Demographics

Perhaps nothing so animates the progressive Left today as the notion of an increasingly race-conscious society, segregated by ethnic identity and dismissive of the traditional ideal of assimilation. If this seems ironic, it should—in the not-so-distant past, this was a position embraced by the reactionary Right, particularly in the Jim Crow South.  read more »

The United States population grew just 0.48% in the year ended July 1, 2019, according to population estimates released on the last day of the year. This is a full one-third decline from the 0.72% growth in 2014. Even that higher rate, typical for the first four years of the decade, was well below the 0.93% rate between 2000 and 2010. This was driven by a decline in the natural growth rate (births minus deaths), which fell from 1,461,000 in 2011 to 957,000 in 2019.  read more »

After having lost more than half a million residents between 1950 and 1980 New York’s borough of Brooklyn has regained more than two-thirds of its population loss. The renaissance of Brooklyn is rightfully cited as an urban success story. It initially attracted Millennials and others seeking an urban lifestyle at a lower cost than Manhattan, but now it has also become increasingly more expensive, evidenced by many new high rise luxury condominium buildings.  read more »

Is America about to suffer its Weimar moment, culminating in the collapse of its republican institutions? Our democracy may be far more rooted than that of Germany’s first republic, which fell in 1933 to Adolf Hitler, but there are disturbing similarities.  read more »

Thirty years ago, after having dropped out of college after just one term, unable to pay for my dorm room, I was unsure if I would ever leave the working class. Two years later I was a student at Barnard College, an elite small liberal arts college three thousand miles from my parents’ home. To this day, I am not sure how I made that leap, but it was smoothed over by significant financial assistance from the college. Unable to pay for my public university, I was able to graduate from one of the best private colleges in the country virtually debt-free.  read more »

“We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta. California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta,” declared then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007. “Not only can we lead California into the future . . . we can show the nation and the world how to get there.” When a movie star who once played Hercules says so who’s to disagree?  read more »

Despite statements by Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg that he was changing the mission of his company to “bring the world closer together,” data from the recent AEI survey on Community and Society make it abundantly clear that  read more »

For the poorest in the world there are more things that are far more important to survival than climate change. Third world countries are the big losers of today’s climate activism. Why? Because they still lack purified drinking water, sewage sanitation, adequate nutrition, reliable electricity (or any at all), adequate health care, i.e., the infrastructures and products we take for granted that are all based on deep earth minerals and fuels.  read more »

The fate of the 2020 election, whether for Congress or the White House, will be decided in the suburbs. Neither the pro-Trump countryside nor the intensely anti-Trump urban core have enough voters to put their preferred candidates in office.

It’s the suburbs that are home to the majority of all voters and over 80 percent of residents of the major metropolitan areas.  read more »

Transit work trip ridership is strongly concentrated in the urban cores of the nation’s 53 major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 population), as is indicated by City Sector Model (Note). In the two urban core categories, the Urban Core: CBD and the Urban Core: Inner Ring, the share of total transit work trips is from four to six times the share of population (Figure 1) The percentage of transit commuters in the Urban Core: CBD was six times that of its overall metropolitan population share.  read more »