denounced Los Angeles authorities’ bizarrely slow and ineffective response to the fires, and with some justification. Some claims were off-base, such as the suggestion that California’s DEI policies are directly to blame. But the progressive complaint that the right is ‘politicising’ the tragedy also makes little sense. The reasons for the devastating impact of the fires are indeed rooted in conscious decisions taken by Democratic politicians.

The LA fires are likely to accelerate the shift in American politics, demography and economy away from the old centres of wealth – Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Boston, Chicago – and towards a new constellation of former laggard states, mostly from the South, the intermountain west and Texas. These provide the base for Trumpism. Indeed, the current ring-kissing at Mar-a-Lago in Florida symbolises this shift in regional power.

There are historical precedents for the shift in power we are now witnessing. At the 1829 inauguration of roughhewn Westerner Andrew Jackson, writes Arthur Schlesinger in The Age of Jackson, ‘people from faraway states came to Washington’. Drawing on the support of southern farmers and the working classes of the cities of the east and north, Jackson’s victory represented a blow against the power of the banks and the New England elites. Now, nearly 200 years later, we are seeing a shift in power just as significant, as the parvenues of the South, Texas, Arizona and Nevada challenge the established power centres.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Photo: The Hurst fire, taken by P. Rivas, via Wikimedia, under CC 4.0 License.

A Quarter Century of Net Domestic Migration

Wendell Cox — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

Between 2000 and 2024, there has been substantial movement between the states — net domestic migration. The source of the data is the Census Bureau population estimates program, which is generally considered the best data on the subject. Data is available for each of the more than 3,100 counties or county equivalents in the nation. There are other sources for net domestic migration data, such as the Internal Revenue Service, which report net domestic migration and the movement of adjusted gross income. The Census Bureau uses this data in its annual net domestic migration reports, but IRS misses people who do not file income tax returns.

Moving to the South

Viewed over this time perspective, there has been considerable movement across the nation. America has been moving to the South. Since 2000, Florida has had the most net domestic migration, at 3.4 million. In the last year, however, Florida fell to 64,000 net domestic migrants, well below its annual average over the period of 142,000.

Texas has received the second most net domestic migrants, at 2.8 million. Like Florida, for example, it too had less net domestic migration in 2024 than its 2000 to 2024 average, with a decline of 32,000.

North Carolina ranked third, with net domestic migration of 82,000 in 2024, an increase over its 2000 to 2024 period estimate of 17,000.

Georgia added 1.035,000 net domestic migrants between 2000 and 2024, ranking fifth. Georgia added 18,000 fewer than its period average in 2024.

South Carolina added 1,240,000 million net domestic migrants over the period for a sixth ranking, while adding 66,000 in 2024, South Carolina’s 2024 net domestic migration figure was 25,000 more than its period average.

Tennessee added 803,000 net domestic migrants between 2000 and 2024. In 2024, Tennessee added 48,000, 15,000 more than its period average.

Thus, although migration to Texas and Florida slowed, the South had six of the seven largest net domestic migration flows over the past quarter century.

A strong performance, and somewhat surprising, was seen in Alabama, which gained 224,000, and accelerated in 2024 to 17,000 above its period average. Oklahoma added 171,000 and its 2024 figure was 7,000 over its average. Arkansas also gained strongly, at 155,000, with a 7,000 gain in 2024 relative to its annual average.

Only three Southern states lost net domestic migrants — Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia. Louisiana had a huge loss, at 565,000, though improved its performance relative to average by 6,000 in the last year. Mississippi lost 5,000 net domestic migrants in 2024, yet performed 1,000 better than its quarter century average West Virginia had an average loss of 1,000 over the period, though recovered to a gain of 5,000 in 2024.

Other Strong Gains

Arizona was the only non-southern state to add more than 1,000,000 net domestic migrants over the period (1,482,000), though in 2024 fell below its annual average by 27,000. Nevada gained 706,000, though dropped in 2024 by 12,000 relative to its annual average.

Three states with strong net domestic migration over the period have sustained recent losses (Colorado, Washington and Oregon). Colorado gained 600,000 net domestic migrants over the period, though lost 20,000 in 2024 relative to its 25 year annual rate. Washington gained 574,000 net domestic migrants over the period, though lost 21,000 in 2024 relative to its annual rate. In Oregon, the gain over the period was 421,000, but the 2024 net domestic migration was 19,000 below its annual average.

Idaho has also done well, attracting 367,000 net domestic migrants since 2000. In 2024, Idaho replicated its rate, adding 1,000 more relative to its period average.

Largest Losses

New York had the largest net domestic migration loss, at 4,106,000 over the period. New York’s 121,000 loss in 2024 was 50,000 better than its annual average.

California has been chasing New York for some time, losing 4,031,000 net domestic migrants since 2000. California lost 72,000 in 2024 relative to its annual average.

The third largest net domestic migration loss was in Illinois, which was down 1,975,000, yet had a gain of 26,000 in 2024 relative to its annual average.

New Jersey lost 1,160,000 net domestic migrants over the period, but gained 13,000 in 2024 relative to its annual average.

Michigan lost 889,000 net domestic migrants from 2000 to 2024, but gained 29,000 in 2024 relative to its annual average.

Ohio lost 628,000 net domestic migrants from 2000 to 2024 and gained 24,000 in 2024 in comparison with its annual average.

Massachusetts dropped over the period by 602,000 net domestic migrants, ranking 44th. Its 2024 loss of 27,000 was about 2,400 below the period average. Maryland ranked 42nd over the period, losing 398,000. The 2024 loss was 1,000 worse than the period average.

Pennsylvania lost 360,000 over the period, ranking 41st. Pennsylvania’s 2024 loss was better by 3,500 than its quarter century average. Connecticut fell over the 25 years by 317,000, to rank 40th. However, its 8,100 2024 gain in net domestic migrants was 2,400 higher than its annual rate over the period.

Figure 1 illustrates the contrast between the states with largest net domestic migration gains between 2020 and 2024. For example, with the top gain of 3.4 million, Florida gained 7.5 million more net domestic migrants over the 25-year period. Florida and Texas combined gained 14.3 million net domestic migrants compared to New York and California combined.

The table (link below) has full details, including the analyses above and the annual net domestic migration data for all states and the District of Columbia. Over the past few years, strong net domestic migration states, especially Colorado, Oregon and Washington have seen their net arrivals drop materially, as the California exodus has increasingly been to other states, where the financial gains from moving have increased (largely a result of better house prices). Moreover, Florida’s net domestic migration has fallen in the last year, while other southern states have significantly improved their performance, especially the “half-back” states of South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee have done better. Finally, three of the southern states that elitists love to hate have secured rankings of 7th (Alabama), 11th (Oklahoma) and 12th (Arkansas).

Download Table file (Excel spreadsheet file downloads directly rather than opening in your browser).

Overall the basic patterns have remained remarkably the same, although some areas appear to be gaining momentum, and others losing slightly. But the future clearly belongs to the south and a handful of western states, although not those on the coast.

State Capitol of Alabama (Montgomery), 7th ranking state for net domestic migration in 2024. Photo: by Eric Hunt, via Wikimedia, under CC 3.0 License.

