Policy

The New Deal at 75: An Inspiration, Not a Blueprint

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 01:57:40 -0400

Whatever your political perspective, Americans need to admire the New Deal for, if nothing else, its ambitious agenda. In a way unparalleled in the 20th Century, the New Deal left us a legacy of achievement – one that we can still see in big cities like San Francisco and small towns like Wishek, North Dakota.

The great genius of the New Deal lay not in ideology but in its pragmatism and practicality. People were out of work so it created jobs. The country’s infrastructure, particularly in the rural areas, was primitive, so it took on the task of modernization.

In some ways, this paralleled what was also being done under the Communists in the Soviet Union as well as under Fascists in Italy and under the National Socialists in Germany. This has led some conservatives, such as “Liberal Fascism” author Jonah Goldberg, to conflate the New Deal legacy with fascism. But this assertion is belied by the fact that we still live under a democratic and liberal political structure, one that by the 1980s had turned to oppose much of that legacy.

Yet I believe that even Ronald Reagan – himself once an avid New Dealer – would admit that the New Deal did much to expand America’s middle class. It did so not by promoting redistribution and welfarism or by moral cajoling – characteristics Mike Lind identifies with the more elite Progressives – but by practical actions that gave people the tools with which to build their own individual prosperity.

Economically speaking, it is also true that the New Deal failed to recreate prosperity (at least until the onset of the Second World War). But it cannot be denied that it literally brought light to large parts of the country – particularly the Southeast and the rural Great Plains – into the 20th Century. Among the New Deal’s great accomplishments, as Andy Sywak discusses, are its public works.A partial list of these accomplishments include:

• 22,428 road projects
• 7488 educational buildings
• Over 7000 sewer, water and other public buildings
• Employed over 3,000,000 workers earning who helped support 10,000,000 dependents
• Employed 125,000 engineers, social workers, accountants, superintendents, foremen and timekeepers scattered in every state and community

Ultimately, notes scholar Jason Scott Smith, the New Deal touched intimately the lives of more than fifty million out of a total U.S. population in 1933 of 125 million. Yet its legacy went well beyond the Roosevelt years, extending from Roosevelt and Truman all the way to Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and, even to some extent, Richard Nixon.

As Sherle Schwenninger points out, The New Deal created the basis for the great, and widely shared, national prosperity of the post-war period. Through infrastructure spending, housing programs, the GI Bill and government-funded scientific research, the New Deal directly and indirectly helped make the United States the premier power on the world scene and by far its strongest economy.

America remains the preeminent country in the world, but there is a great, widely held belief that this status is slipping as other countries – China, Russia, Brazil, India – enact what amounts to their own New Deals. Our once vibrant middle class is under siege, our infrastructure is aging and even “progressives” seem more interested in promoting avant garde cultural values than in economic growth, upward mobility or maintaining technological excellence. Even in the field of conservation, a core value of the New Deal and progressive traditions, the focus is increasing less about preserving resources and open space for people, and more about how to preserve and insulate nature from the ill-effects of human carbon-based life forms.

Yet if we can be inspired by the New Deal, we can not simply repeat it. For one thing, our crisis today is less palpable and immediate, making it all but impossible to mobilize resources in the same way. At the same time, the public sector, small at the onset of New Deal, has already swollen to gargantuan size. The power of organized public employees, largely a non-factor in the 1930s and 1940s, threatens any government initiative by siphoning off too many local and federal resources due to their often extravagant demands in everything from salaries and work rules to pensions.

This can be seen in the morphing of the New Deal legacy in large cities including the greatest of all, New York. Under Mayor Fiorella La Guardia, a maverick Republican of the Theodore Roosevelt stripe, the city built new parks, playgrounds, swimming pools, roads, and sanitation systems with an almost messianic fervor. At one time, New York City was receiving one-seventh of all funds dispersed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

Yet La Guardia’s expanded city government, notes Cooper Union historian Fred Siegel, still operated under an efficiency-oriented progressive administration. La Guardia and his parks commissioner, Robert Moses fired political appointees and dismissed incumbents, leading some public employees to identify him with the Italian dictator Mussolini. Rejecting narrow ideology, La Guardia famously claimed: “There is no Republican or Democratic way to clean streets.”

