inequality

Feudal Future Podcast: Special Episode — Restoring the California Dream

Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky — Mon, 03 Jan 2022 11:37:29 -0500

On this episode of Feudal Future, hosts Marshall Toplansky and Joel Kotkin announce the new California report they've been working on, and have a special invite to all our listeners on January 21st.

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About the hosts:

Joel Kotkin is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, Executive Director of the Urban Reform Institute, and an internationally-recognized authority on global, economic, political and social trends. His most recent book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism is now available for order.

Marshall Toplansky is a widely published and award-winning marketing professional and successful entrepreneur. He co-founded KPMG’s data & analytics center of excellence and now teaches and consults corporations on their analytics strategies.

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.

Feudal Future Podcast: The Purpose Behind the Podcast

Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 14:04:18 -0400

This special in-person episode welcomes our audience to Season 2 of our show. Joel and Marshall share the purpose behind the podcast as well as memorable moments and learning lessons along the way.

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Join the Beyond Feudalism Facebook group.
Learn about Joel's book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism.

About the hosts:

Feudal Future Podcast — Education Exposed: Learning in a Post-COVID World

New Geography — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 15:24:49 -0400

On today's episode of Feudal Future hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky are joined by Dr. Roxanne Greitz Miller, Vice Provost for Graduate Education and the Interim Dean of the Attallah College of Educational Studies.

A member of Chapman's faculty since 2005, Dr. Miller holds the rank of tenured full professor with a joint appointment to Schmid College of Science and Technology. In addition to her teaching at the undergraduate, masters, and doctoral levels, Dr. Miller has served as principal or co-principal investigator on state and federal research grants representing more than $3.5 million in funding and has published numerous refereed articles, book chapters, and comprehensive historical abstracts. Her research centers on teacher professional development, the home-to-school connection, and STEM education. She serves as the immediate past chair of the Small Colleges Special Interest Group of the Professional and Organizational Developers (POD) Network and served as both the Division K Teacher Education Program Co-Chair for the American Educational Research Association (AERA) from 2013-2016 and the contributing editor to NSTA’s Science Scope journal from 2005-2009.

[2:40] Challenges facing the education system post-COVID

[5:34] The Effects of Learning Loss

[13:45] Are we raising consumers of content?

[23:58] Demographic shifts and access to information in the college system

[31:00] Future of the university systems

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Learn more about the Feudal Future podcast.

Learn more about Marshall Toplansky.

Learn more about Joel Kotkin.

Learn more about Dr. Roxanne Greitz Miller.

Join the Beyond Feudalism Facebook group.

Read the Beyond Feudalism report.
Learn about Joel's book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism.

The Collapse of California

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 11:38:26 -0500

If one were to explore the most blessed places on earth, California, my home for a half century, would surely be up there. The state, with its salubrious climate, spectacular scenery, vast natural resources, and entrepreneurial heritage is home to the world’s fifth-largest economy and its still-dominant technological centre. It is also — as some progressives see it — the incubator of “a capitalism we can believe in”.

Perhaps channelling such hyperbole, President Biden recently suggested that he wants to “make America California again”. Yet before leaping on this particular train, he should consider whether the California model may be better seen as a cautionary tale than a roadmap to a better future in the digital age.

The on-the-ground reality — as opposed to that portrayed in the media or popular culture — is more Dickensian than utopian. Rather than the state where dreams are made, in reality California increasingly presents the prototype of a new feudalism fused oddly with a supposedly progressive model in which inequality is growing, not falling.

California now suffers the highest cost-adjusted poverty rate in the country, and the widest gap between middle and upper-middle income earners. It also has one of the nation’s highest Gini ratios, which measures the inequality of wealth distribution from the richest to poorest residents — and the disparity is growing. Incredibly, California’s level of inequality is greater than that of neighboring Mexico, and closer to Central American countries like Guatemala and Honduras than developed nations like Canada and Norway.

It is true that California’s GDP per capita is far higher than these Central American countries, but the state has slowly morphed into a low wage economy. Over the past decade, 80% of the state’s jobs have paid under the median wage — half of which are paid less than $40,000 — and most are in poorly paid personal services or hospitality jobs. Even at some of the state’s most prestigious companies like Google, many lower (and even mid-level) workers live in mobile home parks. Others sleep in their cars.