Bass Faces Fire—Both Literal and Political—Amid LA’s Worst Disaster

Tim Campbell — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

When I was studying for my Project Management Professional certification several years ago, part of the content included disaster planning. I reviewed a case study of a project manager who planned a large IT project in Florida.

During the project’s implementation, a hurricane hit the state. The project manager was proud of his preparation and recovery plans, saying he was able to get the project back on track within a few weeks. Much to my initial shock, the class leader said she would have fired the project manager. Knowing Florida is prone to seasonal hurricanes, why would the manager start an important project in the middle of the most dangerous time of year? Despite his recovery plans, he forgot the most fundamental issue; watch the calendar. Know the risks of weather on project planning.

There are many tragic stories around LA’s recent fires. Thousands of homeowners, renters, and small business owners have lost their homes and livelihoods. Schools and churches have been destroyed. Historic structures are lost for all time. The environmental damage from burned-out cars and businesses will take years to mitigate. And the list goes on. Government officials have called the Palisades Fire, just one of four major conflagrations, the worst natural disaster in LA County history.

But, like the Florida IT project, LA’s disaster was exacerbated by human mistakes and poor timing. While nobody can control the weather, high winds are no stranger to Southern California. It is also no secret the City has failed to maintain and improve its infrastructure, including its water systems. Budget cuts have affected public safety staffing and response. A large portion of the City’s homelessness budget is paid by the General Fund, the same source that pays for police and fire services.

One of the most frustrating stories to come out of the disaster is Mayor Bass’ absence during the first critical hours of the fire. Despite a forecast showing unusually high winds, Mayor Bass chose to follow through on her plans to travel to Ghana on a diplomatic mission.

Just like the unfortunate project manager in Florida, she paid little heed to impending disaster. Her absence was bad enough, but she has steadfastly refused to address the issue since. As she boarded a plane to return to LA, she stared stone-faced at a reporter asking her what she had to say to LA’s residents. Granted, the reporter works for Sky News, a right-wing news outlet, but politicians don’t get to pick and choose who they respond to, especially in the time of a major crisis.

The question would have been equally valid had it come from a Huffington Post reporter. Despite a spirited defense by fellow elected officials, public criticism of Bass’ actions before and after the fire is intensifying. Ironically, for more than a day, President Biden spent more time in LA than our mayor.

Read the rest of this piece at Westside Current.

Tim Campbell is a semi-retired public sector manager who currently writes a weekly column on homelessness program performance for CityWatch L.A. Campbell worked for the City of Fullertonfor more than 30 years, most of them as a Public Works manager. Tim evaluated the efficiency and effectiveness of his department’s operations and developed the City’s performance audit program. His experience includes assessing departments throughout the City, including Police, Fire,Housing, Library, and many other operations. Campbell led a staff of three certified audit professionals and saved the City several million dollars in reduced costs and improved efficiency.

Tim earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science and a Master’s in Public Administration from Cal State Fullerton. He holds three active professional certifications: Certified Internal Auditor and Certified Government Auditing Professional from the Institute of Internal Auditors, and Project Management Professional from the Project Management Institute. The productivity improvement program he developed won ASPA’s National Productivity in Local Government Award in 2000. He was a member of the US Graduate School’s Government Audit Training Institute Advisory Board from 2011 to 2015, and has had an article on fraud prevention training published in the Association of Local Government Auditors Quarterly magazine.

Photo: courtesy Westside Current.

LA's Dreams Went Up in Flames

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

The fire still engulfing large swaths of Los Angeles has done more than destroy homes, businesses, and livelihoods. It has scorched the whole dream of Los Angeles, part of a downward spiral unfolding for a generation — and cast into severe doubt the city’s ability to host the 2028 Olympics.

Fires have been a reality in California for at least 20 million years. In my own, far shorter lifetime, I have seen numerous blazes, and covered several on television. They aren’t predictable, but you know when they are likely to occur. They aren’t preventable, but you can be prepared for them. Fires, floods, and earthquakes — disasters are us, and that has been the case as LA grew over the past century.

This time around, city and state leaders bear a heavy blame for a shocking lack of preparation, given weather conditions that were well predicted and have caused disasters in the past. As Traci Park, a member of the City Council, recently suggested, the fires revealed “chronic underinvestment in our critical infrastructure”. Perhaps the most remarkable failure was the lack of pressure to get water out of hydrants.

This disaster reflects the failure of the one-party progressivism currently dominating governmental structures. In this worldview, basic infrastructure is less important than addressing climate change and “social justice”; measures such as building dams or hardening the electric grid are demoted to a secondary role, with catastrophic effects.

While the fire may not reverse this mentality, it has demolished the reputations of two major adherents: LA Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Even as federal authorities warned of fires, Bass elected to take a junket to Ghana at the behest of President Biden. She came back to a city ablaze, with thousands of Angelinos having lost their homes and businesses.

“Everything in the city — from parks to schools — seems worn and in a state of ill repair”.

During her tenure, Bass, whose political icon was Fidel Castro, had cut the fire department budget, signed off on lavish, and largely unsuccessful, programmes to address homelessness, and crowed about how the city would defend illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, everything in the city — from parks to schools — is worn and in a state of ill repair.

Nor has this regime done much for its poorer residents, which it claims to care most about. LA suffers among the highest poverty rates in the state and the worst in the country. South-central LA, the epicentre of two of the worst riots in American history, is now poorer in relation to the rest of the city than before those upheavals. It remains the second worst homeless capital of America and builds far fewer new housing per capita than almost every other large US metro area. The city still wants to raise taxes amid a deepening budget hole.

Read the rest of this piece at Unherd.

Photo: Ryan Babroff, via Flickr, under CC 4.0 License.

Modal Reliability in the US Work Access (Journey to Work)

Wendell Cox — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

Data in the 2022 National Household Travel Survey (NTHS) provides insight into the daily frequency of daily commuting by the mode characterized as “usual” in survey (See: Summary of Travel Trends: 2022 National Household Travel Survey, Table 7-3, reproduced below as Figure 1). The annual American Community Survey (ACS), administered by the Census Bureau, asks respondents for their “usual” mode of travel over the past week. The Federal Highway Administration conducts the periodic National Household Travel Survey (NHTS), in which respondents indicate their travel mode on a particular day. By comparing the data from the two surveys, it is possible to estimate the percentage of commuter trips on a daily basis made relative to the indicated usual mode

Modal Reliability: This is related to what has been called public transport loyalty, which was the subject of recent Luxembourg labor market research. I choose the term “modal reliability,” which avoids the ideological misinterpretation that can be inferred by “loyalty.” Given that the consumer is considered by many to be “king” in market economies, modes of transport can be evaluated based on how reliable they are in meeting their needs and preferences. There are days that usual transit commuters drive alone, days that car drivers use transit, days, days with inclement weather that lead bicycle riders and those who walk to drive alone, The results are summarized below.

Modal Reliability: The Data: Thus, modal reliability is the measure of how a commuter’s usual mode of travel is represented in actual daily commuting. Thus, if the commuter’s usual mode is used 75% of the time, then the modal reliability is 75% If the commuter uses the usual mode 100% of the time, then modal reliability is 100%.

