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Chapman University’s Vice President of Research Thomas Piechota hosted this month's event, moderated by Dean Thomas Turk of the Argyros School of Business and Economics. Joel Kotkin, Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Marshall Toplansky, Clinical Assistant Professor of Management Science at Chapman University joined the discussion.

If you missed the event, a video of the virtual town hall is below:

On this episode of Feudal Future, hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky are joined by Michael Lind. Michael Lind is a professor of practice at the LBJ School. A graduate of the Plan II Liberal Arts Honors Program and the Law School at The University of Texas with a master's degree in international relations from Yale, Lind has previously taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkins. He has been assistant to the director of the Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs at the U.S. State Department and has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper's, The New Republic and The National Interest. A co-founder of New America, along with Walter Mead, Sherle Schwenninger and Ted Halstead, Lind co-founded New America's American Strategy program, and served as policy director of its economic growth program. He is a former member of the boards of Fairvote and Economists for Peace and Security. (LBJ Texas)

[6:40] Joel asks if national polarization will get worse in the upcoming weeks and how it will affect social platforms as well as the lives of ordinary people.

[9:00] Michael goes into detail how economic control has changed and shifted from the 20th century to today & how the ideas of demonetization plays out in the real economy.

[13:15] Joel and Michael discuss the power of the managerial elite and the historic function of companies and the organization and education of the elite.

[33:45] Joel asks Michael where he sees this clash ending up in the short term and long term.

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More podcast episodes & show notes at JoelKotkin.com

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Related:

Learn more about our upcoming event.
Learn more about the Feudal Future podcast.
Learn more about Marshall Toplansky.
Learn more about Joel Kotkin.
Learn about Michael Lind.

Join the Beyond Feudalism Facebook group.

Read the Beyond Feudalism report.
Learn about Joel's book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism.

You are invited to join Chapman University’s Vice President of Research Thomas Piechota who will host the next Ask the Experts Town Hall on Friday, January 22, from 11 – 12:30 P.M. (PST). The installment this month will be moderated by Dean Thomas Turk of the Argyros School of Business and Economics who will be joined by Joel Kotkin, Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Marshall Toplansky, Clinical Assistant Professor of Management Science at Chapman University. Together, Chapman faculty will be joined by local community experts: Lucy Dunn, President and CEO, Orange County Business Council; Tracy Hernandez, CEO, Los Angeles County Business Federation; Jim Wunderman, President and CEO, Bay Area Council; and Rob Lapsley, President, California Business Roundtable.

Alongside Chapman faculty, our distinguished guests will discuss how best California’s business climate can be revitalized to avoid the loss of companies, higher unemployment rates, and poverty. They will also explore how businesses can be key to correcting these problems including encouraging government to listen more to the challenges being faced.

The entire Chapman community (staff, faculty, and students) and the broader community are welcome to join. Register for the webinar here,  or visit the Ask the Experts Website.

For more information visit blogs.chapman.edu/

Guest Experts

Joel Kotkin, Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures, Chapman University

Marshall Toplansky, Clinical Assistant Professor of Management Science at Chapman University

Lucy Dunn, President and CEO, Orange County Business Council

Tracy Hernandez, CEO Los Angeles County Business Federation, Los Angeles

Jim Wunderman, President and CEO, Bay Area Council

Rob Lapsley, President, California Business Roundtable

Happy new year everyone. Hope you enjoyed the holidays and the recent amazing weather (while staying safe). A lot of you probably had out-of-town family and/or friends visiting. Next time nonlocal friends or family say Houston is too hot, floods too often, or gets too many hurricanes, here's my recommended reaction: politely agree with them that Houston is not a city for the soft or irresilient - they should probably choose somewhere like California. Texas welcomes the tough.

The big item this week is Bloomberg Businessweek's "The Case for Moving to Houston" graphic from a recent cover story on high-tech workers leaving the big expensive coastal cities. Click to enlarge, but note Houston in the upper-left pole position of the best bang for your buck, a combination of high average salaries and low cost of living, reinforcing my ongoing argument that Houston has the highest standard of living among major metros in the US and probably the world as well.

The article also has a couple of nice excerpts:

"Consider Phyllis Njoroge, who grew up in Massachusetts. After graduating from Tufts University in 2019 with a degree in cognitive and brain science, she started making spreadsheets of places in the U.S. that had a warm climate, were diverse, and had a reasonable cost of living. Houston won out, and she moved there in March"

Having more remote workers means “wages in Texas are going up,” he says. So are housing prices. “You can’t have a $2 million, 2,000-square-foot house in San Francisco and a $200,000 house in Dallas that are basically the same for very long when there are airplanes and internet connections and Zoom.”

Moving on to some smaller items this week:

• New Geography: Texas is the fastest growing state + California loses 70,000 residents in the last year
• Houston the 2nd-youngest city in the U.S. behind Salt Lake City (The Mormons have us beat when it comes to cranking out kids, lol ;-)
• Houston Chronicle: When COVID trapped me in Houston, I stopped wanting to escape (non paywall link). Hat tip George.
• And a similar one: “You’re from Houston? I’m so sorry.” Also hat tip to George.

"I simply say, “no, please don’t be sorry. I love living in Houston. It’s a great place to live and I have a great life there. It’s actually not that place that you might imagine it to be. In fact, it’s one of the country’s most ethnically diverse and progressive cities. My children go to school with kids from all over the world. And the wine and food scene there is great, too.”

Finally, I'd like to end with a great year-end review 1m video our President Charles Blain put together on the Urban Reform Institute - Center for Opportunity Urbanism's work, events, and publications in 2020. Here's to 2021 being even better for our growth and impact!

This piece first appeared at Houston Strategies Blog

Tory Gattis is a Founding Senior Fellow with the Houston-based Urban Reform Institute – A Center for Opportunity Urbanism, and writes the Houston Strategies blog.

The latest death rates from COVID-19 are displayed by county urban density in Figure 1. Death rates remain at or below the national death rate in counties with urban densities of 5,000 per square mile or below (Figure 2). These counties have low to medium urban population densities characteristic of suburban and exurban areas and account for 85% of the nation’s population (279 million out of a total population of 328 million). All categories of counties with urban densities exceeding 5,000 per square mile have more than their population proportionate share of COVID-19 deaths. Counties without urbanization (fully rural counties) also have higher proportional death rates (Figure 3).

Higher COVID-19 death rates are associated with higher urban densities because of the overcrowding that often occurs in such environments. This leads to higher exposure densities, because the intensity and duration of risky contacts is likely to be greater.

Similar relationships are evident elsewhere, such as in the United Kingdom and Japan.

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 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.