Bidenomics Isn’t Working

With the announcement that inflation fell to 3% in June, the US President will no doubt be emboldened in his claim that Bidenomics — essentially a green-tinted government-led economy — is working. Read more

Secession Is a Threat Californians Should Take Seriously

At the height of the anti-Trump hysteria after 2016, Democrats in California talked often about “Calexit”, which would allow the Golden State to secede and, no doubt, form an ideal Ecotopia of its own. Read more

What Really Divides America

For almost a decade, the West has been engaged in a deepening conflict. Sometimes it flares up as a political debate; sometimes as a culture war. But whatever form it takes, it is inevitably framed as a disagreement between classes, races or ideologies.

This is a mistake. Demography may be destiny, but it is geography that determines its political shape. The greatest division today is to do with place: in particular, three basic terroirs — urban, suburban and rural — which reflect a divergence in economic interest, family structure and basic values, particularly between big city economies and those on the periphery.

This fracture is widening at a time when the demographic balance between these regions is shifting. For much of the past two centuries, the overwhelming inclination was towards urbanisation, with dense cores serving as the prime engines of economic, cultural and social change. Today, however, that pattern is shifting, particularly since the pandemic, which saw two million citizens move out of big US cities. Even in urban-oriented Europe, 63% of cities experienced a population decline during the pandemic.

Does this mean “the era of urban supremacy is over”, as the New York Times put it? Quite possibly. But don’t expect the urban leadership to acknowledge it. Even as they desperately attempt (and largely fail) to lure workers back downtown, urban political interests continue to dominate the national conversation — even amid high levels of crime, street-level disorder and the resulting shuttering of businesses.

Largely ignored by the city-dominated media, the world’s urban core has been losing this battle for generations. This is not only evident in the United States, but also across Europe and Australia. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, little more than 5% of growth from 1966 to 2021 was in the core cities. In Europe, barely 37% of people live in cities, with the rest in fast-growing suburbs, small towns and rural areas.

Of course, many cities have experienced some revival over the past decade, but that “boom” has largely benefited educated newcomers and their wealthy employers. Urban regions became both richer and poorer; according to Pew research, the greatest inequality in America now exists in “superstar cities”, such as San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and San Jose.

These shifts have, unsurprisingly, shaped urban politics. As middle-class families have left, the urban terroir has been gutted of the old urban bulwark of solid middle and working-class families; as Fred Siegel has observed, it is dominated by an “upstairs/downstairs” coalition of the affluent and dependent.

This demographic reality has driven a shift towards a more progressive politics. In 1984, for example, Ronald Reagan won 31% of the vote in San Francisco and 27.4% in Manhattan. In 2016, Donald Trump won only 10% of the vote in each. Between 1998 and 2018, urban counties — which sometimes includes suburbs — went from 55% to 62% Democratic. Today, there is not a single Republican Mayor of a city of more than one million people. Recent victories of progressives in Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago, New York and Minneapolis, despite widespread social disorder and economic decline, suggest this pattern may well be inexorable.

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 Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: David Clow Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Energy Colonialism Will Worsen the Urban-Rural Divide

In his drive to conquer China, Mao Zedong and his most famous general, Lin Biao, stoked “a peasant revolution” that eventually overwhelmed the cities. In those days, most Chinese toiled on the land, a vast manpower reservoir for the Communist insurgency. Today, in a world where a majority lives in urban settlements, such a strategy would be doomed to failure.

The small percentage of rural and small-town residents in most advanced countries — generally under 20 percent — lack the numbers to overwhelm the rest of society. Political and economic elites feel free to ignore the countryside, but they may find they do so at their peril. Although now a mere slice of the population, rural areas remain critical suppliers of food, fiber (like cotton), and energy to the rest of the economy.