The NHTS provides the necessary information for four commuting modes --- driving alone, transit, walking and bicycle. The largest modes not included is ridersharing (such as car pooling) and working from home. The data is indicated in Figure 1, which shows that auto drivers used that mode of transport on the travel day 91.1%, while they used another mode of transport 0.1% of the time (walking). This would calculate to a reliability index of 99.0% . Among the four commute modes, driving alone has by far the highest reliability index.

Walking has the second highest modal reliability index, at 67.9%. Walking’s usual market share is 2.8%, but the travel day files indicate that 0.8% drive alone, while 0.1% of travel days are on transit.

Transit ranks third, with a modal reliability index of 67.9%. When “usual transit” riders are taking different modes, 16.1% are driving alone and 16.1% are walking.

Bicycles have the lowest modal reliability index, at 54.5%. When “usual” bicycle commuters are traveling by different modes, they are driving alone 36.4% of the time and 9.1% walking.

The above data indicates that driving alone is by far the most reliable form of commute travel. This should not be surprising, since cars are overwhelmingly the fastest mode of travel, and provide access to far more jobs. The latest University of Minnesota job access data for 50 metropolitan areas of more than 1,000,000 residents indicates that the average commuter can reach more than 60 times as many jobs within 30 minutes from home by car as by transit. Their reliability relative to the needs of commuters are why the average work trip travel time in the United States is 26.8 minutes, according to ACS data.

Transit Modal Reliability and Urban Rail Projections: Moreover, this data may explain at least somewhat why new transit rail projects so frequently fail to achieve their ridership projections. The transit modal reliability index suggests that about a third of usual transit riders use other modes about a third of the time.

Working From Home: The data does not include working from home, which in the United States exceeded transit in the 2010s. By the last pre-pandemic year, working from home accounted for 5.7% of usual work access, a bit higher than transit (5.0%). In 2023, the most recent year for which there is data, working from home accounted for 13.7% of usual work access, while transit had fallen to 3.5%.

Interestingly, one of transit’s commuting purposes was to substitute transit trips for driving alone. Over the decades virtually no progress was achieved with respect to this objective. In contrast, working from home quickly substituted for millions of work trips by cars.

Photo: CC 2.0 License.

Eastern Europe's Thriving Talent Market

Nima Sanandaji — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

Modern economies are increasingly driven by talent supply, and talent is often associated with the level of formal education degrees. Yet, across the Atlantic there are large differences in the unemployment rates of highly educated people. Understanding these patterns is relevant, because it shows which countries are likely to thrive as the talent magnets of the future.

Having a higher education degree is often associated with a lower risk of unemployment, but the risk is not zero. Those with higher education can still face unemployment due to lack of job creation, because their education is not of good quality or not suited to the needs of the labor market, or because they are between jobs. It could also be that the unemployment pay is so good relative to the after tax income, that incentives are small to get a job quickly after losing the former position.

In the USA for example merely 2.4 percent of those with an advanced education are unemployed. Compared to Europe in general, this is a good outcome. The variation in Europe is, however, significant. While in Poland merely 1.3 percent of those with a higher education degree are unemployed, the same rate is 8.2 percent in Greece.

The lowest unemployment rates of talents are found in Poland, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia. These countries have unemployment levels of 2 percent or less amongst the highly educated. A low unemployment of talents signals that the education model is functioning well, providing relevant knowledge of high quality. It also signals that the economic system is functioning well, providing dynamic job creation.

It is not a surprise that five Eastern European nations are at the top. Much of the growth of brain business jobs is happening in the capital regions of the Eastern European nations. These countries are characterized by growing talent pools, relatively low taxes and business friendly policies.

Malta, the EU member state that keeps having the strongest growth rate due to low taxes and business friendly policies, has just over 2 percent unemployment rate for those with advanced degrees. Germany, Norway, Iceland and the USA are also amongst the group of nations where the unemployment rate is below 2.5 percent.

The UK and the Netherlands, with moderate taxes and relatively business friendly policies, have an unemployment rate of nearly 3 percent. Ireland, Switzerland, Latvia and Estonia have promising free market based economic models, and relatively low taxes, yet despite this an unemployment level amongst the highly educated of around 3 percent or more.

Denmark and Sweden have just under 4 percent unemployment rate, these knowledge economies of Europe stagnate though due to high taxes and generous welfare states. High taxes not only crowd out talents, investments, entrepreneurs and businesses, but also lead to lower incentives for pupils, parents and teachers to pursue high standards in education. Why work with grit in the school system if high taxes remove much of the incentives. This attitude leads to less grit in the school system, which translates to lack of grit as young adults, and a correspondingly higher risk of unemployment. Grit in education is the key to why Estonia has surpassed Sweden in education results according to the international PISA test, as well as in share of the young population who are engineers or researchers.

Finland and Canada have around 4 percent unemployment rate among those with a higher education. These high rates represent a significant mismatch in the economy, lack of entrepreneurial activity and investments. Individuals who have higher degrees expect typically to be able to avoid unemployment, and those countries where this group struggles to find jobs can experience significant talent migration abroad. They may also experience difficulty attracting foreign talents.

Spain and Greece have the worst situation, with unemployment levels of around 8 percent for those with advanced degrees. Cyprus, despite otherwise being a successful entrepreneurial country, has 5.5 percent unemployment rate. Portugal with a 4.6 percent rate does better, but not good. In the Mediterranean region, Malta is unique in having low unemployment amongst those with advanced degrees. Thanks to low taxes and business friendly policies, Malta is the EU growth leader.

Economic dynamism is a key driving force for job creation, because it is often young firms that create new job opportunities. The more vital economy a country has, the more likely are talents to be able to find new jobs.

Since 2001, some countries have experienced a rise in unemployment of those with advanced degrees, while other nations have improved ability in the labor market for talent absorption. The countries characterized by the strongest reductions of unemployment rates are Croatia, Estonia, Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia, Latvia, followed by Romania.

While Eastern European nations top the league of improving their talent markets, also Germany Italy, Canada and Malta are moving in the right direction. In the USA, the unemployment rate of the highly educated has been reduced marginally by 0.2 percentage points since 2001.

Slight increases of the unemployment rates have occurred in France, Greece, Hungary, Denmark and the UK. The Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland, Sweden and Austria have experienced more profound increases in unemployment rate of those with higher education. Cyprus, Luxembourg and Portugal have had significant increases in the risk of unemployment for those with higher degrees.

Overall, we can see that the USA has a better talent market than most of Europe, yet Europe has considerable variation. Numerous European economies, particularly in Eastern Europe, are doing better in terms of outcome as well as long-term trends. Canada is not doing as well as the USA, signaling that it is not quite as strong of a talent magnet.

Talents are likely to become increasingly mobile across the borders, and those countries with low unemployment levels amongst the highly educated are likely to continue growing with talents. Therefore, the unemployment levels of those with advanced degrees, as well as the long-term direction of change of this metric, can provide important insights into future economic progress.

As it stands, those with higher education degrees often will find higher wages, as well as lower risk of unemployment, in the USA. Yet, it is important to continue pushing for improving the situation instead of becoming compliant. Even the USA can learn from the Eastern European countries, many of which have significantly reduced the unemployment level of the highly educated since the beginning of the millennium.

