The Next Hundred Million
I’ve reviewed Joel Kotkin’s new book, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, over at the Wilson Quarterly. It begins thusly:
Joel Kotkin, along with his some-time nemesis Richard Florida, is perhaps the leading purveyor of a kind of psychoeconomic demography, a predictive chronicler armed with Census tract data, Pew surveys, and some old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting, all recounted in an urgent, assuaging, insider-y tone—a kind of Kiplinger Report for the national soul. I can imagine Kotkin and Florida randomly encountering each other—in, say, the Admiral’s Club at DFW, as each is en route to his assignation with civic leaders eager to sup the sooth—and engaging in a dueling-PowerPoint exercise, with Florida touting his “creative class” metropoles and their cappuccino-fueled dynamism, and Kotkin his “ephemeral cities”—places such as Portland that are elaborate stage sets for hip urban play, ultimately overregulated and hostile to the wants of average Americans, who would find fuller expression of their economic (and reproductive) potential in a place such as Boise. Only one man would be left standing amid the acrid tang of overheated hard drives, but I’m not sure which.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 8:49 am and is filed under Cities, Etc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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February 25th, 2010 at 7:28 pm
“ultimately overregulated and hostile to the wants of average Americans, who would find fuller expression of their economic (and reproductive) potential in a place such as Boise”
Utterly priceless.
February 28th, 2010 at 5:09 pm
Liked the review!
I think something is cut out of the middle, because this sentence doesn’t make much sense:
Once upon a dark time, they also used landlines and sent s optimism about the American future can seem a tonic against unquestioning prophecies of American decline or Dobbsian nativist screeds, the book has an unremittingly Pollyannaish tone, like a gauzy-hued sales document for a master-planned community in one of the author’s beloved suburbs.