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Since the days of the Gold Rush, California has been a magnet for those seeking wealth. A backwater barely a century ago, with just over 3 million residents compared to nearly 40 million today, the Golden State established dominance over everything from agriculture and film to space travel and the internet.

But new data suggests that the tide may be turning, and a rich hegira is afoot.

Researchers found that 39,000 San Franciscans who had filed federal tax returns for 2018 had moved out of the city before filing 2019 returns, taking away a net of $7 billion in income in one year. A soon-to-be released report from the San Francisco Business Times, sources tell me, will see a similar phenomenon in Silicon Valley.

Once able to hold onto its rich, the Golden State seems to be following the course of high-tax places like New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut. For years, these cities and states have been oozing billions in tax revenues as wealthy residents fled to the likes of Texas, Florida, Arizona, the Carolinas and Tennessee. While California still lags behind New York State in the money-losing sweepstakes, it is catching up: in 2020 the state lost $17.8 billion in tax revenue, with the loss spreading into the Bay Area, whose tech-rich economy historically kept the state solvent.

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.

The specific aim for the hot topic of water abundance is to hold this one-day conference September, 15, 2022 hosting experts from industry, business, and academe to speak on the nuts and bolts of water shortages and the significant and real impact water issues have on our communities.

California policy makers seem to focus a great amount of energy on housing affordability and homelessness issues, which are extremely important, but forget to include related relevant and vital water issues. Lawns are shrinking as our ability to care for lawns and landscape declines due to water shortages, which are literally going down the toilet. Desalinization will likely increase and will be expensive to operate and the price of water will increase to unsustainable levels causing more and more Californians to consider moving to more affordable (and sane) states with better policies and practices. Water is probably the hottest and least understood issue affecting Californians now more than ever

Thursday September 15, 2022: 8:30AM - 5:00PM

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On this episode of Feudal Future, hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky are joined by President Emeritus of Chapman University, Jim Doti, to discuss the state of the US economy and the recession.

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From Chapman’s Center of Demographics & Policy, Joel Kotkin & Marshall Toplansky co-author the brand new report on restoring The California Dream.

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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.

NASA’s recent decision to scrub their big moon flight — with rescheduling weeks away — is yet another illustration of how this once mighty federal agency has lost its way. It is already 2022 and the space agency has failed to send another person on the moon for a half century. It is far from tackling the more critical project of visiting Mars.

So with NASA locked in bureaucracy, the momentum has shifted to private industry, which increasingly dominates the burgeoning space industry. Here there is a parallel with what historian J. H. Parry called the “Age of Reconnaissance” in which the initial moves for the creation of the modern world economy were state-sponsored, but the development of the global shipping and the establishment of mercantile colonies was private. Many of the boldest explorers of that era were figures like Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake, privateers seeking profits as well as personal glory.

We are now entering the “Commercial Space Age”, replacing the era of state-led exploration. Today exploration is being driven by billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, and a host of young companies like Space X, Relativity Space, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and Rocket Lab, which recently announced a mission to explore the gases of Venus.

Government is still a large player in countries as diverse as India, Japan, Russia and Israel. China, which is considering a mile-long spaceship, will not likely allow entrepreneurs to lead its dreams of a galactic mandarinate. But in the West, the drive will not be led to NASA, suffers from what author and space expert Rand Simberg notes calls “risk aversion”.

The reasons for the rise of privateers resonates with that of the sea-going privateers — the lure of lucre. The government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) estimates that the space industry contributes approximately $200 billion to the U.S. economy and employs 354,000 people today. New research sees that number growing substantially, and projects the global space economy will be worth $1.0 trillion by 2040. This unscripted opportunity, of course, can expect opposition from the green progressives who dub it just a reflection of capitalism’s flawed obsession with growth.

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.

The once-great state of California is now in a dire condition. With a heatwave now in full force, Governor Gavin Newsom is preparing to cut energy use, which may result in blackouts, brownouts and water rationing.

How did this happen? Ask any of the state’s legacy media, Democrats, and big green non-profits and the answer you’ll get is “climate despair”. But this does not tell us the whole story. Indeed, a key reason for California’s energy shortfall is the state’s harmful green policies; Jerry Brown’s plans to rebuild the state’s water capacity, for example, elicited a hostile green response from a state commission that refused to consider new dams or desalinisation, let alone spending money on already voter-approved new water storage projects. They are even pressuring Washington to demolish four dams in northern California for not being environmentally pure enough.

A similar dunderheadness extends to energy. For the last twenty years, the state has looked toward “green” energy — solar and wind — as the sole acceptable energy source. But despite billions spent, the state continues to struggle with the intermittent nature of solar and wind power. In order to prevent a total electricity shortfall, Governor Newsom — faced with a potentially devastating energy shortage this summer — was forced to reprieve the Diablo Canyon, the state’s last remaining nuclear plant. He has also allowed some gas plants to remain open.

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.