Institutional competition suggests that the variation in Europe might decrease over time, as the countries which are struggling learn from those who are doing better. Those countries which have high or rising unemployment rates amongst talents risk becoming the losers in the talent war. The corresponding brain drain creates strong incentives for economic reform. The talent job market is also in this regard an important predictor of the future.

Nima Sanandaji, Director, European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform (ECEPR)

Photo: Warsaw downtown, in Public Domain.

Why Europe and America Need Each Other

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

European elites are greeting the incoming Trump administration with something less than enthusiasm. The UK has sent an ambassador to Washington with a well-expressed disdain for the returning US president. Le Monde, a French publication not known for its pro-American sympathies, called Trump’s election ‘the nail in [the] coffin’ for the US as a ‘democratic model’ for the world. The Guardian, predictably, has called for Europeans to fight to preserve the continent’s welfare and climate regime.

Some seem to think that Trump’s return is the spur Europe needs to finally stand on its own two feet. But they need to recognise, as was the case during the Second World War and the Cold War, that only a strong alliance between Europe and the US offers any hope of resisting the rise of an authoritarian bloc, this time grouped around China.

There are hopeful signs. Since the start of the Ukraine conflict, ties between Europe, Canada and the US have been strengthened. There is some promise in an incipient alliance between North America and India, Japan and Australia. But Europe cannot expect the US to bear the strategic burden itself.

Trump’s insistence that Europe rearm makes sense at a time when the continent is facing immediate threats, most immediately in the Red Sea and Ukraine. Today, almost all European countries outside the UK, Greece and the Baltic states do not spend more than two per cent of their GDP on defence, while the US spends roughly 3.5 per cent.

Although there is an isolationist tendency among MAGA activists, most US voters are in favour of expanding America’s ‘global presence’. In a reinvigorated alliance, Europe has much to offer in terms of production and expertise, particularly given the sad state of the US military industry, as evidenced by shortages of materials to send to allies like Ukraine, Taiwan or Israel.

A similar imperative exists in the economic sphere. Europeans have long prided themselves on producing a stronger, more equitable economy than the military-oriented Americans. Two decades ago, one could legitimately see Europe as a determinative third force in the world economy. This is no longer the case. It’s basically a choice between China and the US.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Photo: Whitehouse Archives, Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead, via Flickr, Government work, Public Domain.

Taxes and Government Spending Are Crowding Out Growth in Europe

Nima Sanandaji — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

A long-term trend which is continuing, is that the US is running ahead of Europe in terms of prosperity. In 2024, the US economy grew by 2.8 percent, according to the World Economic Outlook, compared to merely 0.8 in the Euro area. In 2025 the gap will reduce somewhat, but the US is still expected to grow its economy by a percentage point more than the Euro area. In 2029, the US economy is still expected to grow at 2.1 percent compared to 1.2 percent in the Euro nations.

One way of looking at it is that we live in a time of continued urbanization and population demise, trends which are apparent throughout the world – yet the US is faring better than Europe in terms of demographics. A global comparison suggests that a key reason is the difference in the tax burden, with the US growing more thanks to a lower burden.

Taxes affect the decision of talents, entrepreneurs, companies and investors. Particularly high skilled people tend to prefer low tax jurisdiction. Demographic challenges exist in low tax as well as in high tax countries, but the challenge of prosperity growth is far more difficult for high tax nations to tackle.

Indeed, it was the global pattern during the 2010s, that advanced countries with lower tax burdens had more economic progress. Ireland had for example an average of 7.2 percent annual growth during this period, thanks to low taxes and business friendly regulations attracting foreign firms and boosting local business growth. Many high tax European economies have however during this period, had limited or even negative growth of GDP per capita.

It is relevant to know that the global pattern shown for the 2010s is not unique. During the 2000s, the 1990s, the 1980s and the 1970s advanced countries with lower tax burdens had more economic growth on average. By adopting free markets and low taxes, countries such as South Korea and Ireland, have been able to increase prosperity significantly during the last five decades.

The comparison of brain business jobs – a term for the share of the working-age population across Europe employed in highly knowledge-intensive enterprises – shows how the knowledge geography is shifting within Europe.

Ireland, Netherlands and Malta with business-friendly policies and taxation are fast climbers in terms of the knowledge intensive jobs of Europe. These countries thrive in brain business jobs growth since they have competitive taxation costs for investors, businesses and labor. They are also progressing in human capital, with Ireland and Estonia having amongst the best school results in the world, according to PISA. The Netherlands, which has a moderate taxation level and business friendly policies, also is amongst the climbers.

The link between economic progress and tax rate has existed for the last five decades, and according to observations by leading economist such as Ibn Khaldun and Arthur Laffer, is a common theme in human civilization. An important point is that high tax and big government policies during a time of population growth can crowd out growth, but still be somehow manageable since the underlying growth levels are high. Now that we live in a time of demographic decline and continued rapid urbanization, the importance of boosting progress becomes even more important.

To avoid stagnation in coming decades, it is wise to focus on limiting the burden of taxation and the crowding out effect of large interventionist governments. High taxes are what holds Europe back compared to the US.

Yet, this is not a feature of Europe as a whole, just the big lumbering economies with too much bureaucracy and state intervention in the economy. EU nations with low taxes that create incentives to work, and growing human talent pools, are estimated to even outpace the US in long terms growth.

In 2029, according to the World Economic Outlook, the US growth of 2.1 percent would be still significantly higher than 1.2 percent in the EU area. But the US would be outpaced by many individual EU nations. This includes Ireland, Luxembourg and Slovakia (2.3 percent), Slovenia and Latvia (2.5 percent), Croatia (2.6 percent), Cyprus (3 percent) and Malta (3.5 percent).

Of course, these are just estimates of the future to come, but the conclusion is still relevant. If the large European economies are tired of stagnating, they need to shift course in economic policy. Why not learn from those EU nations with smaller government sectors and less taxations, which prosper by allowing private enterprise to thrive.

Nima Sanandaji, Director, European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform (ECEPR)

Chart: courtesy the author.

The Battle of the Oligarchs

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

Money and power have rarely been strangers; often nations are made to shudder when the ruling elites battle each other. Britain’s late empire was divided between liberal manufacturers and aristocratic interests, whose conflicts hastened the rise of the Labour Party and the end of empire. In the United States, opposition to powerful trusts defined progressive politics for decades, ultimately laying the basis for the New Deal and a greater scope for government.

In the West today we are witnessing a similar divide among the uber-rich class — epitomized by Elon Musk’s embrace of Donald Trump — that is already reshaping politics. Until 2016 the US establishment, both Republican and Democratic, embraced similar views on national security, global trade and multilateral institutions.

But when Trump spoke against the uniparty’s dogma, many GOP backers on Wall Street and in corporate suites joined forces with the already left-leaning Silicon Valley oligarchs and Hollywood. Four years of Joe Biden’s remarkably inept administration broke up this united front, with even pro-Democratic power brokers like Chase’s Jamie Dimon praising Trump — something unexpected from the man Barack Obama saw as his favorite banker.

