Newgeography.com - Economic, demographic, and political commentary about places

Goodbye and Hello from New Geography

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 15:18:28 -0500

Dear Readers:

After 17 years we are closing New Geography.com.

You'll now find Joel Kotkin's articles on his new Substack page, jkotkin.substack.com, which will also feature articles from past NG contributors.

We owe much to those who kept the site together over the years, including Alex Lotz, Alicia Kurimska, Zina Klapper, Rhonda Howard, among others. And of course we owe most to you, our readers, who have followed us over the past 17 years.

We will see you on Substack!

With our best wishes for the new year,
Joel Kotkin, Mark Schill and Delore Zimmerman

Destroying Countrysides to Save Earth from a Climate Non-crisis

Paul Driessen — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 17:35:17 -0500

Energy analyst Robert Bryce maintains a database showing that, as of November 2025, local communities have rejected or restricted 595 wind, 475 solar and (more recently) 72 large-scale battery projects.

Many don’t want the installations blanketing wildlife habitats, scenic vistas, croplands or their backyard viewsheds; especially when the unreliable electricity is exported to faraway, power-hungry, virtue-signaling cities; and particularly when they are expected to help pay for installations and transmission lines that serve another state: North Dakota ratepayers to help Minneapolis, for example.

Other locals worry about health risks posed by light flicker, low-frequency noise and infrasound.

Many people also get riled up over the real costs of “green” energy – the total actual costs … versus deliberately lowballed costs that advocates emphasize.

This opposition is not only an American phenomenon. French and other European towns are also raising concerns, as are others around the world.

A recurrent sales pitch is that wind and solar power costs are declining and are now lower than coal, gas or nuclear electricity, ensuring lower prices for consumers. The claims leave out important but studiously unmentioned costs – economic, environmental and human.

“Save with renewable energy” promotions typically look only at initial costs associated with installing wind turbines and solar panels – which often come from China and are manufactured with cheap labor, using materials extracted with child labor, in mines and facilities with minimal or no workplace safety or environmental safeguards, with every phase fueled by oil, natural gas or coal.

Promoters also ignore sneaky subsidies paid via taxes and hidden charges on electric bills. They ignore payments to companies for not producing electricity when they must shut down because of high winds or when generation exceeds supply or grid capacity.

They don’t mention the costs of constructing, maintaining and operating duplicative backup systems: coal- or gas-fired power plants that must operate full-time at low throttle and go full-bore whenever wind and sunshine are inadequate. Or the mining and pollution involved in manufacturing all these technologies.

Grid-scale backup batteries cost tens of billions of dollars and carry significant fire and toxic emission risks, as with the 300-megawatt battery inferno at Moss Landing, California.

Offshore oceanic wind turbines must be replaced frequently, due to salt spray and storms. Hailstorms can destroy entire solar panel installations. The trillions of dollars keep adding up.

Read the rest of this piece at Townhall.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate change and human rights. Special thanks to researcher T.H. Platt, author of The Dark Side of Hunger Mountain, for assisting with this article.

Oregon DOT via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Strangely Familiar: Peter Mitchell and the Civic World We Forgot How to See

Samuel J Abrams — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Discovered by chance at a photo book fair, Peter Mitchell’s photographs of Leeds capture a civic world that assumed legibility, continuity, and shared meaning - before cities became abstract, branded, and hollowed out.

The cover of Peter Mitchell’s Strangely Familiar tells you almost everything you need to know - if you know how to look.

A tiny newsagent’s shop stands alone on muddy ground on the outskirts of Leeds. The sign reads, READ THE NEWS OF THE WORLD. BEST FOR NEWS & SPORT. The proprietors, Mr. and Mrs. Hudson, stand in the doorway, neither smiling nor performing. To the right, a Methodist church rises in brick solidity, its cross fixed firmly in place. Between them: churned earth, pause, uncertainty. Something has been removed. Something has not yet replaced it.

Nothing in the photograph is sentimental. Nothing is ironic. Nothing is explained.

The image assumes that you understand what you are seeing - or that you are capable of learning how.

That assumption is Peter Mitchell’s great gift. And Strangely Familiar is built around it.

I did not go looking for Peter Mitchell. I stumbled onto him at a photo book fair, amid tables crowded with contemporary photography that often leans hard on provocation, cleverness, or spectacle. Mitchell’s book sat quietly, modestly, almost shyly. But once opened, it refused to let go.
This is not a plea to freeze cities in amber or to romanticize decline; it is a reminder that change need not erase legibility.

What I encountered was not nostalgia, nor documentary moralizing, nor aestheticized decay. It was something rarer and more demanding: a record of ordinary civic life before it was abstracted, optimized, or erased. A world that assumed its own legibility.

Mitchell was born in Doncaster in 1943 and trained at the London College of Printing in the 1960s. He began photographing Leeds in the early 1970s and stayed with the city for decades - not as a tourist, not as a provocateur, but as a witness. His work was among the first serious uses of color in British documentary photography at a time when galleries still treated color as commercial, unserious, or disposable.

Mitchell understood something institutions did not: color is not decoration; it is evidence. The everyday world, rendered faithfully, carries meaning precisely because it is ordinary.

That conviction runs through Strangely Familiar. Shopfronts declare their purpose plainly: S. Tunick & Son, Stationers. East End Tool Stores, Est’d 1896. Robinson’s Famous Fisheries. Typography matters. Windows matter. The buildings assume permanence. They expect memory to accumulate.

People, too, stand differently in Mitchell’s photographs. They are not “subjects.” They are participants. Mrs. Collins and Mrs. Clayton stand in front of their fish shop without performance. The building’s meaning depends on their presence; their presence depends on the building. Work and person remain legible together.

Even when Mitchell photographs decline or demolition, the images do not plead or accuse. A red telephone box stands marooned amid the flattened remains of Quarry Hill Flats. The drama is not loss alone, but the disappearance of civic grammar - the cues that once told people where they were and what was expected of them.

Mitchell understands this explicitly. In his accompanying texts, he writes about walking through “new canyons of glittering emptiness,” places that promise progress while erasing meaning. Bulldozers do not merely remove buildings; they sever the chain of recognition between people and place.

Modern cities are intensely visible but rarely legible. Buildings announce brands rather than functions. Storefronts rotate. Churches become condos. Public space is curated, programmed, optimized. Where Mitchell shows shops that announce their purpose, today we more often encounter blank facades wrapped in branding that tells us nothing about who is inside or why they are there.

What Mitchell photographs aligns, quietly but unmistakably, with a tradition of urban thought that took legibility and lived experience seriously. Cities work when streets communicate purpose and responsibility - when people can read who belongs where and why. A humane city is one whose paths, edges, landmarks, and districts form a mental map that ordinary citizens can hold in their heads. The danger of modern planning is not change itself but abstraction: efficiency replacing meaning, scale replacing intimacy, management replacing recognition. Mitchell’s Leeds is a visual record of what that earlier wisdom described in words—a city whose everyday architecture, signage, and social rituals made sense without instruction. His photographs do not illustrate theory; they confirm it.

In an era when cities increasingly treat space as content, experience, or investment rather than as a shared moral environment, Mitchell’s photographs remind us what is lost when places stop expecting to be understood.

One caption near the end of the book captures his sensibility perfectly. A postcard shows a ghost train stranded on Woodhouse Moor while its generator is repaired. The ride of death must “take a nap until the power gets fixed.” Mitchell borrows a lyric from a pop song: “I’ve been riding on the ghost train… I don’t know where I’m going but I’ll always tell you where I am.” There is humor here, but also steadiness. Life pauses. It resumes. Place can still be named.

This is what gives Strangely Familiar its quiet authority. Mitchell is not photographing an aesthetic. He is documenting a structure of civic attentiveness - a way of seeing that assumed continuity, coherence, and mutual recognition in everyday life.

The cover image makes this plain. The small newsagent and the Methodist church do not compete. Neither overwhelms the other. Both simply are. Different institutions, different purposes, sharing the same ground. Today, such coexistence feels almost implausible.

Mitchell’s Leeds operates on a different principle. Seeing is acknowledgment. Architecture speaks before it is interpreted. Ordinary places expect to be known. People stand in front of their work not to advertise themselves but to acknowledge responsibility.

This is not nostalgia. It is orientation.

Mitchell does not claim the past was perfect. He insists it was coherent. Places knew what they were for. Signs told the truth. Belonging was built into the visual order of everyday life - not curated, not branded, not performed.

That is why Strangely Familiar feels so bracing when encountered unexpectedly. It does not shout. It does not instruct. It simply says: This was here. This mattered. You can see it if you look.
The renewed attention to Mitchell’s work - through Strangely Familiar and the careful reproduction of his prints - is not a backward-looking revival. It is a reminder that cities once trusted ordinary people to read their surroundings, to understand where they were, and to locate themselves within a shared landscape of meaning. When places speak clearly, citizens do not need constant explanation; they learn the city by moving through it.

I closed the book with gratitude and unease. Gratitude for encountering a photographer who saw so clearly. Unease because his clarity throws our present condition into relief.

We live among images that demand attention but offer little recognition. Mitchell shows us a world that did the opposite - one in which streets, buildings, and faces formed a comprehensible whole, and where seeing was itself a civic act.

Strangely familiar indeed - not because it flatters memory, but because it reminds us that cities once made sense. And once you look with Peter Mitchell’s eyes, the ordinary world begins to speak again - and you are no longer free to pretend that its silence is inevitable.

______________

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.

The Problem with Energy Blinders

Randal OToole — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 11:42:56 -0500

Blinders are used to keep horses focused on the road ahead and not get distracted by people or other things on either side of them. Too many people who work on energy and greenhouse gases put on similar blinders that lead them to ignore many other social problems and goals.

A case in point is a recent study that found that people all over the world travel for about 1.3 hours, plus or minus 0.2 hours, per day. While this is just a confirmation of Marchetti’s constant, the point of the new paper was that “significant decreases in future energy consumption can only be achieved by reducing the average energy used per hour of human travel.”

In other words, people don’t substitute energy for time: if they use a slower but more energy efficient form of travel, they won’t travel more hours (thereby using more energy) to make up for the slower speed. The paper presents this as some kind of revelation: saving energy means forcing people to use more energy-efficient forms of travel. As a practical matter, this means emphasizing walking and cycling.

The problem is that such a policy ignores numerous other important social goals. Want to maximize productivity to keep the nation competitive with other parts of the world? Increasing the average speed of travel is a key component of national productivity.

Want to reduce income inequality? Increasing the average speed of travel among low-income people will give them access to more and better jobs. That necessarily means increasing auto ownership. The University of Minnesota’s Accessibility Observatory has found that the average resident of one of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas can reach almost three times as many jobs in a 20-minute auto drive as a 60-minute bike or transit ride, and more than three times as many jobs in a 10-minute auto drive as a 60-minute walk.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

Bicycles may be the most energy-efficient mode of travel, but that doesn’t mean they are always the best mode. Photo by Carlton Reid, under CC 2.0 License.

What Urbanism Lost When DEI Was Defeated, Part 2

Pete Saunders — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Last Monday I wrote a piece that lamented the state of policy movement on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in America. Here’s my followup to that.

First, here’s a quick summary of that article. Over the last ten years or so, DEI saw a rise in national coverage and discourse nationally that peaked in 2020, in the aftermath of the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests during the Covid pandemic. DEI gradually received more negative connotations starting around 2022, as it came to be associated with what’s now termed “woke” ideology. I saw that as backtracking on progress being made to improve cities since the start of the 21 century, because urbanism became associated with DEI/wokism. I also noted how the “woke” backlash was reflected in the Google Trends mentions of Harvard economics professor Raj Chetty, whose research on economic mobility in America peaked and declined similarly, and even my own Corner Side Yard readership.

I concluded the article with this:

“(The) BLM and woke/DEI (movements) became an albatross around the neck of urbanism. The rising YIMBY movement, with its focus on housing affordability, took hold of urbanism, and allowed urbanists to toss aside the other, more intractable and deeply imbedded aspects of our society, like segregation, economic inequality and economic immobility.

How these became linked is understandable; how these became separated deserves exploration.”

How did urbanism become connected with DEI and the “woke” phenomenon? Is it realistic to address matters of segregation, economic inequality and economic mobility get addressed in an economic fashion, and not a moral fashion?

The Urbanism/DEI framing

Here’s the “how” part.

Starting as early as the 1960s in some cities, more Americans began showing deeper interest in cities. Early advocates like Jane Jacobs touted the virtues of cities and increasingly saw them as places of value. By the 1990s–early 2000s, many urbanists, planners and scholars saw a shift in the American economy – more knowledge and technology-driven, less manufacturing-driven – that fit well with what was happening in cities. They recognized that the rising knowledge and technology-driven economy and their own interests were connected and increasing numbers of people were looking to remake places that fit the new mold. That meant urbanists were targeting the policies that created America’s contemporary suburban development landscape and handicapped the dominant urban model that preceded it.

We can all agree what urbanists at the time were responding to: postwar suburban sprawl; increasing auto dependency; urban renewal and highway construction that destroyed many urban neighborhoods; environmental degradation.

