This is Riga, Latvia. The Baltic Republics had a particularly difficult time during the twentieth century with Nazi Germany invading in 1941 and Soviet Russia occupying them until 1991. What had been a prosperous group of small Scandinavian style countries became relatively impoverished and isolated.

This is Riga, Latvia. The Baltic Republics had a particularly difficult time during the twentieth century with Nazi Germany invading in 1941 and Soviet Russia occupying them until 1991. What had been a prosperous group of small Scandinavian style countries became relatively impoverished and isolated.

This is nothing new. The Baltic has been repeatedly dominated by larger nations since the 1200’s. Riga is equidistant from both Berlin and Moscow. It’s a rough neighborhood and it seems likely there will be more such impositions in the future. The region is too important to left alone. But the people will adapt as they always have.

Between the various wars and occupations when the country was allowed to flourish on its own Latvia proved to be industrious and highly cultured. The buildings that survived the tumults of history attest to the quality of the people, economy, and place.

It was a matter of national pride for the Latvian people to completely restore the historic core of Riga after the Soviets left things in Havana style dishevelment. This is their homeland and the repository of their culture, language, music, and history. It was also an excellent business model. The city is a dynamic and highly profitable venue for foreign investment, trade, and tourism. Every inch of the old city is productive.

But then there’s all that left over communist stuff ringing the city. What exactly do you do with it all? Pulling it down and replacing it is too expensive. And many of these buildings are occupied by ethnic Russians not Latvians. (Latvia is a quarter Russian as a result of the Soviet occupation, but the city of Riga is closer to half Russian.)

This was top down bureaucratic central planning at its finest. Residential buildings were isolated from industry and from each other for health and safety. Operating a business of any kind in these apartment buildings was strictly forbidden. Tightly regulated shops were provided at convenient but segregated locations. Highly consolidated schools and isolated office and manufacturing parks were constructed in their own little pods at some distance.

The preservation of green open space was a hallmark of Soviet design. Grass and trees were necessary for recreation, health, and social tranquility. There’s also a coincidental side effect of this kind of land use planning that worked in favor of central authority. Where exactly would people organize a protest rally in this environment? There is no prominent central square or iconic rallying point. What exactly would the rebel cry be here? Rise up and storm the shrubbery!

Honestly it’s not that different from American suburbia. Communists just preferred concrete tower blocks to wood framed tract homes. If you’ve ever been inside an original 1947 Levittown house then you’ve essentially been inside one of these Soviet apartments. I spent a chunk of my childhood in a beige stucco apartment in Los Angeles that was nearly identical on the inside. The kitchens are small, there’s only one bath, the ceilings are low, there’s no craft or workmanship in the architecture. It’s utilitarian. It’s not terrible. People can and do live perfectly comfortable lives in these places. It’s just bland and there’s never anything to do in the neighborhood. It’s the precise opposite of the historic city center. No tourist ever ventures out to this part of town and you’ll never see photos of these neighborhoods in brochures.

So here’s what the pragmatic Latvians are doing. First, these inherited communist buildings are given a quick skin job. They’re scrubbed clean, fitted with new cupboards and fixtures, painted, given new windows and doors, and generally made to feel fresh. If you squint these buildings look like the lesser offerings of 1960s Sweden or Germany. There are worse places to live in the world. A tidy apartment in a boring suburb of Riga is what some people genuinely prefer. There’s plenty on offer here for them. And there isn’t much else that can be done with these places.

John Sanphillippo lives in San Francisco and blogs about urbanism, adaptation, and resilience at granolashotgun.com. He's a member of the Congress for New Urbanism, films videos for faircompanies.com, and is a regular contributor to Strongtowns.org. He earns his living by buying, renovating, and renting undervalued properties in places that have good long term prospects. He is a graduate of Rutgers University.

The nomination of Hillary Clinton has been secured, but the future of the Democratic Party is far from certain. Despite the patina of unity at the end, the Democrats, like their GOP adversaries, seem divided as to their future direction. Each party is being pulled to the extremes by an increasingly unruly base which regards its own establishment as a cesspool of corruption, influence-peddling and naked opportunism.

The devolution of the parties is reflected generally in the record distaste among the electorate toward the two nominees. Nebraska Republican Sen. Ben Sasse recently remarked, “There are dumpster fires in my town more popular than these awful candidates.” Count me among those looking for some smoldering garbage.

For virtually all of my adult life, I have been a registered Democrat. But as the party has abandoned critical commitments to color-blind racial equality, upward mobility and economic growth, I have moved on to become a registered independent. This makes me part of the fastest-growing “party” in America – the politically homeless.

From economic growth to cronyism and socialism

Historian Michael Lind suggests in his magisterial “Land of Promise” that, generally, all political parties have embraced the gospel of economic growth. Jacksonians in the early 19th century focused heavily on “producerism,” seeking to help those who actually created goods. The original progressives, in both parties, adopted policies favoring modern industry, from infrastructure to education and training. Herbert Croly, the influential early 20th century progressive journalist, described these as “economic agents” leading to greater prosperity.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, with its panoply of price supports and infrastructure projects, was, if nothing else, aimed at restoring prosperity. These policies may have had debatable impact, but certainly by the 1940s – in large part due to World War II – the economy was fully stoked. Later, Democrats from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton generally embraced growth as a means to improve the conditions of most Americans, including the working- and middle-class families with whom the party identified itself.

Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Orlando has taken on a new “web city” form. Its dispersal over a wide geographical area allows distinct and unique pockets of culture to arise within it, a kind of archipelago of art and design. It is a microcosm of the archipelago of many Florida cities. The overall effect is marvelous, if somewhat diluted by distance, and the broad metropolitan area has come to be a proving ground for artists, architects, and urban designers. As an artist and designer commenting on these topics, the single biggest trend I have seen in the last fifteen or so years is a growing sense of maturation. What else have I seen? And, over the years, what have my observations, and those of other critics, contributed to the art scene?

In a city like Orlando, the art and design critic must have an exceptionally broad range, because the arts scene is flung between Daytona and Winter Haven, two poles that are each about 110 miles away from the city’s downtown area. The art scene in pre-World War II Central Florida consisted of a rare, purpose-built art colony simply called “The Research Studio,” where artists from the northeast wintered and pursued creativity.

Near Winter Haven, Edward Bok, retired Harvard president and publisher of the Ladies’ Home Journal, created a cultural retreat of his own. Daytona, meanwhile, attracted automotive technology aficionados to the race track, bringing with them a uniquely American appreciation of pop culture and art. The artistic geography of Central Florida reflects the artistic range of America in many ways as a whole.

More than one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s disciples relocated to Orlando as early as World War I, eying Florida’s inevitable growth potential. Few creatives sought Orlando specifically, and they gravitated here for different reasons. Jack Kerouac, for example, came to live with his sister while On the Road was prepared for publication, using Orlando as a place to escape. This escapism instinct would later inform millions of people a year, when tourism came to the area.

In the aftermath of World War II, Orlando was a sleepy railroad and citrus-shipping town. Its binary heart was born in the '60s with the arrival of Disney. Escapism as an industry brought thousands of performers, artists, and writers to the area. Downtown Orlando today is a hub where artists and writers congregate, while the themed-entertainment industry focuses artistic talents around the southwest side of town.

As in any city, artists and designers have day jobs as well. But the Orlando area is one of the nation's few metropolitan places of affordability and ease of lifestyle. We have artists whose work is collected nationally; artists who have works in major museums across the United States, and art events such as Snap! Orlando, a regional photography exhibition.

Today, these artistic pursuits are being supplemented by new efforts in a wider range of locations. West Volusia County’s mixture of Stetson University and the Museum of Art – DeLand has become an artist’s haven. The Atlantic Center for the Arts, in New Smyrna Beach, has continued to program international artists, musicians, and writers in a secluded, tree-canopied forest near the Intracoastal Waterway. In financial parlance, these creative expressions are thriving new ventures.

Art and design have always had an impact on quality of life. This is more important than ever in the twenty-first century as we re-invent the meaning of human habitation, and artists and designers articulate our current age visually. Performing arts and music also have profoundly influenced the visual arts and the notion of good design. The impact works in reverse as well: our thriving farm-to-table food scene nurtures — literally! — our creative community.

But it is the conversation about art that is key, and the critic stimulates that discussion. As Oscar Wilde said, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” I come to the role of critic as a practitioner, one who walks in the shoes of the creative individual or team. I’d rather make art than talk about it, but still, I have a few thoughts to offer on what constitutes good criticism.

Foremost, it is important to have standards, but standards are a little different than rules. Many urban designers are like artists who fret about using complimentary colors in the wrong way, overlooking the big picture. Standards of good art and design are universal, and are about getting an idea, a story, or a theme across in a satisfying or visually compelling way.

I also pay little attention to credentials. Some of the best artists and designers come to the art world without any credentials at all. In this age, credentials are everything, but they haven’t made a great deal of difference in art and design. Some of the nation's most highly credentialed urban designers were involved in creating Orlando's Baldwin Park, which suffers from low business occupancy and high residential turnover.

Meanwhile, the frowsy Audubon Park, just a half mile away, built in the 1940s, is a 2016 Great American Main Street Award-winner, and is bursting with independent entrepreneurial projects: coffeehouses, urban farms, an exquisite fishing gear business, and some of the best food in the city. Successful design isn’t about credentials; it is about the practical world of what works.

In the fine arts, local museum leadership has undergone a transition, and curators have been set free to show relevant, impactful work. What the curators do with this freedom will be telling. So far, they have created an annual cash prize for the best Florida contemporary artist, unleashed a world-class private art collection free to the public, extended exhibitions to a college museum, and served as juries on artist-in-residence programs. All of this has been fueling the exchange of ideas and stories.

Telling the exciting story of Central Florida art and design has been part of my good fortune. Because it is such a great story, the Association of Alternative Newsmedias has selected three stories about the Central Florida arts scene as finalists in a national competition, beating out stories from rivals such as Austin, Oakland, and Charlotte, three cities of similar size.

An experimental building or a stunning painting is nothing if it is hidden or ignored. Today, with technology and imagination pushing the boundaries, it is often difficult to have a conversation about new art and architecture. Criticism helps to frame the conversation; it sets a standard for the dialogue about what we see. It also serves the purpose of applauding good results, and pointing out results that should be good, but are not. We make our cities better by agreeing on what works.

Since coming to Central Florida in the mid 1990s, I have seen the artistic scene here mature. Experimental work, street art, and emerging talent continues to “bubble up” into the mix. In the past, the bubbles tended to pop, or to float away to places like New York City where the art would be noticed. Now, it seems that good artists are sticking around, trying to make this place better — and beginning to take us to the next level.

Richard Reep is an award-winning artist and architect who writes art and design criticism for a variety of publications. You may nominate him as Best Arts Advocate 2016 by clicking http://orlandoweekly.secondstreetapp.com/l/Orlando-Weeklys-Best-of-Orlan....
Anyone visiting Central Florida can find a discussion of visually compelling aspects of the area in Reep’s Orlando Weekly column.

Photograph by the author: "Cedar of Lebanon" by local artist Jacob Harmeling graces the southern quarter of Lake Eola Park in Downtown Orlando, one of the few original artworks commissioned as part of the city's public art program.

Some time back my brother recommended I watch the documentary film Medora, about a high school basketball team from rural Southern Indiana. I finally got around to doing it.

Someone described this film as an “inverse Hoosiers“, which is an apt description. Hoosiers is a fictional retelling of the Milan Miracle, the legendary story of how tiny Milan High School (enrollment 161) won the state’s then single-class basketball championship in 1954.

There’s no such happy ending in prospect in Medora (available on Netflix). The town’s basketball team had gone 0-22 the season before the film. The question is not whether they will win a championship or even the sectional, but if they can win just a single game.

The basketball team is a proxy for the community as a whole, a once proud town fallen on hard times.  The town of Medora (pop ~700) and its surrounds, locals believe, used to be prosperous, socially cohesive, and have a great basketball team too.

This history is part mythological. I don’t doubt that these towns once had all the doctors and lawyers and such that people say they did. I’ve heard the same stories about where I grew up (two counties south). But that was a different era and I doubt there was ever real prosperity. Rural and small town life has always been tough in America.

But the social history certainly has much truth.  Even in my own childhood I remember that people not only didn’t lock their houses, they left their keys in their cars.  City water service, cable TV, garbage pickup, and even private telephone lines may not have been available, but it had its upsides too.

Today those Mayberry like characteristics are long gone.

In Medora we see not only poverty, but nearly complete social breakdown. I don’t recall a single player on the team raised in an intact family. Many of them lived in trailer parks. One kid had never even met his father. Others had mothers who themselves were alcoholics or barely functional individuals. They sometimes bounced around from home to home (grandmother, etc.) or dropped out of school to take care of a problematic mother.