By the summer of 2024, Wall Streeters like investor Bill Ackman and certain prominent, formerly Trump-skeptical billionaires openly backed the Trump candidacy, joining existing allies like Miriam Adelson, Jeff Yass and Timothy Mellon. Energy executives, too, rallied to Trump. Some big backers like Harold Hamm and Kelcy Warren made their money in fossil fuels, as did the now president-elect’s proposed new energy secretary, Chris Wright. No doubt these executives are thrilled by Trump’s proposal to unleash American energy and boost their profits.

The biggest change took place in Silicon Valley; tech innovators, notes Tevi Troy in his illuminating The Power and the Money, long disdained politics as beneath them, but a rising tide of regulation ultimately forced them out of their open office spaces and into the first ranks of big donors. Elon Musk clearly sees steroid government as a barrier to his ambitions. This opinion is also shared by tech powers such as venture capitalists Marc Andreessen, David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya, who, along with Joe Lonsdale and Peter Thiel, have all jumped on the Trump train.

Democrats still rule in the tech world, but no longer exclusively. The divisions in tech break largely along functional lines. Big interests in software, social media, streaming and ecommerce generally favor Democrats, notably Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft, whose now retired founder, Bill Gates, kicked in a cool $50 million to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. They all profit from an ephemeral universe, where there are few blue-collar workers and no unions.

On the other hand, Elon Musk makes cars, spaceships and other products. As a manufacturer he needs reliable and affordable energy, flexible labor laws and ample physical space to develop. These are among the reasons he, despite the state’s unparalleled human capital, has pulled out of extremely regulated California. This industrial focus resonates with Trump’s appeal to blue-collar workers while the Democrats still win over the keyboard professionals.

Trump also wins backers in high-tech defense companies such as Palantir and Anduril that produce advanced weapons and technology perfect for the ramp-up of military and space-related spending which is likely to come about in the Trump budget. Their alliance with the new president may also give them leverage compared to the old, more Democratic-leaning big firms like the troubled Boeing, absurdly incompetent but reliant on DC connections. For Musk, a Trump presidency turns the solar system into his oyster.

Climate issues mark a key dividing line between the dueling oligarchs. Harris backers came heavily from the ultra-subsidized green industries, backers of steps like removing natural gas appliances and imposing EV mandates. (Ironically, Musk, easily the biggest EV producer in the US, appears on board with Trump’s rejection of them.) In trying to reach “net zero,” oligarchs such as Steve Jobs’s widow Laurene, Michael Bloomberg, the Rockefellers, Jeff Bezos and venture capitalist John Doerr seek to force the West to compete with more expensive, less reliable energy while China and other developing countries use coal, gas and oil to game the green future.

Trade is another dividing line; Trump’s tariff plans directly threaten firms and investors who make their fortunes shifting employment abroad. Biden, too, nudged policy away from free trade, but some hoped Harris would return to it.

These are the stark realities of our current gilded age. According to Pew, 80 percent of Americans believe wealthy donors have too much power, and they are right.

Of course, concentrated oligarchal power, whatever its political orientation, poses a profound threat to any real democracy. But it’s unsurprising to be treated to warnings in the predictably progressive, oligarch-owned Atlantic, that Musk’s backing Trump means “bending the knee” in a display of “strong man politics.” Apparently, when Harris scooped up big cash from Gates, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff or George Soros, it was just rich guys acting for unselfish public reasons.

In the real world, outside the divergent political ecosystems, it’s important for Americans to take advantage of the emerging battle between oligarchs. If Trump doesn’t chase away his new backers with puerile outbursts, we could see a new, contentious era in elite politics, a marked improvement over the groupthink of the Biden years and a rare opportunity for the marginalized hoi polloi to force the oligarchs to compete for their favor.

This piece first appeared at The Spectator.

Osage Tribe Wins Again: Federal Judge Orders “Ejectment” Of 84 Wind Turbines By Next December

Robert Bryce — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

Somewhere, Chief James Bigheart must be doing a victory dance.

On Wednesday, the Osage Nation prevailed again in federal court in Tulsa, winning a decisive ruling in the longest-running legal battle over wind energy in American history.

In her judgment (I’ve posted it here on Google Drive), US District Court Judge Jennifer Choe-Graves ruled that Enel’s subsidiaries, Osage Wind LLC, Enel Kansas LLC, and Enel Green Power North America, “committed trespass, continuing trespass, and conversion in the construction of a wind farm on Indian land.” She ruled that the plaintiffs in the case, the US Government and the Osage Minerals Council, prevailed on the merits and are “entitled to monetary damages on their conversion trespass claims and equitable relief in the form of ejectment on their continuing trespass claim.”

While the tribe did not succeed in collecting millions of dollars in damages from Enel (Choe-Graves awarded $242,652.28), the tribe did win an award for trespass ($66,780). Choe-Graves, an Obama appointee, also ordered Enel to pay the plaintiff’s attorney’s fees, including those incurred by the US Department of Justice and the Minerals Council, which total more than $36 million.

The key paragraph in her judgment can be found on page two, item four, which says, “Defendants are liable for continuing trespass and shall remove the wind farm from the Osage Minerals Estate and return the Osage Minerals Estate to its pre-trespass condition on or before December 1, 2025.”

For years, Big Wind has played hardball with rural communities. In some cases, Big Wind has sued rural governments to try to force them to accept wind projects they don’t want. (I’ll be writing more about that soon.) Across the US, only a handful of turbines have ever been taken down due to local opposition. In 2022, two turbines in Falmouth, Massachusetts, were dismantled after numerous complaints from local homeowners about the noise from the turbines and a years-long legal battle.

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of this ruling. Enel has said that removing the 84 turbines in the Osage wind project would cost the company $300 million. Whatever the cost, the fact that a federal court has ordered the removal of the turbines is unprecedented.

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: Chief James Bigheart, Osage nation Source: visittheosage.com.

Why Both Sides Are Right in the H-1B Visas Row

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

The current clashes over high-skilled immigration between Donald Trump’s right-wing base and his ‘first buddy’, Elon Musk, reveal a fundamental divide within the US president’s odd coalition. On one side are the populists concerned with jobs being prioritised for American workers. On the other, libertarians fret about how businesses can compete on a global scale.

The row was sparked last week by a tweet by Vivek Ramaswamy, co-chair of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, in which he blamed American culture for celebrating ‘mediocrity over excellence’, causing firms to seek skilled workers from abroad rather than hire home-grown talent. Musk has since chimed in to tell opponents of high-skilled immigration to ‘take a big step back and fuck yourself in the face’. ‘I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend’, he wrote on X.

Never one to sweat the details, Trump’s views on this issue are often ill-defined and seem ideal for sparking just such an internal conflict between his base and his Silicon Valley backers.

As the populists point out, H-1B visas – temporary work permits for skilled workers, first introduced in 1990 – have a record of abuse. Most notably, in 2014, Disney was accused of exploiting the H-1B programme to replace American programmers en masse with cheaper Indian ones. In an era of depressed growth in tech jobs, in part due to AI, the oligarchs’ claim that we face a profound shortage of such workers may be increasingly strained.