La Guardia’s successors, in New York and elsewhere, did not stick to this moral and administrative rigor. The share government workers in New York’s workforce expanded from 10 percent in 1950 to over 17 percent in 1970s but with increasingly little accountability. If a new New Deal means a large expansion of the unionized public workforce, in New York or elsewhere, it will be largely doomed.

So as we admire the achievements of the New Deal, we also need to keep in mind the shortcomings that grew out of its success. That we need a new powerful commitment to infrastructure and economic growth is undoubted, but in pursuing this we need to make sure it does not serve primarily the public employee lobbies and the well-organized rent-seeking private interests.

New solutions, such as tapping abundant capital resources from both here and abroad, need to be tried out. And given the overconcentration of power already in Washington, and the spread of technical expertise to states and regions, a greater emphasis on locally based initiatives may work better this time around.

Yet in the end, American still requires some form of broad initiative to overcome its current doldrums. This requires the same kind of bold, innovative and pragmatic spirit characteristic of the New Deal that three quarters of a century later remains its most useful legacy.

Joel Kotkin is the Executive Editor of www.newgeography.com.

Other New Geography New Deal articles:

The New Deal & the Legacy of Public Works
New Deal Investments Created Enduring, Livable Communities
Progressives, New Dealers, and the Politics of Landscape
Public Investment, Decentralization and Other Economic Lessons from the New Deal
Emerald City Emergence: Seattle and the New Deal
Excavating The Buried Civilization of Roosevelt’s New Deall

Other New Deal sites:

New Deal Network (sponsored by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute)
New Deal Cultural Programs
California’s Living New Deal Project

Chicago Has A Dual Housing Market? What About Four Housing Markets?

Pete Saunders — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

You know, prior to the Covid pandemic, there was a lot more discussion in the urbanist sphere about economic inequality and a lack of economic mobility in cities, and their influence on the rising unaffordability of the American housing market. After the pandemic, that kind of discussion dissipated and morphed into something much broader – affordability, and later, abundance – that didn’t carry the same race and class associations typically given to inequality and mobility concerns.

That’s fine for people seeking to broaden support for policy action on affordability. However, it doesn’t touch on the entirety of the affordability problem.

Last week, Crains Chicago Business reporter Dennis Rodkin wrote about metro Chicago’s two-tiered real estate market – one that’s booming for the wealthiest Chicagoans, and one that’s flat for virtually everyone else. Here’s a quote from the paywalled article:

“In the uppermost echelon of home prices, sales took only until early November to pass the record number of homes sold in a full year. And one sale among them, a Winnetka estate that sold for $31.25 million, was the highest-priced sale of an existing home ever in the Chicago metro area (other homes have been built new for more). Meanwhile, in the market for homes at all prices, the number of sales is running only slightly higher than even with 2024, a year that ended with the fewest homes sold since 2011.”

In Rodkin’s interview with Jena Radnay, an agent with @properties Christie’s International Real Estate on Chicago’s North Shore, Radnay said, “(North Shore buyers may be) doing well with their business, sold their companies and cashed out, gotten massive promotions,” invested well or inherited wealth, she says, “and they’re happy to pay what it takes for real estate up here where they know it’s a good investment.”

Rodkin also spoke with Anthony Simpkins, president and CEO of Neighborhood Housing Services. The Chicago nonprofit focuses on financing homeownership in low- to moderate-income neighborhoods, but Simpkins’ perspective on the housing market takes in the middle class as well. Simpkins’ take? “It’s no secret that housing has gotten too expensive for almost everyone.”

Rodkin’s basis for Chicago’s dual housing market comes from his comparison of home price growth with median income growth in the Chicago metro area, between 2014 and 2024. Rodkin’s analysis compared home price growth and median income growth over two periods, 2014-19 and 2019-24. The map below shows areas where home price growth exceeds median income growth (shades of red), and areas where home price growth is surpassed by median income growth (shades of blue):

Rodkin sums up his position in this quote below:

For the past year and a half, Chicago-area home prices have been rising faster than the national average and faster than in nearly every major US city, accelerating the local affordability crunch right alongside interest rates that have remained relatively high.

Rising prices and mortgage interest rates that are twice what they were a few years ago take a one-two punch at affordability, and uncertainty about future financial well-being amid mass layoffs and the creeping hegemony of AI makes the hit feel even harder. “As the cost of housing has gone up dramatically,” Simpkins says, “people are feeling more challenged with being able to keep good-paying employment.”