These kids are also remarkably unsophisticated about the world. Once we see someone drive to Louisville – to pick his mother up from a rehab center – and another time one kid visits a seminary, but otherwise there’s no indication that these kids have spent much time or in some cases ever left Medora. One flirts with enlisting in the military. Another with what appears to be a for-profit technical college. But all of these are clearly unable to apply an independent knowledge or critical thought to what the sales reps for these entities are telling them.

Much of what structure exists in the town and the kids lives appears to be imported. Both the coach and one assistant coach appear to be from Bedford – 30 miles away. Neither really seems equipped to deal with these troubled kids.

Nothing indicates that these kids have much prospect of success in life.

Yet we see that there’s also little motivation on the part of the people in the town to actually change that.  They are steeped in nostalgia and cling to a idealized vision of a past community that they surely know can never be reclaimed, yet insist on grasping until it is physically pried from their grip.

Medora is one of the last unconsolidated small town high schools left in Indiana. (I attended a small school, but one that was already consolidated, with the uninspiring name of South Central High School).  It’s clearly not really viable as an independent school – it’s facing a major budget shortfall during the film – yet they steadfastly refuse to consider consolidation.

The town residents believe that the loss of the school would be the death knell of their community. They aren’t wrong about that. Merging the school would destroy the locus of identity. But the cold reality is that the modern world doesn’t need towns like Medora anymore. Always changing is the future as they say, but it’s hard to imagine anything that would sustainably restore the town.  America is full of towns like Medoras. Some of them may experience a miracle. Most won’t, and will slowly bleed away to a dysfunctional rump community. (Interesting, Medora’s population grew by 23% during the 2000s, something worthy of further investigation).

The residents of Medora refuse to surrender their town and resolutely refuse to leave. In that they are not unlike the handful of people hanging on in depopulated Detroit neighborhoods who will accept planned shrinkage only over their dead bodies. It’s irrational to those of us who have no such attachment to a place, but it is clearly a sentiment that animates many such people all over the world.

The National Review’s Kevin Williamson blames the residents of these towns for their own demise. This is manifestly false. The people in these communities did not change the structure of the economy to render their homes obsolete. They did not invent the technology that destroyed the need for agricultural labor. They did not create the divorce revolution. They did not invent Oxycontin.  These towns have always been belated, sometimes unwilling consumers of what is created elsewhere.

Yet the fact that outside forces acted on them does not absolve them from taking action now. Williamson is right about that. Much of the rural Midwest was settled by homesteaders who ventured off into the risky unknown, or German immigrants like the Renn family. These places were created by people who embodied different values than those who live there now, people who had no choice but to do something desperate in response to desperate conditions.

I chose to leave my hometown. Many other chose to stay. I know that many people there think it is God’s country and can’t imagine anyone ever leaving. I don’t want to claim that their attachment to place is less valid than my lack of it. Even in the city, to the extent that no one is attached to the place, to their neighborhood, for anything other than immediate self-interest, that’s not a good sign for the long term. I see today the consequences of viewing places purely as a mechanism for extracting personal or corporate profit in the now.

Yet the reality is that to the extent that people do choose to stay in the Medoras of this world, their future prospects aren’t good. Nor are those of their children. But if they leave their towns will die, along with a way of life. This isn’t a pleasant choice. They didn’t ask to be faced with it. But it’s the choice they face nevertheless.

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and an economic development columnist for Governing magazine. He focuses on ways to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse twenty-first century. During Renn’s 15-year career in management and technology consulting, he was a partner at Accenture and held several technology strategy roles and directed multimillion-dollar global technology implementations. He has contributed to The Guardian, Forbes.com, and numerous other publications. Renn holds a B.S. from Indiana University, where he coauthored an early social-networking platform in 1991. His personal urban affairs website is Urbanophile, where this piece originally appeared.

In 2009, when Rio de Janeiro was awarded the Summer Games, many saw it as a validation of Brazil’s ascension on the world stage. Yet seven years later, this estimation seems to have been a bit premature, as Rio and other Brazilian cities struggle to meet the basic needs of the Olympians.

The biggest problem facing the Rio Games may not be the filthy venues for aquatic events, or even security concerns in one of the world’s highest crime cities, but basic public health. The fears of transmission of Zika virus may be overblown, given that it’s the winter in Brazil and mosquito populations will be lower, but travelers run a real risk of contracting food-borne illnesses and influenza, according to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.

Rio, covering an urban area of over 11 million, belongs to a class of developing world megacities that, in too many cases, have become “a breeding ground for infectious diseases,” according to researcher Carl-Johan Neiderud, including another feared mosquito-born scourge, dengue.

Dr. Seth Berkley, CEO of the vaccine alliance Gavi, points to the recent increase in the scale of densely populated urban areas, many without adequate sanitation, as turning containable illnesses like Zika and Ebola into pandemics. Dense urbanization may not have created Zika, which causes newborns to have unusually small heads, he notes, but it has accelerated its spread from a mere handful to a current tally of 1.5 million cases this year.

Outbreaks of new pandemics have become increasingly common in the developing world, where urban growth is now three times faster in low-income countries than in their higher-income counterparts. Developing country megacities already represent the majority of the world’s 29 urban areas with over 10 million residents. The United Nations predicts 16 more megacities could emerge by 2030, all but one in the developing world.

This is a problem not only for developing countries, but the health of the world. Zika, like dengue, may have proliferated in unsanitary, dense cities in the developing world, but it’s spreading to the United States. The FDA just called for Miami and Fort Lauderdale to halt blood donations due to cases discovered locally. The number of those infected is climbing in Puerto Rico as well. How long before other wet, hot parts of America — say east Texas and Louisiana – also report infections?

Why is this happening? David Heymann, head of the center on global health security at Chatham House and a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, blames our interconnected world. Even megacities in the most impoverished countriesare just an airline trip away from the rest of the world. Once a disease starts in a developing country, he says, it’s likely to find its way into more prosperous ones as well.

Historic Precedents

Cities afflicted by massive poverty have long been primary breeders of disease. Plagues and pestilences were commonplace in the earliest urban centers, from ancient Greece and Rome to Baghdad, Beijing and Cairo. Cut off often from clean water, living cheek to jowl, large cities were often assaulted, and sometimes all but emptied, by waves of infectious diseases. Rome’s sewer system may have been well ahead of its time, but the higher floors in buildings lacked plumbing hookups, which made this system less than effective in stemming disease.

Conditions got, if anything, worse when the Empire’s capital shifted to Constantinople. The largest city in the Mediterranean at the time, and one of greatest in the world, nearly half the population died from plague in the middle of the sixth century.

 Much the same process occurred in the great cities of the Muslim world. Cairo, which in the 14th century had a population of 400,000, or eight times that of contemporary London, was racked by repeated epidemics that forced rulers and high officials to escape to the countryside. So great were these plagues, the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun noted, buildings and even palaces were abandoned, and “the entire inhabited world changed.”

Arguably, the industrial cities of the West provide the most compelling precursor of what is occurring in megacities today. London, in the 19th century the world’s largest city, suffered mortality rates higher than the countryside until the 1920s. Raw sewage ran down the streets of Berlin as late as the 1870s; only 8 percent of housing had toilets. Not surprisingly, as Berliners dumped their sewage into the river, there were recurrent outbreaks of cholera, typhus, and other devastating diseases. In St. Petersburg, at the dawn of the Russian Revolution, living conditions were even worse than Berlin’s; nearly half of all deaths in the city were traceable to infectious diseases.

Time To Rethink Megacities?

This sad history is repeating itself, in certain respects. We might think that city residents with access to healthcare would be healthier. In many places, that’s not the case. The average lifespan in Mumbai is 57 years, seven years short shorter then the Indian average. Gaps in life expectancy can be found in other developing world megacities, including Tehran and Cairo. “Megacity life,” notes Dr. Marc Reidl, a specialist in respiratory disease at UCLA, “is an unprecedented insult to the immune system.”

Yet despite this, some Western pundits embrace “the inexorable logic of the mega-city” as a blessing for both their residents and the planet. A recent article in Foreign Policy was bizarrely titled “In Praise of Slums,” arguing that megacities are “a force for good” because they provide more opportunities than villages.

Yet rather than accept misery common to such places, perhaps Westerners might think how to apply their past experience to solve megacities’ worst problems. It can be done. After all, Paris cleaned itself and became much healthier after Georges-Eugène Haussman’s renovation of Paris, commissioned by Napoléon III in the mid-1800s. Much can be accomplished by improving basic sanitation; in Dhaka for example, the sewer system covers barely 25 percent of the city, something that would seem strange to a denizen of imperial Rome, much less modern London or New York.

In many countries, including in the United States and Great Britain, particularly in the 20th century, health conditions improved as inner cities depopulated and more people moved to the periphery. This was one of the prime objectives of Ebenezer Howard’s bold vision for the growth of “garden cities,” which greatly influenced town planning in many parts of the high-income world.

Following Howard’s admonitions for the filthy cities of Edwardian England, perhaps we should be encouraging developing countries not to concentrate their people in megacities, but spread them out into more healthful environments. These ideas are not far-fetched. An impressive 2014 study by the McKinsey Global Institute, called “Mapping the Economic Power of Cities,” found that growth is already shifting to smaller cities.

This decentralizing process, notes Singapore-based scholar Kris Hartley, could take advantage of a growing shift of industrial and even service businesses to more rural locales, particularly in Asia. As megacities become more crowded, congested and difficult to manage, Hartley suggests, companies are finding it more convenient, less costly and, critically, better for the families to locate farther from the giant cities.

India, where some of the most impoverished megacities are located, is already experiencing a slowdown in megacity growth. The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has targeted small cities and villages for growth, rather than concentrating more people in larger cities.

Rather than foster the creation of unhealthy cities that incubate diseases like Zika, we in the high-income world should be looking for ways to slow the spread of pandemics that threaten millions of people, not only in the poorer countries, but also, as is plainly clear, closer to home.

This piece originally appeared in Forbes.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo of eco-barrier designed to prevent trash flow into Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro prior to the 2016 Olympics, by Tomaz Silva/Agência Brasil [CC BY 3.0 br], via Wikimedia Commons

Be careful what you wish for, if that is what you wish for.

Except for the oil shocks of the 1970s and a few other recessionary years, the US economy has generally been strong in the postwar era since 1945. Huge advances in technology and trade, a favorable business environment and strong demographics combined to create tens of trillions of dollars of new wealth in the US and around the world.

The demographic component played an important supporting role. During the baby boom years, the number of Americans grew at an average annualized rate of 1.6% (see chart). In subsequent years starting in the mid 1960s, this growth faded to about 1% where it remained until 2007-08. Since then, it has fallen to 0.7% and, on current UN projections, it will continue to fall through 2050 when it may dip under 0.4%.

Put another way, the population grew 1% per year on average in the years 1950-2015 and is expected to grow at half this rate, or 0.5% per year, from today to 2050. As a result, the US population will be at 356 million in 2030 and 389 million in 2050, equivalent to 18 million and 67 million fewer Americans in those years than if the growth rate had remained on its historic 1% trajectory.

(In the charts below, ‘At 1% CAGR’ refers to the (not expected) continuation of the historic 1% trend; ‘Medium’ refers to current projections, including continued immigration; ‘Zero Migration’ refers to a scenario with no new immigrants starting in 2005-10.)

What accounts for this slowdown? Mainly the boomer phenomenon. First, baby boomers had fewer children than their parents. The Total Fertility Rate (TFR = average children per woman) stood at near 2.0 in the 1980s and 1990s, compared to near 3.5 in the 1950s and early 1960s. Second, the number of US deaths will surge in 2025-45, echoing eighty years later the surge in births in 1945-65. Barring a leap in life expectancy, this death boom will put the brakes on demographic growth.

So even before we start talking about immigration, the US population will be slowing down and slowing down by a big number, recording a shortfall or “deficit” of 67 million vs. the historic trend by 2050.

In addition, the aging of the population will create another challenge with a rising dependency ratio (number of dependents per worker) reducing discretionary spending and investing, and straining pensions and entitlements. On current trends, the dependency ratio is expected to rise from 50.9 in 2015 to 65.8 in 2050. This ratio was at 66.5 in 1960 and its subsequent decline in four consecutive decades provided a big boost to the US economy.

Adding immigration to the discussion further complicates the picture. If America had taken in no more immigrants starting in 2005-10, its population would be 48 million smaller (114.9 minus 66.9 in the table above) in 2050 than if it had remained on the present course and 115 million smaller than if it had remained on its historic trajectory. Further, the dependency ratio would climb to 69.6 in 2050. Note how the population would stop growing around 2035 because the number of deaths would roughly equal the number of births. (See also America Heading Towards Zero Population Growth?)

