The recent rioting in France reveals a new and disturbing reality. Across the country, riots moved from the banlieues to town centres and fancy shopping areas, leaving behind a trail of destruction that included over 200 looted shops, 300 bank branches and 250 tobacconists.
Where past disorders, such as in 2005, were once largely confined to the suburbs, increasingly they have spilled into gentrified areas too. In addition, protestors are showing little respect for their supposed social betters: the pension protests, for example, made a show of targeting the offices of Wall Street firm BlackRock and torching President Emmanuel Macron’s favourite restaurant. Welcome to the class struggle, 21st-century style, where no area is fully safe.
As the Supreme Court moves towards its expected affirmative action ruling, a backlash among supporters of racial quotas is already brewing. One magazine, The Nation, suggests that the lawyer pleading the case for Asian American students is serving the cause of “white supremacy”, while top college presidents, interviewed on PBS, predict that any move to curb race quotas would constitute a “disaster.” Some schools are going a step further by exploring how to get around the potential new law — just as corporations, always keen to please the chattering classes, do the same thing.
Affirmative action is not a winning issue for progressives. Indeed, a majority of both Democrats and Republicans, as well as roughly half of African Americans, say that colleges should not factor race and ethnicity into the admissions process. Asian Americans are even more hostile to the idea: one recent national poll found that four in 10 of the group saw affirmative action as “racist” and more than half welcomed a Supreme Court ruling outlawing it.
The fundamental flaw with affirmative action is that it directly contradicts what the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal defined as “the American creed” — a notion, too often ignored, embracing equal opportunity for all its citizens. But where the early goals of the Civil Rights movement backed this ideal, the new affirmative action regime embraces race-based discrimination as an unadulterated good.
Latest Research: From Chapman’s Center of Demographics & Policy, Joel Kotkin & Marshall Toplansky co-author the new report on Nurturing California Industries.
The Center for Demographics and Policy focuses on research and analysis of global, national, and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time. It involves Chapman students in demographic research under the supervision of the Center’s senior staff.
Students work with the Center’s director and engage in research that will serve them well as they look to develop their careers in business, the social sciences, and the arts. Students also have access to our advisory board, which includes distinguished Chapman faculty and major demographic scholars from across the country and the world.
For additional information, please contact Mahnaz Asghari, sponsored project analyst for the Office of Research, at (714) 744-7635 or asghari@chapman.edu.
This show is presented by the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, which focuses on research and analysis of global, national and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time.
On this episode of Feudal Future, hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky are joined by American entrepreneur, Rony Abovitz, and author Michael Malone to discuss the future of Silicon Valley.
Latest Research: From Chapman’s Center of Demographics & Policy, Joel Kotkin & Marshall Toplansky co-author the new report on Nurturing California Industries.
The Center for Demographics and Policy focuses on research and analysis of global, national, and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time. It involves Chapman students in demographic research under the supervision of the Center’s senior staff.
Students work with the Center’s director and engage in research that will serve them well as they look to develop their careers in business, the social sciences, and the arts. Students also have access to our advisory board, which includes distinguished Chapman faculty and major demographic scholars from across the country and the world.
For additional information, please contact Mahnaz Asghari, sponsored project analyst for the Office of Research, at (714) 744-7635 or asghari@chapman.edu.
This show is presented by the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, which focuses on research and analysis of global, national and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time.
In what has been a bleak year for Silicon Valley, the sudden surge in the value of tech company Nvidia, driven by its mastery of chips used for artificial intelligence, may seem like a ray of hope. Yet if this success may reward the firm’s owners and employees, as well as the tech-oriented financial speculators, the blessings may not rebound so well to the industry’s workforce overall, or to the broader interests of the West.
Nvidia’s rise as the first trillion-dollar semiconductor firm reinforces the de-industrialisation of the tech economy. Unlike the traditional market leaders, like Intel, Nvidia does not manufacture its own chips, choosing instead to rely largely on the expertise of Taiwanese semiconductors. It has limited blue-collar employment. Intel, a big manufacturer, has 120,000 employees — more than four times as many as the more highly valued Nvidia, which epitomises the increasingly non-material character of the Valley.
In too many metropolitan areas, housing is no longer affordable for middle-class households, especially in markets subject to "urban containment," now the world's dominant planning regime. According to planning experts Arthur C. Nelson and Casey Dawkins, urban containment draws "a line around an urban area"; it includes urban growth boundaries and greenbelts. It is "explicitly designed to limit the development of land outside a defined urban area, while encouraging" infill, to limit or block organic urban expansion.
Urban containment is intended to increase urban land costs. Shifting demand inside the contained area produces an abrupt increase in land values at the boundary, distorting the land value gradient. As Nelson and Dawkins say, "This shift should decrease the value of land outside the boundary and increase the value of land inside the boundary"(emphasis added), which effectively sets a higher "floor value" for urban land. This is the "urban containment effect."
Read the full discussion at: the May issue of Reason.
Wendell Cox (Demographia): Affirmative
Christian Britschgi (Reason magazine): Negative
The Calgary Herald reports that some office tenants are being forced out of their buildings in the city of Calgary’s program to convert office buildings to residential uses.
