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On this episode of Feudal Future hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky are joined by Tom Campbell, former congressman, and Shawn Steel, republican national committee member. This show is a round table discussion on the future of California politics.

[2:07] Meaning of the recall

[20:45] Entitlements and incentives

[32:44] Abortion Law

[36:05] Common sense for the future

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About our episode guests:

Tom Campbell served five terms in the US Congress and two years in the California State Senate. He was finance director of California and director of the bureau of competition of the Federal Trade Commission. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago and a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard. He was a White House Fellow and a US Supreme Court law clerk, a tenured law professor at Stanford, dean of the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, and dean of the Fowler School of Law at Chapman University.

Shawn Steel was elected in 2016 to a four-year term as the national committeeman of the Republican Party of California. He is a former chair of the Republican Party of California and has been active in GOP politics since he worked for Ronald Reagan's California gubernatorial campaign in 1966.

Learn more about Marshall Toplansky.
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Join the Beyond Feudalism Facebook group.
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Learn about Joel’s book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism.

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.

According to Los Angeles Times reporter Ralph Vartabedian (see: Cost overruns hit California bullet train again amid a new financial crunch, October 8), the troubled California high speed rail system could face additional cost overruns. According to Vartabedian, “The California bullet train is facing at least another billion dollars of proposed cost increases from its contractors, following a history of sharp cost growth on construction work over the last eight years, The Times has learned.”

The already much delayed start of service could be delayed further: “The current plan would start train operations by 2030, but officials working on the project say privately that it appears difficult, if not impossible, to meet that timetable.” At the time of the 2008, when voters approved Proposition 1-A to authorize $10 billion in bonds, the Los Angeles (Anaheim) to San Francisco (Transbay Terminal) line was to have cost $33 billion and entire route was to have opened in 2020. Current cost estimates are in the area of $100 billion, though that is after scaling the project back significantly and sharing conventional commuter rail tracks in the Los Angeles and San Francisco metropolitan areas.

Joseph Vranich and I authored a report on the system in 2008 (see: The California High Speed Rail Project: A Due Diligence Report). In that report we projected cost overruns of 30% to 60% for the entire system, which was to have included spurs to Sacramento and San Diego. Our projections were embarrassingly low, with the much more modest system now likely to cost more than the full promised system with its Sacramento and San Diego branches, little of which appears likely to be opened even 10 years late.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

The announcement that Tesla is moving its headquarters to Texas may not be a surprise, but it confirms trends that California’s progressive gentry simply refuse to acknowledge. Tesla, among the diminishing number of large manufacturers based in the state, joins a growing exodus that includes such tech giants as Oracle and Hewlett Packard, financial firms like Charles Schwab, and a host of high-end engineering and business service companies.

None of this will change the “What, me worry?” crowd in Sacramento, fresh off an impressive recall win, and their media claque, who see no “exodus” despite the fact that since 2000, 2.6 million domestic migrants — a population larger than the cities of San Francisco, San Diego, and Anaheim combined — have moved from California to other parts of the United States.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

According to the The Wall Street Journal, “The accounting and consulting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP says most of its U.S. employees can now live anywhere in the country, in the latest sign that the pandemic is upending traditional working arrangements in a variety of white-collar roles. The article, by Chip Cutter cites similar development among other major companies. For example, Facebook is expanding eligibility for remote work to “all levels of the company.” Those employees not able to obtain permission to work remotely “would be expected to come into the office, at a minimum, 50% of the time.” This means that employees will be able to work remotely up to a maximum of 50% of the time, a practice virtually unheard of among major companies before the pandemic.

The article also references a Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company survey finding that only 41% of pandemic remote workers “looked forward to returning to the office.” A hybrid approach, working both in the office and remotely, was favored by 29%. Ten percent of workers were not comfortable returning to the office “in any capacity.” This is similar to a research by Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis to the effect that many employees will resist returning to the office, out of a “residual fear of proximity” (infection).

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

The city of Indianapolis is building a new jail and criminal justice center on the southeast side of the city. This means many of the current users of the City-County Building, namely the courts, will be vacating the property. There’s a lot of discussion locally about the future of that building and whether it should be redeveloped. The Indianapolis Business Journal asked me to contribute my thoughts, and I revisited my old idea to demolish the building entirely and redevelop the site.

Monday I was in Washington to participate in a book discussion of Howard Husock’s new work The Poor Side of Town: And Why We Need It. Obviously we talk about the intersection of zoning and housing affordability, but the conversation ranges well beyond that. Here’s a replay of the event:

Read the rest of this piece at Heartland Intelligence.

Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker and writer on a mission to help America’s cities and people thrive and find real success in the 21st century. He focuses on urban, economic development and infrastructure policy in the greater American Midwest. He also regularly contributes to and is cited by national and global media outlets, and his work has appeared in many publications, including the The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post.