Honestly, I think Rodkin is making a valid point with his framing of the Chicago housing market. From a pure residential real estate sense, there appears to be a clear worsening of housing affordability, with wealthy buyers getting what they want and others struggling.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Pete Saunders is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on urbanism and public policy. Pete has been the editor/publisher of the Corner Side Yard, an urbanist blog, since 2012. Pete is also an urban affairs contributor to Forbes Magazine's online platform. Pete's writings have been published widely in traditional and internet media outlets, including the feature article in the December 2018 issue of Planning Magazine. Pete has more than twenty years' experience in planning, economic development, and community development, with stops in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He lives in Chicago.

Photo: Chicago housing for sale, courtesy The Corner Side Yard.

Climate Censorship and Integrity at COP30 and Beyond

Paul Driessen — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

The Roman god Janus had two faces: for comings and goings, beginnings and endings, the interim between war and peace, and transitions both tangible and abstract.

Climate Cultists might hail him for presiding over the demise of fossil fuels and the advent of wind, solar and battery power; or of an idyllic past, tumultuous present, and calamitous future if we don’t make that transition.

Most of us might herald Janus as looking back on decades of fantasy and fanaticism over manmade climate crises and magical “renewable” energy – and forward to an era of realism about natural climate change and reliable, affordable energy as the foundation of civilization and living standards.

p>Of course, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, this is not the end of that fanaticism. It may not even be the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning of global economic suicide.

For Climate Cultists, the thirtieth Conference of Parties (COP30) ended in dismay and disarray. Every mention of eliminating fossil fuels to reach temperature targets was stricken from the global outcome document. Demands that rich nations pay trillions of dollars to mitigate or stop climate change were replaced with calls for funding “adaptation” and “loss and damage” compensation.

Worse, those new funding demands include no concrete mechanisms for raising and distributing funds, no enforcement mechanisms to compel countries to contribute, and no countries actually willing to provide more than a pittance.

Perhaps worst for COP Climate Cultists is the latest global energy number. Even after decades of gaslighting about greenhouse gas emissions, rising seas, worsening weather and the “inevitable” energy transition, 86% of the world’s energy is still oil, natural gas and coal.

It may indeed be the end of the beginning of global economic suicide. Happy tidings for all.

But COP30 also highlighted another Janus, the two faces of climate censorship: an incessant stream of climate alarmism and renewable energy fantasy – and continuous efforts to silence voices of realism about both illusions. The UN, academia, search engines, activists, news media and others are guilty.

Read the rest of this piece at TownHall.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books, reports and articles on energy, environmental, climate and human rights issues.

Photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen via Wikimedia, under CC 3.0 License.

Thankful for "Don't Tread on Me" Conservatives

Aaron M. Renn — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving here in the US, one of our best holidays.

This year I want to express thanks for a group of people who often drive me nuts, the folk libertarian, get-off-my-lawn, don’t-tread-on-me conservatives.

These are the people who form the core of the populist base. They are suspicious of government and institutions. No matter how little money the government spends, it’s always too much. No matter how low the taxes, they are always too high. No matter what the change or initiative, they seem to oppose it.

They are ornery and defiant and generally make it difficult for government and society to get things done. They very often oppose things I’d like to see, which frustrates me to no end.

But they might be the only thing standing between us and the kinds of Orwellian regimes that exist in places like the UK.

As you know, I’m a big fan of the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, and his study of the American upper class and elite. He viewed the old WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) Establishment as necessary to avoid excesses in which society might devolve into a bureaucratic despotism, corporate feudalism, or charismatic Caesarism.

His student and collaborator Howard Schneiderman said of this, “A moral force within the putatively amoral world of politics and power elites, an establishment of leaders drawn from upper‑class families, is the final protector of freedom in modern democratic societies.”

That establishment is long gone. Today, the final bulwark of freedom in American society is that ornery folk libertarian conservative who simply refuses to go along with encroachment on his personal liberty.

Multiple times in the last decade, there was a full-spectrum institutional push to impose top down controls on society that, if successful, would have created a mechanism for essentially ruling the public from beyond democracy.

Read the rest of this piece at Aaron Renn Substack.

Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker and writer on a mission to help America's cities and people thrive and find real success in the 21st century. He focuses on urban, economic development and infrastructure policy in the greater American Midwest. He also regularly contributes to and is cited by national and global media outlets, and his work has appeared in many publications, including the The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Photo: Tony Webster/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 2.0

California Gov. Newsom is Oblivious That Electricity Came About After Oil

Ronald Stein — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 16:01:39 -0500

The State of California sent a large delegation to the Conference of the Parties (COP) in Belém, Brazil, including California Governor Gavin Newsom and top officials from the California Natural Resources Agency, Department of Food and Agriculture, Air Resources Board, Public Utilities Commission, and Governor’s Office of Tribal Affairs.

Interestingly, the leaders of the world’s most-polluting countries – China, India, and Russia decided to skip this year’s COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil.

Newsom told the LA Times that he “absolutely” sees California as a proxy for the U.S. at the COP30 conference, the leading global venue for countries to strengthen their commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.

Newsom remains unaware that the demand by humanity for more than 6,000 products and transportation fuels is the only reason for using crude oil! To stop climate change, Newsom wants to stop the world! Ceasing the use of products and transportation fuels is the only known way to rid the world of crude oil usage.

The global population has surged from 1 to over 8 billion in less than 200 years. This growth has been supported by the dramatic increase in the number of products and transportation fuels made from oil, and food production made possible by synthetic fertilizers, all of which did not exist before the 1800s, just a few hundred years ago.

He remains oblivious to the fact that wind turbines and solar panels can only generate electricity, but cannot make any products for the 8 billion on this planet. Without a replacement for oil, he wants the world to go back to the 1800s by reducing the world’s product usage, which translates to promoting the reduction in the number and size of hospitals, airports, and military forces around the world.

With the world’s population projected to grow beyond 9.5 billion by 2050, rather than focusing on wind and solar to generate electricity, Newsom should be inspiring humanity to review and control its materialistic demands toward a viable future for all humans, animals, and plant life on this planet.

Newsom has no clue that a replacement for crude oil has yet to be identified to maintain the supply chain of all the products and various transportation fuels demanded by the world’s 40,000 planes, 100,000 ships, 1.4 million automobiles, and hundreds of millions of commercial vehicles in operation worldwide.

Newsom cannot comprehend that the one thing that’s going to kill billions on this planet is running out of crude oil before we’ve identified its replacement to support the supply chain of products and transportation fuels demanded by humanity. Even the grease he uses to comb his slick hair is made from crude oil.

The 70,000 attendees at the COP30 in Brazil, including Newsom and his entourage, are oblivious that electricity came after oil, as all electrical generation methods from hydro, coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, and solar are all built with the products, components, and equipment that are made from oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil.

Without Crude Oil, there can be no electricity

In addition, electricity can charge an iPhone, but neither wind turbines nor solar panels can make an iPhone; thus, everything that needs electricity consists of products that are also made from oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil.

Without Crude Oil, there will be nothing that needs electricity.

The world extracts from Mother Earth over 100 million barrels of oil per day, while the United States consumes around 20 million barrels daily. That oil is not being replenished, and those poorer developing countries want to be “like us”, thus worldwide extraction rates may increase to meet the demands of humanity for all 8 billion now on this planet.

Obviously, Newsom and world leaders are all in favor of ridding the world of crude oil usage, but we have yet to identify a clone or replacement to oil that will support our materialistic needs for all the products and transportation fuels that allowed the world to populate from 1 to 8 billion in less than 200 years.

Thus, without crude oil or its replacement, to support the supply chain of products made from oil, Newsom wants the world to go back to the pre-1800s, when the world did not have all those products and transportation fuels.

Read the rest of this piece at America Out Loud.

Ronald Stein is an engineer, senior policy advisor on energy literacy for the Heartland Institute and CFACT, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book "Clean Energy Exploitations."

Photo: courtesy America Out Loud.

The Past Isn't Fixed and Neither Are We: Lessons from Colonial Williamsburg

Samuel J Abrams — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 12:11:32 -0500

During the earliest months of the pandemic, when daily rhythms fell apart and the future felt strangely suspended, I began walking Colonial Williamsburg with my son. Schools were closed. Playgrounds were wrapped in caution tape. So much of childhood had migrated to screens. But Williamsburg’s brick streets and greens remained open. We walked simply to be somewhere shaped at a human scale and outside. The place offered continuity at a time when almost everything else was provisional. Those mornings were not nostalgic. They were steadying.

