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

Today’s temperature map alerts us to another heat wave amid another drought across much of the U.S. These conditions guarantee continued battles over water availability and rights to use it. That, in turn, promises restrictions on usage in dry jurisdictions. For many, of course, it’s as down-home as those flow-control showers and toilets.  read more »

The newly released book “Clean Energy Exploitations” helps citizens attain a better understanding that just for the opportunity to generate intermittent electricity dependent on favorable weather conditions, the wealthier and healthier countries like Germany, Australia, Britain, and the U.S. continue exploiting the most vulnerable people and environments globally.  read more »

Located over the mountains from Los Angeles, Kern County has always been a different kind of place. Settled largely by “Okies and Arkies” from the Depression-era South, the area has a culture more southern than northern, more Ozarks than Sierra. Home to just under 1 million people at the southern end of the state’s Central Valley, Kern is noted for producing the “Bakersfield sound,” epitomized by the late country star Merle Haggard, and is sometimes even referred to as “little Texas.”  read more »

Popular culture and academia alike are quick to celebrate the vibrant social life of urban spaces while lamenting the sprawling emptiness and privacy of rural and suburban America.  read more »

What’s global becomes local. What do I mean by that? Nothing that complicated. Check the graph below. It charts economic restructuring, or Cleveland’s evolution from a primarily manufacturing- to knowledge-based economy.  read more »

I’ve written in the past about Columbus, Indiana and its patriarch, J. Irwin Miller. As I said in the Atlantic, Columbus is the Rust Belt city that never rusted. It’s basically the only small manufacturing city I know of in the Midwest that never went through a real decline period.  read more »

The coronavirus pandemic has altered the future of American business. The virus-driven disruption has proved more profound than anything imagined by Silicon Valley, costing more jobs than in any year since the Great Depression.  read more »

Many have understandably applauded Facebook’s decision to ban former President Donald Trump from the site for the next two years, but the ability of a company to decide who should be in the public square, which the social network has effectively become, raises troubling questions about  read more »

With a simple stroke of the pen, Governor Newsom believes he has the power to change the lifestyles of all California residents, and control the supply-demand balance for societies and the economy’s transportation needs.

Since half the electronic vehicles (EVs) in the entire country are registered in California, the troubling news is that there may be warning signs about a bust to the EV growth bubble, as the statistics from California demonstrate that:  read more »

Last spring, the COVID-19 pandemic caused perhaps the worst job losses since the Great Depression. The decrease in the labor force participation rate — from 63.3% to 61.3% — has been steeper than that seen in the Great Recession  read more »