Middle Class

Deteriorating Housing Affordability in Canada

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The Frontier Centre for Public Policy has released the 2022 edition of Demographia Housing Affordability in Canada.  read more »

The Bureaucratization of American Leadership

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In newsletter #63 I discussed the managerial revolution, or the way that we transitioned from an entrepreneurial capitalist system dominated by owners to a bureaucratic system dominated by managers and technocrats spanning the public and private sectors.  read more »

Class is Back

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The growing likelihood of recession, at best sharply lower growth and maybe 1970s-style stagflation, seems likely to further accentuate the class and political divisions already rubbed raw by the pandemic and a global supply crisis.  read more »

Demographia U.S. Housing Affordability – 2022 Edition Released

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Demographia United States Housing Affordability rates middle-income housing affordability, using the median multiple, a measurement of income in relation to housing prices, or 189 major markets (metropolitan areas) for the third quarter of 2021.  read more »

Forget College. Skilled Trades are the Future of the U.S. Economy

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America is suffering from a worker shortage, but a more persistent and perhaps even urgent problem is the profound lack of skills among younger Americans.  read more »

Paying the Poorly Educated

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Joe Biden was right to propose free Pre-K education for 3- and 4-year-olds and free community college in his initial legislative package, rather than pushing for free public university education and the cancellation of college debt.  read more »

America is Quietly Reinventing Itself

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The future shape of post-Covid America is beginning to emerge. As demographic trends and surveys indicate, the pandemic has helped accelerate large, epochal changes in the nation’s geography.  read more »

When "Restoring the Rust Belt" Becomes "Restoring the Urban Middle Class"

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Here’s a followup to the post from earlier this week about my experience at a “Restoring the Urban Middle Class” conference in Houston a couple weeks ago.  read more »

The Kids Are Not Alright and the Center is No Longer Holding

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Across the West, the young are losing faith in the future.

The recent French election provides a case study. In the first round vote, voters narrowly favored President Emmanuel Macron, the epitome of “enlightened” elite rule, over Marine Le Pen, the doyenne of French fascism.  read more »

The Working Classes Are a Volcano Waiting to Erupt

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Whatever the final outcome, the recent French elections have already revealed the comparative irrelevance of many elite concerns, from gender fluidity and racial injustice to the ever-present ‘climate catastrophe’. Instead, most voters in France and elsewhere are more concerned about soaring energy, food and housing costs.  read more »