Hope you emerged from this crazy winter storm + power/water outage week relatively unscathed. I certainly learned the value of stockpiling water and draining water pipes (esp. with a power outage), and ERCOT learned that it's a bad idea to cut off power to natural gas pumps across the state during a winter storm. I hope they spend a bit of time doing analysis before jumping to expensive solutions like full winterization of all facilities. It's possible that if they had simply mapped natural gas pumps and compressors across the state and treated them as critical non-blackout facilities like hospitals, we might have gotten away with short-duration rolling blackouts that would have been far more manageable (like 2011).
"Solutions will have to be nuanced and incremental. Winterizing all power plants would be unnecessarily expensive, and so would a complete overhaul of Texas' market design, which is partly responsible for consistently low power prices compared with the rest of the country."
And an excellent idea: "One option could be rewarding liquefied natural-gas processing facilities in Texas to both curtail electricity usage and to redirect the feedstock natural gas for electricity rather than for exports."
"to equal the 80 Bcf/d of gas delivered during cold snaps, the U.S. would need an electric grid as large as all existing generation in the country, which is currently about 1.2 terawatts."
Unpopular observation: gas-powered cars, trucks, and SUVs were a critical source of resilience during this never-ending mass power-outage disaster by providing heat and recharging. If we all had electric vehicles, this disaster would have been epically worse. A hard truth.
Tory Gattis is a Founding Senior Fellow with the Center for Opportunity Urbanism and co-authored the original study with noted urbanist Joel Kotkin and others, creating a city philosophy around upward social mobility for all citizens as an alternative to the popular smart growth, new urbanism, and creative class movements. He is also an editor of the Houston Strategies blog.
Housing Industry Organization Chief Economist Tim Reardon has predicted that detached housing production will set an all time record in 2021 in Australia. The demographic shifts resulting from the Covid-19 Pandemic are the root cause. According to Reardon: ““Regional locations in many states are showing a larger increase in activity than capital cities as the population moves away from inner city living.” This mirrors a trend reported in other nations.
On today's episode of Feudal Future hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky are joined by Charles Blain, Brian Calle, and Cullum Clark to discuss the future of the GOP.
Charles Blain is the president of Urban Reform Institute. Urban Reform Institute (URI, formerly Center for Opportunity Urbanism) is a stand-alone think tank, based in Houston.
Brian Calle is the CEO and publisher of LA weekly. Since 1978, LA Weekly has been decoding Los Angeles for its readers, infiltrating its subcultures, observing and analyzing its shifting rhythms, digging up its unreported stories and confronting the city's political leaders.
Dr. J.H. Cullum Clark is the Director of the Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative where he is responsible for managing various aspects of the new partnership between the Department of Economics and the Bush Institute and leads the Initiative's work on domestic economic policy and economic growth.
[3:42] Joel compares the GOP to France’s right, saying how the GOP is on its way to becoming a voiceless, minority party.
[6:17] Charles dissects the party, explaining how the party has no unifying voice, member accountability, or adherence to principles.
[26:00] Joel speaks about the GOP's racial insensitivity, lack of positive programming, and opposition of big tech.
[29:48] The episode ends with the hosts and speaker’s optimism on rational bipartisan debates in both the Senate and the House.
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.
A Thursday morning (February 11, 2021) announcement from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (USDOT) shows that US air passenger volumes have fallen behind China for the first time. This is also the first time that the US has not been the world leader, based on available data.
From January through November, US airlines carried 354 million domestic passengers, according to data from the United States Department of Transportation Bureau of Transportation Statistics. By comparison, the China domestic airline volume was 363 million domestic passengers, based on data from the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), reported through CEIC Data.
China had achieved a virtual tie with the United States in the October data, when both nations reached a 2020 volume of 324 million, with the US retaining a small lead.
Obviously, these are not normal times, due to the COVID pandemic, which has been far more destructive to US air volumes than those of China. By comparison, in the pre-COVID year of 2019, US air passenger volume was 927 million. China, which has occupied second place internationally for 15 years, carried 587 million passengers, 37% below that of the United States.
Before the pandemic, China had assumed world leadership in high speed rail, having opened 37,900 kilometers (23,500 miles) in just the last 12 years. This is about two-thirds of all the world’s high speed rail mileage, and China carries two-thirds of the passengers.
