In 1946, the American author John Gunther described Houston as “mostly ugly and barren, without a single good restaurant and hotels with cockroaches”. The only reasons to live in the city, he claimed, were financial; it was a place “where few people think about anything but money”.  read more »

Late in the last decade, domestic migrants began moving to smaller metropolitan areas and micropolitan areas (CBSA’s) as domestic migration to the larger metropolitan areas fell. The trend was covered in “Domestic Migration to Dispersion Accelerates (Even Before Covid).” The trend has continued, especially in the year ended July 1, 2021, according to Census Bureau estimates.  read more »

Nothing has revealed the class divide in the U.S. quite like runaway inflation and skyrocketing gas prices. But in addition to the economic impact the staggering incompetence of the Biden administration is having on the working class, there is a political one; it's undeniably driving working class voters even further from the Democrats and toward the GOP.  read more »

In a society that seems addicted to the “new, new thing,” it is easy to pass off talk about the “metaverse” as classic techie hype. It’s not that or, at least, it’s about to be and is already becoming much more than just that.  read more »

The Texans’ Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), and Australians are constantly being blown away with the growing “nameplate” capacity of wind turbines and solar panels to provide electricity, but electricity from renewables have yet to produce anywhere near their projected capacity due to the intermittency and unreliability of breezes and sunshine.  read more »

It seems impolite to say “we told you so,” but the working class and labor unions were so unjustly maligned more than two decades ago—when they fought the push to expand unfettered global trade—that it seems more than fair to serve some humble pie to global trade’s champions.  read more »

Net domestic migration losses spiked perhaps as never before in the pandemic year of 2021 among urban core counties --- the counties that contain the urban cores  read more »

The notion that “the arc of history” favors humanity extends across the political spectrum from George W. Bush to Barack Obama.  read more »

Presidential candidate Joe Biden repeatedly promised to end fossil fuels in America. There’ll be “no more drilling, including offshore,” he said. “No ability for the oil industry to drill. No more pipelines.”  read more »

The Census Bureau recently released data on domestic migration that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, and their findings were heavily covered in the press with headlines such as “Cities Lost Population in 2021” and “The pandemic city exodus revealed: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago lost the most residents.”  read more »