Residents in agricultural areas have good reason to feel put upon. Their industries are often targeted by regulators and disdained by the metropolitan cognoscenti. They may not be hiding in the caves of Yan’an, but farming communities from the Netherlands to North America are rebelling against extreme government regulations, such as banning or restricting critical fertilizers or the enforced culling of herds. Meat and dairy producers are assaulted in a hysterical article in the New York Times that predicts imminent “mass extinction” caused by humans and suggests that to keep the planet from “frying” we will need to reduce meat and dairy consumption in short order.

This is occurring at a time — following decades of remarkable boosts in agricultural productivity — when food insecurity and high prices are again plaguing even wealthy countries but particularly the poorer countries in Africa. This shortfall has worsened, in part due to the Russia–Ukraine conflict, which has reduced the reliability of food exports from the Ukrainian bread basket, making Western production more critical.

Regardless, the inhabitants of the periphery — the vast area from the metropolitan fringe to the deepest countryside — and the farming that flourishes there will face an extraordinarily well-funded green movement that is now depicting “industrial farming” as one of the principal villains in their ever-expanding climate melodrama. Although greens may support the notion of small farmers using artisanal methods, and the wealthy certainly can afford the much higher food prices, niche farming cannot support most farming communities or provide ordinary consumers with reasonably priced groceries.

The regulatory tsunami reflects attitudes in the media, the academy, and the bureaucracy that generally disparage the periphery, too often regarded as depopulating, depressed places without a future. Rural residents are seen as primitives, driven by “rural rage.” They tend to be more skeptical about climate-change policies and a promised “just transition,” which only makes them even more deplorable.

Read the rest of this piece at National Review.


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 Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Drenaline via Wikimedia under CC 3.0 License.

The Rural Revolution a Welcome Counter to the Liberal Green Agenda

The current deceleration of globalism can herald either a greater period of nationalism, with its tendency towards authoritarianism and xenophobia, or we could return to a more decentralized political system that comports with both American and Canadian traditions and popular preferences.

For some, the nationalist call is irresistible, even if it tramples on local rights and promotes autocratic power from Ottawa or Washington. This was seen particularly during COVID, notably in Canada, with centrally directed assaults on the rights of pandemic dissenters, ranging from the forced cutoff of private bank accounts in Canada, or in the American censorship regimes designed by a partnership of the Washington bureaucracy and the tech oligarchy.

The abating of the pandemic seems unlikely to curb the centralist fever. In Canada, the federal government continues to seek more control over everything from the Ontario Greenbelt to basic energy policy. This all sets the stage for an expanding conflict between the provinces and Ottawa, as the distinct priorities of various regions sometimes conflict with priorities set out by national elites, sometimes with the connivance of large corporate interests.

Much the same is occurring in the United States. In an almost evenly divided legislative branch, U.S. President Joe Biden has managed to expand federal power to unprecedented levels. Some of this has been done through the Stalinist-style bloc voting by Democrats in Congress, or simply by executive fiat. With the GOP in a slight majority in the House, Biden will almost inevitably expand his rule by executive order in the next two years.

But the situation is far from helpless. In Canada, there is growing resentment towards federal power. Energy and agricultural policies that follow the globalist green script may appeal to denizens of Toronto’s towers and swankier neighbourhoods, but can be regarded with horror by farmers in Manitoba or oil-riggers in Alberta. Suburban and exurban residents may be less than thrilled by Ottawa rumbling to force densification — hardly a natural fit for a country with an enormous surplus of land.

Some may see these localist attitudes as defending dying ways of life, but the demographic story tells us something very different. In Canada, people are dispersing, with most growth, even before the pandemic lockdowns, in the outer exurbs and smaller metropolitan areas, particularly in Ontario. After decades of moving to larger cities, data shows that while the population continues to urbanize, people are often moving to smaller communities.

As demographer Wendell Cox has demonstrated, Canadians are moving primarily to exurbs and suburbs, some closer to the big cities, but some quite distant. This was driven largely by high housing prices, and the increase in remote work by Canadians, which sparked a move away from the largest metropolitan areas, particularly ultra-expensive cities like Vancouver and Toronto. Even the Maritimes, long losers in the demographic sweepstakes, has reversed its long negative internal migration, attracting migrants from denser, more urbanized centres.