Racial segregation and concentrated poverty were considered as part of the same mix of challenges. However, they were mostly viewed in an even deeper social context than the other challenges, framing them as societal issues, not necessarily economic ones.

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: graph by Rhonda Howard, under CC 4.0 License.

Why Are Zoomers Embracing Extremist Ideas?

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Conservatives have rightly denounced the extremist tendency among young progressives, but there’s a similar problem now evident on the Right. A new Manhattan Institute study of Generation-Z Republicans confirms this problem, with some embracing conspiracy theories, including antisemitic ones, that were once the domain of the conservative lunatic fringe.

The think tank put together a group of 20 young conservatives, mostly supporters of Trump. What it found was a group “marked by desensitization”. They viewed politics as a form of entertainment, more like a video game. To them, Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, despite their promotion of antisemitic conspiracy theories, are not excluded from conservatism; even where their views are disavowed, they are treated as legitimate fixtures of the movement.

The roots of these disturbing shifts likely lie in the impact of social media and a startling lack of historical knowledge. The Survey Center on American Life confirms that young adults have become increasingly distant from their families and from one another. Instead, they tend to experience the world through the prism of social-media self-expression. As one recent report notes, they are far more focused on themselves than previous generations.

According to academic Jean Twenge, the online world brings “instant communication and unrivaled convenience” but also leaves young people “more isolated from each other” and more polarised, creating “a mental health crisis among teens and young adults”. The new ideal is to optimise the self; interactions with other people, particularly those with different views, are increasingly rare.

For the politically engaged, on both Right and Left, politics increasingly functions as another mode of self-expression. Among women this tendency skews Leftward, while among men it skews Right. For conservatives, this means grappling with an emerging, largely youthful constituency which is prone to conspiracy thinking and increasingly willing to adopt views that include Holocaust denial and open antisemitism.

Some may argue that these troubling trends are merely transitory. After all, many who embraced the far Left during the Vietnam War later became patriotic citizens, and some even turned into Reaganites. Yet much of this shift was tied to young people eventually assuming adult responsibilities: spouses, homes, children. Many in the new generation either reject these paths or see them as unattainable. Unable to establish stable adult lives, they may cultivate a politics that is unanchored, alienated, and potentially violent.

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: screenshot from America First/YouTube channel.

America's Great Migration

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

‘For many states that were once great have now become small; and those that were great in my time were small formerly. Knowing therefore that human prosperity never continues in one stay.’ So wrote Herodotus in his Histories, in the fifth century BC. He reminds us that world history is not a morality tale between the ‘powerful’ and their victims. Rather, societies evolve, grow stronger and overcome weaker ones. People – and, more recently, capital – migrate to places that offer greater opportunities.

This was certainly true in the time of Herodotus. He was born in Greek colonies in what is now Turkey and died in another Greek colony in Italy. The search for better conditions – whether for grazing, farming or, more recently, manufacturing and technology – unravels older orders and paves the way for new ones. As a result, centres of power move. As French historian Fernand Braudel noted, between the 16th and 18th centuries, capitalism shifted from one hub to another – Venice to Antwerp to Amsterdam, and then to London.

With these shifts in power often come shifts in migration patterns. Where droves once headed to Western Europe from the former Soviet bloc, as the old centres stagnate, many may consider returning to the Eastern bloc, and even parts of the once-cursed ‘Club Med’, including Herodotus’s Greece.

Nowhere is this pattern more dynamic than in the United States. Most settlers who flocked there from the old world were motivated by hopes for a better life, not as a quest to impose racial supremacy, as is so often claimed today. Whereas Europe’s density tends to anchor power in London, Paris or Berlin, all of them capitals, the balance of power is constantly shifting in the US, from New England, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, to the mid-Atlantic states, followed by the rapid rise of the upper Midwest, which was then supplanted first by California and the West Coast, and more recently by Texas and the South.

Travel across America and the differences between regions can seem almost like those between nation states. The elite classes – and their chattering-class interlocutors – remain concentrated in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, places that retain much of the world’s ultra-rich. Yet the supremacy of these cities is being undermined by their growing failure to offer working- and middle-class citizens, particularly the young, the prospect of a better life.

Over the past decade, economic and demographic momentum has accelerated towards Texas, Arizona, the Carolinas and Florida – places once dismissed as economically and culturally backward. None of America’s major growth hubs is now located in the north-east or California. The rising cities of today include Dallas-Fort Worth, Raleigh, Houston, Austin, Phoenix, Nashville and Salt Lake City.

This shift has been fuelled by stronger job growth in states such as Idaho, Utah, Texas, the Carolinas and Montana. By contrast, large urban states like New York, California, Illinois and Massachusetts sit near the bottom of the rankings. The same pattern applies to smaller metropolitan areas where job growth has surged, such as Fayetteville, Arkansas; Greenville, North Carolina; Grand Forks, North Dakota; and Ogden, Utah.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Photo: Aerial view of Austin, via Goodfon under CC 4.0 License.

Once Again, Transparency Is Not the Enemy of Academic Freedom

Samuel J Abrams — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Public universities are facing a crisis of confidence. Trust in higher education has fallen sharply over the past decade, driven by rising costs, ideological imbalance, and repeated assurances from campus leaders that Americans should simply ‘trust us’ about what happens in the classroom. Gallup reports that only about four in ten Americans now have high confidence in higher education—a steep decline that helps explain rising demands for transparency. Against that backdrop, the University of North Carolina system’s proposal to require faculty to post syllabi publicly has triggered fierce opposition from some professors; faculty who now insist that transparency itself threatens academic freedom.

They are wrong. And their reaction helps explain why public confidence continues to erode.

The UNC policy is straightforward. Beginning as early as next fall, faculty would be required to upload syllabi to a searchable public database, formalizing what UNC System President Peter Hans described as the principle that ‘public university syllabi should be public records.’ The policy does not dictate course content, ban readings, or impose ideological constraints. It simply makes visible what courses aim to cover, how students are evaluated, and what materials are assigned.

Yet faculty opposition has been swift and intense. Professors quoted in Inside Higher Ed warn that public syllabi could be ‘weaponized,’ chilling inquiry and inviting political harassment. A petition circulated by faculty groups and signed by over 2,000 argues that posting syllabi would ‘invite political actors to attack free inquiry’ and could endanger students and instructors. Others claim the policy undermines faculty governance or intellectual property rights.

These concerns deserve to be heard—but they do not justify the conclusion faculty opponents draw.

Academic freedom exists to protect intellectual inquiry from coercion, not to shield publicly funded instruction from public view. Transparency about course structure and readings is not ideological surveillance. It is basic accountability. Syllabi are not private correspondence. They are formal documents outlining expectations for students who pay tuition and, in public institutions, rely on taxpayer support.

The claim that academic freedom depends on opacity is a category error. Universities already publish course catalogs, learning objectives, degree requirements, and faculty research. Many professors voluntarily post syllabi online. What UNC proposes is consistency, not control.

Nor is this primarily about safety. Faculty opponents frequently cite the possibility of harassment, pointing to past controversies involving public records requests or outside criticism. But harassment is not caused by transparency; it is caused by institutional failure to defend faculty when warranted. The proper response to bad-faith pressure is leadership—not secrecy. Universities must be prepared to stand behind their faculty and explain why rigorous, intellectually diverse instruction serves the public good, rather than hoping that obscurity will protect them from scrutiny.

Read the rest of this piece at AEI.

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: Carmen Murray via Pixabay.

Carney Faces Up to the Reality of Trudeau's Climate Fantasies

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Sometimes policy change is necessitated by reality. The welcome new entente cordiale between Ottawa and Alberta, fast tracking new energy developments, marks a pleasant example.

This is all the more remarkable since Prime Minister Mark Carney, was once a leading voice against fossil fuels; as head of the Bank of England, he led the charge for banks to bankroll the much-ballyhooed transition to renewables. Yet a decade later, he appears to have shifted from a “net-zero” crusader to seeking to become “an energy superpower.”

What changed? This corresponds to the global weakening of climate hysteria. As Matt Ridley noted recently in the Spectator, extreme claims of an imminent collapse of humanity, so promoted by the likes of Greta Thunberg and groups like Extinction Rebellion, have lost their credibility on everything from sea-level rise to imminent mass starvation. To be sure, some media — like the New York Times or John Stewart’s “The Daily Show” — are still predicting massive dislocation in the near future, with Manhattan poised to be soon engulfed by rising waters. But this seems little more than an anti-Trump laugh line.

Nothing better illustrates the climatistas’ decline than the largely ignored COP 30 climate conference in Brazil, which attracted few world leaders. The rejection comes from a growing realization that solar and wind cannot power growing economies, something now widely accepted outside academia, mainstream media, and the NGO complex. As Axios recently reported, Democratic congresspeople have all but abandoned talk about “the Green New Deal,” even amidst their never-ending denunciations of all things Trump.

The shift gained more credibility when the magazine Nature recently retracted a 2024 study predicting economic collapse due to climate change. Reality has started to bite, even in my home state of California, a bastion of climate hysteria. Governor Gavin Newsom, an avid supporter of net zero, earlier this year basically  fell on his knees before Big Oil in April, when two companies announced they were shutting their Californian oil refineries as a result of oppressive green regulations. He also kept the state’s last nuclear plant going.

As they shy away from climate catastrophism, resurgent progressives in the U.S. focus rightly on issues like cost of living, medical care, and jobs. They realize very few working class voters — now up for grabs in the next election — actually prioritize climate policy; in a recent Monmouth poll, just one percent of working-class (non-college) voters identify climate change as the biggest concern facing their families. Recent U.S. polling reveals that belief in predominately manmade climate change is now at 45 per cent, according to Pew, and enthusiasm for spending money on climate initiatives has plummeted.

Perhaps even more surprising, politicians in deep-green Europe are beginning to recognize that green obsessions undermine their own industries.  Net-zero policies, notes a recent OECD study, have doubled the rate of job losses in high-carbon jobs, which traditionally paid higher salaries to mostly male, non-college educated workers than the retail, tourism and other low-end service jobs that replaced them. Virtually all the places with the highest energy costs are those with the strictest renewable policies  —  Germany, California, and the U.K. Overall, British, Italian and Germany industrial users pay roughly twice more for electricity than the U.S. or Canada.

So, here’s the reality: oil and gas remain the dominant source of energy, with even coal, a dirtier fuel than natural gas, making a comeback. Despite billions spent by governments — taxpayers — to subsidize renewables, global hydrocarbon use, notes energy expert Robert Bryce, is not only thirty times larger than wind and solar combined, but is also growing faster. In the last decade, the world added 9,000 terawatt-hours per year of energy consumption from wind and solar but 13,000 from fossil fuels.

Adding to the power grid is increasingly important with the rise of artificial intelligence. This appears to be leading to greater fondness among oligarchs and investors faced with a desperate need for reliable, affordable energy, which solar and wind are not. Now, some embrace nuclear power, long verboten among the green activists they so generously funded.

This shift away from tough climate policies will shape global politics for the next decade or more. Countries with ample fossil fuels like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Norway, and Qatar will become richer and more influential. Other, more troubled oil producers, like Russia, Iran and Venezuela are able to survive, in the face of awful governance, only because they still have their share of “black gold.” The developing world, notably Africa and India, will either develop their own resources, or import huge quantities.

In this still fossil-fuel dominated world, Canada will have great cards to play and now may even be willing to play them. These are also Canada’s biggest exports; it is the world’s fourth largest crude exporter. Like the United States, the world’s leading energy producer, Canada’s influence will be tied to its natural resources.

Canada’s embrace of energy production also constitutes a way to work against fossil-fuel-funded malefactors like Iran, Qatar, Venezuela, and Russia. It is also a way to counter China, which emits more GHGs responsible for more than 30 per cent of global carbon emissions as of 2024, twice the American share.

China, which lacks huge oil or gas resources, has seized on Western climate policies as a way to penetrate markets for solar panels and electric vehicles. This leads to praise from some greens, but the Middle Kingdom is not exactly abandoning fossil fuels; indeed, its EV and panel industries rest on power generated by its over 3,000 coal-power plants, which accounted for  64.4 per cent of global emissions in 2023.

In an ideal world, energy growth would be a common agenda in North America, faced with challenges from Russia, the Middle East and China. But Donald Trump’s misplaced idea of national interest makes such cooperation difficult for now. So, Canada will need to find other markets for crude and other commodities, precisely what proposed West Coast LNG and pipelines would address. Asia is a boom market for fossil fuels, and Canada could enrich itself hugely through this trade.

This is the moment for Canada to assert its economic power and tell us Yankees that you can play the “great game” of power politics, too. Carney’s shift also provides an opportunity — after a decade of disappointment — to get the country back on track and reassert itself as one of the world’s great liberal democracies.

This piece first appeared at National Post.

Photo: Premier Smith and Prime Minister Carney sign a memorandum of understanding that opens the way to construct a new oil pipeline, via X.