As normality returns, it seems likely that the United States will resume its air passenger volume.
If one were to explore the most blessed places on earth, California, my home for a half century, would surely be up there. The state, with its salubrious climate, spectacular scenery, vast natural resources, and entrepreneurial heritage is home to the world’s fifth-largest economy and its still-dominant technological centre. It is also — as some progressives see it — the incubator of “a capitalism we can believe in”.
Perhaps channelling such hyperbole, President Biden recently suggested that he wants to “make America California again”. Yet before leaping on this particular train, he should consider whether the California model may be better seen as a cautionary tale than a roadmap to a better future in the digital age.
The on-the-ground reality — as opposed to that portrayed in the media or popular culture — is more Dickensian than utopian. Rather than the state where dreams are made, in reality California increasingly presents the prototype of a new feudalism fused oddly with a supposedly progressive model in which inequality is growing, not falling.
California now suffers the highest cost-adjusted poverty rate in the country, and the widest gap between middle and upper-middle income earners. It also has one of the nation’s highest Gini ratios, which measures the inequality of wealth distribution from the richest to poorest residents — and the disparity is growing. Incredibly, California’s level of inequality is greater than that of neighboring Mexico, and closer to Central American countries like Guatemala and Honduras than developed nations like Canada and Norway.
It is true that California’s GDP per capita is far higher than these Central American countries, but the state has slowly morphed into a low wage economy. Over the past decade, 80% of the state’s jobs have paid under the median wage — half of which are paid less than $40,000 — and most are in poorly paid personal services or hospitality jobs. Even at some of the state’s most prestigious companies like Google, many lower (and even mid-level) workers live in mobile home parks. Others sleep in their cars.
The state’s dependence on low-wage service workers has been critical in the pandemic, but it now suffers among the highest unemployment rates in the nation, outdone only by tourism-dominated states like Hawaii, Nevada and New Jersey. Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood, now has the highest unemployment rate of the nation’s top ten metropolitan areas, higher even than New York.
But that hasn’t stopped California from portraying itself as a progressive’s paradise, publicly advocating racial and social justice. The state just passed a Racial Justice Act to monitor law enforcement, endorsing reparations (although California was never a slave state) and is working to address “systemic” racism in its classrooms. This “woke” agenda was taken to a new extreme this week when the San Francisco School Board decided to rename 44 schools because they were named after people connected to racism or slavery. The district’s Arts Department, originally known as “VAPA”, also decided to re-brand because “acronyms are a symptom of white supremacy culture”.
Bruce Springsteen’s name may be on the marquee of the Jeep Super Bowl ad featuring The Boss, which is titled “The Middle.” But Lebanon, Kansas -- the real middle -- is the star.
And while the message of the rock-and-roll icon from New Jersey is an appeal for national healing, using a chapel in the geographic center of the nation as a backdrop, out here in Flyover Country we may experience the two-minute commercial differently than other Americans. That’s not just because many in the heartland dislike The Boss’s politics.
It’s really because we know that if the true healing of America ever is going to begin, on a universally edifying basis, it’s going to begin in The Middle. Our middle.
Springsteen knew that. So did Olivier Francois, the chief marketing officer for Jeep and the other brands owned by what used to be Fiat Chrysler and now part of Stellantis. Springsteen has been legendarily shy about making commercial endorsements, but Francois finally was able to draw him into a Big Game ad with an invitation to apply some salve to the national wound.
And the way that Francois – a Frenchman who worked for an Italian company but a very shrewd reader of American moods and culture – drew in The Boss was with a script for an ad that focused on the U.S. Center Chapel in the middle.
“It’s no secret,” Springsteen begins the spot. “The middle has been a hard place to get to lately, between red and blue, between servant and citizen, between our freedom and our fear,” The Boss intones, in a script he helped pen himself, over a new musical score he also assisted in writing.
“Now, fear has never been the best of who we are. And as for freedom, it’s not just the property of the fortunate few; it belongs to us all. Whoever you are, wherever you’re from. It’s what connects us. We need that connection. We need the middle. We just have to remember the very soil we stand on is common ground.”
Springsteen finishes by urging Americans to come together to “cross this divide,” before Jeep ends the ad by putting on screen, “The ReUnited States of America.” A star on a U.S. map where Lebanon is located sits between “ReUnited” and “States.”
