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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Joel Kotkin
Read between
September 6 - September 10, 2020
“superstar cities” are becoming more bifurcated, with oligarchs and the upper clerisy living in the gentrified urban core, surrounded by propertyless and often impoverished masses on the periphery.
Rather than a base for upward mobility, the great cities have largely become magnets for those who are already well-to-do.
As the middle class dwindles, it leaves behind a marginal urban population who depend on the city for a livelihood but often can barely get by.
America’s major cities in general are not producing inclusive economic growth.24 As a result, they now have higher levels of inequality than Mexico,
If New York City were a country, it would have the fifteenth highest inequality level out of 134 countries, landing between Chile and Honduras,
Heavy immigration from developing countries, or from less wealthy parts of Europe, has exacerbated urban polarization. As the indigenous working and middle classes move out to the urban periphery, immigrants and their offspring crowd into the urban centers. They often fill positions at the lower end of the economy, particularly in services.
Unlike earlier newcomers, today’s immigrants find it difficult, in rapidly deindustrializing economies with slow growth, to secure the kind of work that might provide a ladder to the middle class.
Crime has become a major problem in the immigrant-heavy parts of the major European cities.
The social fabric of big cities is being further frayed by efforts to redesign the urban landscape on an upscale model. In many cities, a push for “densification” often replaces affordable older apartments and single-family houses with expensive apartment complexes geared toward affluent singles and childless couples.
This is not simply a result of market forces, but of planning by urban political and economic leaders. Seeking to lure elite businesses, the global rich, and the highly educated, they often adopt policies that push the poor and middle classes outside the city.
The most favored cities naturally draw the very rich, but they also attract many young people in the “creative class” who cannot afford to stay very long, particularly if they want to buy property or have children.
A backlash against gentrification has appeared in many cities,
Today’s urban world with its shrinking middle class is a departure from the ideal of the city as an engine of upward mobility, so emblematic of the industrial capitalist era.
At the same time, economic opportunity has been declining in smaller cities and towns throughout the high-income world.
China’s “two-tier” classification system.
Despite their population growth and economic dynamism, the sprawling megacities of the developing world have not nurtured a substantial middle class.
luxury stores, hotels, and office towers mimic those in the West, but surrounding them are extensive slums.
Another characteristic of the neo-feudal city is a dearth of children and families.
The neo-feudal urban order appears to incubate not only an aversion to having children, but also difficulty in relations with the opposite sex.
Despite the continuing appeal of suburbia, planners, academics, and pundits sneer at this lifestyle.
Some pro-density activists operate from a sense of moral purpose to oppose what is a clearly demonstrated popular preference. While environmental arguments are most common, some activists claim that single-family neighborhoods are inherently racist because they used to be overwhelmingly white.
Others dislike the very idea of property ownership and family privacy.
The attack on suburbia is, in effect, a way of socially deconstructing the middle class. Even as middle-income families are squeezed out of the urban core, planners wish to close off an alternative that majorities in fact prefer.
The new urban paradigm elevates efficiency and central control above privacy local autonomy class diversity and broad-based property ownership.
The “smart city” would replace organic urban growth with a regime running on algorithms designed to rationalize our activities and control our way of life.
Except for those who own or operate the technology or write the algorithms, people will become like bystanders in the computerized city much like the plebeians in imperial Rome whose jobs were taken over by slave labor.
What will the cities created by our tech overlords be like? They certainly will not be like those of postwar America or Britain, with their spreading suburbs, but more akin to the old company towns, such as Lowell, Massachusetts, built around textile mills, or the Pullman company town in Illinois.15 Such developments have been sold as public-spirited accommodations, but they also offered a convenient way to increase control over employees and boost productivity.
Perhaps more concerning is what today’s tech oligarchs expect for their employees. Unlike the executives of the typical large firm of the late twentieth century, they are not expecting their employees to aspire to buy a house and raise children. Instead, they prefer workaholic employees who embrace a modern version of “monasticism.”16 Firms like Google are planning to build cities suited to such workers,
Data collection is totally unfettered in China’s “techno-utilitarian” system, with no privacy protections for the individual.
These “smart cities” will prove to be essentially the opposite of the real thing, substituting machine-driven interfaces for the free and spontaneous human interactions that are the glory of the traditional city.32 Averting the arrival of this contrived and controlled urban form, or at least slowing its development, will require new measures to limit the power of the oligarchic tech companies, and of the clerisy who promote their agenda.
we are seeing what Robert Putnam calls “an incipient class apartheid.”
If the exercise of power in the Middle Ages was justified by force of arms or divine ordination, today’s dominant classes claim their right to control our lives on the basis of supposedly superior knowledge and morality. Unchecked and unchallenged, they may brew up a dystopian future out of monopoly capital, intrusive technology, and coercive ideology.
As Irving Kristol wrote almost two decades ago, the fundamental problem is that technological and scientific elites “have the inclination to think that the world is full of ‘problems’ to which they should seek ‘solutions.’ But the world isn’t full of problems; the world is full of other people.” Of course, he adds, “there is no ‘solution’ to the existence of other people. All you can do is figure out a civilized accommodation with them.”
Many dimensions of human life are not reducible to digital code.
emotional reliance on technology provides more opportunity for the oligarchy and the clerisy to gain access to our inner feelings and profit from them.
We may be witnessing a deterioration of the real-world human interaction that has always been fundamental to our species.
The rewiring of society could be accelerated by an even more remarkable, and somewhat terrifying, biological transformation.
as scientists aim to edit genes to produce a “superior” human being.
biotechnology could enable ruling classes to engineer people to fit their own preferences.
Armed with the power of algorithms to control our social interactions and with unlimited cash, our overlords will be able to run society for their own benefit without worrying about the popular will or the aspirations of their fellow citizens. The technocratic future now being envisioned will have little need for the labor of the lower classes or the messiness of democracy.
Democratic systems rest to some degree on the recognition and nurturing of individual property rights,
In the twentieth century, middle-class asset growth was accomplished in large part by the expansion of an urban footprint beyond the city core that allowed many more citizens to buy property in spacious, safe environments offering a measure of privacy.
Today, the democratization of landownership is being reversed. In the United States and across the world, more and more people are being pushed into living in rented apartments or houses, with little chance of gaining financial independence. This trend is not simply a product of market forces. Rented housing—whether apartments or single-family houses—has been heavily promoted by much of the oligarchy and more so by the planning gurus of the clerisy, even though homeownership is favored by the great majority in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Canada.
Perhaps no institution is more threatened by the neo-feudal order than the traditional family structure.
Perhaps it is not surprising that identity politics based on such things as race, gender, or sexual orientation have taken a strong hold in places with few children and weakening family ties.
lower birth rates in higher-income countries will likely inhibit economic growth,
Draconian climate policies in California and Germany have managed to hurt the middle class and the poor while producing little meaningful reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
Climate activists risk a widespread class-based backlash as long as they fail to consider the economic dislocation caused by the policies they prescribe.
today’s environmentalists are inclined to regard humans as no more worthy of respect than any other creature, and perhaps less so.
a Malthusian approach to demographics and economics tends to favor those who are already rich, to empower the clerisy, and generally to reinforce social hierarchy.