Why the Great Wave Still Commands the Modern Imagination

Samuel J Abrams — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

In November 2025, a version of Katsushika Hokusai’s Under the Great Wave off Kanagawa sold at Sotheby’s Hong Kong for HK$21.7 million — the highest price ever paid for the iconic print. The figure drew predictable attention, but price alone cannot explain the hold this image continues to exert. Japanese woodblock prints are plentiful and often extraordinary. The ukiyo-e tradition produced a vast world of beauty — landscapes, city scenes, actors, courtesans, and seascapes rendered with remarkable discipline and grace. Yet among this abundance, The Great Wave stands apart. It is no longer merely a famous artwork. It has become one of the defining images through which modern people interpret instability, scale, and the feeling of living beneath forces larger than themselves.

What distinguishes this work is not just craftsmanship, rarity, or fame. It is its precision in capturing a psychological reality that feels unmistakably contemporary.
Three narrow fishing boats move across churning water as a vast wave rises overhead, its crest frozen in the instant before collapse. The men do not battle the sea; they brace for it. In the distance, small and unwavering, Mount Fuji remains still, its quiet geometry anchoring the entire scene. The moment is tense but not theatrical. There is danger without exaggeration, energy without chaos. The composition is both dramatic and disciplined.

That restraint is essential. The image does not shout; it measures. It does not glorify struggle; it renders it with clarity.

The modern world increasingly feels like a version of this seascape. Economic volatility, technological acceleration, civic uncertainty, environmental strain, and cultural fragmentation have produced a quiet sense of exposure. Many people move through systems they cannot fully understand and forces they cannot meaningfully control. We experience motion without mastery, pressure without clear authorship. Hokusai gave visual form to that sensation long before it had a name.

The wave is not simply water. It is disruption itself — impersonal, relentless, indifferent. The boats are not merely fishermen; they are ordinary people and communities navigating conditions that demand endurance rather than heroism. And Mount Fuji, distant yet immovable, represents something increasingly scarce: steadiness. A fixed point in a world defined by churn.

What makes The Great Wave singular is its refusal to romanticize control. It offers no fantasy of dominance over nature. There is no triumph here, no promise of conquest. Instead, it presents humility as wisdom. It suggests that survival depends less on bravado than on proportion, awareness, and disciplined posture in the face of overwhelming force.

Many Japanese prints celebrate pleasure, seasonal change, or the fleeting beauty of everyday life. Many are visually stunning. But this one engages something more enduring: the strain of existing inside immense systems that neither indulge nor destroy us outright. It reveals what it means to persist under pressure without illusion.

There is also something unmistakably modern in the viewer’s position. We do not hover above the scene, safely detached. We are placed inside it. Our eye travels along the boats, feels the looming presence of the wave, and rests briefly on the distant calm of Fuji. That immersive perspective mirrors contemporary life, where individuals are no longer buffered by distance or hierarchy but drawn directly into economic, social, and environmental turbulence.

Yet for all its immediacy, the image insists on coherence. The wave is wild, but not formless. The threat is immense, but intelligible. Everything remains legible, held within careful design. Even at the brink, there is structure. That, too, feels instructive: motion need not dissolve into disorder, and danger need not become collapse.

The record-setting sale only sharpens the irony. An image that so powerfully illustrates modesty, vulnerability, and proportion now circulates as a high-value luxury object. But despite its absorption into the marketplace of prestige and spectacle, it refuses decoration. It still unsettles. It still instructs. Its meaning has not thinned with repetition; it has deepened.

Most images become ornamental. A few become fashionable. Almost none retain explanatory power. The Great Wave does. It continues to clarify rather than soothe, to remind rather than distract.

Japanese prints may be many and magnificent. But this one occupies a different category. It has become a visual shorthand for what it feels like to live within vast, impersonal forces and still attempt to keep one’s bearings. Its power lies not in affirming modern confidence, but in tempering it — insisting, quietly and with precision, that balance matters, that limits exist, and that steadiness remains vital even when the sea rises.

In an age addicted to speed, scale, and spectacle, The Great Wave offers something increasingly rare: proportion. It does not promise safety, but it does offer clarity. And in doing so, it reminds us that survival — personal, civic, and cultural — depends not on domination, but on the disciplined ability to face what we cannot command and remain upright anyway.

That is why, nearly two centuries later, this image still commands the modern imagination — not because it flatters our sense of power, but because it quietly tells us the truth.

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: Art Institute of Chicago, under CC 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

What Urbanism Lost When Wokism Was Defeated, Part 1

Pete Saunders — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

This is going to seem like navel-gazing for a moment, but ultimately the point emerges. Please bear with me.

Remember Raj Chetty? Of course you do. He is the professor of economics at Harvard University who rose to fame in the 2010s articulating his research on economic equity and mobility in America. This paragraph on his Wikipedia page sums up his work well:

“Chetty’s contribution to economic mobility started with his 2014 paper, “Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States.” In this paper, Chetty discussed the effects of geography on economic mobility. He used information from deidentified federal income tax records, which gave him records from 1996 to 2012. The research’s main focus was on intergenerational mobility in the United States as a whole. Chetty used the parent’s income between the years of 1996-2000 when the participants were between the ages of 15–20. Chetty concluded that 5 significant variables strongly correlated with intergenerational mobility. Those variables are residential segregation, income inequality, school quality, social capital, and family structure. The authors concluded that intergenerational mobility is primarily a local problem. Meaning that place-based policies are better fitting for each city. This allows for each city to be able to make a plan and policy that will best help the people in that city that is affected by the constrictions of intergenerational mobility.”

I’m not an economist, but an urbanist who wants to make cities into better places. My non-academic perspective has led me to a position very similar to Chetty. My takeaway from Chetty’s work has always been that the five variables he highlights are the critical missing pieces in the revitalization of the cities I care for most in this country, the cities of the Rust Belt, Great Lakes, and broader Midwest. I don’t know what his views are on this, but I’ve always believed these kinds of findings would result in greater attention being given to these issues, and better policies to improve cities.

Chetty was a hot commodity in the 2010s. In 2019, Chetty was a keynote speaker at a Cleveland Fed conference called “Connecting People and Places to Opportunity.” I presented a session at the same conference on segregation and declining economic mobility in Chicago’s south suburbs. I remember his presentation. I thought it was great, and I thought the five variables he highlighted were going to move into the forefront of urbanism discourse.

I started the Corner Side Yard on the Blogger platform in 2012. Running that blog was a lot of fun. I think I was able to produce some pretty good urbanism insights from a Black and Rust Belt perspective. I think it was especially useful in providing a countering view to the prevailing perspectives around cities in the 2010s.

However, it only recently dawned on me how closely linked my blog’s success was tied to the popularity of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the later, broader woke movement (or DEI if you like; I was never a fan of the misappropriation of the Black slang term “woke” anyway).

The first real surge in traffic with the first iteration of the blog happened in 2013, coinciding with the Trayvon Martin shooting by George Zimmerman. I first wrote about that sad event shortly after it occurred in 2012, but reposted this post a year later, after Zimmerman’s acquittal. From that point on the blog took off, reaching a peak in the summer of 2015. Afterwards the blog slipped some before reaching a lower peak in 2017. Then there was a steady decline from 2017 until 2019, and another lower peak in 2020, immediately following the murder of George Floyd.

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

Photo: protests against police brutality in 2016, courtesy The Corner Side Yard.

Equal but Separate

Joel Kotkin and Samuel J. Abrams — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Even as many scholars and pundits deny the differences between the sexes and vastly expand the concept of gender, society is increasingly dividing along these clear and simple lines.

Mountains of data and broad-based studies show that men and women increasingly inhabit separate psychological, relational, and civic universes that interpret adulthood, authority, intimacy, and obligation in profoundly different ways.

The most visible sign of this cleaving of the sexes is the steady decline of marriage and childbearing. The share of U.S. adults ages 25–54 without partners rose from 29% in 1990 to 38% in 2019. In 2021, one-quarter of U.S. 40-year-olds had never married. Even as fertility rates continue to fall, the percentage of children born out of wedlock and living with one parent has risen.

This physical separation is mirrored in our politics, where the gender divide is now a prime determinant of party affiliation – especially among the young. The fierce tribal divide in America is not merely a clash of Democrats and Republicans, but also a contest between the very different visions and priorities of women and men. The growing antagonism between the parties increasingly reflects the distance between the sexes.

Once the central cooperative engine of civilizational continuity, the relationship between men and women is increasingly seen as a zone of tension, risk, negotiation, and withdrawal.

Some of this is due to the battle women have had to fight for greater freedom in the last 60 years, which, of course, has had many positive effects. It has not just expanded women’s opportunities in education and the workplace. It has also allowed women to imprint their values on a patriarchal culture that was long ruled by men – but this time increasingly for their own benefit.

As much as “women’s liberation,” as it was originally known, has been shaped by modern ideas about gender and selfhood, it has also given greater expression to enduring differences between the sexes. It is generally understood that men tend to be more aggressive, competitive, and individualistic, while women tend to place more value on cooperation, compassion, and safety. Various studies – especially those in egalitarian-minded societies of Scandinavia – suggest that the movement toward gender equality has allowed differences to flourish. As Swedish researcher Agneta Herlitz observed: “Some sex differences in personality, negative emotions and certain cognitive functions are greater in countries with a higher standard of living.”

A RealClearInvestigations analysis of this ongoing transformation suggests growing challenges not only for the United States but also for many Western and Asian nations, where this cleaving of the sexes is occurring. It’s undermining the traditional basis for stable families and communities and will have enormous implications for future demography, politics, and social stability.

Read the rest of this piece at Real Clear Investigations.

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

Photo: Tim Mossholder

Gavin Newsom Sticks It To California Ratepayers

Robert Bryce — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 18:52:13 -0500

The Ivanpah concentrated-solar project has been an environmental and economic disaster.

Launched in 2014, the $2.2 billion solar facility located 230 miles northeast of Los Angeles, was designed to produce 392 megawatts of electricity by focusing sunlight on 459-foot-high towers. At the ribbon-cutting ceremony, then-Secretary of Energy Ernie Moniz claimed the sprawling project, which covers nearly six square miles of the Mojave Desert, was a “shining example” of America’s leadership in solar energy.

But Ivanpah was a flop. It never generated more than 75% of its planned electricity output. It relies heavily on natural gas to ensure its complex generators operate properly. The juice it produces is absurdly expensive. And it has been a disaster for wildlife. Some 6,000 birds are being killed every year while flying between the mirrors and the towers. The project also required relocating endangered desert tortoises. Even the goofballs at the Sierra Club, an outfit that has never met a solar, wind, or battery project it couldn’t slobber over, have called Ivanpah a “financial boondoggle and environmental disaster.”

In January, Pacific Gas & Electric, California’s largest utility, announced it was terminating power purchase agreements it signed 15 years ago and the plant, which is operated, and partially owned by Houston-based NRG, would be shuttered and dismantled. Those contracts were expected to run through 2039. Ending the contracts, PG&E said, “will save customers money.” But last week, the California Public Utility Commission rejected the proposed shutdown and ordered the plant to stay open. Why? Shelving the project would threaten the state’s efforts to achieve its renewable energy targets. The agency also said that the transmission and distribution infrastructure that ratepayers have already paid for would be “stranded.”

What a load of crap. As one insider told me, the California Independent System Operator recently issued a forecast which showed the state will have to rely even more on imported electricity in the coming years. With the state’s goal of achieving 100% zero-carbon electricity by 2045 in jeopardy, this insider told me, the state “can’t afford to let go of any renewables no matter how uneconomic...Important to keep up appearances no matter what it costs.”

Read the rest of this piece at: Robert Bryce Substack.

Robert Bryce is a Texas-based author, journalist, film producer, and podcaster. His articles have appeared in a myriad of publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, Time, Austin Chronicle, and Sydney Morning Herald.

Photo:California Energy Commission, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

New York is Becoming the Next London, Home Only to Immigrants and the Super-rich

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

The election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York – alongside the victory of similarly hard-Left candidates in other mayoral races – has left some predicting that urban America will inevitably fall into a “doom loop” of decline, with an exodus of the super-rich leaving cities in the control of a resentful lower class. Yet in reality, the socialist takeover will prove no great win for the working class. If anything, it leaves the haute bourgeoisie even more the masters of places like Gotham than before.

Contrary to many predictions, surging sales of luxury apartments indicate that New York will remain home to the ultra-rich – those with more than $50m (£37m) in assets. In fact, the evidence of the past few years is that, even as the overall population of the city has declined, the number of the super-rich has been growing. Rents, outside those under control, have continued to rise. Even if a few of the ultra-rich leave, New York is likely to remain comfortably the most popular city for the group, ahead of rivals such as Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and London.

With their massive fortunes, these rich folk, 21,000 in New York alone, are also reshaping the urban landscape. Increasingly, global cities like New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, and Miami are functioning less as centres of economic activity for the masses, and more as showcases for luxury brands such as LVMH, which continue to invest heavily in such markets. Even once powerful business landmarks like the Rockefeller Centre are actively reinventing themselves as destinations for recreation, tourism, and the arts.

Mamdani’s election also does not appear to have stopped developers and speculators from looking to transform former office buildings – places of employment – into yet more luxurious apartments. This reflects long-established national patterns. New US office construction has plummeted since the 1990s, while the number of residential high-rises has continued to surge.