We had covered this program recently, noting that “that the City has adopted an aggressive program to reduce downtown’s office footprint. With 14 million square feet vacant, the city has adopted the “Downtown Calgary Incentive Program,” a goal of which is to reduce CBD office space by 6 million square feet by 2021. The purpose of the program is to encourage the removal of vacant office space in the downtown to help address vacancy rates and stabilize property values over the next decade.” The program provides subsidies to building owners undertaking conversions.
The Herald cites the case of one business that signed a sublease for space on April 12, just over a month ago. The company learned shortly thereafter that they would need to relocate before the end of 2023. Four years before their sublease was to expire.
Conversion of office buildings to residential may be the greatest hope for the survival of downtowns where until the pandemic, there were far more jobs than resident workers. The experiences cited in the Herald story could make downtown Calgary even less competitive with other office locations in the metropolitan area, as firms face uncertainty about being able to rely on agreed upon lease expiration dates.
Gavin Newsom, the would–be president many Democrats hope might be an alternative to the current dodderer–in–chief, has landed himself in hot water. Once an enthusiastic backer of just about every progressive cause, the California Governor must now cope with a budget deficit that has already ballooned to $32 billion. This will no doubt limit his ability to spread largesse to the party’s loyal constituencies.
Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the coming battle over reparations for African Americans. Newsom approved a reparations task force in the midst of the frenzy which followed the murder of George Floyd, but he now faces a bill that could top $800 billion. Newsom has already hinted that the reparations discussion is about “more than cash payments”, but in reality cash — estimated as at least $125,000 per individual but sometimes much higher — is what this is all about.
Humanity’s future is an urban future, yet that future is in jeopardy as many cities suffer from bad decisions and policies. Please join us as this panel discusses their recent release, The Future of Cities, and how urban areas can move forward in a reimagined vision of our urban future. Please stay afterward for a reception with the panelists.
Date: May 24, 6:00–9:00PM Location: The Harmonie Club, NYC
John F. Early’s excellent discussion in Saturday’s Opinion section on the statistical establishment’s struggles with defining and describing race is a question we all need to address seriously. It seems that OMB, which tried and failed to introduce similar thoughts for inclusion in the 2020 decennial census, seems to be trying it again on perhaps a more hospitable administration. Their clumsy efforts to somehow make America divide comfortably into five easy to label World groups (and two smaller ones) is an immense struggle with reality. Few outside Washington could respond to their new race question categories or care about them. A large part of it comes from having failed to convince Central and South Americans that they are something called an “ethnicity” and so OMB created “Some Other Race” as a categorization in order to make the data collection process fit.
My first experience with racial data collection was for the New York metropolitan area to meet federal requirements for travel data to support public investment analyses. At first, the survey we designed included race. We were told that was divisive and ordered to take the questions on race out. About a year after completing that survey I arrived in the Washington metropolitan area, again working on developing transportation survey data, and when I presented my draft designs I was asked why there’s no race questions in there. How can we tell what’s going on with different people? So race was back in. That was all about 50 years ago.
Some current comic effects of the OMB struggle:
The OMB says Europeans are White, except Spaniards, who are given as an example of Hispanics. Hmmm! That makes it a little clumsy in that the little country next to Spain on the Iberian peninsula called Portugal will be white, but not Spain? In Spain the Catalans have never wanted to be Spanish anyway, so maybe they’re still white – – should we ask them? My wife is from Catalonia and was labeled Hispanic at work years ago to up the percentage for government reporting.
Oh, then there’s the small matter of a place in South America called Brazil which is Portuguese-speaking and constitutes the majority of South American population, so are they white like the Portuguese or are we making them Hispanics to fit the geography? So maybe we make the Portuguese Hispanics because they almost share the language, and White Europe stops at the Pyrenees.
The Census Bureau seems intent on creating a "race" or "ethnicity" out of MENA - Middle Eastern & North African populations, a compartmentalization of the North African Middle Eastern, sort-of-Arabic world. It includes old friends such as Israel, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia. It’s unclear where MENA begins and totally not clear where it ends -- around Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan? Who might voluntarily identify themselves as a MENA?
Then there’s the Asians in America, about 5% of our population, but more than half of the world’s so we’ll squeeze Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Indonesians, all into that meaningless but convenient phrase. When they describe Asian, Indonesia is never mentioned. I’m sure they won’t mind! We could shift the Indonesians to the Pacific Islanders and Hawaiians Race category and up their population by about a quarter of a billion people.
Finally, will African-Americans and Africans be comfortable with that single word appellation?
These have become tangled labeling tools to make summary reporting convenient for the US statistical system to which probably none of the respondent populations would recognize. Perhaps geography is the easier answer? As Mr. Early suggests, maybe just forget the whole thing that has so clumsily, been drawn again and again.
Alan Pisarski is a writer, analyst and consultant in the fields of transportation research, policy and investment.
Infinite Suburbia is the culmination of the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism's yearlong study of the future of suburban development. Find out more.
Authored by Aaron Renn, The Urban State of Mind: Meditations on the City is the first Urbanophile e-book, featuring provocative essays on the key issues facing our cities, including innovation, talent attraction and brain drain, global soft power, sustainability, economic development, and localism.
Email this Blog entry
