Economics

The Future of Cities: The Future of the Big American City Is Not Bright

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As COVID-19 begins to wane and become endemic, the question for policymakers, theorists, and Americans at large is: What is in store for our nation's big cities?  read more »

Upward Mobility: Improving Conditions, Not Just Opportunities

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I’m old enough now to have grandnieces and nephews, and almost all of them have lower living standards and worse working conditions than their parents.  read more »

How the California Dream Became a Nighmare

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For Americans, California once looked like the future. It was a state defined by risk-taking and utopian dreaming. Yet for most Californians today, the upward mobility so central to the state’s ethos is rapidly disappearing.  read more »

The Rise of the Single Woke Female

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Unmarried women without children have been moving toward the Democratic Party for several years, but the 2022 midterms may have been their electoral coming out party as they proved the chief break on the predicted Republican wave.  read more »

California's Budget Surplus Has Vanished; Its Economy is Facing a Harsh Reality

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The much-celebrated California boom is facing a harsh reality.

Everything was looking good, based on enormous growth in capital gains in tech stocks and property, and some in Sacramento assumed the bounty would last — until it didn’t.  read more »

Welcome to Austin

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I'm going to make a little deviation from the bulk of the "Welcome to..." stories you see below, which mostly focus on South Side Chicago neighborhoods (the exceptions are Rosemont, in Chicago's northwest suburbs, and Park Forest, in the south suburbs).  read more »

It's Time for Region to Collect Opportunity We Left on the Table

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For all the talk about how the pandemic, remote work, social distancing and other huge new developments have dislodged traditional patterns in business and life in America and created vast new opportunities in the process, Flyover Country has left a lot on the table.  read more »

Can Capitalism Save Hollywood?

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After a decade of rapid growth, the nation’s media and entertainment complex is facing retrenchment and, perhaps, a necessary reappraisal. Firms are consolidating. Workers are being laid off at Disney  read more »

North America Has An Opportunity to Lead the World

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For generations, pundits the world over have insisted that the future will be forged elsewhere — Europe for some, Japan for others and, more recently, China. Yet, in reality, the United States and Canada may well be best positioned for a changing world, if our leaders can leverage our natural advantages.  read more »

The Collapse of the Progressive Economy

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In recent decades, progressive politics has been underwritten by the ascendant economic titans of capital, technology, and communication. Big Tech and financial firms have long financed Democratic causes, led by those such as George Soros and the now-disgraced crypto-master Sam Bankman-Fried, who was released last month on a $250 million bail deal.  read more »