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Joel's new book, THE NEXT HUNDRED MILLION: America in 2050 is now available at booksellers everywhere.
EVER since the collapse of the Soviet Union ended the old, neat division between East and West, people have been inventing new ways of dividing up the world. In the 1990s it was fashionable to talk about America, Europe and Japan. Today pundits draw the line between emerged and the emerging markets.
"What I find disturbing," says Joel Kotkin, an expert on the evolution of cities and a presidential fellow at Chapman University, "is the lack of discourse. Los Angeles did not always have a perfect democracy, but you had arguments.
But, according to a recent piece by the Wall St. Journal's Conor Dougherty, the entrepreneurial culture in Texas may have largely spared us the worst. Indeed, Houston appears well-positioned to create good middle-class jobs, offering a vivid example of "opportunity urbanism," as city expert Joel Kotkin has often described it.
Forbes contributor Joel Kotkin calls America’s “agricultural heartland” one of the top five regional economies to watch in 2012.
Kotkin says states don’t need “oil or gas to enjoy a strong economy,” and he points to Omaha and Des Moines as two examples.
"If you move from New York to Houston, you just gave yourself a gigantic raise," said Joel Kotkin. "As the country has become more stressed, people have to move to those places where they can achieve a middle-class lifestyle at a lower cost."
"Greenurbia is the suburbs of the future. The suburbs of the 1950s were bedroom communities for people who commuted into the city. Today, there’s much more employment in the suburbs, and the big change is the number of people working full-time or part-time at home. Having people commute from one computer screen to another doesn’t make sense."
Kotkin has a striking ability to envision how global forces will shape daily family life, and his conclusions can be thought-provoking as well as counterintuitive. It's amazing there isn't more public discussion about the enormous changes ahead, and reassuring to have this talented thinker on the case. — Jennifer Ludden, NPR national desk correspondent
