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

For all his ugliness and buffoonery, Donald Trump got some big things right, politically and practically, that Joe Biden will undo at his own peril. Almost all of Trump’s wins, abroad and at home, have one thing in common: They focused on most Americans achieving broader prosperity and not only the best-off.  read more »

Thousands of people on the coasts are pleading for help getting out of the urban enclaves from which they once looked down their noses at us, out in Flyover Country.

How should we respond? By taking advantage of an economic-development opportunity for the ages.  read more »

It’s thirty years this autumn since I began my undergraduate degree at Durham University in the North East of England. To tell you the truth I didn’t know much about the city before I applied there. My visit for the three required interviews was very enjoyable, and more positive than some of the less elite institutions I had applied to. I enjoyed looking about the Norman castle and cathedral set high on a hill surrounded by the moat-like River Wear.  read more »

Like many, if not most Americans, I am somewhat relieved to see the petulant, nasty and sometimes clearly unhinged Donald Trump leave the White House. Yet for all his antics and vitriol, Trump has left a legacy that will be difficult to ignore and, given the dispensation of his opponents, could shape the future for the next decade.  read more »

The Andes are the longest mountain range in the world, stretching 4,300 miles (7,000 kilometers) from near Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, not far from the isthmus of Panama that connects South American to North America to Tierra del Fuego, near the Straits of Magellan, less than 700 miles (1,100 kilometers) from the Antarctic Peninsula. By comparison, the Andes stretch almost half again the distance of the Rocky Mountains and more than 2.5 times that of the Himalayas.  read more »

We cannot hope to have a functional democracy when property and information are controlled by a small number of companies tightly allied with political power.  read more »

In a tragic development, Tony Hsieh, the former CEO of Zappos and founder of the Las Vegas Downtown project, died at at 46 of complications from injuries suffered in a house fire.  read more »

For decades, Orange County was a reliable incubator of conservative politics, and, in the era of Nixon, Goldwater and Reagan, a fairly powerful force in the state and on the national level.  read more »

In a November 13 article entitled “Hong Kong banks lose appetite for prime space in world’s costliest city as work-from-home becomes permanent after pandemic,” the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reports that some of the strongest financial institutions in Hong Kong are embracing working at home.  read more »

More than 840,000 green card holders became citizens last year, the most in a decade. Over 10 percent of the American electorate was born elsewhere, the highest share in a half-century. All of Donald Trump’s huffing and puffing could not stop this demographic evolution; nor could an endless stream of stories about what an unequal, unfair, and no good place America has supposedly become.  read more »