Slouching towards Gavin
Newsom likes to present himself as a member of the hustling classes and yet, in truth, he has destroyed them
Joel Kotkin
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
Tuesday
Tuesday
Why we need to talk about black anti-Semitism
There is now a growing rift between these two historically persecuted groups
Wednesday
What’s the matter with Los Angeles?
How ‘the better city’ has gone from bad to worse
Tuesday
Why cities have lost their appeal
Rather than signaling decay, the growth of suburban and exurban communities represents the cutting edge of 21st-century urbanism
Thursday
The climate has changed on climate change
Trump is likely to be blamed for the implosion of the green agenda, but its collapse long pre-dates his re-ascension
Thursday
The battle of the oligarchs
The billionaires have chosen their sides. What does that mean for the rest of us?
Monday
The West faces a new type of housing crisis
Will new generations ever be able to afford a home?
Monday
The Californication of the Democratic Party
Does the rest of America want to be like the Golden State?
Wednesday
The gloomy future facing trade unions
Why has it been so hard to get unionizing efforts off the ground?
Friday
Who is winning America’s class war?
From our UK edition
38 min listen
This week Freddy is joined in The Spectator offices by regular contributor and fellow of urban studies at Chapman University, Joel Kotkin. They discuss Biden and Trump’s respective attempts to burnish their credentials with the unions this week, how the cultural agenda is alienating voters, and whether technology could prevent the coming of neo-feudalism.
Sunday
The decline of the West: America’s Pacific cities face a bleak future
From our UK edition
As recently as the early Nineties, when the great cities of the Midwest and East Coast were careening toward what seemed like an inevitable downturn, the urban agglomerations along the Pacific coast offered a demonstrably brighter urban future. From San Diego to the Puget Sound, urban centres along America’s western edge continued to thrive and
Monday
Artificial Intelligence is the crack cocaine of the digital age
From our UK edition
The rise of artificial intelligence may be rescuing the tech oligarchy, but its current trajectory could hasten our steps towards what virtual reality guru Rony Abovitz calls ‘computational autocracy’. The new possibilities posed by AI represent a force multiplier for the large tech firms. Musk, Apple, Meta, Google and Microsoft already seem poised to dominate
Saturday
The new corporatism that’s killing capitalism
Big business is getting bigger. That’s bad news for all of us
Wednesday
Is it the end of Silicon Valley?
From our UK edition
39 min listen
Freddy Gray speaks to Joel Kotkin who is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. On the podcast, they discuss the collapse of Silicon Valley. With mass layoffs in the tech sector and a post-pandemic real estate downturn, Kotkin argues the Valley is entering a period of long-term decline
Sunday
The end of the Silicon Valley dream
From our UK edition
It is difficult, given what Silicon Valley has become, to convey exactly what it was like in the 1970s and ‘80s. It was a remarkable centre of technology, but also the embodiment of the spirit of capitalism at its very best, as epitomised by garage start-ups like Apple. Greed, of course, is always a human
Wednesday
How America’s ‘big sort’ will upend politics
The country is on the move — giving Republicans a historic opportunity
Monday
America is entering a golden age of democratic capitalism
From our UK edition
America could be entering the ‘Great Stagflation’, defined by economist Noriel Roubini as ‘an era of high inflation, low growth, high debt and the potential for severe recessions’. Certainly, weak growth numbers, declining rates of labour participation and productivity rates falling at the fastest rate in a half century are not harbingers of happy times.
Monday
The revenge of the analog economy
Digital fantasies have collided with analog reality
Monday
How the boomers robbed the young of all hope
Younger generations inherit a world in which the middle ranks are struggling almost everywhere
Saturday
Welcome to the end of democracy
From our UK edition
We bemoan autocracies in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Russia and China but largely ignore the more subtle authoritarian trend in the West. Don’t expect a crudely effective dictatorship out of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: we may remain, as we are now, nominally democratic, but be ruled by a technocratic class empowered by greater powers
