The Center for Demographics and Policy focuses on research and analysis of global, national, and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time. It involves Chapman students in demographic research under the supervision of the Center’s senior staff.
Students work with the Center’s director and engage in research that will serve them well as they look to develop their careers in business, the social sciences, and the arts. Students also have access to our advisory board, which includes distinguished Chapman faculty and major demographic scholars from across the country and the world.
For additional information, please contact Mahnaz Asghari, sponsored project analyst for the Office of Research, at (714) 744-7635 or asghari@chapman.edu.
This show is presented by the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, which focuses on research and analysis of global, national and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time.
Oklahoma City, could become home to the nation’s tallest building, at 1,907 feet, a dimension intended to celebrate the 100th anniversary of statehood. The building would be constructed in Bricktown, near the Interstate 40/Interstate 35/Interstate 235 interchange in the southern part of downtown. Details of the plan are here.
Once widely considered the gathering of the elite of a future world government, the World Economic Forum is leaving a legacy of increasing irrelevance. To be sure, the snow was good; the AI art installation and occasional forays into witchcraft may have stirred some; but the whole thing has devolved into a cocktail party for the self-important, with diminishing bearing on world politics.
The interconnected world envisioned by the WEF is disintegrating. Indeed, it has fallen victim to the resurgence of history and the rise of powers determined to return us to the glories of the Middle Ages. Davos existed in a world that believed in Francis Fukuyama’s end of history, but ended up looking a lot more like Samuel Huntington’s bleak vision in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Huntington was the first to describe “Davos man”, and appears to be accurate in having predicted his demise.
The growing irrelevance of what Adrian Wooldridge has labelled “the progressive aristocracy” can even be seen in the less than enthusiastic press coverage. Politico describes the contemporary Davos crowd as a “smart set” which “sounds dumb.” In the Wall Street Journal, Walter Russell Mead, pronounces “the humiliation of Davos man”. Even the establishmentarian Financial Times has to admit that “the hubris among the Davos set is palpable.”
The Forum maintains some cheerleaders for policies which have weakened liberal democracies around the world while serving the interests of the rising illiberal powers. The grandees don’t have to travel far to see the results of their “reset” as nearby Germany’s industrial machine collapses, with even its last solar panel plant about to go belly-up.
Green jobs increasingly seem to be reduced to the low-wage service type. The forced march towards renewables has only rewarded China, even as the country embarks on a coal-plant building spree and emits more greenhouse gases than all developed countries put together. The much-ballyhooed “energy transition” has favoured a China that already produces more than four times as many batteries as second-placed United States, and which controls critical raw materials including large concentrations of rare earths, lithium, copper and cobalt. China can thank the gnomes of Davos when it reaches its stated aim of becoming the leading global superpower by 2050.
Other “Great Reset” notions, like the arrogant assumption that large corporations and investment banks could mandate a better world, lie in ruins. The whole ESG movement, which sought to reward “right-thinking” executives, is falling apart, in large part because it makes no economic sense. Even millennials and Gen Z have adopted negative attitudes towards such elaborate virtue-signalling. An estimated $5 trillion in ESG assets has dissolved in just two years. What’s more, enlightened capitalist funds around the world are in free fall, notably renewable energy stocks, while traditional energy firms enjoy record profits.
A San Francisco Chronicle article (“S.F.’s biggest mall lost nearly $1 billion in property value after retail exodus”) indicates that the San Francisco Centre, the city’s largest shopping center, has been appraised at a value of $290 million, down from $1.2 billion in 2016. The Centre now has a vacancy rate of about 50%, having seen recent store closings such as Nordstrom’s (a 35 year tenant).
At the heart of N.Y. Long Island's Suffolk County, new Brookhaven town supervisor Dan Panico wants to remove processing steps, such as at the planning board, from new housing development. This is a first step toward significant new supply in one of America's tightest exurban markets. See: https://timwferguson.com/2024/01/11/long-island-supe-wants-to-build/
How has the mosaic of European politics been recast by the relentless waves of immigration? This pressing question takes center stage as Ambassador Ron Spogli and deputy editor Fraser Myers join me to unravel the complex tapestry of populism's ascent in the West. With the spotlight on Georgia Maloney's prime ministerial triumph in Italy, we peel back the layers of public sentiment that propelled her to power. The narrative reveals a populace not driven by xenophobia but by a fervent desire for reform and sovereignty over their borders, a sentiment echoing across the continent from France to Sweden.
The Center for Demographics and Policy focuses on research and analysis of global, national, and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time. It involves Chapman students in demographic research under the supervision of the Center’s senior staff.
