Economics

For much of the last part of the 20^th Century, the world’s middle class was ascendant, expanding and, in most countries, firmly in control of national politics and culture. Yet in more recent decades, this process has been slowly reversed, in the United States as well as in Europe and, increasingly, East Asia.  read more »

With many still living with little to no access to electricity, American politicians are pursuing the most expensive ways to generate intermittent electricity with offshore wind turbines on the East and West Coasts.  read more »

Over the past two decades America’s largest urban areas enjoyed a heady renaissance, driven in large part by the in-migration of immigrants, minorities and young people. But even as a big-city dominated press corps continued to report on gentrification and displacement, those trends began to reverse themselves in recent years as all three of those populations started heading in ever larger numbers to suburbs, sprawling sunbelt boomtowns and smaller cities and out of the biggest ones.  read more »

‘The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all… Do you guys think of it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.’ So said Saikat Chakrabarti, former chief of staff for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and generally acknowledged author of the Green New Deal.  read more »

With some energy literacy, folks may realize that there may not be a silver bullet answer for all of humanity’s energy needs. Whether you ultimately drive an internal combustion engine vehicle or an EV, and get exposed to electricity from wind, solar, coal, natural gas, nuclear, or hydro generation, will depend on you or your community’s wealth.

Most people in the world want both prosperity and nature, not nature without prosperity. They are just confused about how to achieve both.  read more »

The Democratic Party has always been a loose confederation of outsiders — poor farmers, union members, populists, European immigrants and southern segregationists. As the actor Will Rogers said in 1924: “I am not a member of any organised political party. I am a Democrat.” Yet despite being unwieldy, it was often effective, and usually beat the more homogeneous country-club-led Republicans.  read more »

It's impossible to predict the future. But one thing you can be sure of: few things will be more important to the lives of our children than who wins the emerging, epoch-defining struggle for control of space.

This is a battle just beginning over who will control the communication satellites so central to our economy, as well as the vast resources of other planets. But ultimately, the new space battle represents a war over opportunities for colonization, for an increasingly resource-stretched and crowded earth.  read more »

The Dallas Morning News editorial, A Blow to Affordable Housing, illuminates the opposition to the affordable housing apartment complex by the historically Black neighborhood, Hamilton Park. They are joined by the ethnically diverse neighborhood area of Stults Road in their opposition to this proposed apartment complex named Cypress Creek at Forest Lane.  read more »

The mad dash for states, cities and other local units of government to spend the Biden-administration largess has begun. Once the floodgates are opened in a few weeks and the trillions of dollars in “Covid relief,” infrastructure “investment” and other sources of new federal bounty actually start flowing to jurisdictions across the country, America will see a government-spending spree the likes of which this nation has never experienced – not even in the midst of the Great Depression.  read more »

Jamil Ford still recalls the disorders of late May. ‘It was like Baghdad’, he recalls, even as jurors listen to the arguments during the trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer accused of killing George Floyd. ‘I constantly think about it. The past history does not go away’, the African-American architect recalls, noting with trepidation possible National Guard deployments. ‘The mental part is still there.’  read more »