This transition makes sense given that office vacancies, largely due to persistently high levels of remote work, remain elevated. Although less pathetic than many downtowns, New York offices are far emptier than they used to be, with midtown office occupancy at around 65 to 70 per cent of pre-pandemic levels. The rise of artificial intelligence is likely to make things worse.

Today, New York, once the world’s unchallenged financial capital, is shifting into an “amenity city” with a priority for building casinos and other tourist-oriented development. Despite the much ballyhooed construction of JP Morgan’s new tower in midtown Manhattan, finance jobs have declined as a proportion of total city employment, with jobs headed more to places like Dallas and Miami.

These shifts will change the world of many native New Yorkers. They are also likely to be exacerbated by the election of Mamdani. Working class and middle class families are already leaving cities. Socialist policies, which almost guarantee poor-performing schools and lax law enforcement, impact the hoi polloi far more than the elite bourgeois or young single professionals.

Some may think that Mamdani’s policies will turn the world’s capitalist capital into a First World version of Havana. But given the US federal system, Mamdani can’t expropriate fortunes by edict from Gracie Mansion, however he might like to do so. Instead, his biggest victims are likely to be among the lower social orders, not least the mostly minority owners of bodegas and small businesses. His rent control freeze, notes the perceptive analyst Nicole Gelinas, is likely to hit hardest small property owners, who own 30 to 50 per cent of all rent control units but may not be able to handle Mamdani’s proposed freezes.

Worse yet, Mamdani and his socialist cadre do not seem concerned about improving working class communities by creating better jobs; the emphasis is almost totally on free goodies, not people being empowered to improve themselves. As the analyst Martin Gurri has suggested, unlike past socialists, whether in Stalin’s Russia or among Sweden’s social democrats, today’s variety regards economic growth with “remarkable indifference”, a tough stance in an economy where good jobs are already headed elsewhere.

Despite all this, New York will not turn into the next Third World hellscape. It is more likely to end up like London. Under Labour, that city has become more global but can hardly seem British anymore, with many recent immigrants apparently reluctant to integrate into society. It also hosts post-national financial and cultural elites who often seem to mock the sensibilities of the British population.

In other words, London today seems less like the capital of the UK, and more like a refuge for people and capital from the rest of the world. Tourists drive much of the economy, including wealthy free spenders from distant locales.

This seems like the likely road for New York. Rather than following its commercial focus, a legacy stretching back to Dutch times, New York’s economy will become oriented to serving the rich, their offspring and tourists. In the new order, the city becomes what the University of Chicago’s Terry Nichols Clark has described as an “entertainment machine ”. The tourism industry also serves the new configuration by becoming a key employer of a largely poor, often immigrant, workforce.

Lost in the process is the notion of the city as an engine of upward mobility. The true mission of great cities, noted the late Jane Jacobs, “is transforming many poor people into middle class people... Cities don’t lure a middle class. They create it.”

Great cities with history and culture, like New York and London, may remain alluring for the young, the wealthy and for those immigrants who have yet to adapt to their adopted country. But with the road to opportunity blocked by their own policies, the socialists may end up leaving their cities ever more bourgeois, albeit under a red flag.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Photo: Mamdani for NYC, social media.

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.

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

South Africa: Still the World’s Most Race-Regulated Country?

Hügo Krüger — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

As South Africa hosts the G20 Summit in Johannesburg on 22-23 November 2025, the event has been overshadowed by two high-profile disputes over race policy.

First, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a full boycott by U.S. officials, declaring on Truth Social that holding the G20 in South Africa was “a total disgrace” because of alleged government-sponsored discrimination against Afrikaners, including claims of killings and land confiscations.

Second, and directly tied to the same debate, the Afrikaner trade union Solidarity in November 2025 erected more than 30 digital billboards and banners along key G20 routes proclaiming South Africa “the most race-regulated country in the world”.

Johannesburg authorities removed most of them within hours, citing lack of permits. Solidarity immediately obtained an urgent interim interdict from the High Court, replaced the boards, and—in protest—escalated by erecting over 50 additional banners across Gauteng highways and airport approaches. Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi publicly welcomed the initial removals as a defeat of “racism” and labelled Solidarity members “racists” on X, while the union accused him of censorship and incitement. Meanwhile, the South African Presidency dismissed the campaign as the work of a “tiny right-wing minority” intent on embarrassing the nation.

With regards to race laws, South Africa currently has 142 pieces of national legislation that explicitly or implicitly make race a legal criterion for rights, benefits, obligations or penalties. This is more than existed at the height of apartheid (123 in 1980), according to the Institute of Race Relations’ continuously updated Index of Race Law, last revised on 11 June 2025. Of the 142, 116 have been enacted since 1994.

The list includes major framework laws such as the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act (2003), the Employment Equity Act (1998), the Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act (2000) and recent amendments to sector charters (mining, water services, electricity, etc.) that impose minimum Black ownership or management percentages as licensing conditions.

A significant portion of the 142 statutes are, however, outdated or partially obsolete. At least 26 pre-1994 laws still on the statute book contain racial references that have never been repealed or amended (for example, old group-areas extensions, certain pension-fund racial clauses, and remnants of the Population Registration Act repeal process that left stray provisions intact). Critics of the IRR index therefore argue that the “142” figure is inflated because it mixes active transformative legislation with dormant apartheid-era relics.

Read the rest of this piece at Hügo's Newsletter.

Hügo Krüger is a South African born Structural/Nuclear Engineer, writer and YouTube podcaster, commentating on topics relating to Energy and Geopolitical Matters, Hügo is married to an Iranian born Mathematician and Artist; the couple resides in Paris.

Photo: courtesy Hügo's Newsletter.

California Job Cuts Will Hurt Gavin Newsom’s White House Run

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 19:28:14 -0500

California Governor Gavin Newsom loves to describe his state as “an economic powerhouse”. Yet he’s far more reluctant to acknowledge its dramatically worsening employment picture. According to new outplacement figures, Golden State employers announced over 170,000 job cuts this year, up 14% from last year. More than 75,000 of these cuts were made in the all-important tech sector.

No other state outside Washington DC has been cutting so many jobs, and California now suffers from America’s highest unemployment rate at 5.5%. But this is nothing new. The state has been haemorrhaging jobs in fields such as manufacturing, construction and business services since Joe Biden’s presidency.

Michael Bernick, who previously served as the director of California’s labour department, has pointed to the state’s “Upstairs, Downstairs economy”, in which a wealthy college-educated class relies on service economy workers. California manages to be at once the state with the most billionaires and the nation’s poverty capital. Its teenage unemployment rate tops 21%, just short of twice the national average; for those under the age of 30, it ranks second nationally behind Mississippi.

This shortage of jobs, particularly high-quality ones, has steadily built into a crisis in recent years as politicians look away. Affordability, particularly for housing, is a big issue but California is also by far the worst state at creating jobs which pay above average, losing 1.6 million such roles in the last decade. In the past year, the only jobs created in California were in government-financed healthcare and government itself.

Tech is supposedly California’s strong point, yet even here things are murky. While venture-financed AI startups descend on the Bay Area, the overall picture is one of tech job losses. This year, according to the LA Times, thousands of workers at the likes of Amazon, Meta, Paramount and Warner Bros have been laid off. Worse still, many tech jobs are headed elsewhere. Texas is leading the charge, followed by Florida, as Southern states including Tennessee and Georgia make significant gains.

One factor here is that California’s nationally high energy prices are undermining its AI industry. Firms such as Nvidia and Samsung are now looking to establish data centres in locations with lower prices, so that they’ll be better placed to develop advanced chips and processors. For instance, the University of Texas at Austin is planning a substantial new quantum computing centre, while energy-rich states such as Pennsylvania are now seeking AI growth as a way to reanimate traditional industrial sectors.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo: Felton Davis, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

How California is Failing Its Latino Population

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Few states so self-righteously proclaim their commitment to helping minorities like California does. Gov. Gavin Newsom rarely misses an opportunity to assert his solidarity with people of color, proclaiming in 2022 that “our incredible diversity is the foundation for our state’s strength, growth and success — and that confronting inequality is not just a moral imperative, but an economic one.”

Nice words, but on the things that matter — affordable housing, good jobs, and decent education — the current California regime has been a disaster for minorities. In a new study I did with attorney Jennifer Hernandez, released by the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute, we found that in most critical areas, African Americans and Latinos do worse here in California than in most of the country.

To be sure, some minorities have benefited from such programs as diversity, equity and inclusion to get into elite colleges and universities. But this has not stopped the rise of the state’s poverty rate, which increased to 18.9% in 2023, well above 11.0% in 2021, according to new Census data. Latinos, with a poverty rate of 16.9%, remained disproportionately poor. Some 13.6% of African Americans, 11.5% of Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders and 10.2% of white Californians lived in poverty.

These awful results reflect state policies — particularly around climate change — that hurt job growth and wages and yet are embraced by Newsom and the Legislature. For his part, Newsom still sees climate as a useful wedge issue with Democratic primary voters, as he demonstrated by making an appearance at the recent climate summit in Brazil, which most leaders of the top carbon-emitting nations skipped.

Yet his climate obsessions have had some awful results for the poorest Californians. Recently, the California Air Resources Board, the primary executor of California’s climate policies, projected that these policies will result in significant income declines for individuals earning less than $100,000 a year, while boosting incomes for those above this threshold.

At the same time, the state has created the continental U.S.’ highest electricity rates, which disproportionately fall on low-income consumers in part because others have shifted to solar. Those companies that use a lot of electricity, including tech firms, increasingly move outside the state. Manufacturing has lost one-third of its jobs in California since 1990, one reason few new electric vehicle plants, semiconductor and other new industrial facilities locate in California. This matters particularly to Latinos, who represent the vast majority of Californians in “carbon economy” jobs from production workers to material handling and truck driving — all industries in the crosshairs of state climate policy.

Despite green claims that renewables will lower prices, California’s electricity rates have surged 80% since 2008, compared with 28% nationwide. The impact of high energy prices on households is direct — particularly in the less temperate, overwhelmingly Latino interior. For poorer California, mostly Latino, energy costs take up 4% of the household budget, compared with barely 1% for better-off Californians.

As vast wealth has been generated by the tech sector and real estate, 85% of all new jobs in California have been in the low-paid service sector. California is the single worst state at creating jobs that pay above average; the state hemorrhaged 1.6 million above-average-paying jobs in the past decade, more than twice as many as any other state.

Particularly for Latinos and other minorities, California is losing its economic advantages. Indeed, according to our new report, the average Latino wage earner here earns roughly $10,000 a year less than their counterparts in less regulated places such as Texas. They also fare better in many Midwestern and Plains states such as Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska.

At the same time, the state’s climate-driven housing regulations make it harder to build affordable single-family homes, mostly on the periphery of urban areas. Policies favoring small urban units may be fine with a 25-year-old single tech worker in San Francisco or Manhattan Beach but are not likely to please the more family-oriented Latino population. Our survey found that the vast majority of Latinos prefer single-family homes, and most are seeking the same basic things as most people — that is, safety, good schools and closeness to jobs. (Interestingly, the notion of living near other Latinos, or people they agree with politically, was ranked as a low priority.)

Yet wanting a house and getting one are two different things. African Americans and Latinos in California do far worse in homeownership than their counterparts do in the rest of the country, including in heavily Latino Arizona, Texas and Florida. Overall, 59.2% of Hispanic households in Texas, for example, own their own homes, while only 45.9% of California’s Hispanic households do.

Perhaps the biggest failure has been education. In California, for example, Latino students account for more than 56% of all public-school students, but only 36% met standards for English language and just 22.7% for math. California Latino students perform worse than their counterparts in Florida and Texas; in fourth-grade reading, the state ranks behind longtime laggard Mississippi. Overall, California Latinos rank among the bottom 10 states in higher educational degree attainment in the nation.

Clearly California is failing its minorities, including Latinos, now the state’s largest ethnic group — expected to constitute more than half the state’s population by 2030.

Yet many of the state’s young Latinos will enter the labor market in a poor position because of our dysfunctional schools. Many may already be unemployable; the state recently suffered the nation’s highest rate of unemployment, particularly for teenagers and Generation Z, or people under 30.

Only by changing directions, and looking for ways to boost Latino economic prospects and those of other minorities, can we align our boastful multicultural rhetoric with reality.

This piece first appeared at: Los Angeles Times.

Photo: Don Barrett, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Martin Parr Saw Who We Really Are

Samuel J Abrams — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

The news of Martin Parr’s passing feels like a quiet rupture in the cultural record. Parr was not simply a photographer. He was a documentarian of civic life in its most unguarded, democratic, and unselfconscious forms. His lens captured modernity not through abstractions or theories, but through the granular details of how people move through everyday spaces; details most of us overlook, though they reveal who we are more honestly than any political slogan or census table.

Parr’s world was not the realm of monumental architecture or carefully manicured urbanism. His was the realm of beaches, food courts, supermarkets, small high streets, half-faded seaside towns, and the awkward social choreography of leisure. These places - often dismissed as banal or vulgar by cultural elites - were, for Parr, civic landscapes. They were the stages on which people negotiated class, aspiration, identity, and belonging. And he treated them with a seriousness that contemporary social analysis often reserves only for institutions. That alone made his work radical.

