“The technocratic future is already upon us. And it has little need for the labor of the lower classes—or the messiness of democracy. These same people have amassed the power to control and disseminate information far more subtly and efficiently than Mussolini, Hitler, or Stalin.”
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The passion for equality and social justice often obscures the best way to achieve it. This is the epitome of virtue signaling; policies and results matter more than intent,
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From Joel Kotkin at The Daily Beast, Trump Will Go Away, but the Anger He’s Stirred Up Is Just Getting Started: And then there’s the mountain rebellion against political correctness. Relative few Americans have much patience with such things as “micro-aggressions,”
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From Joel Kotkin at The Daily Beast, Trump Will Go Away, but the Anger He’s Stirred Up Is Just Getting Started: Exacerbating this cultural and class discussion is the growing division between the coastal and interior economies. Essentially, as I have argued
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From Joel Kotkin at The Daily Beast, Trump Will Go Away, but the Anger He’s Stirred Up Is Just Getting Started: Progressive Triumphalism may lead the Clintonites to believe her election represented not just a rejection of the unique horribleness
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From Joel Kotkin at New Geography, TODAY’S TECH OLIGARCHS ARE WORSE THAN THE ROBBER BARONS Now from San Francisco to Washington and Brussels, the tech oligarchs are something less attractive: a fearsome threat whose ambitions to control our future politics, media,
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From Joel Kotkin at newgeography.com AMERICA’S NEW OLIGARCHS—FWD.US AND SILICON VALLEY’S SHADY 1 PERCENTERS this is an excerpt from a reader’s comment on the article above: The Valley’s failure to fulfill its promise seems to be due precisely to this: it
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From Joel Kotkin at newgeography.com AMERICA’S NEW OLIGARCHS—FWD.US AND SILICON VALLEY’S SHADY 1 PERCENTERS excerpts: Perversely, the small number of jobs—mostly clustered in Silicon Valley—created by tech companies has helped its moguls avoid public scrutiny. Google employs 50,000, Facebook 4,600, and
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from The American Conservative Rob Dreher writes Trump: Fishtown’s Champion Against Belmont: The Davos elites of the Democrat and Republican parties didn’t get the teenage daughters of Fishtown pregnant, or didn’t get the Fishtown sons busted for possession or fired from his
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from Millennials heed the siren call of socialism by Joel Kotkin at Orange County Register The biggest and most important development has been the massive support among the new generation of voters for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and his open embrace
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from The Orange County Register, Jews finding less comfort on the Left by Joel Kotkin Like their European counterparts, some Democratic politicians soon may find that appealing to Muslims pays larger dividends than catering to Jews; by 2030 there will
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from Joel Kotkin in New Geography, The Changing Geography of Racial Opportunity: Excerpt: Perhaps the greatest irony in our findings is the location of many of the best cities for minorities: the South. This is particularly true for African-Americans who
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The shift from a focus on growth to one on what is fashioned as sustainability has proven a boon both for the public sector, particularly those working in regulatory agencies and politicians who now have new ways to elicit contributions,
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Unlike the grandees of Wall Street or the energy industry, the tech Oligarchs have so far experienced relatively little of the criticism commonly directed at Wall Street or energy executives for their huge compensation levels. They, it appears, are different
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Perhaps nothing reflects the descent of the Yeomanry better than the fading role of the ten million small businesses with under 20 employees, which currently employ upwards of forty million Americans. Long a key source of new jobs, small business
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Indeed as the Yeomanry have struggled, the lower parts of the economic spectrum have expanded. In the five years following the Great Recession, the percentage of people living in poverty rose to 15 percent, the highest level in 20 years,
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Whether their views are right or wrong on a particular issue, the scientific community has taken on a partly theological character, with top scientists achieving something of the role of supreme clerics. This approach ignores the reality that widely held
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In our present “age of elites,” as author Chrystia Freeland has dubbed it, this ideological shift among the rich, particularly the new rich, is critical to understanding the new class order. Some of the nation’s wealthiest regions, many of which
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The Golden State is now home to 111 billionaires, by far the most of any state. In total, California billionaires personally hold assets worth $485 billion, more than the entire GDP of all but 24 countries in the world. At
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Like the Russian oligarchs, the moguls of turn- of- the- twentieth- century America have become so powerful because, unlike many firms in other industries, software giants such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Oracle face still limited foreign or domestic competition.
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