The populists also have it right in that H-1B visas have accelerated class divides, particularly in places like Silicon Valley. Valley types used to hire from local schools, like San José State University, rather than from places like the Indian Institutes of Technology. Today, roughly three-quarters of the Valley’s jobs go to non-citizens. Tech oligarchs may like this arrangement, but taking jobs from people who vote can have severe political ramifications, something those galaxy-brained techies seem not to comprehend.

What’s more, the widening social divides in the Bay Area have already created a progressive monoculture, while the GOP has all but ceased to exist there. Back in the 1970s, when the Valley was a place of upward mobility, its politics were decidedly centrist.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Photo: TED Conference via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

United States Moves to the South

Wendell Cox — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 20:28:58 -0500

For years, the US South has done very well in net domestic migration (moving into the region from another region of the United States. Since the 2020 census, only the South region gained net domestic migrants, as the other three regions, the Northeast, Midwest and West have all lost residents to other regions.

Census Regions

Over the past four years (July 2020 to July 2024), the South gained 2,685,000 net domestic migrants. This included strong gains in Florida, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.

All of the other three census regions lost domestic migrants.The second best regional performance was in the Midwest, which lost 494,000 net domestic migrants. Nearly all of this loss was in the East North Central, which includes Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin. The West ranked third in net domestic migration, losing 978,000. The last place was taken by the Northeast, which lost 1,186,000 net domestic migration.

Census Divisions

There are nine census divisions, two in each of the regions, with the exception that there are three in the South region. Four census divisions gained net domestic migrants, while five sustained losses. The table below shows data by census region, census division and state/DC.

Census Divisions in the South

The South Atlantic division (Atlantic coast states from Maryland south) had the largest net domestic migration gain, at 1,579,000. Florida had the largest gain, at 810,000, followed by North Carolina (384,000), South Carolina (300,000), Tennessee (237,000) and Georgia (194,000). Only the states of Maryland (115,0000) and Virginia (35,000) had net domestic migration losses over the period, as did the District of Columbia (14,000).

The West South Central division gained the second most net domestic migrants, at 725,000. This includes Texas (694,000), Oklahoma (89,000) and Arkansas (66,000), while Louisiana lost 124,000.

The East South Central division ranked fourth nationally, with a net domestic migration gain of 354,000. Much of this gain was in Tennessee and Alabama (109,000), with a smaller gain in Kentucky (28,000) and a loss in Mississippi (minus 20,000).

Census Divisions in the West Region

The only census division outside the South to gain net domestic migrants was the Mountain west, with a gain of 525,000. Arizona gained 222,000, Idaho 111,000. Nevada 71,000, Montana 51,000,Utah 47,000 and Colorado 24,000 and Wyoming 7,000. New Mexico lost 9,000.

The other census division in the West, the Pacific had the greatest net domestic migration loss in the US. Fueled principally by California, the losses are also being sustained in the other Pacific states, spreading in Oregon, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii. The largest loss in the nation was in California, which accounted for 1,398,000. Hawaii lost 46,000. Washington 34,000, Alaska 18,000 and Oregon 8,000.

Census Divisions in the Midwest Region

The West North Central division had the smallest loss in the nation, at 31,000. The best performing state was South Dakota, which had a 21,000 gain. All of the other states had losses, with North Dakota losing 6,000, Iowa losing 8,000, Nebraska losing 13,000, Kansas losing 20,000 . By far the biggest loser was Minnesota, at 47,000).

The other Midwest division, the East North Central, lost 463,000 net domestic migrants. Indiana did best, gaining 29,000, while Wisconsin gained 3,000. Ohio lost 35,000, Michigan 63,000 and Illinois 396,000. The Illinois loss was greater than all states, with the exception of California and New York.

Census Divisions in the Northeast Region

The second largest divisional net domestic migration loss was in the Middle-Atlantic, at 1,122,000. Much of this was in New York at 894,000, which was a larger loss than any state but California. The other two Middle-Atlantic states also lost net domestic migrants, including New Jersey 183,000 and Pennsylvania 45,000.

The other division in the Northeastern region, New England , had the second smallest divisional loss. Maine had the largest gain, at 47,000. New Hampshire gained 28,000 and Vermont gained 6,000. Massachusetts lost 134,000 net domestic migrants, Rhode Island 8,000 and Connecticut 4,000. Without these three states, New England is gaining net domestic migrants.

The Trend

As people continue to move away from areas with higher urban densities to ones with lower urban densities (see: More on the Flight from Density: Within Major Metropolitan Areas). This is particularly evident in the northern New England gains, the stronger gains in some Mountain states and in the South.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Photo: Looking toward Tallahassee Capitol building via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Table back to reference.

SUMMARY OF NET DOMESTIC MIGRATION July 2020 to July 2024
CENSUS REGIONS	Net Domestic Migration	Rank
Northeast Region	-1,186,027	4
Midwest Region	-494,057	2
South Region	2,658,499	1
West Region	-978,415	3

CENSUS DIVISIONS	Net Domestic Migration	Rank
New England	-63,940	6
Middle Atlantic	-1,122,087	8
East North Central	-462,579	7
West North Central	-31,478	5
South Atlantic	1,579,240	1
East South Central	354,378	4
West South Central	724,881	2
Mountain	524,794	3
Pacific	-1,503,209

STATES	Net Domestic Migration	Rank
Alabama	109,375	9
Alaska	-17,930	34
Arizona	222,465	6
Arkansas	66,039	12
California	-1,397,897	50
Colorado	23,807	21
Connecticut	-3,522	27
Delaware	44,125	16
Florida	810,122	1
Georgia	193,886	7
Hawaii	-46,018	41
Idaho	111,459	8
Illinois	-395,721	48
Indiana	28,556	18
Iowa	-8,251	30
Kansas	-22,041	36
Kentucky	27,734	20
Louisiana	-124,444	45
Maine	47,322	14
Maryland	-114,948	44
Massachusetts	-133,608	46
Michigan	-63,064	43
Minnesota	-46,516	42
Mississippi	-20,099	35
Missouri	43,293	17
Montana	50,720	13
Nebraska	-12,996	33
Nevada	70,963	11
New Hampshire	27,898	19
New Jersey	-183,099	47
New Mexico	-8,713	32
New York	-893,537	49
North Carolina	383,851	3
North Dakota	-6,012	28
Ohio	-35,266	39
Oklahoma	89,307	10
Oregon	-7,602	29
Pennsylvania	-45,451	40
Rhode Island	-8,258	31
South Carolina	299,962	4
South Dakota	21,045	22
Tennessee	237,368	5
Texas	693,979	2
Utah	47,233	15
Vermont	6,228	25
Virginia	-34,634	38
Washington	-33,762	37
West Virginia	11,089	23
Wisconsin	2,916	26
Wyoming	6,860	24

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA	Net Domestic Migration
District of Columbia	-14,213

Why Can't America Build Better Cities?

Pete Saunders — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 20:28:58 -0500

Today’s piece will be a little nerdy, perhaps a little lecture-y. You’ve been forewarned.

I often think about why American cities seem almost incapable of capitalizing on their assets, of routinely and easily making the case for greater investment from the federal and state levels of government. We struggle to make public transit investments. We struggle with implementing good placemaking practices. We struggle with undoing bad urban policies, and instituting good ones.

