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

Roughly a half century ago, rising energy prices devastated Western economies, helping make the autocrats of the Middle East insanely rich while propping up the slowly disintegrating Soviet empire. Today the world is again reeling from soaring energy prices; but this time the wound is self-inflicted — a product of misguided policies meant to accelerate the transition to green energy.  read more »

There are lots of ways of measuring how New Zealand is doing, and none of them is perfect.

We stack up very well on measures like life expectancy, unemployment, infant mortality, and car ownership.  read more »

I recently enjoyed a podcast where the two hosts engaged in a bit of banter about real estate. One had gradually purchased a few homes in a row along the same street and compared them to the little houses in the game of Monopoly.  read more »

Enthusiasts of “the new economy” long cherished the notion that it would be different from the unenlightened, sluggish, and piggish older one. Yet our economy seems increasingly to resemble not some hippy capitalist utopia, but the deeply concentrated economy of pre-war Japan.  read more »

The future of public transit is nearly empty buses and railcars. Yet President Biden’s American Jobs Plan calls for spending $85 billion on transit. Although transit carries less than 1 percent of passenger travel in the United States, and no freight, this represents 28 percent of the funds Biden proposes to spend on transportation.  read more »

The labouring masses are restless, as evidenced by the Canadian trucker strike, union drives in Amazon warehouses in the US and in demonstrations throughout the developing world. More revealing still may be the turmoil in the labour markets, where workers are changing jobs, creating their own and, overall, refusing to return to the structures of the pre-pandemic order.  read more »

I’m back. I haven’t written much lately but I am always reading and gathering topics for future posts. Here’s one.

Over the last 2-3 months, I’ve come across Twitter discussions among many self-professed YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) advocates. If you’re familiar with YIMBYs you know that they believe the lack of housing affordability in American cities largely stems from regulatory restraints that limits housing production.  read more »

Shipping is by far the biggest transport polluter in the world. The fuel used is the cheapest and most polluting fuel available for the world’s 90,000 ships that burn approximately 370 million tons of fuel per year, emitting 20 million tons of sulfur oxides.  read more »

Mayors and urban planners have crucial roles in the management of cities. They must help cities adapt rapidly when confronted with external shocks—the pandemic is only the latest one of these. To be a prudent and efficient janitor is the main task of mayors.  read more »

The Shiloh-Scott extension added 3.5 miles to St. Louis’ light-rail system in 2003, yet St. Louis transit carried 4.5 percent fewer bus and rail riders in 2004 than it had carried in 2002.

As an op-ed article in the St. Louis Business Journal points out, buses carried 40.3 million riders in 1993, before the region’s first light-rail line opened.  read more »