Williamsburg has always been more than a historical attraction. It is a town rebuilt to demonstrate how a community once functioned—how work, worship, trade, political argument, and daily life fit together. It gives form to the idea that civic life is not just something we think or feel. It is something we do together in shared space.

This point has gained renewed attention. In a recent article in The Atlantic, Clint Smith describes Williamsburg’s ongoing shift away from a narrow, comfortable version of the colonial era and toward a fuller account of the community that existed here: enslaved and free, wealthy and laboring, those with power and those subjected to it. He makes clear that this is not a simple or smooth transition. Williamsburg has always been contested ground—its meaning argued over, revised, defended, and reimagined.

Richard Handler and Eric Gable saw this clearly in their book The New History in an Old Museum. Williamsburg was never a static tribute to the past. It was always a living negotiation among public memory, tourism, scholarship, and national identity. The question was never whether the story would change. The question was how and with what degree of responsibility.

Today, Williamsburg is admirably choosing to lean into complexity. It is not rejecting the founding. It is rejecting simplification. It is choosing honesty over comfort, and seriousness over spectacle.

I saw this one morning outside a carpenter’s shop. An interpreter was portraying an enslaved craftsman, explaining how some skilled laborers could negotiate wages that were partially their own, sometimes allowing them to petition for freedom. A visitor, unsettled, interrupted: “But if he was that talented, why didn’t he just leave?” The interpreter paused—not to correct her, but to answer in full. Leaving meant abandoning one’s family, one’s community, and every relationship that structured daily life. It meant entering a world where capture was likely and legal protection nonexistent. He spoke simply, without theatrics. The group fell silent. For a moment, the past was not symbolic. It was human, difficult, and real.

That is what Williamsburg does at its best. It holds the complexity of the American founding without flattening it into either pride or guilt. The founding was not pure, and it was not fraudulent. It was aspirational and incomplete. The same society that articulated universal natural rights also denied those rights to millions. Acknowledging that fact does not undermine the founding. It clarifies the scale of the promise the nation set in motion.

Williamsburg shows that liberty was never something handed down whole. It was constructed—argued over, negotiated, lived, and sometimes painfully delayed. It was work. And it remains work.

The physical environment of Williamsburg makes this visible in ways no textbook can. The scale of the town slows the pace of thought. Narrow streets require awareness. Greens and benches invite lingering. Buildings face one another, encouraging encounter rather than retreat. Even when workshops are quiet, the arrangement of work-yards and service buildings reflects a world structured by apprenticeship, patience, and interdependence. Taverns and coffee houses hint at how political identity formed around tables, not hashtags.

Williamsburg’s design demonstrates that civic life is embodied. It happens when people must encounter one another in common space. It depends on proximity.

This stands in sharp contrast to much of American life today. Many of us now experience history, politics, and identity primarily through screens. The digital sphere encourages performance rather than deliberation, certainty rather than understanding, reaction rather than reflection. The past becomes something to wield. Citizenship becomes a brand. The public square becomes a stage.

Williamsburg slows that down. It requires presence. It requires patience. It invites the possibility that understanding takes time.

The pandemic revealed how vulnerable our civic habits had already become. When schools, congregations, sports leagues, arts programs, civic organizations, and neighborhood associations paused, people did not just lose activities. They lost the places where shared memory is formed. Without shared memory, trust erodes. Without trust, civic life fractures.

Walking through Williamsburg during that time, I realized that continuity is not something one remembers. It is something one participates in. The place reminded us that earlier generations lived through crises they did not choose, and did not fully understand while they were living them, and still built institutions and communities meant to outlast them. The past is not instructive because it is reassuring. It is instructive because it shows that our challenges are not singular and that renewal is possible.

Williamsburg does not offer answers. It offers perspective. It demonstrates that history is not settled. It continues to press on the present. And it suggests that how we understand the past shapes whether we believe the future can be built in common.

One afternoon during our Covid walks, my son asked me whether people in the eighteenth century knew they were “in history.” I told him that people then were the same as we are now—trying to make decisions without knowing what would last and what would fade. They did not feel like figures in a story. They felt like ordinary people living through uncertainty. And that is true of us. We are not looking back at history. We are inside it.