It is important to highlight the demographic shortfall vs. the historic trajectory because some of today’s more extreme anti-immigration rhetoric is being presented as a promised return to the better economic conditions of the past. These conditions can be recovered through other paths but not through measures that exacerbate the population slowdown. Indeed if we judge by the figures above, it is clear that returning to the past is not in the realm of the possible, at least as far as demographics are concerned.

In order for the US population to grow at 1% again without immigration, the birth rate would have to jump to levels not seen since the baby boom or higher. Even then, the dependency ratio would climb more steeply for two decades because of the millions of new babies.

The US economy can and most likely will have a bright future but it cannot count on population growth to fulfill its historic supportive role. The economy benefited for decades from the demographic sweet spot of a rising population and a declining dependency ratio. Neither of these measures will be as supportive in the future. Instead greater gains will have to come from technology and automation and from investments in productivity and education.

Related:

This chart shows the number of Americans aged 20-64 and 30-59 under the Medium scenario. The working age population (20-64) is expected to remain flat for fifteen years and then to grow at a lower rate than in the past. This population would decline under a Zero Migration scenario. While it is true that automation will take over a number of functions and would dampen the impact of a stagnant or falling work force, demand for goods and services would certainly take a hit unless new export markets are opened up.

For more on the role of demographics in the economy, we suggest that you listen to this podcast.

It should also be remembered that world demographics are far from standing still. See here and here or consult the Populyst demography archive.

Sami Karam is the founder and editor of populyst.net and the creator of the populyst index™. populyst is about innovation, demography and society. 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. In addition to a finance MBA from the Wharton School, he holds a Master's in Civil Engineering from Cornell and a Bachelor of Architecture from UT Austin.

Statue of Liberty photo, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

There is no better way to see China than by train. This is especially true because foreigners are not allowed to drive rental cars without first obtaining a Chinese drivers license. China has developed the world's largest high-speed rail system, which includes one of only three profitable routes in the world, along with Tokyo to Osaka and Paris to Lyon.

Travel by train in China is now more convenient for people who do not speak Mandarin. Tickets may now be purchased over the internet. Details of the trains and ticketing are provided at the end of the article.

Last month I traveled from Shanghai (Image 1 from a previous trip) to Changchun and Jilin, in Manchuria's Jilin Province (Manchuria includes the northeastern provinces of Liaoning, Jilin and Heliongjiang, and is called the "Dong Bei" or the "east north") and then to Beijing and on to Nanchang, in Jiangxi Province, finally returning to Shanghai.

Shanghai is China's largest urban area, with 22.7 million residents (Note). I started out from Shanghai's Hongqiao Railway Station, which is one of the most important rail hubs in the country. It is located across the runways from Hongqiao International Airport, from which most domestic flights operate. Most international flights operate from Pudong International Airport, which is 34 miles (55 kilometers) to the east.

The train used the main Shanghai to Beijing line as far as Tianjin, where the train continues along Bohai Bay toward Manchuria, while the main line turns left toward Beijing.

It is not long before the train reaches speeds above 300 kilometers per hour (186 miles per hour). For at least the first 135 miles (220 kilometers), to the far edge of Changzhou, there is a mix of primarily urban development with some rural development. There are also many high-rise residential developments and "peri-urban" developments, with rural areas transitioning to urbanization.

The train travels west through Kunshan, an urban area of 1.9 million residents, part of Suzhou municipality, which also contains the Suzhou urban area (5.4 million). There are particularly good views of the Grand Canal in Suzhou (Image 2, from a previous visit). The Grand Canal was completed approximately 1,400 years ago and for centuries has provided a means for water transport between Hangzhou, to the south of Shanghai, across the Yangtze River and to Tianjin, near Beijing. It is the longest canal in the world, at 1,100 miles (1,800 kilometers).

From Suzhou, the train continues into Wuxi, an urban area of 3.7 million population (Images 3 and 4). The route continues into Changzhou (urban area population 3.7 million). Finally, is some open country, as the main route travels through a valley to the south of Zhenjiang to Nanjing, an urban area of 6.4 million population, which serves as the capital of Jiangsu. Nanjing was the former capital of China and its streets are lined and cooled in the summer by its "French trees" (Image 5, from a previous visit).

Leaving Nanjing, the train crosses the Yangtze River and travel through largely agricultural country. It passes through the smaller Suzhou (Anhui province) of Nobel Literature Prize winner Pearl S. Buck, and then through Xuzhou, Jiangsu (1.3 million). In Xuzhou, I noted the elevated connections for the new rail line to Zhengzhou (and also saw them in Zhengzhou). Service will begin in September, cutting three hours off the Shanghai to Zhengzhou travel time, and placing historic tourist attraction Xi'an, with its Terracotta Army, within seven hours of Shanghai.

The farmland continues to Jinan (3.9 million), the capital of Shandong province, which largely consists of the peninsula of the same name that forms the southern boundary of Bohai Bay. Just north of Jinan, the train crosses the second of China's great rivers, the Yellow River (Image 6), which is again crossed north of Zhengzhou (below).

Then there follows the longest stretch of agriculture between Shanghai and Beijing, most of the way to Tianjin (Image 7), an urban area of 11.3 million residents and is now the fastest growing large municipality in China, at more than four percent per year. Soon, we passed through Tangshan (2.4 million) which suffered a disastrous earthquake in 1976 but has been rebuilt (Image 8).

The train continued northward to Shenyang (3.4 million), the capital of Liaoning (Image 9). Finally, the train reached the destination of Changchun Railway Station (Image 10), 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) and 11 hours from Shanghai. Changchun (Image 11) is the capital of Jilin province and has 3.4 million residents.

Changchun is called the "automobile city," because the government placed the first automobile manufacturing plant here in the late 1950s. This was where the Red Flag limousine was built, favorite of government ministers and which carried President Richard Nixon around Beijing in his 1972 visit. My hotel in Ordos had a classic Red Flag on exhibition (Image 12). Now, automobile manufacturing is spread around the country and includes virtually all of the world's leading brands. Last year, Chinese bought 21.1 million cars, compared to 17.5 million in the United States, both records.

Jilin, an urban area with 1.7 million residents,(Images 13, Jilin Railway Station & 14) is only 45 minutes away by train, separated by picturesque rolling agricultural country from Changchun (Images 15 & 16). The corn looks at least as good in Jilin as it does now in Illinois.

A few days later I took the train from Changchun to Beijing South Railway Station (Image 17) to connect for the flight to Ordos, Inner Mongolia (See: Surprising Ordos: The Evolving Urban Form). Beijing is the nation's second largest urban area, with 20.4 million residents.

Flying back from Ordos, my next train trip was from Beijing West Railway Station. I could have traveled by subway, but since the view underground is not as good, traveled by taxi. Early Sunday morning, the traffic on the Third Ring Road from my hotel near the CCTV Tower (across town) was horrific.

The next train ride was to Nanchang, along the Beijing to Guangzhou line. This is the other principal north-south route though its traffic appears to be light compared to the Shanghai to Being route. The train traveled (Image 18) toward, Shijiazhuang, an urban area of 3.5 million residents and the capital of Hebei province (Images 19 and 20).

Parts of these first three trips coursed through the planned Jin-Jing-Ji megacity, which will better integrate the urban areas between Beijing, Tangshan, Tianjin and Shijiazhuang.

Continuing south, the train stopped at Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan (5.8 million), with its impressive extension of the Zhengzhou new area and the new railway station (Images 21 & 22). The train then headed south toward Wuhan, (7.6 million residents), the capital of Hubei and  a heavy industrial area that is been called the "Chicago" of China. Before reaching Wuhan, there was attractive rolling scenery in northern Hubei (Image 23), then the Yangtze River crossing in Wuhan (Image 24). Just a few miles upriver (the direction of the camera shot), Chairman Mao, at 72 years old, is reputed to have swam across the Yangtze in 1966.

The July greenery of central China was impressive. It continued into northern Hunan province (Image 25) and its capital of Changsha, an urban area of 3.8 million. In Changsha, the train diverted from the Beijing to Guangzhou line and turned eastward toward Nanchang. Along the way, the "peri-urban" development seemed to get more intense (Image 26). 

The Nanchang urban area (Image 27) has a population of 2.8 million and sits on the Gan River, which eventually flows into the Yangtze, to the north. It is home of the Pavilion of Prince Teng, on the older east bank city, across from the newer development on the west bank (Image 28).

A few days later, the last leg of the trip from Nanchang to Shanghai Hongqiao took less than four hours. Between Nanchang and Hangzhou, (7.6 million), the capital of Zhejiang, there was more greenery, rolling and mountain country and intense peri-urban development (Images 29-31). Hangzhou has been undergoing a huge construction boom (Image 32). It was less than one hour to Shanghai, and the peri-urban development continued to intensify (Image 33).

All in all, the five train trips had covered more than 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) and passed through 14 provincial level jurisdictions.

Trains

The best trains in China are the "G" trains, the "D" trains, and the "C" trains, all of which are of European high-speed rail quality. The "G" trains have a top speed of more than 300 kilometers per hour. The "D" trains have a top speed of 250 kilometers per hour, while the "C" trains are shuttles, such as those operating between Tianjin and Beijing or Changchun and Jilin and tend to operate at 250 kilometers per hour or more.

All of these trains use similar equipment (Image 34). Image 35 is the inside of a 2nd class coach, which have with reclining seats and snack service. All of the trains have information displays in each car indicating train speed, time, etc. (Image 36). Stations may be central as in Tianjin or near-airport distances from the urban core, as in Jilin and Wuhan.

Tickets

Ticket purchase has become simple. Tickets can now be booked from virtually anywhere and paid for by credit card. US residents will pay a service fee of up to $6 per ticket. Confirmation documents are provided over the internet and can be presented at any station in China to receive the tickets all at once. My ticket pickup took no more than 10 minutes at the downtown Shanghai Railway Station.

I would recommend using a travel agency that is located in China, has a toll-free 24 hour number from one's home country, has agents with good English skills, and a local China number for use when there. I was very happy with travelchinaguide (https://www.travelchinaguide.com/), which meets this description. Train schedules can be accessed at https://www.travelchinaguide.com/china-trains/.

Note: The urban area populations are as estimated in 2016, taken from Demographia World Urban Areas: 12th Annual Edition (2016).

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international pubilc policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Photo: Changchun, Jilin, China: urban core (by author)

In Sacramento, and much of the media, California is enjoying a “comeback” that puts a lie to the argument that regulations and high taxes actually matter. The hero of this recovery, Gov. Jerry Brown, in Bill Maher’s assessment, “took a broken state and fixed it.”

Yet, if you look at the long-term employment trends, housing affordability, inequality and the state’s long-term fiscal health, the comeback seems far less miraculous. Silicon Valley flacks may insist that the “landscape now has been altered,” so prosperity is now permanent, but this view is both not sustainable and deeply flawed.

Jobs: The long view

Since 2010, California has begun to generate jobs at a rate somewhat faster than the nation, but this still has just barely made up for the deep recession in 2007. The celebratory notion that true-blue California is outperforming red states like Texas is valid only in a very short-term perspective. Indeed, even since 2010, the job growth in Austin and Dallas has been higher than that in the Bay Area, while Los Angeles has lagged well behind.

If you go back to 2000, the gap is even more marked. Between 2000 and 2015, Austin has increased its jobs by 50 percent, while Raleigh, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Nashville, Orlando, Charlotte, Phoenix and Salt Lake City – all in lower-tax, regulation-light states – have seen job growth of 24 percent or above. In contrast, since 2000, Los Angeles and San Francisco expanded jobs by barely 10 percent. San Jose, the home of Silicon Valley, has seen only a 6 percent expansion over that period.

Regional concentration

As Chapman University economist and forecaster Jim Doti recently suggested, the California boom is exceedingly concentrated in one region. “It’s not a California miracle, but really should be called a Silicon Valley miracle,” Doti noted in his latest forecast. “The rest of the state really isn’t doing well.”

Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Bill Watkins is a professor at California Lutheran University and runs the Center for Economic Research and Forecasting, which can be found at clucerf.org.

In Ghana, about 80 percent of the working-age population is self-employed in an economy of improvisation and self-reliance where the quest to make a living is played out daily. The complexity of operating in the business environment — characterized sometimes as fetching water with a basket — has deterred many entrepreneurs from upgrading their business skills, raising capital and taking risks to grow. So many remain in the informal sector — a fluctuating medley of businesses that are agile enough to navigate the ever-changing jumble of economic headwinds but unable to scale up in any meaningful way.

The hope and promise of local development is that people will be empowered to achieve a higher standard of living in terms of economic prosperity and quality of life. With the advent of Ghana’s formal decentralization policy, the nation’s 216 district assemblies are now the designated champions of local development, which depends considerably on strengthening small and medium-sized enterprises by improving local competitiveness.

