What happens when we give machines the power to think without ensuring they share our values? This riveting conversation dives deep into one of humanity's most pressing challenges: controlling artificial intelligence as it grows increasingly powerful.
Joined by Roni Abovitz, founder of groundbreaking companies Mako Surgical and Magic Leap, and neuroscientist Dr. Uri Maoz from Chapman University, we explore the profound question of AI intentions.
The Center for Demographics and Policy focuses on research and analysis of global, national, and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time. It involves Chapman students in demographic research under the supervision of the Center’s senior staff.
Students work with the Center’s director and engage in research that will serve them well as they look to develop their careers in business, the social sciences, and the arts. Students also have access to our advisory board, which includes distinguished Chapman faculty and major demographic scholars from across the country and the world.
For additional information, please contact Mahnaz Asghari, sponsored project analyst for the Office of Research, at (714) 744-7635 or asghari@chapman.edu.
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.
For more than half a century, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) has been used to block new residential (and other) projects. There is considerable evidence that CEQA has been a major contributor to California’s housing price crisis. According to The Wall Street Journal, “has been used by opponents to block almost any kind of development project.”
Over most of the last decade, a number of legislative reforms have been enacted to address the severe unaffordability and constrained housing supply in the state. Yet, from 2019 to 2024, building permits have dropped by nearly 10%, according to Census Bureau data.
Last week, Governor Gavin Newsom set passage of CEQA housing reforms as a condition of signing the state’s budget act. The principal reforms exempt some housing projects from CEQA.
To be exempt from CEQA challenges, a housing project must be infill and within a Census Bureau urban area (see Los Angeles Densest Large Urban Area). This means that Greenfield development, often the target of CEQA suits, could not be exempt.
Projects up to 20 acres can be exempted. The buildings must be 85 feet tall or less. This is approximately eight stories. Minimum housing unit densities would need to be from 5 to 15 housing units per acre. In metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles (and other metropolitan areas with more than 2,000,000 residents), the minimum housing densities would be 15 units per acre in cities with more than 25,000 residents. This high residential density means that the reform is likely to result in virtually no single family permits (a type of development despised by the planning orthodoxy but preferred by more households).
Generally, the minimum densities are higher than the already developed areas. As a result, the CEQA reforms are less an affordability program and more a densification program. It is worth noting that California already has the highest urban population densities in the nation, according to the latest Census Bureau data (2020), at 4,789 per square mile. The latest Census Bureau data shows California to have the three densest larger urban areas in the nation (Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Jose). New York is fourth densest, with its sprawling suburbs weighing down its urban density).
Some analysts expect that the CEQA reforms will produce substantial new housing construction. This mirrors expectations expressed for the previously enacted reforms, which have had little effect. Part of the problem is that analysts portray the California housing debacle as a supply problem. But it is much more an affordability problem.
American patriotism has sunk to a historic low, according to a new Gallup poll with national pride tumbling among Democrats in particular. Political polarisation has reached fever pitch, with each side increasingly viewing the other not as opponents but as enemies. Since 1994, the share of Republicans and Democrats who hold “very unfavourable” views of the other party has more than tripled, and now makes up a solid majority on both sides.
Cognitive elites often lay the blame — as they do for most things — at the feet of Donald Trump. As a symbol of rudeness and disregard for others, he has certainly made things worse. But America’s civic decline predates his ascent to power in 2016. Around 20 years ago, roughly 90% Democrats, Republicans and independents were “proud” to be American; today, barely a third of Democrats and half of independents feel that way, even as Republicans retain their patriotic leanings.
The legacy of the Sixties and popular opposition to the Vietnam War is critical here: many protesters from that era became college professors, who in turn trained the next generation of teachers, journalists, and bureaucrats. Unsurprisingly, patriotic sentiment among Generation Z is now roughly half that of Baby Boomers. Rather than raise the flag in spite of the country’s flaws, today’s elites often view the Stars and Stripes as an emblem of fascist repression. One leading organiser of the “No Kings” movement even urges Americans to skip 4 July celebrations entirely, calling the US “a country that doesn’t love you back”.
The capture of the educational bureaucracy (especially in blue states) has led to an emphasis on progressive values over basic civics. Like many educators, I’m continually shocked by students’ ignorance — confirmed by national test results — of basic concepts such as the reasons for the Electoral College, the tripartite structure of Government, or the origins of the Senate. Just one in four students is proficient in civics, and that number is declining.
