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On this episode of Feudal Future hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky are joined by Ross Elliott, Chairman of the Urban Land Institute of Australia, and Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, Professor of Psychiatry at UC Irvine. This show covers the psychological impact of COVID-19 and how governments are managing it.

[3:15] The Nudge Unit

[8:25] Australia & Covid

[24:45] How to handle vaccines

[39:02] What should policy makers do now

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More podcast episodes & show notes at JoelKotkin.com

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About our episode guests:

Ross Elliott is the co-founder of Suburban Futures (formerly The Suburban Alliance). He has 30 years’ experience in the property and urban development industry, including a number of national leadership roles for the Property Council of Australia as its Executive Director, then Chief Operating Officer and later as National Executive Director for the Residential Development Council. In this time he pioneered a number of policy initiatives for the industry on urban growth and cities policies for Australia. He has both authored and edited a number of monographs on urban development policy, housing and cities policies for Australia. Ross was also founding CEO of Brisbane Marketing, winning an International Downtown Association’s (USA) award for City Marketing in 2003. A frequent speaker, author and commentator on urban development policy, he was in 2016 invited to be international keynote speaker for the American Planning Association’s Utah conference and in 2017 was published in a global joint MIT/Chapman University project “Infinite Suburbia.”

Aaron Kheriaty is Professor of Psychiatry at UCI School of Medicine and Director of the Medical Ethics Program at UCI Health. He serves as chairman of the medical ethics committees at UCI Hospital and at the CA Department of State Hospitals. Dr. Kheriaty graduated from the University of Notre Dame in philosophy and pre-medical sciences, earned his MD degree from Georgetown University, and completed residency training in psychiatry at UCI. He has authored books and articles for professional and lay audiences on bioethics, social science, psychiatry, and religion. His work has been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Public Discourse, and First Things; he has conducted print, radio, and television interviews on bioethics topics with The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, Fox, and NPR. On matters of public policy and healthcare he has addressed the California Medical Association and has testified before the California Senate Health Committee.

Learn more about Marshall Toplansky.
Learn more about Joel Kotkin.

Join the Beyond Feudalism Facebook group.
Read the Beyond Feudalism report.
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.

Recent California housing policies may result in the decimation of forests in both urban and suburban single-family neighborhoods of Los Angeles. L.A.-based policy analyst and writer Chris LeGras shows us drone footage of LA's "secret" forests that may be affected by the state's recent changes in housing policy.

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In 2019, Washington Policy Center asked national transportation expert Wendell Cox to evaluate transportation planning in the Puget Sound region. He looked at data showing where people choose to live, where they choose to work, and how they choose to travel. Specifically, he addressed the policy question: does our regional transportation plan reflect reality or wishful thinking?

Key Points about the report and WSDOT's drafted response:

1. A 2019 WPC study by Wendell Cox found that public transit has little potential to serve employment destinations outside of downtown Seattle.
2. The study emphasized that transportation planning should focus on access to jobs.
3. WPC asked for feedback from the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) on the study, but never heard back.
4. Through public disclosure, WPC found WSDOT had drafted a response but never sent an official response.
5. WSDOT’s complaints are largely around methodology and authorship, without any real dispute with our data.
6. A thoughtful and data-focused reply should have been compiled and sent, which would have contributed to the public’s understanding of transportation policy and spending.

A brief excerpt follows:

"Lastly, Secretary Millar stoops to ad hominem attacks, stating that Cox is a “proponent of auto-centric development” so it’s not surprising that the study “downplays the positive contributions that transit and other options have on congestion mitigation.” On the contrary, Cox is a demographer and national urban policy expert whose values have been readily published online in an invited European journal essay and on Demographia’s website as follows: “The objective of urban policy should be to achieve widespread affluence and eradicate poverty” and that this “requires transport that maximizes mobility and minimizes travel times."

Read the full Policy Note here (PDF opens in new tab or window).

This article is reprinted with permission from Washington Policy Center.

Mariya Frost is the Director of the Coles Center for Transportation at Washington Policy Center. Mariya has lived in both Eastern and Western Washington, and believes strongly in the freedom of mobility for all Washingtonians. She is on the Board of Directors for the Eastside Transportation Association, a member of the Jim MacIsaac Research Committee, and a member of the Women of Washington civic group. She and her husband live in Tacoma.

The Census Bureau has just announced that median household income in the United States declined by 2.6% in 2020 compared to 2019. This is the first statistically significant reduction in income since 2011. In 2020, the median household income was $67,521, down from $69.560 in the last pre-pandemic year of 2019.

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.

Alex Chisholm, chief operating officer of the United Kingdom civil service and permanent secretary of the Cabinet Office, said that the new-found ability of officials to vary working patterns was a “huge positive,” according to The Times of London. He told the House of Commons public accounts committee that “letting people work flexibly would also allow the civil service to shrink its footprint on Whitehall, the location of a number of national ministries and other offices of the national government in London. He cited the costly London real estate costs as a consideration favoring downsizing the government’s presence in Westminster (central London).

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.