In May, 300 representatives of Ghana’s metro and rural districts assembled in Kumasi, a sprawling city of more than 2 million people, for the second annual Conference on Local Government. Praxis Africa organized the conference on behalf of the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development, which focused on the United Nations sustainable development goals. Agreed to by 193 countries to mark out a roadmap for global prosperity, the SDGs have a goal of 7 percent growth per year in the world’s least developed countries. Ghanaian President John Mahama has been appointed co-chair of a group of SDG advocates by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, making the SDGs a prominent dimension of Ghana’s development plans.

Ghana’s ministers of Local Government and Rural Development, Chieftaincy and Traditional Affairs, and Fisheries and Aquaculture Development, plus the deputy minister of Communication and the regional Ashanti minister all highlighted the need for sustainable, inclusive growth that creates employment and prosperity. Multi-stakeholder partnerships involving government, the private sector and civil society were hailed as the glue that holds the development process together. Collins Dauda, minister of Local Government and Rural Development, affirmed that public/private partnerships are a new way of dealing with the traditional Ghanaian way of doing things, which is known as the “do-and-share” principle.

Partnership-driven development is essential in an age where many successful enterprises are less the product of an individual entrepreneur than of the assembled resources, knowledge, and other inputs and capabilities that can be mobilized in a local entrepreneurial ecosystem. In Ghana, formalization and growth of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises is essential for development. There is wide agreement that lack of access to finance and markets, low levels of education, poor business skills and an absence of suitable mentors are among the biggest obstacles that entrepreneurs face. Praxis Africa’s guidance to the districts in working with entrepreneurs is to help them by:

Decentralization of economic development is not unique to Ghana, as a confluence of potent forces is creating an era of localism and decentralization across the planet — driven in part by increasing global connectedness. There is no single formula for success for any community in the 21st century. Nonetheless, to foster and sustain a robust local economy, a community must take full advantage of its unique combination of resources, culture, infrastructure, core competencies in industry and agriculture and the skills of entrepreneurs and workers. 

Delore Zimmerman, president of Praxis Strategy Group in Fargo, N.D., and co-founder of Praxis Africa.

Photo: a panel discussion as part of the second annual Conference on Local Government, held in may in Kumasi, Ghana. IMAGE: PRAXIS AFRICA

Intellectuals — a category that includes academics, opinion journalists, and think tank experts — are freaks. I do not mean that in a disrespectful way. I myself have spent most of my life in one of the three roles mentioned above. I have even been accused of being a “public intellectual,” which sounds too much like “public nuisance” or even “public enemy” for my taste.

My point is that people who specialize in the life of ideas tend to be extremely atypical of their societies. They — we — are freaks in a statistical sense. For generations, populists of various kinds have argued that intellectuals are unworldly individuals out of touch with the experiences and values of most of  their fellow citizens. While anti-intellectual populists have often been wrong about the gold standard or the single tax or other issues, by and large they have been right about intellectuals.

The terms “intellectual” and “intelligentsia” arose around the same time in the 19th century. Before the industrial revolution, the few people in advanced civilizations paid to read, write, and debate were mostly either clerics like medieval Christian priests, monks, or secular scribes like Confucian mandarins who worked for kings or aristocrats, or, as in the city-states of ancient Greece, teachers whose students were mostly young men of the upper classes.

The replacement of agrarian civilization by industrial capitalism created two new homes for thinkers, both funded directly or indirectly by the newly enriched capitalist elite. One was the nonprofit sector — the university and the nonprofit think tank — founded chiefly by gifts from the tycoons who lent these institutions their names:  Stanford University, the Ford Foundation. Then there was bohemia, populated largely by the downwardly-mobile sons and daughters of the rich, spending down inherited bourgeois family fortunes while dabbling in the arts and philosophy and politics and denouncing the evils of the bourgeoisie.

Whether they are institutionalized professors and policy wonks or free-spirited bohemians, the intellectuals of the industrial era are as different from the mass of people in contemporary industrial societies as the clerics, scribes, mandarins, and itinerant philosophers of old were from the peasant or slave majorities in their societies.

To begin with, there is the matter of higher education. Only about 30 percent of American adults have a four-year undergraduate degree. The number of those with advanced graduate or professional degrees is around one in ten. As a BA is a minimal requirement for employment in most intellectual occupations, the pool from which scholars, writers, and policy experts is drawn is already a small one. It is even more exclusive in practice, because the children of the rich and affluent are over-represented among those who go to college.

Then there is location. There have only been a few world capitals of bohemia, generally in big, expensive cities that appeal to bohemian rich kids, like the Left Bank of the Seine and Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury. In the U.S., the geographic options for think tank scholars also tend to be limited to a few expensive cities, like Washington, D.C. and New York. Of the different breeds of the American intellectual, professors have the most diverse habitat, given the number and geographic distribution of universities across the American continent.

Whether they are professors, journalists, or technocratic experts, contemporary intellectuals are unlikely to live and work in the places where they are born.  In contrast, the average American lives about 18 miles from his or her mother. Like college education, geographic mobility in the service of personal career ambitions is common only within a highly atypical social and economic elite.

In their lifestyles, too, intellectuals tend to be unusually individualistic, by the standards of the larger society. I am aware of no studies of this sensitive topic, but to judge from my experience the number of single individuals and childless married couples among what might be called the American intelligentsia appears to be much higher than in the population at large. The postponement of marriage in order to accumulate credentials or job experience, the willingness to move to further career goals, and — in the case of bohemians — the willingness to accept incomes too low to support children in order to be an avant-garde writer or artist or revolutionary sets intellectuals and other elite professionals apart from the working-class majority whose education ends with high school and who rely on extended family networks for economic support and child care.

The fact that we members of the intellectual professions are quite atypical of the societies in which we live tends to distort our judgment, when we forget that we belong to a tiny and rather bizarre minority. This is not a problem with the hard sciences.  But in the social sciences, intellectuals — be they professors, pundits, or policy wonks — tend to be both biased and unaware of their own bias.

This can be seen in the cosmopolitanism of the average intellectual. I was the guest of honor at an Ivy League law school dinner some years ago, when, in response to my question, the academics present — U.S. citizens, except for one — unanimously said they did not consider themselves American patriots, but rather “citizens of the world.”  The only patriot present, apart from yours truly, was an Israeli visiting professor.

Paranoid populists no doubt would see this as confirmation of their fear intellectuals are part of a global conspiracy directed by the UN or the Bilderbergers.  I see it rather as a deformation professionelle.  Scholarship, by its nature, is borderless.  The mere phrases “Aryan science” and “Jewish science” or “socialist scholarship” and “bourgeois scholarship” should send chills down the spine. Furthermore,  many successful academics study, teach, and live in different countries in the course of their careers.

So it is natural for academics to view a borderless world as the moral and political ideal — natural, but still stupid and lazy. Make-believe cosmopolitanism is particularly stupid and lazy in the case of academics who fancy themselves progressives. In the absence of a global government that could raise taxes to fund a global welfare state, the free movement of people among countries would overburden and destroy existing national welfare states, or else empower right-wing populists to defend welfare states for natives against immigrants, as is happening both in the U.S. and Europe.

The views of intellectuals about social reform tend to be warped by professional and personal biases, as well. In the U.S. the default prescription for inequality and other social problems among professors, pundits, and policy wonks alike tends to be:  More education! Successful intellectuals get where they are by being good at taking tests and by going to good schools. It is only natural for them to generalize from their own highly atypical life experiences and propose that society would be better off if everyone went to college — natural, but still stupid and lazy. Most of the jobs in advanced economies — a majority of them in the service sector — do not require higher education beyond a little vocational training. Notwithstanding automation, for the foreseeable future janitors will vastly outnumber professors, and if the wages of janitors are too low then other methods — unionization, the restriction of low-wage immigration, a higher minimum wage — make much more sense than enabling janitors to acquire BAs, much less MAs and Ph.Ds.

The social isolation of intellectuals, I think, is worsened by their concentration in a few big metro areas close to individual and institutional donors like New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. (where I live) or in equally atypical college towns. It was never possible for Chinese mandarins or medieval Christian monks in Europe to imagine that their lifestyles could be adopted by the highly visible peasantry that surrounded them. But it is possible for people to go from upper middle class suburbs to selective schools to big-city bohemias or campuses with only the vaguest idea of how the 70 percent of their fellow citizens whose education ends with high school actually live.

Universal national service would be a bad idea; the working class majority is hard-pressed enough without being required to perform unpaid labor. But it might not hurt if every professor, opinion journalist, and foundation expert, as a condition of career advancement, had to spend a year or two working in a shopping mall, hotel, hospital, or warehouse. Our out-of-touch intelligentsia might learn some lessons that cannot be obtained from books and seminars alone.

This piece first appeared at The Smart Set, an online magazine covering culture and ideas.

Michael Lind is a contributing writer of The Smart Set, a fellow at New America in Washington, D.C., and author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States.

Image courtesy of  simpleinsomnia via Flickr (Creative Commons).

I recently got into a discussion on Twitter about the soundness of upzoning, or the increase in the allowance of residential units in cities, as a rational and reasonable response to the lack of affordable housing in our nation's large cities.  Anyone who's been reading my writing knows that I've disagreed with this for quite some time, and tried many ways to articulate my views and reach some understanding. From the discussion I learned two things: 1) Twitter is a really poor vehicle for debate when nuance is critical (OK, I really knew that already), and 2) the orthodoxy of the upzoners is so strong that my views on this might put me on the pariah end of the urbanism spectrum. 

It started innocently enough.  Ramsin Canon suggested upzoning major streets in Chicago for more residential units.  That brought several supporters, including City Observatory writer and fellow Chicago blogger Daniel Kay Hertz, who (gracefully, I might add) noted my objections.  I then chimed in, and shortly thereafter I found myself swimming against the tide of upzoners hoping to prove that upzoning helps improve housing affordability. 

Look, upzoners, I understand the problem and the sentiment.  I understand the desire to find the right policy response to address the issue.  But I remain unconvinced that upzoning will help any more than a handful of American cities.  Here's why.

An Abstract Argument

Surely a big part of the appeal of upzoning is its abstract simplicity.  Increasing the supply of housing units in extremely tight housing markets can unleash market forces that drive home prices and rents downward, making cities more affordable to affluent and poor alike.  And in housing markets that have an almost even distribution of high priced housing within them, like San Francisco or New York, this makes sense.  Allowing more units will have the effect of bringing prices down.  (I'd also add parenthetically that the tightest and most expensive housing markets nationally also tend to be the most geographically constrained, by either water or mountains, and that constraint does not hold for all cities nationwide.  This escapes many people.)

The reality, however, is that nationally gentrification is just a pittance compared to the expansion of urban poverty.  As Carol Coletta of the Knight Foundation put it in a speech last month at the Congress of the New Urbanism:

"In 1970, about eleven hundred urban Census tracts were classified as high poverty.

By 2010—40 years later—the number of high poverty Census tracts in urban America had increased from 1100 to more than 3,000. (3165)

The number of people living in those high poverty Census tracts had increased from 5 million to almost 11 million. And the number of poor people in high poverty Census tracts had increased from 2 million to more than 4 million.

So over a 40-year period, the number of high poverty Census tracts in America’s core cities had tripled, their population had doubled, and the number of poor people in those neighborhoods had doubled.

Given that record, I’ll bet a lot of people are hoping for a little gentrification– if gentrification means new investment, new housing, new shops without displacement.

The idea that places might benefit from gentrification runs against the popular narrative. But here’s the really startling fact: only 105 of the eleven hundred Census tracts that were high poverty in 1970 had rebounded to below poverty status by 2010. That’s only ten percent! Over 40 years!"

Most American cities are not like San Francisco or New York, where the high prices and rents cannot be avoided and the return-to-the-city demand remains very high.  Most cities have greater variance in prices and rents, from very high to very low.  This takes away the first layer of abstraction for prices and rents and allows those with money to rationally widen their consideration when choosing to live in cities.  On the surface this sounds great. 

But -- and this is where the second layer of abstraction is shed -- people don't make housing decisions or neighborhood decisions rationally.  They take in all sorts of information and put it to subjective use, and justify its rationality later.  Historical perceptions of neighborhoods linger far longer than their reality.  Media perceptions can distort the reality of neighborhoods.  Egos can get involved and people select neighborhoods that have a certain cache or brand.  For urban neighborhoods in most cities, we find that affluence clusters in certain areas and moves outward slowly.  Poverty expands quickly, as those who have the ability to escape it do so, and further destabilize a neighborhood in the process.  The end result, again for cities that do not have the same strong return-to-the-city demand or the uniformly high home prices and rents, is affluent enclaves surrounded by expansive and increasingly impoverished neighborhoods.

