Demographics

The rising cost of entitlements will test inter-generational harmony.

In the week following the Brexit vote, a recurrent complaint from the losing side was that a majority of older people voted to leave while a majority of younger people voted to remain. In the eyes of the complainers, this rendered the leave outcome less legitimate because younger people have more years of life ahead of them and therefore would allegedly suffer more than old people from a decision to leave the European Union. So much for the wisdom of old age knowing what is best. And so much for the principle of one person one vote, regardless of age, gender or race or whatever.  read more »

I made quite a few trips to San Francisco during the late 90s into the early 2000s, but hadn’t been back in a very long time – probably close to 15 years.

Recently I was there for a conference and a long weekend and got to spend some time exploring the city. I won’t claim a comprehensive review, but I did have a few takeaways to share.  read more »

In its decades of unprecedented population growth, California was a land of superlatives. Regrettably, the superlatives have changed from mostly positive to largely negative. For example, the latest Census Bureau Supplemental Poverty Estimates, indicated that California continues to have the highest poverty rate of any state, after adjustment for housing costs (Figure 1). Not even Mississippi can compete with that, sitting 3.6 percentage points lower.  read more »

The 2016 election is in the rear-view mirror. But the votes and views of a key demographic group—young women—will reverberate significantly in future elections. Two members of this group, Ivanka Trump and Chelsea Clinton, were the most visible representatives of their peers during the campaign. Examining their unique demographic characteristics and attitudes provides clues about what we can expect from the emerging female electorate going forward.  read more »

At the end of most US presidential elections, most Americans are ready to see the last of campaign ads, social media commentaries and tension-fraught news coverage. That’s even more true this year. But more than in most recent elections, we shouldn’t expect the frustrations and divisions that have surfaced over the past 18 months to disappear after the ballots have been counted. Tensions over class and race, especially, may die down, but they aren’t going away. If a new president will take them on, something good might yet emerge from this ugly election.  read more »

The 2016 presidential election revealed a strongly divided nation. Donald Trump’s victory has been characterized as a “landslide” by some, noting the surprisingly high electoral vote tally. Others note the likelihood that Hillary Clinton will win the popular vote. In any event, the result is far different than many expected.  read more »

n an election so ugly and so close, one is reluctant to proclaim winners. But it’s clear that there’s a loser — the very notion of the United States of America.

Instead we have populations and geographies that barely seem to belong in the same country, if not on the same planet. The electorate is so divided that many states went for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton by lopsided margins. The Northeast was solidly Democratic, with Clinton winning New York, Massachusetts and Vermont with three-fifths of the vote or more. Washington, D.C., heavily black and the seat of the bureaucracy and pundit class, delivered an almost Soviet-style 93% to 4% margin.  read more »

A friend recently expressed an interest in how some cities are reforming their land use regulations. “I mean, there are places like LA that say they’ve thrown out the code books and are rewriting their zoning.” My short response was… No. The reality is that the city plays an expensive and byzantine game of cat and mouse with each individual neighborhood.  read more »

It’s almost a truism in urbanist circles that construction of urban freeways was a bad idea.

Indianapolis Monthly magazine takes a somewhat more charitable view in its retrospective on the 40th anniversary of the completion of the downtown “inner loop” freeway.  read more »

Retraining the employed and the unemployed for higher value-added skills is now more important than simply adding to the number of jobs.

Coal and steel magnate Wilbur Ross, a senior policy advisor to the Trump campaign, has just made in the pages of the Wall Street Journal an economic prediction that looks mathematically unattainable.  read more »