Demographics

It’s been over a decade since I wrote the original “screwed generation” piece for Newsweek. In the subsequent years, the idea that younger people face a difficult future has become commonplace in public debate.  read more »

For years, urbanists and pundits have insisted that young Americans are rejecting the suburbs. Supposedly, Millennials and Gen Z crave walkable cities, apartment living, and dense cores filled with transit options and 24-hour vibrancy. The story goes: the white picket fence is passé, the cul-de-sac is dead, and no one under 40 dreams of mowing a lawn.

But the data—like much conventional wisdom these days—tells a different story.  read more »

The recently released book, The Future of Labor, is an anthology that offers an exploration of how artificial intelligence (AI), digitalisation and technological transformation are reshaping the future of work. The first section of Chapter 4 — authored by Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky — is excerpted below.  read more »

People talk today about creating a political movement around the “multi-racial working class.” But this class, and its politics, already exist. The political parties have just not yet found a way to connect with it.

The history of Northwest Indiana, my family’s southern migration from western Kentucky, and my own childhood on the fringe of the nation’s once murder capital, Gary, Indiana tells the story of the evolution of the multi-ethnic working-class, the issues they face, and what matters to them.  read more »

The recent riots in Los Angeles, sparked by President Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, could be a harbinger to a new era of ethnic conflict not only in the U.S. but throughout the West, including Canada.  read more »

Zohran Mamdani may represent the future of New York, but only by destroying the secrets of its past success. The city, even under the quasi-socialist mayor Fiorello La Guardia, has from its Dutch days been a fundamentally capitalist enterprise.  read more »

Visionaries, dreamers, and autocrats have long dreamt of reshaping humanity to their preferred model.  read more »

Los Angeles is reeling once again from urban disturbances, as it did in 1965, 1992 and 2020. After each outbreak the city is widely seen as a hopeless disaster  read more »

Here’s something I think about a lot. I believe in that Shakespearean phrase “what’s past is prologue”, meaning that past events serve as a good indicator of what the future may hold.  read more »

Los Angeles has a long, combustible history — and it’s flaring up again. The current unrest, driven in part by political grievances  read more »