His breakthrough series, The Last Resort (1983–85), remains one of the clearest articulations of his worldview. Shot in New Brighton, it documented working-class families vacationing in a declining seaside town during an era of economic upheaval. What gives the series its power is not its critique but its honesty. The trash-strewn beaches, sunburned children clutching melting ice creams, and parents asleep in plastic chairs are not staged, not idealized, and not mocked. They are simply visible - as they were, as they lived, as they coped. In an era obsessed with “representation,” Parr represented ordinary people by refusing to turn them into symbols. He allowed them to occupy the center of the frame.

His camera understood, long before social media made it inescapable, that consumer life is a language. His 1990s project Signs of the Times, which explored domestic décor trends and the earnest, sometimes touching, sometimes absurd ways people construct self-identity inside their homes, reads today like an early ethnography of aspirational culture. The floral sofas, plastic-laminated dining tables, and proudly displayed tchotchkes signal the same anxieties and yearnings that now play out algorithmically on Instagram and Pinterest. Parr understood that taste is never neutral; it is a form of self-expression shaped by class, exposure, and the emotional economies of late capitalism.

Even before that, his early black-and-white documentary work from the 1970s - nonconformist chapel communities, declining rural villages, small-town rituals - captured a Britain on the cusp of social transformation. The scenes feel intimate and already fading: congregations thinning, traditions eroding, a sense of place stretching thinner each year. That early attentiveness to social texture deepened into the saturated flash aesthetic that made Parr famous. But the core remained: a desire to record how people inhabit spaces, how spaces shape them in return, and how modernity rearranges both.

What distinguishes Parr’s work, especially to anyone who studies civic life, is that it refuses both nostalgia and contempt. Many cultural observers treat consumer spaces and mass leisure with either hand-wringing or disdain. Parr took a different path. He documented these spaces with anthropological fidelity, without sentimentality, without moralizing, and without surrendering to cynicism. His images of crowded beaches with their sprawling towels, patterned swimsuits, folding chairs, squinting faces do not mock their subjects. They reveal public life in one of its few remaining egalitarian environments. A beach is one of the last places where class, age, and background spill into each other, however imperfectly. Parr noticed these collisions and treated them as central rather than marginal to modern civic experience.

Color was essential to his argument. At a time when “serious” photography still clung to black-and-white aesthetics, Parr insisted that modern life was too bright, too saturated, too garish to be rendered in monochrome. His palette captured not just the surface of consumer culture but its psychological atmosphere. The neon signs, fluorescent supermarket aisles, cheap souvenirs, vivid plastic toys; these were the textures of everyday aspiration. He did not hide or soften them. He made viewers confront the world as it actually was, not as they preferred it to be.

This is why Parr’s work matters so deeply now. The world he photographed is evaporating. High streets struggle, independent shops shutter, seaside towns are hollowed out, and informal public life is increasingly displaced by screens. The rituals he captured - families picnicking on unfashionable promenades, couples wandering through shabby arcades, children making their own unstructured fun - are giving way to curated leisure, algorithmically filtered entertainment, and a civic sphere where spontaneity feels like a relic.

Parr’s photographs are not simply nostalgic artifacts; they are records of a social ecosystem that once sustained a sense of common life. In his images, you see the friction and humor of people encountering difference casually, without mediation. You see informal norms negotiated without institutional intervention. You see the everyday indignities and everyday pleasures that formed the connective tissue of community life - messy, fragmented, ordinary, but shared.

Critically, Parr’s photography also documents the geography of inequality without preaching. In The Last Resort, the decaying seaside amusements reflect economic strain without turning the families enjoying them into props. In Signs of the Times, interior décor reveals aspiration and insecurity without indicting the people who embraced it. Across his global projects - from tourism culture in Europe and Asia to food rituals in the United States - he mapped how consumer culture shapes social expectations while leaving room for agency, humor, and tenderness.

For those of us who write about civic culture, community, and the changing built environment, Parr’s archive is invaluable. It is visual sociology of the highest order; not for its technical mastery but for its insight into how people live. His images show that civic life does not reside solely in institutions or grand projects. It resides in the mundane negotiations of public space, in the quiet dramas of leisure, in the informal social codes that govern queues, beaches, parks, and discount stores. These are the places where people encounter one another as citizens, not abstractions.

Parr’s death comes at a moment when the very idea of unmediated public togetherness feels fragile. His work reminds us of what we risk losing: uncurated spaces, unselfconscious rituals, the kind of public intimacy that emerges when we are not performing for a digital audience. He captured the ordinary before it became endangered.

In the end, Martin Parr’s legacy is not only artistic. It is civic. He showed us that everyday life - messy, colorful, contradictory - is worth understanding. He restored visibility to people often ignored in cultural narratives. He taught us that the vernacular spaces of modern life are not trivial but foundational. And he insisted that to see society clearly, we must look directly at how ordinary people actually live, not how we imagine they do. That clarity is a gift, and we are fortunate he left so much of it behind.

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: Mirabella via Wikimedia, under CC BY-SA 3.0.

What the Deaths of Frank Gehry and Robert A.M. Stern Tell Us About American Cities

Samuel J Abrams — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Two titans of American architecture — Frank Gehry and Robert A.M. Stern — have passed within days of each other. Gehry died at 96 in Santa Monica, Stern at 86 in Manhattan. Their departures close a defining chapter in American design, but they also open an opportunity to reconsider what we expect from our cities, our institutions, and the built environments that shape civic life.

Their careers unfolded in completely different registers. Gehry was the disrupter: the Toronto-born, Los Angeles-forged rebel who discovered emotional electricity in chain-link fences, corrugated metal, sun-bleached stucco, and the digital tools that eventually allowed him to twist steel into improbable billows. Stern was the historian and builder of context: a Brooklyn kid who fell in love with New York's limestone behemoths and marble-clad entryways, and who spent half a century arguing that tradition could be renewed rather than discarded. Yet despite their differences of temperament and technique, they shared an unusual seriousness about architecture's civic purpose. Both believed that buildings could elevate ordinary life, strengthen our sense of belonging, and make cities more humane.

I remember seeing Gehry's earliest plans for the Guggenheim Bilbao when I was a teenager in New York. I didn't yet know the theoretical vocabulary — I wasn't thinking about deconstructivism or parametric curves — but the image stopped me. The museum's titanium looked like it was alive. It didn't sit on the riverbank; it unfurled onto it. The forms seemed to be moving even as the building stood still. Until then, buildings had been objects. Bilbao was an event. It showed me for the first time that architecture could make you feel something unexpected and, frankly, joyful — and that public space could carry that emotional charge.

For Bilbao, Gehry took a dying industrial waterfront — a landscape of rust, soot, and shuttered factories — and turned it into the global shorthand for urban renaissance. The so-called "Bilbao effect" was often mocked by critics as a faddish, simplistic formula, but the underlying lesson was more profound: cities can be revived not only through infrastructure and zoning, but through beauty, risk, and ambition. Whether one loves or hates Gehry's sculptural exuberance, he proved that a single building, properly conceived, can shift a city's trajectory. In the decades since, many cities have learned the wrong lessons, erecting loud buildings that imitate the surface spectacle without the deeper logic. Still, Gehry's achievement remains singular. His work insisted that cities owe citizens not merely functionality but delight — an underrated civic virtue.

Stern worked from the opposite direction. He believed deeply in continuity, in the idea that cities accrue character over time and that good architecture participates in that long story rather than bulldozing it. Long before he became famous for 15 Central Park West, he spent decades designing unflashy but dignified dormitories, libraries, museums, and civic buildings that understood their settings. He believed that architects had a duty to engage context, not ignore it.

Stern's 15 Central Park West — two limestone towers, one modestly scaled on the park and the other taller and set back, joined by a copper-domed rotunda and a civilized motor court — was a rebuke to the anonymous glass towers that had overtaken Manhattan. Critics noted that the building seemed to belong to an older era of New York civic confidence. Buyers flocked because it felt familiar yet new, rooted yet polished. It was Stern's breakthrough, but its real significance was that it restored respect for the prewar vocabulary that had made New York legible in the first place. Where Gehry reimagined the future of form, Stern reasserted the value of memory.

Stern's civic projects — the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge — all followed the same quiet principle: people deserve buildings that treat them as participants in a story. His work argued that tradition is not nostalgia but a democratic inheritance. For Stern, the past was not an anchor holding the city back; it was a set of tools for creating places people would actually love.

It is tempting to reduce Stern and Gehry to opposing poles in a culture war: classicism versus deconstruction, hand drawing versus computer modeling, limestone versus titanium. But that framing floats above the more meaningful truth. Both were reacting against the same problem: the thinness of modernism when abstract ideology overrides human need. Stern criticized the modernist tendency to produce "self-important objects" with no relationship to their surroundings. Gehry recoiled from the antiseptic perfection of high modernism — the polished pavilions that he felt were "effete" and incompatible with the messy vitality of real life. Both men, in their own ways, rejected purity. Both cared about people first.

Their shared conviction — that architecture is a civic art, not an academic exercise — matters now more than ever. We are living through a period of deep institutional fragility. Students arrive on campuses anxious and lonely. Cities, especially legacy metros, are grappling with empty office towers, transit strains, unaffordable housing, and weakened civic confidence. Too many new buildings are interchangeable glass commodities, equally at home in Seoul, Austin, or Midtown Manhattan. Too many public spaces look like corporate lobbies: frictionless, placeless, and forgettable.

Gehry and Stern provide a counterpoint. They remind us that buildings teach. A well-designed campus signals order, purpose, and seriousness. A museum that welcomes people with beauty rather than intimidation suggests that civic life is meant to be shared, not siloed. A neighborhood that respects its past invites trust and affection. A city that takes risks on public art, unusual forms, and emotional resonance gives residents reasons to care.

Both architects also demonstrated that taste is not trivial. When a city builds well, it dignifies the people who live in it. When it builds poorly, it signals indifference — or worse, contempt. This is especially evident in the fabric of American suburbs and small cities, where too many civic buildings are designed like budget hotels and too many commercial centers are anonymous boxes surrounded by parking lagoons. Gehry and Stern would have disagreed about the right materials or forms for these places, but they would have agreed that the task is honorable, that residents deserve something better than the purely expedient.

Their deaths also invite a reflection on the American habit of oscillating between opposites: between nostalgia and novelty, between aesthetic puritanism and architectural spectacle. Stern and Gehry suggest a more mature direction. Continuity and reinvention need not be enemies. A city can honor its historical grain while still experimenting with new shapes, materials, and technologies. A community can build traditional civic buildings without sliding into pastiche, and can build expressive modern structures without turning them into billboards for developers. The question is not old versus new, but whether the result strengthens the civic realm.

When I think back to seeing the Bilbao plans as a teenager, what struck me wasn't the novelty but the possibility. When I think now of Stern's work — the way 15 Central Park West fits Manhattan's skyline without disappearing into it — I think about the power of restraint. Cities need both impulses. They need imagination and memory, ambition and modesty, the courage to shock and the wisdom to calm.

That balance is painfully rare in contemporary planning debates. Our arguments about zoning, density, and housing often reduce buildings to units, envelopes, and FAR calculations. These are essential elements of policy, but they are not the whole story. A city that builds only for efficiency will eventually erode its own identity. A city that builds only for spectacle will eventually exhaust itself. Gehry and Stern, each through decades of work, showed that civic architecture is most powerful when it is clear about its purpose: to make the shared world feel worth belonging to.

Their deaths are reminders, not just losses. They urge us to demand more of our public spaces, our institutions, and our cities. They ask us to look up — literally — and to let architecture rekindle our sense of possibility. America has no shortage of challenges, but we have also inherited a remarkable toolkit: the imagination of Gehry, the discipline of Stern, and a tradition of building that once took citizenship seriously.
The question now is whether we still have the will to use it.

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: Frank Gehry, by Forgemind Archipedia via Flickr: Flickr, under CC 2.0 License; Robert A.M. Stern, by the Historic Districts Council, via Wikimedia, under CC BY-SA 4.0.

$1.8 Trillion for Nothing

Randal OToole — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Congress sporadically handed out transit capital funds in the 1970s and 1980s, but in 1991 it made it systematic with creation of the transit capital investment grants program, also known as New Starts. Since then, federal, state, and local taxpayers have spent more than half a trillion dollars on transit capital improvements. Transit agencies have also spent nearly $1.2 trillion on transit operations, only $355 billion of which was covered by passenger fares.

These numbers are from the National Transit Database Historic Time Series, the 2024 edition of which the Federal Transit Administration released last week along with the 2024 annual transit database that was featured here yesterday. While the above figures are in nominal dollars, after adjusting for inflation to 2024 dollars using GDP deflators, taxpayers have spent more than $1.8 trillion subsidizing transit since 1991.

What have we gotten for this excessively generous subsidy? In 1991, the average urban resident rode transit more than 40 times a year. Transit ridership grew between 1991 and 2014, but so did urban populations, so trips per resident increased to just 42. Ridership fell after 2014 and by 2019 the average urban resident took only 36 transit trips per year. As of 2024, it was around 27 trips per year.

