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Metropolitan America
The rural to urban exodus is well known. It has driven the growth of the largest urban areas from one million residents as late as 1800 to nearly 40 million today. The United States has risen from less...
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Judenrein Europe
Some people go their whole lives without seeing a ghost; me, I see them all the time.– Detective Bernie Gunther in Phillip Kerr’s Greeks Bearing GiftsLast month the German commissioner for “Jewish Life...
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St. Louis Blues
My latest article is online in City Journal and is a look at the most recent failed attempt to merge St. Louis city and St. Louis county governments in light of the backdrop of civic challenges there....
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Reparations and the Racial Republic
America was conceived with the highest ideals about humanity — “all men are created equal” — but operated also as a racial republic, where rights were delineated by race, leaving only white males with...
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Ranking the Best & Worst Transit Agencies
The nation’s worst-managed transit systems lose 65 cents for every dollar they spend on operating costs, fill only 42 percent of their seats, carry the average urban resident just 40 round trips per...
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The Good Life, Just Beyond
Radical Suburbs: Experimental Living on the Fringes of the American City, by Amanda Kolson Hurley (Belt Publishing, 160 pp., $16.96)If forced to compare an ice cream flavor with suburbia, many would...
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The Stockton Sandwich
I just spent a few days in Stockton, California visiting old family friends. They’re a recently retired Lutheran pastor and his wife who relocated from Southern California and returned to their...
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California Can’t Afford To Be An Economic One-Trick Pony
For the past decade, the soaring stock prices and nosebleed valuations of Silicon Valley’s IPOs and unicorns has been a boon for California, helping create a record budget surplus of almost $22...
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High Performing Midwest Cities Need to Learn How to Attract National Talent
My latest column is online in the Indianapolis Business Journal. Obviously it’s about Indianapolis, but similar arguments apply to basically every other basically well-performing Midwest city. They are...
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Population Density and Resource Abundance: Turning the Malthusian Logic on...
A few months ago prominent naturalist David Attenborough told attendees at the World Economic Forum about humanity’s unsustainable population growth and his certainty that it has to “come to an end”...
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Paris, London Lead European Metropolitan Areas: Latest Data
Eurostat, the statistical agency of the European Union (EU) indicates that Paris is the largest metropolitan area in the EU, Switzerland and Norway, with 12.8 million residents, according to the latest...
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Relief for the Weary: New Premium Bus Lines vie for Short-Hop Flyers
During a summer vacation season marked by long security lines and record-setting air traffic, it is easy to overlook a trend in U.S. ground travel that is winning converts from those who would...
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Why Can’t It Be Like That Now? Remembering What We Had and Could Have Again
‘But why can’t work be like that now?’ my colleague Julia asked when I told her about my research into the former Guinness brewery at Park Road in West London. After working on the project for the best...
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The Dangerous Rise Of The Woke Corporation
It would be comforting if Nike’s decision to ditch its “Betsy Ross” flag sneakers at the behest of former NFL quarterback and social justice warrior Colin Kaepernick was exceptional, but, sadly, it is...
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The Great Conservative Suicide Pact
Republicans have been celebrating their good fortune as Democrats vying for the presidential nomination propose free medical care for undocumented people and the elimination of private health...
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Age of Amnesia
We live, as the Indian essayist Saeed Akhter Mirza has put it, in “an age of amnesia.” Across the world, most notably in the West, we are discarding the knowledge and insights passed down over...
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In Defense of Houses
A critical component in the rise of market-oriented democracy in the modern era has been the dispersion of property ownership among middle-income households—not just in the United States but also in...
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LSE Economist Paul Cheshire on Urban Containment and Housing Affordability
Paul Cheshire, Professor Emeritus of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics, has distinguished himself as one of the world’s pre-eminent housing economists. This article discusses his...
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Population Shifting in the Midwest
My latest post is online at City Journal. I actually wrote it prior to the Indy op-ed I just put up, but for scheduling reasons they came out in the reverse order. This contains some of the background...
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The Tech Oligarchs Are Going to Destroy Democracy — Unless We Stop Them
When there is a general change in conditions, it is as if the entire creation had changed, and the whole world altered. —Ibn Khaldun, 14th-century Arab historian Congressional posturing about tech...
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