Upzoning can accelerate this process.  If a major city undergoes an upzoning process and allows a substantial increase in the number of housing units, what do you think the development community's response to that will be?  My guess is that they will work hard to fulfill the market demand where the demand is strongest -- in the most desirable neighborhoods or in the areas immediately adjacent to them.  Only after that demand is tapped out will developers move into other areas, and most will elect to build in areas that are adjacent to the newly saturated neighborhood.  Those who live in the path of development will see prices and rents remain high; those away from the path of development will likely see  prices and rents crater, and lament the lack of investment in their community. 

The Need for Investment

TAt one point in the Twitter discussion.  Daniel Kay Hertz asked me, "Would there be more or fewer Latinos in Logan Square if there was more new housing in Lincoln Park?"  For non-Chicagoans, Logan Square is the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood immediately west of the quite-gentrified Lincoln Park neighborhood on the lakefront.  My response was that Logan Square would indeed have more Latinos in that scenario and that it would have no discernible impact on other neighborhoods outside of the "hot zone" as well.  But that sets up the scenario I cite above -- an affluent neighborhood next to an eternally poor/working class one, possibly lamenting the lack of investment in their midst.  And the further one's home or neighborhood is from the "hot zone", the more that lament turns into angst, frustration and resentment.

It's worth bringing back a portion of the quote above from Carol Coletta:

Given that record, I’ll bet a lot of people are hoping for a little gentrification– if gentrification means new investment, new housing, new shops without displacement.The idea that places might benefit from gentrification runs against the popular narrative.

Despite the growing problems of affordability in select neighborhoods in major cities across the nation, there are many more neighborhoods that wish they had that problem.  Many people rue the fact that maybe one-quarter or one-third of a city is priced beyond their means.  That leaves two-thirds to three-quarters of a city to explore and find a place worthy of investment.  Upzoning can have the impact of further concentrating development within the "hot zone" and drive a deeper inequality wedge between urban haves and have-nots.

Upzoners are not doing cities a favor more broadly by addressing an issue that helps them directly.

Ultimately I see high prices and rents as being demand-driven and not supply-driven.  Prices and rents are high because there are too many people focusing on too few neighborhoods -- and squandering the opportunity to take some of that investment to other neighborhoods that could use it.

Pete Saunders is a Detroit native who has worked as a public and private sector urban planner in the Chicago area for more than twenty years.  He is also the author of "The Corner Side Yard," an urban planning blog that focuses on the redevelopment and revitalization of Rust Belt cities.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has released its 2013 to 2014 migration data. This data provides estimates of residential movement between counties and states based on the number of claimed exemptions on IRS income tax forms. According to IRS, this "approximates the number of individuals" who moved between jurisdictions. Of course, not all people are covered by filed income tax returns, yet this covers   approximately 80 percent of the population, and unlike Census Bureau annual data, this is counts of actual people (and incomes). As such, the IRS data is probably the best approximation of domestic migration available. This article outlines data relating to state to state (and District of Columbia) domestic migration.

Net Domestic Migration: Gainers

Net domestic migration, calculated by subtracting the number of people moving out of state from the number of people moving into a state, was by far the greatest in Texas and Florida. This is not surprising, since these states have routinely been at the top of the domestic migration league tables for virtually all of the new century. The once exception was for a brief period during the housing bubble when the Florida numbers were depressed. During that period, Florida's reached levels only exceeded by California but have since been moderated. That, plus a severe local recession, were associated with the drop in net domestic migration.

This year's champion was Texas. The Lone Star State had net domestic migration of 229,300. This is more than double the net domestic migration of second ranking Florida and exceeds the total net domestic migration of the other 16 states that gained. The District of Columbia and 30 states experienced net domestic losses between 2013 and 2014.

Florida added 114,400 net domestic migrants, which is nearly 4 times as large as third ranking South Carolina (30,100). Colorado followed closely, at 29,500 net domestic migrants, with Washington placing fifth (Figure 1)

Net Domestic Migration: Losers

The states with the largest net domestic migration losses are no surprise. New York, which has led net domestic out-migration in most recent years, did so again, with the loss of 126,800. Illinois lost the second greatest number of domestic migrants at 82,000. California ranked third, with a loss of 57,900. New Jersey had the fourth largest loss at 46,000, followed by Pennsylvania at 27,500 (Figure 2).

State Attraction Ratio

A state attraction ratio was developed, by dividing out-migration by in-migration (stated in out-migrants per 100 in-migrants). Not surprisingly, the highest state attraction ratio was in Texas, at 156.3, South Carolina ranked second, with 127.3 in-migrants per 100 out-migrants, with Florida close behind at 126.7. The fourth and fifth highest state attraction rates were in Oregon, at 122.3 and North Dakota at 120.2 (Figure 3).

The lowest state attractions ratio --- those places were leavers most outpaced in-migrants --- was in New York, where 65.4 people moved into the state for every 100 who moved out. Illinois was close behind at 67.1. In New Jersey, the ratio was 75.9, in Connecticut 78.3 and Alaska had the fifth lowest state attraction ratio at 80.1 (Figure 4)

Income per Capita: In-migrants

In 17 states, the per capita income of people moving from other states exceeded that of their new state's overall average income. The biggest differences was in Florida, where in-migrant incomes were 30.5 percent higher than average. Migrants to South Carolina averaged 18.6 percent more than the state average income, while migrants to Maine had 18.3 percent higher incomes. The top five was rounded out by New Hampshire, where in-migrants had average incomes 14.0 percent greater than average and Arizona where the differential was 9.8 percent (Figure 5)

The lowest in-migrant incomes relative to state averages were in states with large resource industries. The biggest difference was in North Dakota, where the average new resident had an income 33.5 percent below average. In Alaska, the difference was 30.7 percent, while in Wyoming it was 23.0 percent. Newcomers to Nebraska averaged 22.6 percent below the state average, while the fifth lowest figure was registered in Oklahoma at -21.3 percent (Figure 6)

Income per Capita: Out-migrants

In 17 states, people heading for other states had higher incomes per capita than the average in their former states. The biggest differential was in Maine, where out-migrants had average incomes 20.1 percent higher than the overall state average. The second largest differential was in California where out-migrants had 19.7 percent higher incomes than California residents who remained, followed by Connecticut at 16.8 percent. The average income of people leaving was 14.6 percent greater than the Illinois average. In New Jersey, the average income of levers was 13.4 percent greater than the state average (Figure 7).

Wyoming residents had the largest income differential relative to newcomers, at 32.6 percent. In Alaska, new migrants had average incomes 25.9 percent below the state average and in Hawaii, new migrants had average incomes 22.0 percent below the state average. The fourth and fifth lowest newcomer incomes were in South Dakota, 21.9 percent below the state average and North Dakota, 21.1 percent below the state average (Figure 8)

New Results Track Old

There is a striking similarity between the domestic migration results for 2013-4 and those reported by the Census Bureau population estimates program from 2000 to 2013 (no data for 2010). Among the top 10 gainers in net domestic migration in 2013 to 2014, nine were also among the top 10 gainers between 2000 and 2013. These included Texas, Florida, South Carolina, Colorado, Washington, Arizona, North Carolina, Oregon and Nevada. Georgia was replaced by Oregon in the IRS 2013 to 2014 list.

However in the earlier period, Florida was the leading importer of people, while Texas, now number one, ranked second. However, Florida could challenge Texas in the future, if that state's in-migration numbers suffer substantially from the oil bust. Net domestic migration continues to focus on the South and West, with each region accounting for five of the top 10 states.

There is also similarity among the largest exporters of people, though somewhat less so. Among the top five domestic migrant exporters, four ranked in the top five between 2000 and 2013. New York, California, Illinois and New Jersey appeared in both lists, while Pennsylvania replaced Texas in the 2013-2014 IRS data.

Among the 10 greatest losers in net domestic migration, five were in the Northeast, three were in the Midwest, one was in the South and one in the West.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international pubilc policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Yes, Jay Gould was a bad guy. But at least he helped build societal wealth. Not so our Silicon Valley overlords. And they have our politicians in their pockets.

A decade ago these guys—and they are mostly guys—were folk heroes, and for many people, they remain so. They represented everything traditional business, from Wall Street and Hollywood to the auto industry, in their pursuit of sure profits and golden parachutes, was not—hip, daring, risk-taking folk seeking to change the world for the better.

Now from San Francisco to Washington and Brussels, the tech oligarchs are something less attractive: a fearsome threat whose ambitions to control our future politics, media, and commerce seem without limits. Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Uber may be improving our lives in many ways, but they also are disrupting old industries—and the lives of the many thousands of people employed by them. And as the tech boom has expanded, these individuals and companies have gathered economic resources to match their ambitions.

And as their fortunes have ballooned, so has their hubris. They see themselves as somehow better than the scum of Wall Street or the trolls in Houston or Detroit. It’s their intelligence, not just their money, that makes them the proper global rulers. In their contempt for the less cognitively gifted, they are waging what The Atlantic recently called “a war on stupid people.”

I had friends of mine who attended MIT back in the 1970s  tell me they used to call themselves “tools,” which told us us something about how they regarded themselves and were regarded. Technologists were clearly bright people whom others used to solve problems or make money. Divorced from any mystical value, their technical innovations, in the words of the French sociologist Marcel Mauss, constituted “a traditional action made effective.” Their skills could be applied to agriculture, metallurgy, commerce, and energy.

In recent years, like Skynet in the Terminator, the tools have achieved consciousness, imbuing themselves with something of a society-altering mission. To a large extent, they have created what the sociologist Alvin Gouldner called “the new class” of highly educated professionals who would remake society. Initially they made life better—making spaceflight possible, creating advanced medical devices and improving communications (the internet); they built machines that were more efficient and created great research tools for both business and individuals. Yet they did not seek to disrupt all industries—such as energy, food, automobiles—that still employed millions of people. They remained “tools” rather than rulers.

With the massive wealth they have now acquired, the tools at the top now aim to dominate those they used to serve. Netflix is gradually undermining Hollywood, just as iTunes essentially murdered the music industry. Uber is wiping out the old order of cabbies, and Google, Facebook, and the social media people are gradually supplanting newspapers. Amazon has already undermined the book industry and is seeking to do the same to apparel, supermarkets, and electronics.

Past economic revolutions—from the steam engine to the jet engine and the internet—created in their wake a productivity revolution. To be sure, as brute force or slower technologies lost out, so did some companies and classes of people. But generally the economy got stronger and more productive. People got places sooner, information flows quickened, and new jobs were created, many of them paying middle- and working-class people a living wage.

This is largely not the case today. As numerous scholars including Robert Gordon have pointed out, the new social-media based technologies have had little positive impact on economic productivity, now growing at far lower rates than during past industrial booms, including the 1990s internet revolution.

Much of the problem, notes MIT Technology Review editor David Rotman, is that most information investment no longer serves primarily the basic industries that still drive most of the economy, providing a wide array of jobs for middle- and working-class Americans. This slowdown in productivity, notes Chad Syverson, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, has decreased gross domestic product by $2.7 trillion in 2015—about $8,400 for every American. “If you think Silicon Valley is going to fuel growing prosperity, you are likely to be disappointed,” suggests Rotman.

One reason may be the nature of “social media,” which is largely a replacement for technology that already exists, or in many cases, is simply a diversion, even a source oftime-wasting addiction for many. Having millions of millennials spend endless hours on Facebook is no more valuable than binging on television shows, except that TV actually employs people.

At their best, the social media firms have supplanted the old advertising model, essentially undermining the old agencies and archaic forms like newspapers, books, and magazines. But overall information employment has barely increased. It’s up 70,000 jobs since 2010, but this is after losing 700,000 jobs in the first decade of the 21st century.

Tech firms had once been prodigious employers of American workers. But now, many depend on either workers abroad of imported under H-1B visa program. These are essentially indentured servants whom they can hire for cheap and prevent from switching jobs. Tens of thousands of jobs in Silicon Valley, and many corporate IT departments elsewhere, rent these “technocoolies,” often replacing longstanding U.S. workers.

Expanding H-1Bs, not surprisingly, has become a priority issue for oligarchs such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and a host of tech firms, including Yahoo, Cisco Systems, NetApp, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel, firms that in some cases have been laying off thousands of American workers. Most of the bought-and-paid-for GOP presidential contenders, as well as the money-grubbing Hillary Clinton, embrace the program, with some advocating expansion. The only opposition came from two candidates disdained by the oligarchs, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

Now cab drivers, retail clerks, and even food service workers face technology-driven extinction. Some of this may be positive in the long run, certainly in the case of Uber and Lyft, to the benefit of consumers. But losing the single mom waitress at Denny’s to an iPad does not seem to be a major advance toward social justice or a civilized society—nor much of a boost for our society’s economic competitiveness. Wiping out cab drivers, many of them immigrants, for part-time workers driving Ubers provides opportunity for some, but it does threaten what has long been one of the traditional ladders to upward mobility.