My son and I continue to visit Williamsburg—not because the place is perfect, and not because the story it tells is finished, but because it treats history as something serious enough to matter to the present. It does not romanticize the past, and it does not weaponize it. It treats the past as an inheritance.

And like any inheritance worth having, it must be cared for, tended to, and carried forward.

The past is not fixed. Neither are we. A free society does not need a flawless origin story. It needs a citizenry willing to learn, to remember, and to continue the work that was left unfinished.

That work belongs to us.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: Colonial Williamsburg by Humberto Moreno, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Can America Really Afford a Gavin Newsom Presidency?

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 20:18:38 -0400

To the surprise of no one this side of the Sierras, Gavin Newsom is gearing up for a presidential run — a move he’s been rehearsing since succeeding Jerry Brown as California governor in 2019.

Newsom can often come across as a caricature of the opportunistic politician who is more focused on climbing to higher office than tackling California’s problems. By a margin of more than two to one, Californians say he cares more about his political ambitions than about delivering competent governance — a criticism echoed recently by San Jose’s Democratic mayor, Matt Mahan.

Still, it would be a mistake to write off the Governor. He’s quietly leapfrogged the far less fluent Kamala Harris in the polls. While Harris is still flirting with a run, few in the party’s upper ranks seem eager for it. Newsom, meanwhile, remains a darling of Silicon Valley’s oligarchs, many of them wary of Trump’s confrontations with China, and he’s even peeled away some Harris operatives.

As Democratic strategist Dave Gershwin notes, Newsom isn’t just ambitious — he’s methodical. “He is one of the hardest-working politicians I have seen,” Gershwin told me. “He will outwork any other Democratic candidate, and he knows how to adapt to win the propaganda war.”

Such flexibility shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s followed California politics. Newsom has a habit of repositioning himself. As San Francisco’s mayor, he courted business interests; as lieutenant governor, he made pilgrimages to Texas — where so many Californians have fled — praising its economic dynamism. After the Donald Trump’s presidential victory last year, he changed tack once more, extending a hand to conservatives like the late Charlie Kirk.

More recently, in response to his party’s fiercely anti-Trump mood, Newsom once again shifted gears, recasting himself as a self-styled leader of the “Resistance”. He has adopted some of Trump’s own rhetorical tactics, deploying sharp personal insults as if to borrow from the master provocateur himself. His effort to redraw congressional districts, effectively erasing what remains of the California GOP’s presence in Washington, appears likely to succeed, further cementing his standing among Democratic activists.

Newsom’s big challenge lies not in his tactics, but his record. The Governor has presided over California’s fall from economic preeminence. This is evidenced by poor GDP growth, the nation’s highest cost-of-living-adjusted poverty rate, a consistently underperforming public education system, a powerful out-migration trend, record homelessness, low homeownership and ever-increasing inequality.

In response to these harsh realities, Newsom likes to crow about California’s status as the world’s fourth largest economy, which largely reflects the success of a handful of tech companies. Unfortunately, however, the rest of the state is suffering. That is likely why he has fended off progressive proposals, such as a 32-hour work week, raising the state’s income tax, and adding new payroll taxes to pay for universal health care.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Bureau of Reclamation, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

How to Create the New American Middle Class

Pete Saunders — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 20:18:38 -0400

Remember the term “social contract?” It’s a term that’s been slowly gaining stream in recent years, but one that’s always been at the front of my mind, especially when it comes to cities. Simply put, our nation has been operating without a social contract now for decades, and that has a lot to do with our political, social and cultural issues today.

The definition of “social contract” will vary, but it usually means there is an implicit agreement between government and institutions and the public. Government and institutions agree to provide certain policies and services that allow people to prosper, and the people agree to, well, not rebel. Seriously, the people will often agree to sacrifice some individual freedom for state and institutional services.

The prosperity that followed World War II in America represented a unique time in our history, in world history, and led to the establishment of a unique American social contract, especially in economic terms. Essentially, with Europe’s economic powers recovering from the Depression and a devastating war, America took on the role of being the world’s economic and political superpower. America helped rebuild Europe. Yet America also led the world in manufacturing and industrial production when other nations could not. That was at the heart of the social contract that was established.