This does not seem like a great return on a $1.8 trillion investment.

Transit has not relieved congestion. It hasn’t reduced greenhouse gas emissions. It hasn’t helped many low-income people, the vast majority of whom have their own cars and don’t use transit. All this $1.8 trillion has done is enrich a few special interest groups.

The historic time series consists of five different spreadsheets. The first two, tables TS1.1 and TS1.2, focus on how much transit funding comes federal, state, or local sources. More interesting is table TS2.1, which lists operating expenses, fares, route miles, revenue miles, revenue hours, riders, and passenger-miles, all broken down by both transit agencies and modes for each agency. Table TS2.2 is the same but broken down only by transit agencies, not by modes. Table TS3.1 has capital expenses broken down by agency and mode while table TS3.2 inventories assets by agency and mode. I use mainly 2.1 and 3.1.

Previous issues have included most data back to 1991, though capital costs began in 1992 and fares in 2002. For some reason, this year the FTA began many of the time series in 2015, so I turned to the 2023 time series to get earlier years.

The American Public Transportation Association’s Public Transit Fact Book includes capital costs and fares for the years that are missing from the historical time series. Though APTA’s data aren’t broken down by mode, they add to the continuous series of national data.

Transit advocates talk endlessly about the advantages of transit over driving. Americans are paying for it but they aren’t using it.

This piece first appeared at The Antiplanner.

Photo: chart courtesy The Antiplanner.

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.

Slouching Towards Gavin Newsom

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

More through historical accident than anything else, Gavin Newsom has emerged as the de facto leader of the Democratic resistance. His dubious attempt to redistrict California along partisan lines won at the ballot box last month. It was a gamble – an open and explicit attempt at gerrymandering – which voters have rewarded. He is conspicuously modeling his image on Bill Clinton’s and Slick Willie is returning the compliment by letting insiders know that he is hugely impressed by Newsom’s talents.

Newsom is also audaciously recasting himself as a working-class hero. He has said he spent his childhood “hustling” and that he “raised himself.” That rather downplays his rise as a protégé of the Getty family, which employed his father as its lawyer. In 1991, a young Newsom was photographed with the Getty children as part of a newspaper story titled “The Children of the Rich.” It’s unlikely that the San Francisco elite, who have financed his ruse, are fooled; nor is anyone else for that matter. Yet the act goes on, without a hint of shame.

In November, his former chief of staff was indicted for wire fraud and falsifying tax returns, using fake contracts to deduct the cost of luxury handbags and private jet travel. Dana Williamson’s defense team say federal investigators had sought her cooperation with an as-yet undisclosed investigation into Newsom himself. His team denies any knowledge of such an investigation – an increasingly common occurrence in the one-party state.

Whatever the truth of the Williamson case, Newsom’s record as Governor alone ought to be fatal. California has led the globe in culture and technology for more than a century. If the state were a country, it would be the fourth-largest economy in the world, as Newsom endlessly brags. But look under the hood and California has become a disaster for most workers.

This economic regime is, as former director of the California labor department Michael Bernick puts it, an “upstairs, downstairs” autocracy. Newsom’s state has a phenomenally wealthy class above a large, low-wage underbelly. Of course he rarely discusses the other California; the state has the highest proportion of those living in poverty, tepid job growth and the country’s highest rates of unemployment.

Among teenagers the unemployment rate tops 21 percent, just short of twice the national average. For Gen Z, unemployment ranks second, just ahead of Mississippi. California is the single worst state at creating jobs that pay above average; it hemorrhaged 1.6 million above-average-paying jobs in the past decade, more than twice as many as any other state. In the past year, the only new jobs created in California were in government-financed healthcare and government itself.

Yet the Governor likes to bask in California’s glow. He inherited an economy that is home to five of the top ten companies in the world. No other region on the planet comes close. The presence of these firms, and their capital gains, along with a highly inflated property market, do much to propel the state’s GDP. That’s partly why he now dominates the race to be the presidential candidate for 2028, as his long-time rival Kamala Harris fades towards well-deserved obscurity.

The notion of an enlightened California coming to rescue the nation from Trump also plays well with large sections of Silicon Valley. Despite the tech world’s flirtation with MAGA, loyalties remain decisively on the side of the Democrats. The Republicans haven’t won a statewide race in almost two decades. Partly that’s down to demographics. Young workers are fleeing. Left behind is a rapidly aging population, many rich from real-estate investments, a large coterie of affluent professionals, state-dependent individuals and, most importantly, public-sector workers, whose unions funded Newsom’s successful redistricting drive. Leading Democratic pollster Paul Mitchell told me that, thanks to these demographic changes, the GOP’s chances of recapturing the Governor’s Mansion would be “a one in every 200 years event.”

Newsom’s agenda is shaped largely by public-employee unions and tech-financed green lobbies. But these same policies have devastated the state’s blue-collar economy. Once a major oil producer, the state now suffers the nation’s highest energy prices and is utterly dependent on foreign imports from South America and Saudi Arabia. California’s regulations have added to the erosion of industrial jobs. Since 1990, one-third of manufacturing jobs – 1.3 million positions – have disappeared. Newsom likes to present himself as a member of the hustling classes and yet, in truth, he has destroyed them, encouraged by the established wealth of unions and tech oligarchs. It’s a story that makes much more sense when you learn of his early years.

Over the past two decades, four million net domestic migrants have left California – that’s the population of San Francisco, Anaheim and San Diego combined. In the past decade, the four leading destinations for young people were all in the South – Nashville, Austin, San Antonio and Dallas-Fort Worth. Austin’s growth in educated-millennial migration was almost three times that of New York and twice that of San Francisco. This has only accelerated under Newsom.

Some suggest that California’s tech sector will make up for this decline in jobs. But companies, too, are leaving. Along with energy firms such as Chevron and Occidental, the recent exodus includes Tesla, SpaceX, McKesson, Jacobs Engineering and Oracle. The big winner is California’s arch-rival, Texas. Hollywood is also suffering a major loss of jobs to other states and countries. Tech employment is heading downward, with more than half of all national tech job losses occurring in the Golden State. Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee and South Carolina are projected to enjoy the biggest growth in tech over the next decade.

Optimists point to artificial intelligence as a new source of growth, but California’s high energy prices make that unlikely. The soaring need for affordable electricity is leading firms such as Nvidia and Samsung to locate centers which fabricate advanced chips and processors in areas with lower prices for electricity. This includes Texas, where a new quantum-computing center is being planned, and energy-rich states such as Pennsylvania, which is seeking AI growth as a way to reanimate its industrial sector.

To be sure, many AI firms began life in San Francisco. But they are unlikely to create more tech jobs. City economist Ted Egan suggests that layoffs from other companies, largely due to AI replacing workers, have wiped out gains from the new tech. AI will, if anything, accelerate the rewards to the investor class, a handful of entrepreneurs and well-compensated “genius” programmers. What seems to be happening is that a few highly paid executives and developers stay on their campuses, while computing power shifts to places where energy is cheaper. California is becoming the oligarch’s state, led by the oligarch-in-chief.

Nothing drives the mass departure from America’s most blessed state more than affordability. This of one of issues that excites both the “abundance” advocates and the increasingly socialist-oriented YIMBY movement. Newsom, who bought a new $9 million house last year, claims to be taking bold steps to improve the state’s housing market. But he has overseen laughably poor results. Many Californians will never own a home or find an affordable rental. Despite hundreds of “pro-housing” initiatives, the state’s housing crisis is getting worse. California consistently lags in the construction not just of single-family homes but multifamily homes as well, while the state dominates the list of the nation’s most expensive ZIP codes.

Home prices in coastal California are nearly 400 percent above the national average, and statewide the median cost of a home is 2.5 times higher than in the rest of the country. Not surprisingly, California has the second-lowest home-ownership rate in the nation, 56 percent (New York’s is lowest, at 54 percent). Nor have Newsom’s policies helped renters. The average cost of a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles is just shy of $3,000 a month, according to apartments.com, about $1,000 more than the national average.

Housing is just one of the many Newsom policies that may not play so well in the vast center of America, where single-family homes are the norm and prices are far lower. Certainly, his long-standing assault on fossil fuels will win over few workers in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, the Dakotas and Pennsylvania, the epicenters of the US’s enormous energy production. Laid-off factory hands in Michigan may not welcome an agenda that includes the wiping out of profitable gasoline-fueled cars. Progressive mantras that play well in California may prove Newsom’s undoing in a 2028 presidential run.

But it would be foolish to underestimate Newsom. Burdened by dyslexia, he has compensated with extreme discipline and hard work. Never an object of adulation, like his predecessor Ronald Reagan, or of respect like the more cerebral former California governor Jerry Brown, his career trajectory has evolved carefully, along very pragmatic lines, even while Newsom embraces progressive bromides. “He is trying to be the anti-Trump,” notes long-time Democratic consultant Dave Gershwin, “but if he needs to cut ties with the left, he’ll do it.” There is little sign of that yet in his cultural stances, such as his preference for transgender over parental rights or his embrace of climate-change religion, which still resonate with his state’s progressive-dominated media.

An ability to shift from ideology to practicality has been a hallmark of Newsom’s career. Expect a move right on these questions in the coming months. As mayor of San Francisco, he often sided with business interests against the local radical left. As lieutenant governor under Brown, he resorted to visiting Texas in search of a more viable economic model. Just this year he displayed his skill at shifting with the winds by trying to reach out to conservatives such as the late Charlie Kirk when it seemed MAGA was on the rise.

When necessary, Newsom is willing to jettison progressive demands. He vetoed a bill that would have legalized “shooting alleys” – so-called safe drug-injection sites. He worked to keep the state’s last nuclear and natural-gas plants in operation to prevent politically unpalatable blackouts. To do otherwise would have been madness: these plants account for half of California’s electricity. Newsom is many things, but mad is not one of them. Facing a dismal fiscal reality, he has been forced to fend off proposals from Sacramento progressives that included a 32-hour work week, raising the state’s income tax – already the nation’s highest – and adding new payroll taxes for universal healthcare.

To balance practicality with ideology, Newsom uses his media skills – ultra-friendly Politico claims he has “won the internet” – to assert himself. The donor class, which has always liked him, now sees him as the best option at a time when a majority of under-40s embrace socialism. Particularly threatening to Palo Alto is a survey that found that a majority of under-40s now favor restricting incomes, with a large portion seeking limits of less than $1 million annually.

GOP opponents say that Newsom is the “tier one” to fear in 2028. “He’s really smart,” according to California’s Republican national committeeman Shawn Steel, “besides having great hair.” Even the American Conservative proclaimed him “the big winner” of the 2025 elections, thanks to his gerrymandering initiative.

Of course, Newsom’s record of failure for working people could provide fodder for a challenger from the left, and in November 2028 from the GOP. But right now, anti-Trumpism overwhelms serious progressive critiques of Newsom’s record. He is no great statesman. But, with his media savvy and good looks, he could well play one on TV, and that may be more than enough against either his party’s socialists or the remnants of a disintegrating MAGA.

This piece first appeared at: The Spectator.

Photo: Press Office of CA Governor Newsom

Ruth Asawa's Civic Imagination

Samuel J Abrams — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

On the sixth floor of the Museum of Modern Art, Ruth Asawa's wire sculptures hang like breaths made visible, loops of brass and light suspended between earth and heaven, quiet reminders that beauty can still be a civic language. They sway almost imperceptibly as visitors move through the gallery, casting shadows that ripple across the white walls. The effect is serene and public all at once: a choreography of discipline, patience, and grace. Each loop of wire is hand-woven, continuous and unbroken. Step closer and you see the human labor inside the geometry - evidence of time and attention in a culture allergic to both.

Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective, jointly organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gathers more than 300 works spanning five decades of artistic production. The exhibition is far more than a historical survey; it is a civic revelation. In a moment when contemporary art often trades in irony, provocation, or despair, Asawa's work stands as a counter-tradition of constructive joy. Her art is not rebellion but repair. It embodies the conviction that beauty, education, and community are inseparable threads in the democratic fabric.

Formation and Discipline

Asawa's life story is as American as it is extraordinary. Born in 1926 to Japanese-American farmers in Norwalk, California, she was sixteen when her family was forced into internment camps during World War II. Her father was arrested by the FBI in February 1942; the rest of the family was first held at Santa Anita racetrack, then sent to Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas. The experience could have produced bitterness. Instead, she found order and solace in pattern and repetition. In the camp she began to draw; after the war she enrolled at the legendary Black Mountain College, where she studied under Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller.

Albers taught design as moral formation. "Art is revelation instead of information," he believed - a philosophy that to see clearly was to live rightly, that perception itself was a civic virtue. Asawa absorbed that ethic completely. She would later write, "An artist is not special. An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special." That conviction shaped her life and teaching. For Asawa, art was education, and education was the moral architecture of democracy.

The lessons of Black Mountain followed her west. What she learned in Albers's classroom - discipline, patience, respect for material - she transformed into an art that united craft and contemplation. Her San Francisco home doubled as studio and classroom; children threaded wire beside her while neighborhood students dropped in to learn. The line between life and art, between family and form, simply dissolved.