Then there is the extraordinary geographical concentration of the new tech wave. Previous waves were much more highly dispersed. But not now. Social media and search, the drivers of the current tech boom, are heavily concentrated in the Bay Area, which has a remarkable 40 percent of all jobs in the software publishing and search field. In contrast, previous tech waves created jobs in numerous locales.

This concentration has been two-edged sword, even in its Bay Area heartland. The massive infusions of wealth and new jobs has created enormous tensions in San Francisco and its environs. Many San Franciscans, for example, feel like second class citizens in their own city. Others oppose tax measures in San Francisco that are favorable to tech companies like Twitter. There is now a movement on to reverse course and apply “tech taxes” on these firms, in part to fund affordable housing and homeless services. Further down in the Valley, there is also widespread opposition to plans to increase the density of the largely suburban areas in order to house the tech workforce. Rather than being happy with the tech boom, many in the Bay Area see their quality of life slipping and upwards of a third are now considering a move elsewhere.

Once, we hoped that the technology revolution would create ever more dispersion of wealth and power. This dream has been squashed. Rather than an effusion of start-ups we see the downturn in new businesses. Information Technology, notes The Economist, is now the most heavily concentrated of all large economic sectors, with four firms accounting for close to 50 percent of all revenues. Although the tech boom has created some very good jobs for skilled workers, half of all jobs being created today are in low-wage services like retail and restaurants—at least until they are replaced by iPads and robots.

What kind of world do these disrupters see for us? One vision, from Singularity University, co-founded by Google’s genius technologist Ray Kurzweil, envisions robots running everything; humans, outside the programmers, would become somewhat irrelevant. I saw this mentality for myself at a Wall Street Journal conference on the environment when a prominent venture capitalist did not see any problem with diminishing birthrates among middle-class Americans since the Valley planned to make the hoi polloi redundant.

Once somewhat inept about politics, the oligarchs now know how to press their agenda. Much of the Valley’s elite–venture capitalist John Doerr, Kleiner Perkins, Vinod Khosla, and Google—routinely use the political system to cash in on subsidies, particularly for renewable energy, including such dodgy projects as California’s Ivanpah solar energy plant. Arguably the most visionary of the oligarchs, Elon Musk, has built his business empire largely through subsidies and grants.

Musk also has allegedly skirted labor laws to fill out his expanded car factory in Fremont, with $5-an-hour Eastern European labor; even when blue-collar opportunities do arise, rarely enough, the oligarchs seem ready to fill them with foreigners, either abroad or under dodgy visa schemes. Progressive rhetoric once used to attack oil or agribusiness firms does not seem to work against the tech elite. They can exploit labor laws and engage in monopoly practices with little threat of investigation by progressive Obama regulators.

In the short term, the oligarchs can expect an even more pliable regime under our likely next president, Hillary Clinton. The fundraiser extraordinaire has been raising money from the oligarchs like Musk and companies such as Facebook. Each may vie to supplant Google, the company with the best access to the Obama administration, over the past seven years.

What can we expect from the next tech-dominated administration? We can expect moves, backed also by corporate Republicans, to expand H-1B visas, and increased mandates and subsidies for favored sectors like electric cars and renewable energy. Little will be done to protect our privacy—firms like Facebook are determined to limit restrictions on their profitable “sharing” of personal information. But with regard to efforts to break down encryption systems key to corporate sovereignty, they will defend privacy, as seen in Apple’s resistance to sharing information on terrorist iPhones. Not cooperating against murderers of Americans is something of fashion now among the entire hoodie-wearing programmer culture.

One can certainly make the case that tech firms are upping the national game; certain cab companies have failed by being less efficient and responsive as well as more costly. Not so, however, the decision of the oligarchs–desperate to appease their progressive constituents–to periodically censor and curate information flows, as we have seen at Twitter and Facebook. Much of this has been directed against politically incorrect conservatives, such as the sometimes outrageous gay provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.

There is a rising tide of concern, including from such progressive icons as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, about the extraordinary market, political, and culture power of the tech oligarchy. But so far, the oligarchs have played a brilliant double game. They have bought off the progressives with contributions and by endorsing their social liberal and environmental agenda. As for the establishment right, they are too accustomed to genuflecting at mammon to push back against anyone with a 10-digit net worth. This has left much of the opposition at the extremes of right and left, greatly weakening it.

Yet over time grassroots Americans may lose their childish awe of the tech establishment. They could recognize that, without some restrictions, they are signing away control of their culture, politics, and economic prospects to the empowered “tools.” They might understand that technology itself is no panacea; it is either a tool to be used to benefit society, increase opportunity, and expand human freedom, or it is nothing more than a new means of oppression.

This piece first appeared in The Daily Beast.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Official White House Photo by Pete Souza.

“Old in error,” writes historian Kevin Starr, “California remains an American hope.” Historically, our state has been a beacon to outsiders seeking a main chance: from gold miners and former Confederates to Midwesterners displaced by hardship, Jews seeking opportunity denied elsewhere, African Americans escaping southern apartheid, Asians fleeing communism and societal repression, Mexicans looking for a way out of poverty, counter-culture émigrés looking for a place where creation can overcome repression.

Yet, this notion of California as a land of outsiders is being turned on its head, our state’s dream repackaged — often with the approval of its ruling hegemons — as something more like a medieval city, expelling the poor and the young, while keeping the state’s blessings to the well-educated, well-heeled, and generally older population.

Some boosters of the current order, such Gov. Jerry Brown, contend that the affluent and the educated are still coming, while the less educated and well-heeled, are leaving. They cite this as evidence that the “declinists” are wrong. Yet, the reality remains that California is losing its allure as a place of opportunity for most.

COMING AND GOING

California has been “bleeding” people to other states for more than two decades. Even after the state’s “comeback,” net domestic out-migration since 2010 has exceeded 250,000. Moreover, the latest Internal Revenue Service migration data, for 2013-2014, does not support the view that those who leave are so dominated by the flight of younger and poorer people. Of course, younger people tend to move more than older people, and people seeking better job opportunities are more likely to move than those who have made it. But, according to the IRS, nearly 60,000 more Californians left the state than moved in between 2013 and 2014. In each of the seven income categories and each of the five age categories, the IRS found California lost net domestic migrants.

Nor, viewed over the long term, is California getting “smarter” than its rivals. Since 2000, California’s cache of 25- to 34-year-olds with college, postgraduate and professional degrees grew by 36 percent, below the national average of 42 percent, and Texas’ 47 percent. If we look at the metropolitan regions, the growth of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees since 2000 has been more than 1.5 to nearly 3 times as fast in Houston and Austin as in Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. Even New York, with its high costs, is doing better.

In fact, the only large California metropolitan area which has seen anything like Texas growth has been the most unlikely, the Inland Empire. The coastal areas, so alluring to the media and venture capitalists, are losing out in terms of growing their educated workforces, most likely a product of high housing prices and, outside of the Bay Area, weak high-wage job growth.

The location of migrants tells us something about where the allure of California remains the strongest, and where it has been supplanted. Almost all of the leading states sending net migrants here are also high-tax, high-regulation places that have been losing domestic migrants for years — New York, Illinois, Michigan and New Jersey. In contrast, the net outflow has been largely to lower-cost states, notably Texas, as well as neighboring Western states, all of which have lower housing prices.

And, finally, there is the issue of age. Historically, California has been a youth magnet, but that appeal is fading. In 2014, according to the IRS data, more than two-thirds of the net domestic out-migrants were reported on returns filed by persons aged from 35 to 64. These are the people who are most likely to be in the workforce and be parents.

CLASS AND ETHNIC PATTERNS

Upward mobility has long been a signature of California society. Yet, 22 of the state’s large metro areas have seen a decline in their middle class, according to a recent Pew Research Center study. Los Angeles, in particular, has suffered among the largest hollowing out of the middle-income population in the country. In places like the Bay Area, there’s a growing upper class, while in less glamorous places like Sacramento, it’s the low end that is expanding at the expense of the middle echelons.

The economy, too, has been tending toward ever more bifurcation, with some growth in tech and business services, largely in the Bay Area. Elsewhere, the overwhelming majority of jobs created since 2007 have come from lower-paying professions, such as health and education and hospitality, or, recently, from real estate-related activities. Overall, traditional, higher-paying, blue-collar jobs – such as construction and durable goods manufacturing – have continued to lose ground. Most California metropolitan areas, most notably Los Angeles, lag most key national competitors — including Texas metro areas, Phoenix, Nashville, Tenn., Charlotte, N.C., and Orlando, Fla. — in higher-paid new jobs in business services and finance.

But the biggest losers of egalitarian aspirations have been the constituencies most loudly embraced by the state’s progressive establishment: black and brown Californians. Nowhere is this disparity greater than in home ownership, the signature measure of upward mobility and entrance into the middle class. Overall, Latino homeownership in California is 41.9 percent; nationally, it’s 45 percent, and in Texas it’s 55 percent. Similarly, among African Americans, homeownership is down to 34 percent in California, compared to 41 percent nationally and 40.8 percent in Texas. In Los Angeles, which has the lowest overall homeownership percentage among the nation’s largest metro areas, only 37 percent of Hispanics own their own homes, compared to 50 percent in Dallas-Fort Worth.

CALIFORNIA’S ROAD FORWARD

One popular progressive theory for how to address the economy lies in trying to emulate places like Massachusetts, a state whose per-capita income ranks among the highest in the country. Yet, this approach fails to confront the huge demographic differences between the states.

Let’s start with ethnicity. Eighty percent of Massachusetts’ population is comprised of non-Hispanic whites or Asians, who traditionally have higher incomes, while in California whites and Asians constitute only 52 percent. Some 80 percent of the Boston metropolitan area is non-Hispanic white or Asian, compared to only 46 percent the population in the Los Angeles-Orange County area, and 40 percent in the Inland Empire. California has a poverty rate, adjusted for housing costs, of 23.4 percent, while Massachusetts, with its lower share of more heavily disadvantaged minority populations, registers just 13.8 percent.

California could only resemble Massachusetts if it successfully unloaded much of its disadvantaged minority and working-class population. Although some might celebrate the movement of poorer people out of the state, our poverty rate is unlikely to decrease, since historically disadvantaged ethnicities (African Americans and Hispanics) account for 58 percent of the under-18 population in California, and only 25 percent in Massachusetts.

Simply put, California faces a gargantuan challenge of generating a better standard of living for a huge proportion of its population. To be sure, both the San Francisco and San Jose metropolitan areas can thrive, like Massachusetts, in a highly education-driven economy. But states like California, Texas and Florida are too diverse, in class and race, to follow the “Massachusetts model.” We need good blue-collar and white-collar, middle-income jobs to keep a more diverse, and somewhat less well-educated, population adequately housed and fed.

This should be the primary concern of our state. But the governor and legislators seem more interested today in re-engineering our way of life than improving outcomes. True, if you drive up housing and energy prices, some of the poor will leave, but so, too, will young people, the future middle class. Though our largest coastal metropolitan counties — Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo and San Francisco — have long been younger than the rest of country, soon they will be more gray than the nation.

The demographic future of California seems increasingly at odds with the broad “dream” that Starr and others evoke so powerfully. We are headed ever more toward a state of divided realities, of poorer, downwardly mobile people, largely in the interior and in inner-city Los Angeles or Oakland, and a rapidly aging, wealthier, whiter enclave hugging the coast. For those with the right education, inheritance and a large enough salary, the California dream still shines bright, but for the majority it seems like a dying light.

This piece first appeared in the Los Angeles Daily News.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international pubilc policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Photograph: Great Seal of the State of California by Zscout370 at en.wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0],from Wikimedia Commons

I live on the Upper West Side in New York and love it. But when Paul Krugman wrote a blog post using the UWS an example of what’s right in America – “If you want to feel good about the state of America, you could do a lot worse than what I did this morning: take a run in Riverside Park” –  I had to respond.  Not only is the UWS obviously unrepresentative of America, but many people see its prosperity as purchased at least in part at their expense.

My piece “Paul Krugman’s Bubble” is now online at City Journal:

Most Americans have never heard of gorgeous Riverside Park. In fact, they may have only a vague idea about the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the neighborhood where Riverside Park is located. But they understand that life on the Upper West Side—and places like it—is fabulous for the people who live there. Such places have boomed thanks to changes in the economy, but also from deliberate government policies designed to make them prosper. Wall Street, unlike Main Street, got bailed out during the financial crash. Most Americans may not be able to tell you what TARP stands for, or what quantitative easing is, but they have a good understanding of who profited the most from them—and that such people often take morning jogs in places like Riverside Park.