There were many facets to the post-WWII social contract. The G.I. Bill enabled veterans to establish their post-war lives – go to college, get generous terms for mortgages. Federal support for unions, which would’ve been unheard of in the first half of the 20^th century, was especially strong as America became the world’s manufacturer. A happy and plentiful workforce, employed by booming industrial corporations, were supported by unions that ensured their gains. You could also include interstate highway development and the expansion of suburbia as elements of the social contract of the era.

That began to fray in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. I won’t go into much detail here, but a period that saw political and social upheaval in the U.S., troubling economic issues due to rising energy prices and shortages, rampant inflation and the rise of other nations as they returned to the economic world stage, changed the American calculus.

By the 1980’s a split was becoming evident in the American social class structure. Upper-middle class people, the professional workforce I usually call the “salary class”, got a boost in the changing world. Improving technology heightened their production, and they were able to huge advances in computing technology, finance, medicine and health care, and more. Meanwhile, the lower-middle and middle classes, or what I’ve called the “wage class”, struggled with changes in the automation of manufacturing facilities, as businesses sought to reduce costs and lower prices on goods.

From my perspective, growing up in the 70’s and 80’s in the Midwest, I felt the loss of a social contract, without a new one replacing it.

So here we are today, after a tech boom and bust, a housing bubble that burst, continued economic growth without corresponding wage growth at all levels, and we have a societal dilemma now. Over the years I’ve viewed improving cities as one part of the reimagining of the middle class. I’ve written about this many times over. But now the moment seems to particularly demand it.

I wrote recently about the Economic Innovation Group’s proposed wage subsidy as a way to get our low-wage workforce on a course toward the middle class. But it turns out EIG has far more ideas than just a wage subsidy. They have a larger worker policy program. In EIG’s Agglomerations Substack, they rolled out a seven-point plan designed to strengthen and stabilize all segments of the American workforce.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Ken Mattison, composite of photos from album of People Working, via Flickr, under CC 4.0 License and CC 2.0 License.

Housing Reforms are Needed to Stop Stockholm from Stagnation

Peter Zonabend - Per Arwidsson - Nima Sanandaji — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 19:28:38 -0400

New companies face obstacles growing in Stockholm, in part this stagnation is due to the combination of a regulated rental market and too high prices for new housing development. Growing companies find it difficult to expand in urban regions with lack of housing, this adds to Sweden already being at a disadvantage due to relatively high taxes.

A study written by Tobias Lundberg, senior partner at McKinsey warns that Sweden is stagnating in growth and prosperity, with 70 percent of the total value of startup companies ending up in other countries.

This is not only because Sweden has high taxes on business and labor, but also because new companies have a hard time expanding in a city that has insufficient housing growth. The need for construction is 20,000 homes per year, in the capital city of Stockholm, but the households of the region can only afford 13,600.

Stockholm can be compared with the Irish capital region of Dublin and the Swiss capital region of Zurich. In Zurich, 13.9 percent of the residents are engineers and researchers, in Dublin the level is clearly lower, 9.2 percent. Stockholm has the second highest level in Europe; 13.1 percent of adults are engineers and researchers.

At the same time, Dublin and Zurich now have just over 50 percent higher prosperity per inhabitant compared to Stockholm, illustrating the need for growth reforms. This is shown by a report about conditions for a growing Stockholm, commissioned by Arwidsro real estate company and produced by ECEPR. In Stockholm, GDP per capita, expressed in the equivalent March 2025 krona exchange rate, is 787,100 kronor. That is how much value creation takes place in the economy per adult inhabitant. The level can be compared with 1,269,050 kronor per capita in Dublin and 1,199,350 in Zurich.

Europe's second most knowledge-intensive capital region has a stagnant housing market, which leads to stagnant growth. The new study calculates the economic value that would be created if reforms lowered the cost of construction, so that a thousand more households could afford to establish themselves in the housing market. In that case, individuals could contribute an additional SEK 2.2 billion ($230 million) in value added to the total gross domestic product in Sweden over the course of their careers. Discounted because future gains are worth less today, the social gain is converted to a present value of SEK 1.2 billion ($130 million). This is the productivity gain created by more housing on the margin in the capital region, on top of which there is also extensive value created through capital formation. If the reforms that are implemented are long-term, there will be a similar growth effect every year.

