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Automotive News reports that Nissan will produce two new electric vehicles in metropolitan Jackson, Mississippi at its suburban Canton assembly plant. Nissan announced that: “it will invest $500 million to transform its … assembly plant into a ‘center for EV manufacturing and technology’” In addition, “The investment will include the addition of battery pack assembly operations in Canton.”

The plant will produce Nissan and Infiniti models. Read more here.

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.

Joel Kotkin, Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Marshall Toplansky, Clinical Assistant Professor of Management Science at Chapman University, plus Holland & Knight Partner Jennifer Hernandez and Raley’s President and CEO Keith Knopf join a Bay Area Council webinar to discuss how we can restore the California dream. The webinar was moderated by Jim Wunderman, President and CEO, Bay Area Council.

Watch the video:

"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?

Related:

Listen to the Tällberg Podcast

Read 'Welcome to the End of Democracy'

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.

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.

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.