The state’s dependence on low-wage service workers has been critical in the pandemic, but it now suffers among the highest unemployment rates in the nation, outdone only by tourism-dominated states like Hawaii, Nevada and New Jersey. Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood, now has the highest unemployment rate of the nation’s top ten metropolitan areas, higher even than New York.

But that hasn’t stopped California from portraying itself as a progressive’s paradise, publicly advocating racial and social justice. The state just passed a Racial Justice Act to monitor law enforcement, endorsing reparations (although California was never a slave state) and is working to address “systemic” racism in its classrooms. This “woke” agenda was taken to a new extreme this week when the San Francisco School Board decided to rename 44 schools because they were named after people connected to racism or slavery. The district’s Arts Department, originally known as “VAPA”, also decided to re-brand because “acronyms are a symptom of white supremacy culture”.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Ask the Experts: Revitalizing California's Business Climate

New Geography — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 12:01:35 -0500

Chapman University’s Vice President of Research Thomas Piechota hosted this month's event, moderated by Dean Thomas Turk of the Argyros School of Business and Economics. Joel Kotkin, Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Marshall Toplansky, Clinical Assistant Professor of Management Science at Chapman University joined the discussion.

If you missed the event, a video of the virtual town hall is below:

Elite Democrats Could Destroy the Middle Class if Biden Wins in 2020

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 01 Nov 2020 18:05:52 -0500

It’s been a long time since the Democrats were considered “the party of the people” and the GOP the party of the fat cats. This year Joe Biden and even more so his running mate, Kamala Harris, are raising record sums from the corporate elite, notably the tech giants and their Wall Street allies. These wealthy donors dominate the party, own much of the media, and can manipulate the social-media platforms where a growing proportion of Americans get their news.

Meanwhile, the Republicans find themselves largely castigated in the press and overwhelmed by a torrent of oligarchic wealth at the Senate and local levels. This wealthy oligarchy is not just liberal; many members also support a thorough remaking of our country. Some, like former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, are so committed to progressivism that, as he said recently, those who don’t get with the program should “face a firing squad.” Currently led by CEO Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gone so far as to block The New York Post’s account after it reported on the unsavory foreign business dealings of Biden’s son Hunter.

If these Democrats win both houses of Congress as well as the White House, things could get far worse for the already beleaguered middle class, which has been rocked by the pandemic, with an estimated 100,000 small firms going out of business. Particularly hard-hit by the recent urban unrest are inner city and minority businesses.

Read the rest of this piece at NYPost.

Beyond Feudalism: Addressing California's Inequality Crisis (Live Event)

Charlie Stephens — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 19:48:24 -0400

On July 14th, Joel & Marshall held a Virtual Town Hall on a research brief titled, Beyond Feudalism: A Strategy to Restore California's Middle Class discussing inequality in California and how a change in state policy could restore our state’s dream. This is a recording of the presentation and Q & A.

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Virtual Town Hall – California Feudalism: Addressing California's Inequality Crisis

Rhonda Howard — Sun, 05 Jul 2020 18:59:01 -0400

Join us for a presentation on Kotkin and Toplanksky's research brief titled California Feudalism: A Strategy to Restore California's Middle Class, discussing inequality in California and how a change in state policy could restore our state’s dream. Kotkin and Toplansky will be joined by distinguished panelists for commentary and Q & A. The event will be moderated by Lisa Sparks Dean of the School of Communication at Chapman University.

Sponsored by the Orange County Credit Union and hosted by Tom Piechota, Ph.D. PE, Vice President of Research, Chapman University

Moderator:

Lisa Sparks, Ph.D., Dean, School of Communication, Chapman University

Presenters:

Joel Kotkin, Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures, R. Hobbs Professorship in Urban Studies, School of Communication, Chapman University

Marshall Toplansky, MBA, Clinical Assistant Professor of Management Science at Chapman University’s Argyros School of Business and Economics, and Research Fellow at the C. Larry Hoag Center for Real Estate, Chapman University

When: July 14, 1:00 p.m. (PST)

Learn more, and register for this event at Chapman.edu