The Geometry of Community

Her signature looped-wire sculptures - those floating volumes of air and light - grew from a basket-weaving technique she learned in Mexico in 1947, during a summer trip while studying at Black Mountain College. Using ordinary materials - galvanized steel, brass, copper - she built intricate lattices that feel at once mathematical and maternal. Each loop encloses and releases space, creating inside and outside simultaneously. "I'm not so interested in the expression of something," she once said. "I'm more interested in what the material can do."

Standing beneath these forms at MoMA, one senses a rare harmony between intellect and humility. They are rigorous yet tender, abstract yet profoundly human. Their calm precision offers an antidote to the noise of the age. Where much contemporary art insists on confrontation or spectacle, Asawa's insists on coherence. She understood that art's highest purpose is not to shock but to order, not to dazzle but to dignify.

Some critics mistake Asawa's serenity for retreat, her discipline for decorum. Yet in her patience there is protest: a quiet refusal of cynicism, haste, and the hollow virtue of outrage. Each loop of wire is an act of faith that connection still matters, that emptiness can hold form.

From Studio to City

That ethic carried beyond the studio. After settling in San Francisco, Asawa turned her attention outward - to fountains, plazas, and public schools. Her Andrea Fountain (1968) at Ghirardelli Square, with its entwined mermaids and sea forms, invites children to play and touch. Her San Francisco Fountain (1973) near Union Square, covered in hundreds of cast-bronze reliefs depicting the city's neighborhoods and workers, transforms the everyday into civic monument.

In contrast to the forbidding monumentalism of mid-century public art, Asawa's civic works are intimate and participatory. They do not impose; they invite. Where Richard Serra's Tilted Arc divided Manhattan, Asawa's fountains bind communities together. Her art exemplifies what might be called a civic modernism of belonging; an art that joins beauty to stewardship.

MoMA's retrospective restores this dimension. Models, sketches, and archival photographs of her public commissions line the galleries, revealing an artist who saw no hierarchy between fine art and civic architecture. For Asawa, the city itself was a canvas of relation and, powerfully, a place where form could teach virtue.

Education as Civic Renewal

Of all her legacies, education may be the most enduring and this was featured potently in the retrospective. During the 1970s and '80s, as arts programs were disappearing from public schools, Asawa became a tireless advocate for creative education as civic necessity. She organized community workshops, wrote curricula, and lobbied the San Francisco Board of Education to establish a public arts high school. Her decade-long effort culminated in the founding of the San Francisco School of the Arts in 1982 - now renamed the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts.

She believed that learning to see was the beginning of learning to care. In an era when politics increasingly substitutes for pedagogy, her conviction that creativity undergirds citizenship feels newly urgent. A society that neglects the arts, she understood, erodes the habits of attention and patience that self-government requires.

At a time when art and music programs are again the first casualties of budget cuts, Asawa's legacy reminds policymakers that aesthetic formation is civic formation - that to teach beauty is to teach democracy.

Against Spectacle

The exhibition also offers a quiet rebuke to the art world's current obsessions. Where so much contemporary work aims for shock, Asawa sought equilibrium. Her practice rejects the assumption that seriousness demands despair. She built beauty, not irony.

Her fountains were not luxury goods for collectors but instruments of civic play. Her wire forms were not slogans or identity statements but expressions of shared discipline. The retrospective's curators, Cara Manes and Janet Bishop, wisely resist framing her as a rediscovered "outsider." Instead, they present her as a peer of Albers, Calder, and Eva Hesse - an artist who expanded modernism's vocabulary by rooting abstraction in the everyday.

Her legacy forces a question: what if public institutions embraced her ethos? What if beauty and stewardship, not branding and outrage, guided our cultural life? That MoMA, the most visible museum of modern art, now devotes its sixth floor to her work is itself an act of civic correction; a recognition that rigor and gentleness are not opposites but allies.

Transcendence in the Everyday

The quieter rooms of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective reveal the artist at rest. Watercolors of wilted poppies, contour drawings of her children, geometric studies in ink - all bear the same meditative rhythm as her wire sculptures. There is something almost liturgical in their repetition, as if each line were a small prayer for coherence.

The show's through-line is unity: between sculpture and sketch, between home and public space, between the hand that loops wire and the city that receives its pattern. "Art is doing. Art deals directly with life," she said. Those words capture the civic heart of her vision—an understanding that attention itself is a form of creation.

A Civic Vision for Our Time

Asawa's worldview was never narrowly aesthetic. It was civic, even constitutional. She believed that the virtues of making - patience, discipline, care - are the same virtues that sustain a democracy. Her life offers a model of citizenship rooted in creation rather than consumption.

That insight speaks directly to the crises of our own moment. Polarization has replaced participation; distraction has replaced devotion. Yet Asawa's example reminds us that civic trust is built the same way a sculpture is: one loop at a time, each joined to the next. When students learn to draw, weave, or fold, they are also learning how to see one another

The Republic of Beauty

In the film that concludes the exhibition, Asawa leads a classroom of children in a paper-folding exercise. Their faces brighten as flat sheets rise into complex geometries. "You can make something beautiful out of almost anything," she tells them in the film. It could be her epitaph or a creed for public life.

For Asawa, beauty was not ornament but ethic: the visible sign of care, the trace of faith that the world can still hold form. Her retrospective is more than an art event. It is a moral reminder that beauty is a public duty.

Standing in MoMA's final gallery, as the wire forms shimmer and sway, one senses not nostalgia but instruction. The work teaches us how to look, how to care, how to build. It suggests that beauty, like democracy, is not a finished product but a practice - looped, patient, participatory, and unbroken.

In the fragile republic of art and citizenship alike, Ruth Asawa remains our most luminous teacher - showing that to make something beautiful is to believe, however quietly, that the world can still be made whole.

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: Alexandra Courtis, via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.

An Anti-woke Counter-revolution is Sweeping Through the Media

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

The purchase of Paramount and CBS by David Ellison – scion of Larry Ellison, the world’s third-richest man, with a $250 billion tech fortune – marks a shift away from one-party domination of the media and culture. It follows Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, now X, and the Trumpian capture of Washington DC’s Kennedy Center.

Long a cakewalk for progressives, the culture war is edging towards high noon. For the first time in decades, the left faces competitors who read from different scripts and come from different perspectives.

Naturally, progressives are not happy. Robert Reich, a leading left-wing economist, denounces – rightly – the ability of the ultra-rich to buy media outlets and push an agenda. Yet he and others had no such qualms when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, when Salesforce’s Marc Benioff snapped up the moribund Time magazine, when Laurene Powell Jobs took over the Atlantic, or when another well-endowed heir purchased the New Republic from Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.

Perhaps most unsettled are those who profited from decades of one-party cultural rule, stretching from Hollywood and Silicon Valley to Manhattan. Bari Weiss’s pledge to ‘blow up’ CBS – Paramount has announced plans to lay off 2,000 workers in Hollywood and New York – alarms the likes of Katie Couric, the onetime CBS star, nominally because it undermines ‘independent journalism’. Progressives will certainly attack CBS for moving away from promoting climate hysteria, which no longer enjoys its own special desk. Worse still for the left, conservative voices – such as the ubiquitous Mormon Wives, glamorous mothers and reality-TV stars who stand in sharp contrast to the over-the-top Kardashians – are gaining traction on television.

Why is this happening now? The re-election of Trump, the ultimate anti-wokist, has emboldened some oligarchs to enter what was once the exclusive domain of the left. But political power alone does not explain the shift. Trump’s influence will fade, after all. Demographics and customer preferences matter more.

Mainstream media have become disconnected from at least half their audience. Overall public confidence in the press is near a historic low: barely a third express trust, half the share that did so in 1978. This is not just an American phenomenon – the travails of the once-respected BBC in the UK make that clear.

The gulf between the media and audiences widened after the George Floyd riots, when major media companies – in print, film, radio and online – doubled down on an ever more overt progressivism. They downplayed far-left violence and embraced a mission not of informing or entertaining, but of ideological propagation.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo: IMDB/House of David

New Report: The Rise of Latino America

Joel Kotkin and Jennifer Hernandez — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Executive Summary

In The Rise of Latino America, we argue that Latinos, who are projected to become America’s largest ethnic group, are a dynamic force shaping the nation’s demographic, economic, and cultural future. Far from being a marginalized group defined by oppression, Latinos are integral to America’s story. They drive economic growth, cultural evolution, and workforce vitality. Challenges, however, including poverty, educational disparities, and restrictive policies, threaten their upward mobility. Policymakers who wish to harness Latino potential to ensure national prosperity and resilience should adopt policies that prioritize affordability, safety, and economic opportunity over ideological constraints.

We urge policymakers to reject ideologically driven policies that hinder Latino progress, such as restrictive land use, costly climate mandates, and reduced personal mobility. Embracing policies that align with Latino aspirations rooted in work, family, and opportunity will not only empower this vital population but also strengthen America’s economic and demographic future in a competitive global landscape.

Introduction

Migration has shaped America’s history. The earliest migrants, the ancestors of the American Indians, arrived from far east Asia. Migration from the British Isles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was voluntary but thousands of enslaved people also arrived here from Africa at the same time. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw waves of Germans, Italians, Russians, East Asians, Indians, and Jews.

Each group has faced sometimes brutal discrimination from the dominant majority. Many on the left see such racial prejudice as the American experience’s defining characteristic. From this perspective, Latinos are simply the latest group to live under an oppressive regime and whose lands “settlers” stole.

Yet the Latino experience is unique and far more uplifting. Latinos differ from Europeans: notably, they migrated to a country whose territory Anglo immigrants had conquered—in Texas initially and later across the entire Southwest—and taken from them.

But contrary to the narrative of “settler colonialism,” very few of today’s Latino residents can trace themselves to earlier settlers; the vast majority are recent arrivals. Indeed, the Southwest’s entire Mexican population in 1848 was barely 48,000. Yet the dominant academic and progressive narrative remains one of unending oppression and seizure of land. Latinos, writes one leftist writer, have “been forgotten by the nation” and have “nothing but their angers and their hungers.” Like the Anglos who settled areas seized from Mexico, they too want a piece of the pie, someplace safe and prosperous for their families to live and where they can acquire wealth.

At the same time there are some on the political right who fear America’s ongoing Latinization. Some influential right-wing theorists continue to hold the notion that Latinos are intrinsically inferior to whites and Asians. Others fear that the Latinos blend of Catholic and Indio culture makes them less digestible than earlier immigrants.

This report disputes both perspectives, and focuses instead on the progress, as well as the very real challenges Latinos face in America. The rise of Latinos does not constitute a departure from the American story; it is both wrong and dangerous to speak about them as if they were. Latinos, soon to be America’s largest ethnic group, are in a prime position to shape America’s future. Although the bulk are from Mexico, a large contingent comes from the Caribbean, Central and South America.

Read the rest of this report at: Civitas Institute.

Download the full paper

Authors

Jennifer Hernandez has practiced land use and environmental law for more than 30 years, and leads Holland & Knight's West Coast Land Use and Environmental Group. She is a former longtime co-chair of the firm's national Land Use and Government Team. Ms. Hernandez divides her time between the firm's San Francisco and Los Angeles offices.

Researchers

Wendell Cox is a leading proponent of adopting land use and transport policies based on their effectiveness in improving the standard of living and alleviating poverty. He is principal of Demographia (Wendell Cox Consultancy) in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He specializes in urban policy, transport and demographics and is author of Demographia World Urban Areas and co-author of Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey. He is also author of Toward More Prosperous Cities, a framing essay on urban areas, urban planning, urban transport and sustainability.

Marshall Toplansky is an award-winning Innovation Professor of Management Science at the Argyros School of Business and Economics at Chapman University. He is a widely published and award-winning marketing professional and successful entrepreneur. Marshall co-founded KPMG's data & analytics center of excellence and now teaches and consults corporations on their analytics strategies.

Erika Ozuna is a senior consultant at Chapman University’s Center for Demographics and Policy. She currently works on multifamily and senior housing analysis and market studies throughout the country. Ozuna has over ten years of experience in the commercial real estate industry, including experience in all types of senior housing appraisals. Prior to her multifamily housing experience, Erika worked for seven years in the banking and investments fields, has conducted quantitative and qualitative research and analysis for numerous projects and entities, and was a high school teacher. Erika holds a M.P.P. in international relations and economics from Pepperdine University and a B.S. in business administration from the University of Texas RGV.

Photo: report cover and pages from the report, Civitas Institute.

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

Universities Have Sold a Whole Generation a Lie

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Some day, Donald Trump may lead America into a golden era of reindustrialisation, or perhaps one last hurrah before China’s domination of materials and manufacturing knocks the US off its number one perch. Yet what if we start to build new factories and ports but no one shows up to work in them?

Trump claims to have dragooned some $12tn in new foreign investment, but even he questions whether we have the bodies, and minds, to fill American jobs. He recently defended H-1B visas for migrants with “special” talents (after first questioning them), alarming some of his more nationalist Maga allies.