Click through to read the whole thing.

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and an economic development columnist for Governing magazine. He focuses on ways to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse twenty-first century. During Renn’s 15-year career in management and technology consulting, he was a partner at Accenture and held several technology strategy roles and directed multimillion-dollar global technology implementations. He has contributed to The Guardian, Forbes.com, and numerous other publications. Renn holds a B.S. from Indiana University, where he coauthored an early social-networking platform in 1991.

The Upper West Side of New York – Image via City Journal

From the earliest days of the Republic, banking and finance has largely been the purview of what one historian calls the “Yankee Empire.” Based largely in New York and Boston, later on financial centers grew along the main route of Yankee migration to Chicago and San Francisco.

Yet, if you look at where financial jobs are now headed, perhaps it’s time, as the Dallas Morning News cheekily suggested recently, to substitute Y’all Street for Wall Street. Finance, increasingly conducted electronically, is no longer tethered to its traditional centers. Large global financial companies like UBS, Deutsche Bank , Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are all committed to relocating operations to less expensive locations.

In the U.S., this has benefited the South the most. This year’s list of the metro areas that are increasing employment in financial services at the fastest rate is led by first-place Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro-Franklin, Tenn., No. 2 Dallas-Plano-Irving, Texas, No. 4 Austin-Round Rock, Texas, and No. 5 Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia N.C.-S.C.

Financial service employment is important, particularly since the recovery from the 2008 financial meltdown. The industry is second in the U.S. only to the professional and business services sector in terms of the number of people it employs in high-paying jobs (average salary: $62,860), and its recent growth has been spread across the country. Of the 70 large metro areas we studied, only three have lost financial jobs since 2010.

Methodology

To generate our ranking, we looked at employment growth in the 366 metropolitan statistical areas for which BLS has complete data going back to 2005, weighting growth over the short-, medium- and long-term in that span, and factoring in momentum — whether growth is slowing or accelerating. (For a detailed description of our methodology, click here.)

The South Rises Again

The shift to the South seems to be based on several factors: lower costs (including for housing), less regulation and expanding markets, driven by rapid population growth. As population has shifted to the South, most notably low-tax states like Tennessee and Texas, it has clearly increased local demand for financial services. But there’s also another factor: the migration of financial jobs from traditional centers such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Our top emerging financial superstar, Nashville, has all these characteristics.

Since 2010, the area’s financial workforce has expanded 24.5 percent to 60,900. Population growth and in-migration rates have been spectacular.

Between 2010 and 2014, in-migration accounted for 65.4 percent of local population growth, the fifth highest proportion among the nation’s top 25 metro areas that added more than 100,000 people, while the overall population soared 10 percent.  Since the recession ended in 2009, employment has grown 21 percent while per capita income has risen 4 percent. Financial sector growth has come from firms with U.S. headquarters in the New York area, such as Switzerland-based UBS, as well as from locally based financial firms, like the investment bank Avondale Partners.

But the biggest raw job gains, as we also found in professional and business services, are in No. 2 Dallas-Plano-Irving, where financial employment has expanded 23.2 percent since 2010 to 226,100 jobs, making the metro area the third-biggest financial services hub in the nation behind New York and Chicago. If the adjacent Ft. Worth area is added in, the region boasts a total of 282,000 financial job, behind only New York. Unlike Houston, slowed by the oil industry downturn, Dallas is on a super-sized roll.

The Big D’s drive to become “y’all street” also stems from the recipe of large-scale population growth, low taxes, affordable housing and business friendliness. Large corporate relocations, such as Toyota from California, creates new demand both from business and consumers.

To be sure, a New Yorker could scoff at the idea of Dallas replacing Manhattan as a financial center as something akin to the old Texas insult: all hat and no cattle. Yet it might behoove uppity Gothamites to pay more attention to the big Texas metroplex. The area’s dispersed financial institutions may not look like those associated with Manhattan, but they are growing more quickly, and in a place where middle managers can thrive on modest salaries. Then there’s the advantages of its central location, one of the things that led Comerica to move its headquarters to Dallas in 2007. More recently, State Farm and Liberty Mutual have opened large operations in the northern suburbs.

But it’s not just Texas and Tennessee that are dominating the dispersion of financial services jobs. Before the recession, No. 5 Charlotte, N.C., had risen to become the second-largest financial center in the country, home to Bank of America and Wachovia. Wachovia fell hard in the financial crisis, and was swallowed by Wells Fargo, but BofA soldiers on, and the area clearly has recovered from the recession doldrums. Since 2010, the metro area’s financial workforce has grown 14.2 percent to 86,100 jobs, with 5 percent growth last year alone.

The Rise Of The Mormon Belt?

Outside the south, the other big growth area for financial services lies in the Intermountain West, the vast region between California’s Sierras and the Rockies. Two metro areas stand out in terms of financial growth: No. 3 Salt Lake City area and No. 6 Phoenix. Like the Texas cities, these metro areas offer middle managers a huge housing advantage; home prices, adjusted for incomes, are roughly half those in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Salt Lake City’s financial services job count has grown 19.9 percent since 2010 to 55,200 jobs, with 6.2 percent growth last year alone. The Utah capital has gained particular renown as Goldman Sachs’fourth-largest global hub, and is slated to keep growing. Particularly attractive for Goldman is the language skills of returning Mormon missionaries.

Rapid financial growth is now common across the “Mormon belt” that stretches from Arizona to Idaho. Among mid-sized metro areas (those with less than 450,000 nonfarm jobs),  Boise ranks second for financial services job growth, followed byProvo-Orem, Utah, and No. 5 Clearfield-Ogden. With young and well-educated workforce, and relatively low (particularly compared to California) housing prices, these areas are creating a whole new archipelago of financial centers.

At the southern end of the Mormon belt sits Phoenix. Like the southern financial boom towns, the Valley of the Sun is booming both demographically and in terms of jobs; financial positions are up 19.7 percent since 2010.

Much of this follows the movement of people from other parts of the country, notably California and the Midwest. Financial companies, too, are migrating south such as Chicago-based Northern Trust, which moved 1,000 jobs last year to Tempe, a close in Phoenix suburb. Growth in financial services has helped bring some life back to the long torpid office market, attracting new investors.

The Big Boys

Despite the growth in the top cities on our list, the central position of New York remains unassailable. After hard times amid the financial crisis, employment has risen a modest 6.3 percent since 2010 to 461,500, over 200,000 more than second-place Chicago, and salaries are on the rise again.

What has changed is where the challenges may come from. Its onetime main rivals, 56th place Chicago-Naperville- Arlington Heights and Los Angeles (57th) are not even keeping pace, and seem destined to fall even further behind. Similarly,  other likely financial rivals, like No. 21 San Francisco-Redwood City-South San Francisco, No. 39 Boston-Cambridge-Newton or No. 49 Seattle-Bellevue-Everett aren’t growing fast enough to mount a major challenge.

If New York’s supremacy is to be challenged, it will instead likely be from the lower-cost places that dominate our list in the South and Intermountain West. With the exception of Dallas, no single one of these metro areas could conceivably grow to be big enough to threaten Gotham’s leadership, but over time they could in aggregate weaken its predominance, spreading financial power to what are largely relatively youthful financial centers.

This piece originally appeared in Forbes.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Michael Shires, Ph.D. is a professor at Pepperdine University School of Public Policy.

Will a unified Europe survive Britain’s vote on Brexit? The referendum of last June pointed the country out of the European Union. Will France or Italy follow suit? If so, it could doom the structure that began in the 1950s as a customs union, if not an uneasy economic alliance to keep Germany from rearming and dominating central Europe. And will a consequence of Brexit be the re-emergence of Russia as the dominant power in Eastern Europe? Or will the European Union last long enough to bring prosperity to the forgotten countries of Eastern Europe?

I thought about these questions when I recently boarded a night train in Zurich. Switzerland has never been a member of the European Union, but it coexists with the EU through a series of bilateral agreements, similar to those that Britain will now seek. I was heading east on a series of sleepers that took me through Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, and Bulgaria, precisely those countries that a unified Europe had aimed to lift into prosperity.

I expected to find an absence of trade barriers, and see lands benefiting from the common currency, the euro, which is used by nineteen of the twenty-eight EU members. Instead, I felt as thought I was descending into a Brave Old World, that of a Europe with guarded borders and separate currencies, a land best imagined as lying on the far side of an economic Iron Curtain rather than a political one. Here’s the view from the train window:

Austria: Along with its capital city, Vienna, Austria has been an EU winner. Into the 1980s Vienna was a cul-du-sac of the Cold War; the dead end, final stop of Western European laissez-faire economic polices that nestled against the dragon teeth and barbed wire of the Soviet sphere of influence.

After the wall fell, Vienna became a glittering capital of central Europe, the ideal city for both corporate headquarters and long weekends at the opera. Its banks and companies flourished, and much trade with the new countries of the East began and ended in the Austrian capital, which lies on the western edge of the great Hungarian plains.

Without the EU, however, Austria would be at risk of becoming a more dynamic Slovenia.

Slovakia: A stepchild of the Soviet dissolution, Slovakia is the rump state to the east of the Czech Republic, the other half of divided Czechoslovakia. Its capital is in Bratislava, which is something of a Viennese suburb. The rest of the country, surrounded by Poland, Hungary, and Ukraine, is best understood as a heavy machine shop of collectivization, where there is now more demand for imported jeans than for Comecon turbines.

An EU member in the Eurozone — that is, a member that uses the euro as its currency — Slovakia is betting its economic future on the basis of its low-costs and proximity to Austria, which has attracted a number of Western car companies, including Jaguar. A nice hotel room is €45.

Conversely, Western consumers are indifferent to Slovakian products, goods, and services, which has positioned Turkey as one of the country’s leading trade partners.

I spent an evening with a Slovakian who is fixing up his house. His solution wasn’t to order British or French fixtures from within the EU, but to import a container full from Istanbul, complete — so he implied — with Turkish workers to hitch up the low-cost appliances and lighting.

Hungary: In the go-go years of European expansion, Hungary was the France of Eastern Europe, a proud civilization that dates back more than a thousand years. Its capital city, Budapest, is a place of grace and sophistication.

London bankers invested their bonuses in Pest apartment flats, and discount airlines flooded the Buda hills with wandering tourists.

In the soon-to-be-reordered European Union, Hungary could become neither here nor there. Its nationalist, right wing parties (70 percent of the recent election) dream of a Hungarian greatness that was lost at Trianon after World War I and in Transylvania. But the Hungarians have no idea whether its salvation lies in turning east toward Russia, north toward Germany, or west toward a fragmented EU.

Without a lodestone that inspires optimism, Hungary finds it easier to blame its problems on gays, immigrants, Viennese bankers, and the EU, not to mention the protocols of the elders of Zion.

Serbia: My overnight train from Budapest to Belgrade was covered with graffiti, giving it the air of a wayward New York City subway train from the 1970s, although one with couchettes and without break dancers.

NATO bombed Belgrade in spring 1999, in support of Kosovo's independence. Legally, Kosovo is an autonomous region of Serbia, but in practicality it is a NATO protectorate, the love child of Madeline Albright’s and Richard Holbrooke’s air campaign.

Among the casualties of that air war was Serbian enthusiasm for all things American and European. The isolated, rump republic of 11 million Serbs has become an orphanage of disaffected Europeans who remain locked away from Western prosperity with a stillborn economy.

In theory, Serbia, the nearby republics of Macedonia and Montenegro, and perhaps even a new republic in Kosovo were to rise into the middle class through membership in the European Union. In reality, the EU has no more appetite for Serbia’s tottering banks or pig farms than it does for more Greek debentures.

Bulgaria: Sofia, the capital, is 225 miles from Belgrade, the same distance as Boston is from New York City, but my meandering sleeper took twelve hours to make the overnight trip, which included several hours at dawn on the Serbian-Bulgarian border, the site of many Balkan wars.

Carved from the Ottoman Empire at the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, Bulgaria could rightfully claim to be both the last piece on the European chess board and the best barometer of EU efficacy in the twenty-first century. Some polls say it is the most unhappy EU member. As a city, Sofia is a pleasant combination of socialist realism, Balkan impressionism, and a few modern glass towers.

I first visited it in summer 1976, when Bulgaria was hewing the Marxist line with Stalinist devotion. Now, in summer 2016, the oppression comes from a hybrid form of capitalism that mixes Leninist sympathies with mafia business practices. No wonder the EU isn’t in any rush to bring the euro to Bulgaria, although the country is a member of the confederation.