Read the rest of this piece at National Post.


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 Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Homepage photo: composite with photo by Tom Corser via Wikimedia under CC 3.0 License

Is America Entering a New Age of Democratic Capitalism?

Most everyone outside the Biden administration knows that a recession is now more than likely. We could be entering what economist Noriel Roubini describes as the “Great Stagflation: an era of high inflation, low growth, high debt and the potential for severe recessions.” Certainly, weak growth numbers, declining rates of labor participation and productivity rates falling at the fastest rate in a half century are not harbingers of happy times.

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Can the South Escape its Demons?

Out on the dusty prairie west of Houston, the construction crews have been busy. Gone are the rice fields, cattle ranches and pine forests that once dominated this part of the South. In their place sit new homes and communities. But they are not an eyesore; the homes are affordable and close to attractive town centres, large parks and lakes. These are communities rooted in the individual, the family and a belief in self-governance.

The new American Dream has its heart in the states of the old Confederacy. But its allure does not merely lie in a conservative embrace of lower taxes, less regulation and greater self-reliance, although these surely matter. More important are the opportunities that come from building businesses and owning new homes, not for the privileged few but for an increasingly diverse, and growing, populace.

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The Fading Family

For millennia the family has stood as the central institution of society—often changing, but always essential. But across the world, from China to North America, and particularly in Europe, family ties are weakening, with the potential to undermine one of the last few precious bits of privacy and intimacy.

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Powering Down the Developing World

The Covid-19 pandemic has been particularly cruel to the developing world, with Africa, Latin America, and South Asia all epicenters of high fatalities. But something worse may be on the way – this time not from viruses but good intentions, bolstered by often-unrealistic climate projections, which threaten to keep these countries in poverty for the foreseeable future.

Economically strong countries – China, above all – account for most of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions. But increasingly, western powers, along with the World Bank, investment banks, development funds, and the huge nonprofit sector, are moving to block fossil-fuel projects that could lift large parts of the world out of energy poverty. Emissions and economic progress remain closely linked; in the last two decades, CO2 ­concentrations have been falling in all wealthy nations, though these reductions were offset by the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to a resurgent China.

The still-developing countries’ misfortune has been to get to the economic table when the climate change movement has gained unprecedented power in the West, placing new roadblocks in their following the East Asian path of manufacturing-led growth. At the same time, concerns over loss of industrial and other fossil-fuel-related jobs have led to growing calls from the likes of Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer and the European Commission to tax the carbon content of imports, threatening the anti-poverty strategies of India and other poorer countries  while also dimming the prospects of struggling middleweights like Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine.

These countries are not likely to agree with U.S. climate representative John Kerry’s notion that “no one is being asked for a sacrifice.” It’s all about which populations get hit hardest under green-ification. We can see previews already in places like California and in Germany, where green energy shortfalls produce higher prices, rising energy poverty, blackouts – and a growing dependency on less-green places, like the Intermountain West or Russia, for energy.

Of course, such comparatively rich places are far better equipped to absorb soaring energy bills. If decarbonizing means the end of growth in the West, including restrictions on air travel, what will it mean for countries that are already poor, energy short, and possessing little in the way of savings? The Rockefeller Foundation estimates that more than half of Sub-Saharan Africa still lives in energy poverty, with deforestation making up the majority of its energy-related needs. The practice of indoor cooking on open fire and stoves alone contributes to almost half of all childhood-pneumonia related deaths worldwide.

Africa needs energy: the continent is set to make up almost 40% of the world’s population by the end of this century, and it is urbanizing at a rapid rate. In some senses, Africa’s problem is not its carbon footprint, but lack of one; the continent accounts for only 3% of the world’s carbon emissions. In Africa’s two largest economies, South Africa and Nigeria, the youth unemployment rate pre-Covid-19 approached 50%, five times that of the U.S. and three times that of the EU.