H-1B visas are typically used by tech firms, but the row over their future illustrates why America is facing a critical shortage of skilled workers across the board. To some extent, both sides of the debate are right.

As the populist Right points out, H1-B visas have a record of abuse – including a notorious case at Disney, which replaced some of its American IT workers with foreign ones and even effectively required the departing US staff to train their replacements. Roughly three-quarters of Silicon Valley’s jobs were in 2018 estimated to be held by non-citizens. Of course, the oligarchs look at these “technocoolies” not so much as a genius input as a way to save money.

But still, as Vivek Ramaswamy has acidly pointed out, foreign workers are needed because of profound failures in the US education system.

Today, US fourth and eighth graders are performing worse not only than students in East Asia, but also those in the likes of Poland and Sweden. Overall, some 40pc of US public school students fail to meet standards in either maths or English, worse than pre-pandemic. The country was hardly doing spectacularly before then. In maths, the OECD’s 2018 Program for International Student Assessment found the United States was outperformed by 36 countries, not only by China, but also Russia, Italy, France, Finland, Poland, and Canada.

This lack of achievement at the grade school level is felt not only in the elite professions but even in more mundane careers such as truck drivers, machine-tool operators, and welders who can do basic industrial tasks. By 2030, the US could be short about two million industrial workers; the American Welding Society estimates the shortage of skilled welders exceeds 400,000 nationwide.

Even well-paying jobs of this kind have been hard to fill. Ford chief executive Jim Farley notes that the carmaker has 5,000 open mechanic jobs that pay $120,000 annually that can’t be filled.

America’s inability to produce a new generation that can do these jobs reflects a deeply-ingrained tendency to ignore practical skills in favour of the supposed Valhalla of a four-year liberal arts education. The problem is not just universities. High schools have removed shop classes – where students are taught basic skills like woodwork – thinking them too declassee and demeaning.

One proposed solution is mass immigration, but Biden’s disastrous open border policy largely attracted migrants from Latin America, who tend to be less skilled than those from east and south Asia, as well as far less educated than earlier waves. Most are likely to remain at the bottom of the employment chain throughout their lives. These newcomers primarily compete with other poor people for living space, jobs, and social services.

In reality, what is needed most is to reclaim our increasingly disengaged native-born workforce; the percentage of prime age men not in the labour force has risen in recent decades. Europe has, if anything, a larger cohort of the young and disengaged; in Britain, parents worry about “generation jobless”.

To address this issue, the education system needs to shift away from consciousness-raising, a favourite of progressive faculty, towards developing productive skills. Many are already ditching traditional academia. From 2010 to 2021, US undergraduate enrollment has dropped from 18.1 million to about 15.4 million. Over the past decade, more than 500 US private colleges have closed, three times the rate of the previous decade.

In contrast, the number attending vocational schools was up 16pc in 2023 to the highest level since 2018. This marks a major shift in attitudes. A recent Gates Foundation study suggested decreasing interest among those under 30 in four-year college degrees and greater interest in trade schools. This appears to be particularly true among working class families. Americans have more faith in two-year colleges, where over 40pc of all undergraduates are enrolled, than in four-year schools.

For many young people, a shift towards tactile skills is well-advised. The digitisation of the economy has weakened the status of many professions, including code-writers. Even among those who manage to finish university, more than 40pc of recent graduates aged 22 to 27 are underemployed, meaning that they’re working in jobs that don’t require their degree, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports.

Moreover, the supposed “jobs of the future” are already in danger of evaporating. The automation of information, computer scientist Kai -Fu Lee suggests, will end up wiping out the “coders”. Lee, a venture capitalist and author of AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future, predicts, “a lot of employees are going to feel like turkeys waiting for Thanksgiving”.

This means that the future may be less about analytical skills than actually fixing and building things. “It’s the end of the white-collar knowledge work,” virtual reality pioneer Rony Abovitz, now the founder of AI startup Sun and Thunder, told me. Instead, he predicts that the future will be shaped more by “the rise of this sophisticated, technically capable blue-collar worker”.

If Trump, like many Democrats, is seeking a resurgent America, the critical challenge will lie not in financial manipulation, computer games, or supervising AI as it analyses everything in minute details. The future is in developing and nurturing the skilled hands needed to resist and surpass the United States’ competitors.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Photo: Telegraph

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.

Taro Moberly and the Moral Geography of Seeing

Samuel J Abrams — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 18:51:46 -0500

Kyoto is one of the most photographed cities in the world, and perhaps one of the most misunderstood. Most images of it feel decorative; tourist postcards masquerading as art, emptied of the quiet pulse that makes the city human. Taro Moberly’s Kyoto Dreaming breaks from that tradition. His work restores to the city its weight, its patience, its moral texture. His camera listens. Each frame insists that to see a place well is not an act of aesthetic consumption but of citizenship: an effort to attend, to notice, to dwell.

Moberly introduces his book not with self-assertion but with gratitude. Born to a Japanese mother and an American father, he grew up in California with Kyoto present in memory and story but distant in experience. He writes of visiting as a child - the grandeur and vastness of Kyoto Station, the floorboards of Nijo Castle, the toy-train shop on the top floor of Daimaru. In 2015 he moved there, returning to the place his mother was raised and his grandparents had called home. The move was not simply geographic; it was formative. “I discovered so much about the unique and fascinating culture of my adopted homeland,” he writes. “Kyoto has changed how I see the world and helped me become the person I am today.” When he returned to California in 2023, he carried the city inside him. “Within myself,” he concludes, “I still see Kyoto as a major part of my identity.” The book is less a record of that period than a testament to what the city taught him: that meaning and belonging are earned through attention.

The opening photographs tell the story. Two figures sit on the steps of a temple, dwarfed by the roof’s massive eaves. They are enveloped in silence. The composition honors scale without losing intimacy; we are made to feel the proportion between person and place. Moberly’s power lies in this restraint. His images are not declarations but invitations; to linger, to feel the density of the ordinary. In a time when nearly every image demands to be consumed instantly, his work asks us to slow down. His palette is subdued, his tones favoring twilight and rain. The light is not dramatic but devotional. Kyoto, in his hands, becomes less an object than a conversation: between architecture and weather, between time and memory, between the photographer and the city that made him.

To walk through the book is to sense the rhythm of a life lived attentively. We move from courtyards and alleys to the quiet ritual of commuting; umbrellas passing under red lights, taxis idling on wet streets, a parent guiding a child along a stone path lined with cherry blossoms. The repetition of these scenes accumulates into a moral vision. Moberly does not aestheticize civility; he observes it. His Kyoto is not the idealized city of postcards but the functioning city of mutual awareness, where strangers share space without spectacle. In this sense, his art offers something civic. The sociologist Richard Sennett described cities in his The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities essentially as theaters of encounter, sustained by the way strangers learn to look at one another. Moberly’s photographs record that encounter in real time. Every image reveals the choreography of coexistence: the small courtesies that hold urban life together. Pedestrians pause, cars yield, umbrellas tilt just enough to avoid collision. It is a social order built on perception.

The book’s stillness is deliberate. In an age of acceleration, stillness itself becomes a statement. Moberly resists the compulsion to dramatize. His camera does not chase decisive moments; it waits for coherence to reveal itself. This patience is a moral stance. It rebukes the attention economy that governs both photography and public life. Where the digital image thrives on speed and self-display, Moberly’s work restores scale and humility. The figures he captures are not subjects to be possessed but neighbors to be regarded. The act of seeing becomes relational, not extractive. The city, through his lens, is an organism of shared restraint.

Light is his great ally. In Moberly’s Kyoto, illumination functions like character: by turns tender, elusive, and instructive. Dawn glows faintly on tiled roofs; dusk turns wet streets into mirrors; neon reflections shimmer across taxi windows. He refuses the oversaturated brightness of commercial travel photography. His colors breathe within limits, his blues deepening toward memory rather than spectacle. In that restraint lies reverence. He allows light to emerge as revelation; to arrive, as grace does, without force. The viewer can feel the hours spent waiting for the right balance between luminosity and shadow, as if patience itself were a kind of prayer.

The formal discipline of the images echoes the discipline of the city. Kyoto’s architecture has long embodied order without rigidity - geometry in the service of grace - and Moberly composes with the same ethos. Lines of roofs and alleyways guide the eye gently; depth is earned through perspective, not manipulation. One image of wooden facades glistening after rain captures the principle perfectly: symmetry balanced by warmth, precision softened by use. He understands that restraint is not absence but articulation, that beauty often arises when ambition gives way to attention. In his visual grammar, order is not a constraint but a form of respect.

What makes Kyoto Dreaming resonate, though, is its humanity. The photographs breathe with companionship: a couple in conversation, a worker in the rain, a child discovering spring. The scenes are neither anonymous nor sentimental. They affirm continuity in an age obsessed with rupture. The red jacket of a child beneath pale blossoms becomes a symbol of renewal, the small assertion of color in a world rendered gray by haste. Moberly’s empathy is architectural, he gives his subjects room to exist within the frame. The result is intimacy without intrusion. He treats each life as belonging to the larger composition of the city, an act of recognition that carries its own civic weight.

As the book unfolds, its emotional key deepens from observation to gratitude. The late-night cityscapes - headlights diffused in rain, reflections stretching across wet crosswalks - feel like meditations on endurance. Kyoto, far from a timeless relic, appears here as a living organism: mortal, changing, resilient. Moberly captures that fragility with affection rather than melancholy. His attention dignifies transience. He shows how the fleeting can still feel eternal when looked at with care. That sensibility, inherited from the city’s own traditions, becomes the moral spine of the book: to see clearly is to care; to care is to remain human.

Moberly’s return to California closes the narrative but not the connection. “The city, the culture, and the people of Kyoto have left a profound impact,” he writes. “I will be forever grateful for the lessons and character taught to me by what now feels like my second home.” Gratitude is a rare word in contemporary art, but it fits him. He has made gratitude into a method, an aesthetic and a moral discipline. His photographs do not demand recognition; they offer it. In a culture addicted to novelty, this is a radical act. He reminds us that reverence is not nostalgia. It is attention sustained across time.

What emerges from Kyoto Dreaming is a philosophy of looking that transcends place. Moberly demonstrates that belonging begins with perception - that the ethics of seeing and the ethics of citizenship are inseparable. Cities depend on this kind of vision: on people who notice, who yield, who understand that public life survives through small acts of regard. His photographs are, in that sense, civic instruction. They teach us how to inhabit our own streets: how to look again at the surfaces we hurry past, how to find coherence in the weather of daily life.

The book could easily have been another exercise in aestheticized travel, but Moberly refuses that path. His work carries no slogans, no filters of irony or self-display. It asks us instead to practice the ancient discipline of looking until we actually see. In doing so, he joins a lineage that stretches from Saul Leiter’s New York to Masahisa Fukase’s Japan: photographers who understood that light, patience, and moral attention are ways of honoring the world.

In the end, Kyoto Dreaming is less a photobook than a form of civic meditation. It restores the bond between perception and gratitude. It reminds us that beauty is not found in the exceptional but in the continuous; in streets walked daily, rituals repeated, faces glimpsed in passing. The health of any culture depends on its ability to see in this way. When we lose that capacity, we lose not only art but sympathy, not only beauty but belonging.

Taro Moberly’s achievement is to make seeing itself feel like an act of care. Through his lens, Kyoto becomes more than a city; it becomes a teacher. It reveals how civilization survives: not through grand gestures or perfect design, but through the quiet labor of attention - one person, one street, one beam of light at a time.

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: Kyoto Dreaming book cover, via Taro Moberly's Instagram.

Newgeography.com - Economic, demographic, and political commentary about places

Goodbye and Hello from New Geography

Destroying Countrysides to Save Earth from a Climate Non-crisis

Strangely Familiar: Peter Mitchell and the Civic World We Forgot How to See

The Problem with Energy Blinders

What Urbanism Lost When DEI Was Defeated, Part 2

Why Are Zoomers Embracing Extremist Ideas?

America's Great Migration

Once Again, Transparency Is Not the Enemy of Academic Freedom

Carney Faces Up to the Reality of Trudeau's Climate Fantasies

Why the Great Wave Still Commands the Modern Imagination

What Urbanism Lost When Wokism Was Defeated, Part 1

Equal but Separate

Gavin Newsom Sticks It To California Ratepayers

New York is Becoming the Next London, Home Only to Immigrants and the Super-rich

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

South Africa: Still the World’s Most Race-Regulated Country?

California Job Cuts Will Hurt Gavin Newsom’s White House Run

How California is Failing Its Latino Population

Martin Parr Saw Who We Really Are

What the Deaths of Frank Gehry and Robert A.M. Stern Tell Us About American Cities

$1.8 Trillion for Nothing

Climate Censorship and Integrity at COP30 and Beyond

Slouching Towards Gavin Newsom

Ruth Asawa's Civic Imagination

An Anti-woke Counter-revolution is Sweeping Through the Media

New Report: The Rise of Latino America

Thankful for "Don't Tread on Me" Conservatives

Universities Have Sold a Whole Generation a Lie

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

Taro Moberly and the Moral Geography of Seeing

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