Bulgaria's political dilemma is that its gas is a hostage to fortunes in Russia and Ukraine (where all the pipelines originate), while its subsidies and regulations come from Brussels.

***

Sadly, I doubt the EU will last much longer. Brexit marks the ebb tide of European optimism, and part of the reason the British voted themselves out is a wish to send home Hungarian, Slovak, and Bulgarian immigrants who despair of making a living in their own countries.

Brexit is also a diplomatic move in the increasing cold war between Western Europe and Islam, whose fault lines run precisely through Bosnia, Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Turkey.

When the Brexit vote took place, Europe was in the midst of a terror spree that had Muslim fanatics opening fire on shoppers in a Munich mall and driving a truck through a Nice street fair on Bastille Day. Is it any wonder that Britain, staring at refugees camped out in Calais, would raise the draw bridge?

Brexit is also a victory for Putin’s Russia and its gangster capitalism. Until the invasions of Crimea and Ukraine, Russia felt encircled by NATO in Turkey and by the EU in the Baltic States. Now, however, Europe has the look of what diplomatic histories used to call a “dead letter,” leaving much of Eastern Europe vulnerable to a modern Russian Risorgimento.

In the EU, only Germany is earning any money, and it is only a matter of time before Angela Merkel is voted out of office. A new leader there — appealing to nationalist sentiments — will ask German voters, “Why are you working for 4.5 years, on average, to pay the subsidies that are handed out to lazy Spaniards, Greeks, and Italians?”

As someone who admired the European Union, riding trains from Zurich to Sofia reminded me of the downside of old Europe. I hated changing money in train stations, and being woken up by border guards at forlorn crossings like Dimitrograd (Serbia) or Kalotina (Bulgaria). More disturbing was to see, in Belgrade parks or along rail lines, Syrian refugees living like cattle that is drifting north across an arid plain.

The EU was created to embrace free trade and freedom of movement across a continent of 400 million that, in the past, has failed to compensate for overlapping national claims by adjusting borders.

Brexit is one overt expression of dissatisfaction with Europe. But EU failures can also be seen across countries that have changed little since Bismarck, an early Pan-European, said the Balkans were not "worth the bones" of a single Prussian grenadier.

Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of, among other books Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, and Whistle-Stopping America. His next book, Reading the Rails, is due out in August. He lives in Switzerland.

Flickr photo by sbrrmk: Rhodope Mountains, Bulgaria

Recently I published a piece on my Forbes site that discusses the disparate impact that demographic and social shifts had on larger, older U.S. cities over the second half of the 20th century.  Basically, the smaller American household size, generated by later marriages, rising divorce rates, lower fertility rates and rising life expectancy, among other things, has meant that unless cities were adding housing, they simply weren't growing.  Yeah, I know I'm quoting myself, but here's a sample:

"Most people intuitively understand the economic underpinnings of urban decline, and the economic advantages that have led to their rebound. The loss of manufacturing destroyed the economic base; the spread of globalization and the new economy has created new opportunity in cities. But far less well understood are the far-reaching cultural and social changes that impacted the demographic makeup of cities — and would have caused population loss, even without economic restructuring."

I encourage you to check it out.

I go on to suggest that population loss was inevitable for the most of the largest cities of mid-century America, and point out that today's cities may never reach their previous population peaks.  I put together a cool table that demonstrates this:

However, in putting this piece together I left quite a bit on the table, both in terms of graphics and additional content.  So consider this an addendum to the Forbes piece.

First, I think it's stunning to see a visual that illustrates the differences in a 1950 and 2010 population ceiling for the ten cities examined.  Check these out, shown two cities at a time:

I think it is absolutely stunning to see that cities like Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis could at best (at least right now) attain maybe half of their population in 1950.  And a case could be made that smaller household size may be the most significant factor in their decline.

Three points I was unable to expand on in the Forbes piece.  First, now that the pendulum is swinging back in favor of cities, their influence is ascending faster than their population growth.  Cities are leading discussions now the economy, on infrastructure, on energy, on housing.  For the latter third of the 20th century the suburbs led that discussion.  But today, cities have reclaimed that role.  Their actual size, in terms of population, matters less today than it did 60 years ago.  

Second, the American preference for new over old has nearly as much to do with this shift as shrinking household size.  For nearly 50 years the suburbs (and by extension, the Sun Belt) was new, and that was a main feature of their attraction.  But there's also that saying, "everything old is new again."  Cities are the new thing, and while they're not everyone's cup of tea, they are doing better than at any time in the last 50 years.

Third, it's conceivable that many suburbs and/or Sun Belt cities may find themselves impacted by emerging demographic or social shifts.  Having a huge inventory of single family homes in a world that is asking for multifamily options?  A strong auto-oriented landscape when more people are looking for walkable environments?  

I'm not suggesting that all older cities are ascendant, and the suburbs and Sun Belt are doomed.  But staying ahead of trends may be the lesson all need to heed.

Pete Saunders is a Detroit native who has worked as a public and private sector urban planner in the Chicago area for more than twenty years.  He is also the author of "The Corner Side Yard," an urban planning blog that focuses on the redevelopment and revitalization of Rust Belt cities.

Top photo: Vacant homes in Philadelphia, awaiting their revitalization.  Source: smartgrowthamerica.org

Professor Robert J. Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War is a magisterial volume that will benefit any serious student of economics, demographics or history. I took the opportunity of the 28 hours of sunlight on a round trip from Detroit to Shanghai to read it, which was a productive and delightful way to make the time go faster.

Gordon is the Stanley G. Harris Professor in the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. This review will summarize the basic thesis of the nearly 800 page book, and refers to Gordon's comments on urbanization and transport, which are of particular interest to newgeography.com readers.

The principal value of The Rise and Fall of American Growth, lies in its comprehensive history of the standard of living. Professor Gordon dedicates about 80 percent of the text to this issue, while using the last 20 percent for his prognostications. He uses a passage from Steven Landsberg, the University of Rochester (NY) economist to remind of the substantial and historically recent improvement in the standard of living.

Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing. There were wars, political intrigue, the invention of agriculture—but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of people's lives. Almost everyone lived on the modern equivalent of $400 to $600 a year, just above the subsistence level…. Then—just a couple of hundred years ago—people started getting richer. And richer and richer still.

The bad news, according to Gordon, is that most of the real progress in the standard of living took place between 1870 and the early 20th century --- sparked by groundbreaking advances, such as electricity, the telephone, improved sanitation, and the internal combustion engine. 

Progress, productivity and economic growth have been slower since 1970, according to Gordon, in part because subsequent technological improvements have tended to be incremental rather than transformational. For example, Gordon suggests that: "Leaving aside audio, visual, and computer-related equipment...  the only new piece of household equipment introduced after 1950 was the microwave oven."

Gordon notes that improvements to information technology have not restored the earlier stronger growth rates. He quotes Nobel Prize winning economist, Robert J. Solow, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." Gordon laments the fact that primary and secondary education has made large investments in information technology without any evident improvement in test scores: "Colleges spend vast sums on smart classrooms that require ubiquitous handholding by support staff, without any apparent benefit to educational outcomes."

There are a number of interesting videos on the Internet featuring Gordon. In some he uses an interesting illustration, asking participants what they would rather have the sanitary improvements of the three decades following the Civil War (such as sewers and flush toilets) or the advancements of the Internet and the smart phone? I suspect any choosing information technology over sanitation have not seriously considered what life was like with chamber pots, outhouses, open sewers (if there were sewers at all), water drawn from a remote communal pump and streets covered by horse droppings.

Suburbs  

Gordon has his criticisms of post-World War II suburbanization, but graciously points out their advantages without any of the all too familiar polemic.

The distinction between the city and the suburb can be overdone. Adjectives to describe each exaggerate the differences. Cities can be described as bad (dangerous, polluted, concrete) or good (diverse, dense, stimulating), and so can suburbs (homogeneous, sprawling, and dull vs. safe, healthy, and green).

Gordon recognizes that:  

Artists and intellectuals were disdainful of suburbs from the start. They were repulsed by the portrayal of suburbs as “brainless utopias” in the television sitcoms of the 1950s and 1960s. Much of the negativism reflected class divisions—those leaving the cities for the new suburbs of the 1950s were the former working class who were in the process of becoming middle class, including factory workers, retail store employees, and school teachers."  

Gordon describes the economic advantages of US suburbanization:

The suburban sprawl in the United States compared to that in Europe has advantages in productivity that help to explain why the core western European countries never caught up to the U.S. productivity level and have been falling behind since 1995.

One reason for this is that:

The European land use regulations that contain suburban sprawl and protect inner-city pedestrian districts have substantial costs in reducing economy-wide productivity and real output per capita.

He also cites a factor often missed in comparing the greater suburbanization of the US compared to Europe: "An important contributor to sprawl was arithmetic—the U.S. population more than doubled between 1950 and 2010, whereas population growth in countries such as Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom was less than 20 percent." Even so, European suburban growth has dwarfed that of urban core sectors over the past half century.

He also decries the land use regulations that "create artificial scarcity."

Urban Transport

Gordon says that" "Much of the enthusiastic transition away from urban mass transit to automobiles reflected the inherent flexibility of the internal combustion engine—it could take you directly from your origin point to your destination with no need to walk to a streetcar stop, board a streetcar, often change to another streetcar line (which required more waiting), and then walk to your final destination." To this day, this advantage virtually bars any serious increase in transit's importance in the city. Even a more than doubling of gasoline prices and the largest economic decline since the Great Depression were not enough to attract drivers to transit, with the major metropolitan drive-alone market share rising from 73.2 percent in 2000 to 73.6 percent in 2013.

Gordon quotes automobile historian James J. Flink on the benefits of automobility, such as "an antiseptic city, the end of rural isolation, improved roads, better medical care, consolidated schools, expanded recreational opportunities, the decentralization of business and residential patterns, a suburban real estate boom, and the creation of a standardized middle-class national culture."

Further, he says that "One of the benefits of the automobile ... was the freedom it gave to farmers and small-town residents to escape the monopoly grip of the local merchant and travel to the nearest large town or small city." This appropriately stresses the point that the standard of living is not based rising incomes alone, but also requires keeping the prices of goods and services   low through competitive pressures.

The Future?

The only really controversial part of the book concentrates on the future. Here, Gordon indicates the likelihood that future growth will be more modest. George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen is more optimistic in  a Foreign Affairs review. Yet of his standard of living history, Cowan says, “Gordon’s analysis here is mostly correct, extremely important, and at times brilliant—the book is worth buying and reading for this part alone."

Gordon also suggests policies he thinks would help spur additional growth, such as raising the minimum wage. Harvard economist Edward Glaeser disagrees on the minimum wage, but is less critical than Cowan about Gordon's view of the economic future.

The latest data (2014) shows real median household incomes to be lower than 1998 and economic growth to be glacial. My fear is that history might be on Gordon's side.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international pubilc policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Photo: The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War(http://press.princeton.edu/images/k10544.gif)

Summer is usually a time for light reading, and for the most part, I indulged the usual array of historical novels, science fiction as well as my passion for ancient history. But two compelling books out this year led me to more somber thoughts about the prospects for the decline and devolution of western society.

One, “Submission” by the incendiary French writer Michel Houellebecq, traces the life of a rather dissolute French literature professor as he confronts a rapidly Islamifying France. The main character, Francois, drinks heavily, sleeps with his students and focuses on the writing of the now obscure French writer, J.K. Huysmans. Detached from politics, he watches as his native country divides between Muslims and the traditional French right led by the National Front’s Marine Le Pen.

Ultimately, fear of Le Pen leads the French left into an alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood, handing power over to an attractive, clever Islamist politician. With all teaching posts requiring conversion to Islam, Francois in the end “submits” to Allah. Francois motives for conversion merge opportunism and attraction, including to the notion that, in an Islamic society, high prestige people like himself get to choose not only one wife, but several, including those barely past puberty.

The other declinist novel, “The Family Mandible” by Lionel Shriver, is, if anything more dystopic. The author covers a once illustrious family through the projected dismal decades from 2029 to 2047. Like the Muslim tide that overwhelms Francois’ France, the Brooklyn-based Mandibles are overwhelmed in an increasingly Latino-dominated America; due to their higher birthrate and an essentially “open border” policy, “Lats” as they call them, now dominate the political system. The president, Dante Alvarado, is himself an immigrant from Mexico, due to a constitutional amendment — initially pushed to place Arnold Schwarzenegger in the White House — that allows non-natives to assume the White House.

Collapse is from within

Some critics have lambasted author Shriver as being something of a Fox style right-wing revisionist while others have labeled Houellebecq as an “Islamophobe.”

But these books are far more nuanced than orthodox Muslims or progressives might assume. For one thing, neither book blames the newcomers for the crisis of their respective societies. The collapse, they suggest, is largely self-inflicted.

Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.