The images carrying the narrative are a virtual paean to the raw simplicity of the Great Plains in the winter, to its rolling hills, rolling stock on the rails, rugged rock outcroppings, icy sunsets and slush-strewn city streets.
There’s even a baldly spiritual statement encompassed by the cross on top of the chapel, and the three crosses stuck in a field outside – all of which are embraced by the ad. Springsteen sits in the tiny chapel and lights a votive candle toward the end.
Dale Buss is founder and executive director of The Flyover Coalition, a not-for-profit organization aimed at helping revitalize and promote the economy, companies and people of the region between the Appalachians and Rockies, the Gulf Coast and the Great Lakes. He is a long-time author, journalist, and magazine and newspaper editor, and contributor to Chief Executive, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and many other publications. Buss is a Wisconsin native who lives in Michigan and has also lived in Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida.
This year, the Big Game is about Flyover Country more than ever. Two of our teams are battling it out. They’re contesting on one of our fields. And their strivings on the gridiron will be accompanied by an ample chorus of TV and digital advertisements by companies that hail from the heartland, ranging from automakers to insurers to food processors to mortgage brokers.
There’s no telling the outcome of Super Bowl LV in a potentially great, quarterback-led match-up in Raymond James Stadium in Tampa between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers of Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes’s Kansas City Chiefs, the reigning champions. But you can be certain that advertisers based in the middle of America will be providing plenty of great commercial moments to the rest of the country and the world.
Dale Buss is founder and executive director of The Flyover Coalition, a not-for-profit organization aimed at helping revitalize and promote the economy, companies and people of the region between the Appalachians and Rockies, the Gulf Coast and the Great Lakes. He is a long-time author, journalist, and magazine and newspaper editor, and contributor to Chief Executive, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and many other publications. Buss is a Wisconsin native who lives in Michigan and has also lived in Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida.
On this episode of Feudal Future, hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky are joined by Rev. John L. McCullough, President Emeritus of Church World Service. CWS is a global ecumenical organization specializing in Development and Humanitarian Assistance, Immigration and Refugee Services, Justice and Human Rights. Headquartered in NYC with primary offices in: Bangkok, Belgrade, Buenos Aires, Elkhart (IN), Hanoi, Islamabad, Jakarta, Miami, Nairobi, Phnom Phen, Vientiane, Washington, D.C. CWS is also branded as CROP Hunger Walks, and is a major sponsor of the Ecumenical Advocacy Days. Mission Statement: Church World Service works with partners to eradicate hunger and poverty and to promote peace and justice around the world.
[4:00] Marshall opens up the discussion asking Rev. John what the impact of covid has had on faith-based organizations
[6:45] Joel and Rev. John discuss how developing countries respond to crises without relying on the government
[22:15] Marshall and Rev. John dive into the effect COVID is having on refugees and resettlement across the world
[32:00] Rev. John ends the episode with how religion will reinvent itself through this pandemic
Chapman University’s Vice President of Research Thomas Piechota hosted this month's event, moderated by Dean Thomas Turk of the Argyros School of Business and Economics. Joel Kotkin, Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Marshall Toplansky, Clinical Assistant Professor of Management Science at Chapman University joined the discussion.
If you missed the event, a video of the virtual town hall is below:
On this episode of Feudal Future, hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky are joined by Michael Lind. Michael Lind is a professor of practice at the LBJ School. A graduate of the Plan II Liberal Arts Honors Program and the Law School at The University of Texas with a master's degree in international relations from Yale, Lind has previously taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkins. He has been assistant to the director of the Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs at the U.S. State Department and has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper's, The New Republic and The National Interest. A co-founder of New America, along with Walter Mead, Sherle Schwenninger and Ted Halstead, Lind co-founded New America's American Strategy program, and served as policy director of its economic growth program. He is a former member of the boards of Fairvote and Economists for Peace and Security. (LBJ Texas)
[6:40] Joel asks if national polarization will get worse in the upcoming weeks and how it will affect social platforms as well as the lives of ordinary people.
[9:00] Michael goes into detail how economic control has changed and shifted from the 20th century to today & how the ideas of demonetization plays out in the real economy.
[13:15] Joel and Michael discuss the power of the managerial elite and the historic function of companies and the organization and education of the elite.
[33:45] Joel asks Michael where he sees this clash ending up in the short term and long term.
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.
Email this Blog entry