Students work with the Center’s director and engage in research that will serve them well as they look to develop their careers in business, the social sciences, and the arts. Students also have access to our advisory board, which includes distinguished Chapman faculty and major demographic scholars from across the country and the world.
For additional information, please contact Mahnaz Asghari, sponsored project analyst for the Office of Research, at (714) 744-7635 or asghari@chapman.edu.
This show is presented by the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, which focuses on research and analysis of global, national and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time.
Education, the cornerstone of our future, teeters on a precipice of change. Former California State Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero and retired superintendent Mike Christensen join us to dissect the intricate web of challenges plaguing California's schools—from the scapegoating of teachers and the undervaluation of family engagement to the contentious rise of charter schools and the debate over the high school exit exam. Their expertise illuminates the tangled tapestry of responsibility and reform needed to empower educators, involve parents, and ultimately, shape our children's destiny.
The Center for Demographics and Policy focuses on research and analysis of global, national, and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time. It involves Chapman students in demographic research under the supervision of the Center’s senior staff.
Students work with the Center’s director and engage in research that will serve them well as they look to develop their careers in business, the social sciences, and the arts. Students also have access to our advisory board, which includes distinguished Chapman faculty and major demographic scholars from across the country and the world.
For additional information, please contact Mahnaz Asghari, sponsored project analyst for the Office of Research, at (714) 744-7635 or asghari@chapman.edu.
This show is presented by the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, which focuses on research and analysis of global, national and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time.
Long Island’s town of Southampton covers 295 square miles including a varied range of communities, some quite different from the village of Southampton that is familiar to seasonal visitors. One hamlet, called Riverside, is a pocket of relative distress, greatly Black and Latino-immigrant. It sits on the south side of the Peconic River, separating it from the more familiar Riverhead on the other side.
Sometimes Hamptonites lump the two together, though Riverhead is not part of Southampton town. That distinction has come to the fore as Southampton moves to bring development to Riverside—the first major such effort since Suffolk County opened a sheriff’s station, courthouse and jail there decades ago. Riverside has what so many East End communities say they need—“affordable” housing—and the town wants more of it there so as to contain the daily traffic throng to the Hamptons from points west (part of which, ironically, funnels through Riverside).
To do that it needs, among other investments, a big sewer plant. All well and good, but it turns out, as this latest useful report from the East End Beacon explains, this is not so welcome in Riverhead. There’s lots of news nowadays in these parts—the bridge between the affluent and preservationist South and North Forks of Long Island—and any transitions will merit further attention.
Is sanity finally returning to America’s blue cities? The places that incubated inept policies such as “defund the police” and “sanctuary cities”, but welcomed open-air drug use, are beginning to have second thoughts. In Seattle, Portland and San Francisco (which featured in a recent UnHerd special), lawmakers are looking at ways to curb public drug use — a move that has been symptomatic of a wider pushback against progressive policies.
Take Houston as a different example. This week, progressives lost two-to-one in the mayor’s race, electing a moderate Democrat, John Whitmire, and rejecting Sheila Jackson Lee, one of the reliably far-Left Democrats in Congress. In addition, the city elected more conservatives and moderates to the city council.
In Houston, as elsewhere, crime was cited as by far the city’s biggest issue. It was also behind the defeat last month of a Soros-backed prosecutor candidate in Pittsburgh’s district attorney race and in Seattle’s contest for city attorney, which a Republican won. Meanwhile in Dallas, another city with a serious crime problem, Mayor Eric Johnson, an African American, felt compelled to change parties, becoming the second major city (after Miami) to go to what many urbanistas call “the dark side”.
None of this suggests that Republicans will inherit the cities. The demographic shifts in recent years have eroded the party’s potential base of middle- and working-class white ethnic groups, who are being replaced by both minorities and millennials, both of whom vote heavily Democratic.
The key here is a potential coalition of moderate Democrats with conservatives and family-oriented multi-racial groups. This is the formula that two decades ago helped elect reformist mayors from both parties across the country, ranging from Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg in New York, to Richard Riordan in Los Angeles, to Ed Rendell in Philadelphia. Their elections played a critical role in the reduction of crime and economic resurgence in all these cities.
Like now, progressive politics, lax law enforcement and stupefying regulations brought these cities close to bankruptcy and decay. But today, the problem is arguably worse: an influx of undocumented immigrants and soaring real estate prices have made the situation near untenable for Democratic leaders.
Infinite Suburbia is the culmination of the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism's yearlong study of the future of suburban development. Find out more.
Authored by Aaron Renn, The Urban State of Mind: Meditations on the City is the first Urbanophile e-book, featuring provocative essays on the key issues facing our cities, including innovation, talent attraction and brain drain, global soft power, sustainability, economic development, and localism.
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