In a nutshell, America struggles with doing things that work toward the common good, and has a firm belief that improving the lives of individuals is the best way to improve the common good.

Public health is another example of the same phenomenon. America is fine with having the best and most advanced health care system in the world – for some. But extending that common good to the masses so that many more can benefit from it is a bridge too far. We don’t like “freeriders”.

The emphasis on individualism in America can be traced to several cultural, political, and historical factors. This bias often manifests in political rhetoric, policy priorities, and societal attitudes that tend to favor individuals over groups, and private priorities over commonly shared goals. We can easily call to mind all the things that have historically made this happen in America; our historical roots in agrarianism and our preference for localized representation and government stand out. Put these things and others together, and it becomes clear why great American cities are the rare exceptions, and not the rule.

I’d argue that America’s individualistic culture is at the heart of making decent cities good, and good cities great. In fact, the nation has had an anti-city bias since its settlement and founding, and it’s baked into the nation’s fabric.

Two Early Acts

Let me introduce you to two early acts of the U.S. Congress of the Confederation, the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. They probably receive less attention than they should because they were acts passed under the Articles of Confederation, the organizing document that preceded the U.S. Constitution that passed in 1789. Together, they are perhaps the most influential federal acts in the development of early America. They were created to organize the region we now call the Midwest, in the aftermath of the American win in the Revolutionary War with Great Britain, but they had influence well beyond.

As it relates to 21^st century America, a nation in which more than 80 percent of its inhabitants live in cities and suburbs, it’s critical to know about these acts and how they contribute to the anti-city bias built into the American fabric. In the nearly 240 years since the Land Ordinance was passed, the nation has steadily grown more and more urban with each passing decade. Yet the fundamental tools that established precedents for land and political subdivision, and land disposition, had a distinctly rural flavor one that cities struggle with overcoming today.

The Northwest Ordinance came two years after the Land Ordinance, and took on the matter of political organization of the expanding nation. And because the Old Northwest (or the core of today’s Midwest that’s currently comprised of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin) was the place first settled under these acts, they set the precedent for the rest of the nation.

The Land Ordinance of 1785

The Northwest Ordinance followed passage of the Land Ordinance by two years, and was important for many federal and state level concerns. It established the precedent by which the federal government would be sovereign and expand westward with the admission of new states, rather than with the expansion of existing states and their established sovereignty under the Articles of Confederation. It also set legislative precedent with regard to American public domain lands. The act also prohibited slavery in the territory, an action that probably presaged the Civil War some 75 years later.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Public Domain, via picryl.

The Democrats Need to Get Over Their Delusions

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 20:28:58 -0500

Since the election conservatives have assumed that the results represent a “mandate” for their political agenda, as well as a confirmation of their version of national identity. Yet in reality, the election was actually quite close, as Trump’s win margin in the popular vote is the smallest since Jimmy Carter’s in 1976.

This is remarkable given the inadequacy of the Democratic candidates, as well as the well-deserved disdain many Americans feel toward the Biden Administration. Indeed, the case can be made that the November vote was less an endorsement of Trump, who remained widely disliked all the way to the election, than a rejection of the current cocktail of progressive policies. These include unpalatable positions from draconian climate policies to the embrace of transgender ideology, open borders, race quotas, and censorship. As Nate Silver suggests, voters were “giving the middle figure” to the “expert class” of Harvard and Yale credentialed types whose genius brought the country rising crime, inflation, and a generally unstable planet.

Yet conservatives are making a mistake in supposing that the Democrats will be down for the long-term. Gallup notes that Kamala Harris was detested for many positions, but was still favored on such things as “preserving the American dream for young people” and “strengthening the middle class.” Similarly, most Americans favor increasing taxes on the wealthy, a position anathema to most Republicans but usually embraced by Democrats.

On top of this, Democrats can count on Trump finding ways to alienate voters with his myriad personal faults, which will make it unlikely there’s a repeat of Reagan’s “Morning in America.” Trump also will inherit Biden’s awful legacy, including a bloated budget deficit, a weakened military, inflation that hits hardest among the least affluent, and an economy that has failed to lift up the bulk of the working and middle class. Overall, one in four Americans fear losing their job over the next year, and roughly half now think the vaunted “American Dream” of homeownership has become unattainable, particularly in coastal cities.

The traditional Democratic focus on class mobility would be far more effective than their current approach, which is largely shaped by their own ideological and sociological bubbles rather than the concerns of regular Americans. As long-time Democratic operative Van Jones has observed, once voters choose wrongly, they’re dismissed as racists and fascists. It goes without saying that this kind of selective scapegoating is not a workable political strategy.

Democrats are already sharpening knives to keep anyone from thinning out the bloated bureaucracy, which, as Rep. Ro Khanna suggests, also places them out of touch with the majority of voters.

As they kowtow to progressive non-profits and public employee unions, Democrats reflect the values of the progressive culture dominant in classrooms, the media, Hollywood, and indeed the government bureaucracy itself. Doing this has led the Democrats to lose even the most basic sense of what is happening on Main Street.

Read the rest of this piece at American Mind.

Photo: Senate Democrats via X.

Christianity Around the World; Gift Card Industry and More

Sami J. Karam — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 20:28:58 -0500

This week, the new Syrian authorities declared Christmas a public holiday. This brought some reassurance to local communities that worried about the new regime and Sunni majority’s treatment of minorities. The Assads, themselves part of the Alawite minority, did not discriminate against other minorities. They were equally brutal to everyone, or on the whole even more so toward Sunnis.

In recent weeks, there had been some worrying but isolated incidents of vandalism at Christian churches in and around Hama. But the new declaration of Christmas as a public holiday will calm spirits and must be counted as a win for religious tolerance, which is sorely lacking in many parts of the Middle East.

Since Christmas is this week, we take a broad look at the state of Christianity around the world.

A February article in the Baptist Resource Network states the following:

First, the best news! Christianity is growing! According to the research, Christianity is growing around the world faster than the rate of population! The population growth rate is currently trending at 0.87% growth but Christianity’s growth rate is trending at 1.08%. In fact, the Christian population is projected to top 3 billion before 2050! Among these Christians, Protestants, independents, evangelicals, and Pentecostal/charismatics are the fastest-growing groups.

Also, the fastest-growing areas for Christianity are in the global south, particularly Asia and Africa. By 2050, the African Christian population will swell to more than 1.28 BILLION people! Amazing!

The report also reveals that most new adherents to the faith will come from non-Christian countries and that the global atheist population will continue to decline.

We would treat these figures with caution since these new Christians are not self-identified as such. The report that produced these figures looks at majority religions for each country and assumes that any population growth results in a larger number of Christians. This is a fair approach to some extent, but is like painting with a wide brush. The rising figure ignores the decline of Christianity in populations that are increasingly atheistic, namely the rich countries of the West. The number of Christians in France for example may look like it is growing if we count 85% of France as Christian, but it is in fact declining due to the doubling of non-believers since 1980, as we showed in TWL #249.

Let’s look at Christianity by region to get a better idea. This is only a quick survey and is not meant to be comprehensive.