Three reforms that are needed include lowering of the VAT on housing construction, to the lowest level of 6% that is allowed in Sweden. It is problematic that VAT is even charged at all on the construction of private housing, as renting out property is generally exempt from VAT. Balance targets in the planning process are needed, so that social benefit is also weighed up, not just formalities. Planning processes are currently treated so that they are analyzed for what could be considered reasons to stop the plans, without considering the opportunity cost of not building housing.

The Swedish Real Estate Association has pointed out in an analysis that overall Sweden has the highest moving taxes in the EU, and that reforms such as a phased-down capital gains tax where those who have owned the same home for a long time are eventually exempted from the tax. By lowering the thresholds for mobility, moving chains can make more homes available.

Stockholm needs to be a city where more affordable housing is built, allowing more individuals to join the more productive capital region economy, and more of the growing companies of the region to keep growing at home rather than relocating due to growth obstacles.

Authors
Peter Zonabend is CEO of Arwidsro Fastighets AB.
Per Arwidsson is President of Arwidsro Fastighets AB.
Nima Sanandaji is Director of ECEPR (European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform).

Photo: Stockholm, by Jonatan Svensson Glad via Wikimedia, under CC-BY-SA 4.0 License. Chart: Comparison of real wealth per inhabitant of Stockholm vs. other European capital regions since 2014; courtesy the authors.

Climate Cult Fantasy and Duplicity Precede COP30

Paul Driessen — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Cheeky claims about causes and solutions for an illusory climate crisis must be challenged

The 30th Conference Of Parties on climate change (COP30) will promote its climate, energy and economic fantasies and demands November 10–21 in Belém, Brazil. Some 70,000 grifter scientists, activists, politicians and journalists (plus observers) will attend.

Despite pre-summit hype and proclamations of hope, the summiteers are nervous.

Increasing evidence demonstrates that claims of a planetary crisis are rooted in meaningless computer models and fearmongering, not in actual science, data or fact.

More voters worldwide are rejecting and rebelling against Net Zero/anti-fossil-fuel policies that have raised energy costs, destroyed jobs and industries, and crushed hopes and living standards.

Even the poorest US state (Mississippi) now boasts a higher GDP per capita than climate-obsessed Britain, where the average household price of electricity is US$0.35 per kilowatt hour (likely to rise to $0.55/kWh by 2027) – compared to a 17.5¢ US average and 13.5¢ in Mississippi.

UK industries now pay the world’s highest electricity prices – 27% more than equally obsessed Germany – and conservative/alternative political parties in both countries are surging in popularity against the entrenched interests that imposed these destructive, job-killing, unsustainable policies.

The United States economy is outpacing Europe’s largely because the Trump Administration has re-embraced abundant, reliable, affordable fuels, petrochemicals and electricity, while Britain, Germany and most of Europe refuse to drill or frack for oil and gas or retreat from their unattainable climate pledges.

Trump agencies have slashed subsidies, favoritism and environmental fast-tracks for wind and solar projects … and clawed back billions of dollars that the Biden Administration had given to “green energy” and “climate justice” groups during its last weeks in office.

President Trump again withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement, may not let US representatives participate in COP30, and is unlikely to allow US taxpayer money to flow into UN slush funds for climate “reparations,” “resilience” or “losses and damages.”

Mr. Trump also excoriated Net Zero policies before the UN General Assembly, calling them a “green scam” concocted by “stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success.” UN member states chastened by the Russia-Ukraine war, growing dependence on Russian gas and Chinese minerals and wind turbines, and their own economic demise were hard-pressed to disagree. Developing countries also paid attention.

Meanwhile, the Net-Zero Banking Alliance – beloved by eco-imperialists for opposing and preventing financing for fossil fuel projects in Africa and around the world – has ceased all operations, following a mass exodus by its US, Canadian, British and Swiss bank members.

“The 2.1 billion humans who suffer in abject energy poverty” and families of “the 16.5 million loved ones” who died from “indoor air pollution during the 5-1/2 years the Alliance was working” can now breathe sighs of relief, said energy realist and human rights campaigner Ryan Zorn.

The EU Parliament agreed to roll back multiple environmentalist mandates and regulations on businesses, in what Politico calls an “emerging rightward rupture that is reshaping European policymaking.”

Read the rest of this piece at Heartland Institute.

Photo: courtesy the author.