These social ills can be traced in part to lack of reliable energy and water for developmental needs. South Africa has since 2008 experienced an energy shortfall and simultaneously a water crisis. In 2021, Nigeria experienced a total grid collapse, and blackouts in the country are routine. Comparable situations exist in Iran, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

There are also massive political risks. Africa’s young population is frustrated and unemployed, and riots over a rise in energy prices have occurred in South Africa, Nigeria, and Senegal. Comparable events occurred in 2019 in Iran, when protestors demonstrated against increasing fuel prices, as well as in Lebanon and Ecuador in 2021 The pandemic has made these places even more unstable, but long-term energy deficits could make such disorder commonplace.

Read the rest of this piece at Real Clear Energy.


Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Hügo Krüger is a Structural Engineer with working experience in the Nuclear, Concrete and Oil and Gas Industry. He was born in Pretoria South Africa and moved to France in 2015. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Pretoria and a Masters degree in Nuclear Structures from the École spéciale des travaux publics, du bâtiment et de l’industrie (ESTP Paris). He frequently contributes to the South African English blog Rational Standard and the Afrikaans Newspaper Rapport. He fluently speaks French, Germany, English and Afrikaans. His interests include politics, economics, public policy, history, languages, Krav Maga and Structural Engineering.

Photo credit: Kate Holt via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

How America Abandoned the World—and Our Own Inner Cities

In America and across the globe, COVID-19 is diminishing people’s prospects, exacerbating inequality and creating ever-more feudal societies as the pandemic ravages the health and the pocketbooks of the poor and the poorly educated.

Globally developing countries are suffering from what The Nation describes as “a gargantuan north-south vaccination gap” between developing countries where fewer than 10 percent of people have been vaccinated compared to around 70 percent in Western Europe, Israel, Canada and US. And within affluent countries, there’s nearly as wide a gap between well-off and well-educated populations, and rural and urban backwaters still suffering from “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

In the long history of pestilence and plague, French historian Fernand Braudel noted, there was always a “separate demography for the rich”. As today, the affluent tended to eat better and could often escape the worst exposure to pestilence by retreating to country estates, while the poor have been left to fend for themselves as “victims of the urban graveyard effect” that’s persisted since the fall of Rome.

Despite attempts in the media to deny or downplay the links between density and disease, COVID death and infection rates remain worse in dense urban counties where poorer residents often have to navigate insufficiently ventilated enclosed spaces that their more affluent and mobile counterparts have been mostly able to avoid.

Generally speaking, educated and affluent city and suburban dwellers recovered their incomes within the first year of the pandemic, even as millions of Americans have fallen into poverty or are on the verge of destitution, and the federal moratorium on evictions is about to expire. Overall, upper-income workers recovered completely while lower-wage workers suffered major income declines.

As of May, employment for those making $60,000 a year or more is up by 7.4 percent since the pandemic began, while employment for those making $27,000 a year of less has plunged by 21 percent, according to tracktherecovery.org. The drop in low-wage employment has been even steeper in affluent areas, like Manhattan, as the high-wage workers who had clustered there are now dispersed while working remotely and buying services in their new locales.

This trend could accelerate if new pandemics emerge in the near future, as many fear they will. But for now, at least for developed countries, vaccinations offer a way out. Since January, COVID-19 has dropped from the leading cause of death in America to the seventh leading cause. But even here, the widely varied inoculation rates suggest future social problems, particularly as COVID-19 is becoming “hyper-regionalized” in communities with both low vaccination and low immunity rates, according to former FDA commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb.

These come primarily in two very different, but historically impoverished and poorly educated populations: rural America, where the national media has mocked the people getting sick as Trumpist rubes, and inner-city America.

Read the rest of this piece at Daily Beast.


Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Homepage photo: MCJ1800, via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License. Composite, R. Howard.