Europe

The trends in Europe show a clear decline. In the UK, church attendance falls every year and is down 40% since 2009. In Italy, church attendance has halved since 2005. In France, the number of Christian believers has fallen by over half since 1950. In Spain, the share of non-believers has grown from less than 10% in 1980 to 41% in 2023. On the whole, about 65% of Christian Europeans believe in God or another higher power, but only 27% believe in God as described in the Bible. About 30% of Europeans say that “science makes religion unnecessary.”

Read the rest of this piece at The Wednesday Letter.

Sami J. Karam is an analyst and writer. He is the publisher of The Wednesday Letter (TWL), and is the founder and editor of populyst.net and the creator of the populyst index™. Before populyst, he was the founder and manager of the Seven Global funds and a fund manager at leading asset managers in Boston and New York.

California Ruled with Great Jobs and Boom Times. What Happened?

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 19:28:38 -0500

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s constant reminders that California’s economy ”leads the nation” as well as being a model for social justice are delusional. To be sure, California has a huge GDP, paced largely by high real estate prices and the stock value of a handful of tech companies, but it is not widely seen as a place for class mobility, and it is slowly ceding its dominance, even in tech-related industries.

In contemporary California, home to four of the world’s seven most valued tech firms, tech bros and real estate speculators occupy what Lenin called “the commanding heights,” while the reality on the ground is far less ethereal. The view from where most Californians reside is revealed in a new study sponsored by Chapman University: “Is California Losing Its Mojo?,” by business professors Marshall Toplansky (Chapman) and Kenneth Murphy (UC Irvine).

Historically, the report notes, California has outpaced the rest of the country in terms of the growth of its goods and services. However, that pace of GDP growth in the state has dropped significantly since 2022, with the measure now lagging when compared with other states. The distribution of jobs and wealth is even more worrisome.

California has been a particularly poor bet for blue-collar professions, such as manufacturing, the traditional path to upward mobility for minorities and non-college educated people. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, analyzed by Lightcast, shows California has lagged far behind places like Utah, Nevada, Texas and Arizona over a decade.

The Chapman paper acknowledges that the state has experienced enough job growth to keep unemployment levels low, but as the report details, most new jobs in California aren’t concentrated in high-wage sectors. Over the last 10 years, 62% of jobs added in California were in lower-than-average paying industries, versus 51.6% for the nation as a whole. In the last three years, the situation worsened, with 78.1% of all jobs added in California coming from lower-than-average paying industries, versus 61% for the nation as a whole.

In a state with high living costs, a dearth of well-paying jobs seems likely to bear responsibility for the state’s out-migration rate and its poverty rate, which the Census Bureau calculates, in its most comprehensive estimate, as 15.4%, one of the highest in the nation. California may be home to a lot of billionaires, but it also is home to nearly 30% of the country’s homeless.

Of course, not everyone has suffered. Besides tech billionaires, who is doing well in California? Older homeowners, for one, whose bottom line has risen as home values increased dramatically. Government workers have also thrived.

Census Bureau data highlighted in the Chapman report show that California public sector job growth over the last decade has been growing at about the same pace as jobs overall in California, but the average annual pay for those government jobs was almost double that of private sector jobs. In other words, the road to the middle class comes not from private employment but from jobs that are funded by taxpayers.

In the past, California cities including San Francisco, San Jose and San Diego all ranked in the top 10 among hubs for “advanced industry” employment — where there’s high investment in R&D and a high percentage of STEM roles. But since 2020, only San Jose remains in the top 25 metro areas for growth in such employment. Today the emerging hot spots are often east of the Sierra: Austin, Texas; Nashville; Indianapolis; Salt Lake City; and Phoenix.

Can California get its mojo back? After all, many of the state’s assets — research universities, leading tech firms and the lifestyle appeal — have not disappeared.

First, Newsom and other state cheerleaders have to stop using the size of the economy as a cover for real problems. Whatever the state’s strengths, as the Chapman report puts it, low-wage jobs overtaking advanced industry work is not sustainable.

The Biden administration emphasized bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., and President-elect Donald Trump promises to do the same, but California misses out on opportunities due to the costs associated with its regulatory regimes.

Consider technologies largely developed and embraced by California, such as EVs and the batteries that run them. Jobs in those manufacturing industries overwhelmingly fall to red states, largely a reflection of such things as easier permitting rules, lower energy costs and less intrusive labor regulations.

Remarkably, Newsom, who feuds with Elon Musk and has taken on the role of the national anti-Trump, has promised that if the next administration in Washington eliminates the federal $7,500 buyer EV tax credits, California will step in with state rebates for the vehicles — with reportedly one exception, Teslas, which happen to be the dominant American brand and the only EVs made in California. The plant in Fremont employs thousands in good manufacturing jobs.

And that’s hardly the end of the self-destructive politicking.

One “advanced industry” where California, and in particular Southern California, still has a leg up is aerospace, and its corollary, defense. The state remains well in the lead in terms of aerospace-related employment, and innovative new firms, such as Anduril in Orange County, seem primed to take advantage of Trump’s emphasis on military spending. In his first term, he increased the defense budget to historic highs.

But is California’s Democratic leadership on board?

Once again, the state’s relations with Musk, Trump “first buddy” and the world’s preeminent space pioneer, would indicate just the opposite. Musk, upset at a California law that allows schools to keep parents in the dark when their children identify as LGBTQ+, decided to move SpaceX’s headquarters from Hawthorne to Texas this year. And just weeks ago, the California Coastal Commission denied SpaceX’s request to increase its rocket launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base; reportedly after commissioners discussed his political views before they voted on the issue. Even Newsom objected.

This is not the way to build a truly inclusive and healthy economy. Gavin Newsom can talk all he wants about California’s bounty, but the road the state’s Democrats have set for us has been profoundly regressive.

This piece first appeared at Los Angeles Times.

Photo: Tesla Factory, Fremont, California by Maurizio Pesce via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Christmas/Chanukah Message to Our Readers

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 19:28:38 -0500

We have been publishing for 15 years, and we are thankful for your readership now and in the future. The partnership with Praxis Strategy group has been fruitful, as we hope you will agree.

In this difficult year, it seems right to seek reconciliation with others, particularly those who differ from us. I wish in particular to express my appreciation for my Muslim friends, who are among my closest collaborators on urban and other policy matters. Particularly notable is that, as our rabbi Sharon Sobel, reminds us, there is the odd coincidence between Christmas and Chanukah this year. The last time Chanukah fell on Christmas Day was in 2005 and they won't overlap again until 2035 and then 2054.

I feel this in particular because of the success of the partnership behind this website, two Plains Christians and a west coast Jew, shows that differences, geographic or ethnic, are not material to producing a good product. I would also like to extend my appreciation to both our Gentile and Jewish readers, who sustain us in this week.

Our readers come from around the world, so my friends in Sydney and Brisbane keep out of the sun while for our many readers in Britain, well, watch out for the mist and rain, if not worse. Some will dine on Chinese food, or latkes, others baked ham. In our fondness for food, drink and company we are all one race.

Enjoy yourselves.

Photo: One of the state Christmas trees and the National Menorah on the Ellipse near the White House in Washington, DC. Kevin Harber, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

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