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 and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
This legislative session has culminated in a landmark victory for property rights and housing affordability in Texas. Thanks to the tireless work of advocacy groups like Texans for Reasonable Solutions, which championed this entire suite of bills, Governor Abbott has now signed four powerful pieces of legislation that represent the most significant pro-housing reform the state has seen in decades. This isn't a single, timid step; it's a coordinated, multi-front assault on the regulatory red tape that has driven up housing costs and limited options for Texas families.
For years, we've watched major Texas metros grapple with an affordability crisis born not of scarcity of land or lack of demand, but of an ever-growing thicket of municipal ordinances. These four new laws—HB 24, SB 840, SB 2477, and the capstone bill, SB 15—take direct aim at the root of the problem: artificial constraints on supply. Let's break down each of these strategic wins.
1. HB 24: Ending the "Tyrant's Veto"
One of the most pernicious, anti-growth mechanisms in Texas zoning has been the "protest-by-a-small-minority" rule, rightly dubbed the "tyrant's veto." Under the old law, if owners of just 20% of the land area near a proposed zoning change objected, it triggered a supermajority vote (three-fourths) of the city council for approval. This gave a handful of NIMBY ("Not In My Back Yard") neighbors disproportionate power to block new housing projects that a simple majority of elected officials, and likely the community at large, supported.
Championed by Rep. Dustin Burrows and Sen. Bryan Hughes, HB 24 fundamentally restores fairness to the process. The bill targets the most common use of the veto by raising the protest threshold for adjacent property owners to 60% and, crucially, removes the supermajority requirement for those protests.
The result: A small group of opponents can no longer single-handedly kill beneficial projects. This strengthens property rights for landowners who wish to develop housing and empowers city councils to make decisions for the good of the entire city, not just a vocal few.
Tory Gattis is the Founder at BeSomeone - Talent Unbound PBC, and former CEO & Founder at Microschool Revolution. Tory is a McKinsey consulting alum, TEDx speaker, and holds both an MBA and BSEE from Rice University. In his spare time, he writes his long-running Houston Strategies and Opportunity Urbanist blogs for the Houston Chronicle, and writes and speaks as a Founding Senior Fellow with the Urban Reform Institute.
One might not easily associate Donald Trump with Otto von Bismarck. Yet like the Iron Chancellor, who was famous for embracing the realpolitik of “blood and steel” in forging the German Empire, Trump has found his own formula — based largely on America’s tech savvy and energy abundance — to intimidate enemies and control friends.
The US President last night announced that Israel and Iran had agreed to a ceasefire after a 12-day war, though Israel has this morning accused Tehran of immediately violating the order. As the conflict threatens to restart already, energy policy could prove a critical determining factor.
Suggestions from the Iranian government that it would close the pivotal Strait of Hormuz clearly haven’t deterred Washington. Threats to shut down oil production would previously have terrified an America which just two decades ago was the world’s largest importer of oil. Now, the picture is very different. Largely thanks to fracking, America is the number-one producer of oil and gas globally, most of it produced in Trump-friendly states such as Texas. The Permian basin, located in the arid wastes of the western reaches of the Lone Star State, now constitutes the world’s fifth-largest oil producer, and is soon expected to be responsible for half of all US output. Other areas such as Pennsylvania, with its expansive fracking economy, also seem likely to benefit.
Across the Atlantic, much of Europe’s declining influence stems from its ruinous embrace of Net Zero policies. Britain, once an energy power, has dropped its previously substantial fossil fuel production by two-thirds since the turn of the century — all while consumption has only fallen by a third. The country increasingly depends on imports from outside the European Union, even as an estimated 25 billion barrels remain untapped in the North Sea.
Other European countries, notably Germany, suffer from the same dilemma, as high prices have undermined once-potent industrial economies. Much of the continent has simply shifted its dependence from Russian oil and gas to Gulf producers such as Qatar, a country which has consistently bankrolled Islamist radicalism. In contrast, the only state in contiguous America which imports most of its crude oil energy from foreign countries is hyper-liberal California.
As Europe appears resigned to the sidelines of the Middle East conflict, another significant advantage held by Trump is in military technology and cutting-edge defence systems. This includes everything from stealth technology, as shown by the success of Saturday’s B-2 attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, to developing artificial intelligence-based systems from the likes of Anduril and Palantir.
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 and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
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.
Books
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
