"We may remain, as we are now, nominally democratic, but be ruled by a technocratic class empowered by greater powers of surveillance than those enjoyed by even the noisiest of dictatorships.”
Those words were written by Joel Kotkin in a recently published essay on democracy’s demise. Donald Trump is not the villain of the piece, as most pundits want us to believe, nor other populists outside the United States. Rather, Kotkin argues that the withering of democratic process and institutions reflects the deeper transformation of American and European societies: the emergence of a ruling technocracy; the use of the pandemic and the environmental crisis to constrain individual rights; the new concentration of power in governments, and the growing distance between the governing and the governed. All of it is made worse by the mind-boggling concentration of economic wealth, which is as much an issue in China as it is in the United States.
Kotkin’s analysis deserves our attention. What do you think—not about Trump, but about democracy? Who can do what to bend the arc away from the dystopian end game that he and others describe?
The Tällberg Foundation, launched in 1981, exists to explore the issues that are challenging —and changing— our societies. Today, those challenges are profound: the world that we have known since the mid 20th century, which produced unprecedented peace as well as human advance, is changing at a pace and in directions that threaten to evolve towards Orwellian dystopia.
As inflation continues to soar in America, few things have become more precious than hard assets like property. And with the stock market as unsteady as our political leadership, big dollars from Wall Street are pouring into real estate, snapping up both multi-family and single-family homes.
Rents are on a wild binge, up near 20% in the past year, while home prices have hit a record high. As people can no longer afford to buy homes, they have been forced into the rental market, driving up prices towards absurd levels in fashionable cities like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Like a pestilence of its own, high rents are spreading to the realm of the “wannabe” places where the “creative class” types are moving to: cities like Miami, Austin, Nashville, and Las Vegas as well as more prosaic places such as Tampa and Memphis.
When: March 8, 2022 at 12PM (CT) Where: Join on Zoom
The seeming success of compact cities and the supposed dangers of sprawl to the climate have led to pushback against sprawling, car-dominated cities. Join us as we discuss the environmental case for suburbia.
San Francisco Examiner reporter Jeff Elder describes efforts to coordinate hybrid work schedules that involve working part time at home and part time in the office (“Tech industry’s ‘three-day work week’ may change the future of the office forever”). Elder notes that tech workers, in the Bay Area seem to be gravitating toward working at home on Mondays and Fridays, and working in the office Tuesday through Friday.
Jeff Bellisario, executive director of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute told the Examiner. “There’s going to have to be some experimentation. We’re going to end up somewhere around three days a week in the office. As we talk to companies, they increasingly say around three days in the office is what they want from employees.”
According to Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University, “In 2022, employees will increasingly be required to come in on set days, with the payoff of working from home on the other days.”
A Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday work in the office week might offer employees an organized period to maximize collaboration, as opposed to less formalized arrangements in which employee attendance would be more random.
Such an arrangement would seem to have potential to maximize Tech employee productivity in the Bay Area, the world’s largest Gig labor market.
This week’s massive vote against three of San Francisco’s most woke school board members represents a triumphant outbreak of reason in one of the most insanely progressive places on the planet. But it is also, far more consequently, a rejection — in this case by over 70% of voters — of radical Left politics that is building up across the country.
To be fair, the recalled board members were defeated not just for extreme politics, but for their reluctance to open schools during the pandemic. Instead of re-opening schools during the pandemic, they advanced a plan to rename 44 public schools named after figures such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Dianne Feinstein and Abraham Lincoln, with one board member even claiming that “black lives didn’t matter” to the president who freed America’s slaves.
A new report by Joel Kotkin, Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Marshall Toplansky, Clinical Assistant Professor of Management Science at Chapman University lays out the challenges faced by middle and working-class Californians. The January 21 presentation of the report was followed by an all-star panel led by Jeff Ball, new CEO of the Orange County Business Council. Click here to learn more and download a copy of the report.
Governor Mike DeWine announced today (January 21, 2022) that Intel will build two semi-conductor plants in suburban Licking County, in the Columbus metropolitan area. The plants will be located in New Albany’s International Business Park, which already has Google, Amazon and Facebook as tenants. The plants are to be opened by 2025.
The plant is expected to employ 3,000 initially, at an average wage of $135,000, while secondarily generating 20,000 additional jobs statewide.
Representative Troy Balderson, who represents the plant location in the US Congress said “We are allowing ourselves to be held hostage by the imbalance of foreign chip production. It’s past time to bolster this production here at home.”
Already, the Columbus metropolitan area had catapulted to leadership as a domestic migration destination, adding 53,000 net domestic migrants between 2010 and 2020, the most of any Midwestern metropolitan area.
On this episode of Feudal Future, hosts Marshall Toplansky and Joel Kotkin are joined by American entrepreneur, Rony Abovitz, and Charlie Fink, AR/VR consultant and professor of Chapman University.
This show discusses the metaverse and what the future holds in a digital world.
Joel Kotkin is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, Executive Director of the Urban Reform Institute, and an internationally-recognized authority on global, economic, political and social trends. His most recent book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism is now available for order.
Marshall Toplansky is a widely published and award-winning marketing professional and successful entrepreneur. He co-founded KPMG’s data & analytics center of excellence and now teaches and consults corporations on their analytics strategies.
This show is presented by the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, which focuses on research and analysis of global, national and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time.
About the guests:
Rony Abovitz is an American entrepreneur. Abovitz founded MAKO Surgical Corp., a company manufacturing surgical robotic arm assistance platforms, in 2004 and recently acquired by Stryker for $1.65 billion. Abovitz is the founder of the Mixed reality/Augmented Reality (MR/AR) company Magic Leap and served as its CEO from its founding in 2010.
Charlie Fink is a Forbes Columnist, and the Author of Remote Collaboration & Virtual Conferences (2020), Convergence (2019) and Charlie Fink's Metaverse (2017). In the early 90s, Fink ran VR pioneer Virtual World Entertainment. Previously, he was a VP at Disney, SVP at AOL, and President of AG & Blue Mountain. He teaches XR at Chapman University in Orange, CA.
Join us for a webinar on January 21st, hosted by Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky to learn how we can restore the California Dream for middle and working class Californians. Following the presentation of the report, there will be an all-star panel led by Jeff Ball, new CEO of the Orange County Business Council.
Panel participants include Raul Anaya, Joe Hensley, and Karla Del Rio.
The Vancouver Sun reports on the dimensions of the urban to suburban, exurban and even rural exodus fueled by the pandemic. The first dimension is households taking advantage of the opportunity to regularly work remotely, which permits fewer physical commutes. This makes it practical for households to move to more space, both in housing and yards, such as to exurban Chilliwack, in the eastern Fraser Valley, where housing is severely unaffordable but much less unaffordable than in Vancouver, which rated as the second least affordable among 92 major markets in nine nations in Demographia International Housing Affordability 2021 (with a median multiple of 13.0 --- median house price 13 times the median household income.
The article also describes household movement of people from exurbs to even farther away, not only small metro areas, such as Kelowna and Kamloops but beyond to small towns like Quesnel and rural areas. Kamloops is 220 miles from downtown Vancouver (about 190 miles from the edge of the urban area, also called the population centre) and Quesnel is nearly 400 miles. Remote workers choosing locations such as these are likely to be able to work virtually all the time from home.
Infinite Suburbia is the culmination of the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism's yearlong study of the future of suburban development. Find out more.
Authored by Aaron Renn, The Urban State of Mind: Meditations on the City is the first Urbanophile e-book, featuring provocative essays on the key issues facing our cities, including innovation, talent attraction and brain drain, global soft power, sustainability, economic development, and localism.
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