Joel Kotkin: All Related Content

When Americans think of our nation's power (or our imminent lack of it) we tend to point to the national debts, GDP or military prowess. Few have focused on what may well be the country's most historically significant and powerful weapon: its emergence as the modern world's first multiracial superpower.

Some, like Joel Kotkin, author and urban futures fellow at Chapman College, predict a new era of "localism." People will become more rooted in their ...

"Bringing the United Nations to Dubai makes sense," wrote Joel Kotkin, a fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and Robert J. Cristiano, ...

“The danger is that a slow city ends up as a city for the geriatric rich and the trustafarians,” said Joel Kotkin, an urban analyst and author of “The City, ...

If the U.S. were a stock, it would be trading at historic lows. The budget deficit is out of control, the economy is anemic and the political system is controlled by academic ideologues and Chicago hacks. Opposing them is a force largely comprised of know-nothings--to call them Neanderthals would be too complimentary.

Not surprisingly, many Americans have become pessimistic. Two in three adults now fear their children will be worse off than they are. Nearly 40% think China will become the world's dominant power in the next 20 years, as indicated by a recent survey.

The Wall Street Journal's reporting that Arizona, Nevada, Oregon and Utah are telling corporate executives, venture capitalists and manufacturers to relocate outside of California. Last Friday, Colorado got the jump on the rest with valentines to hundreds of local CEO's with the message: "Mile High State Seeks Sea-Level Executive." We hear more from economists in Denver and Los Angeles. Link to audio

As the financial crisis takes down Wall Street, the regular folks on Main Street are biting their nails, watching the toxic tsunami head their way. But for all our nightmares of drowning in a sea of bad mortgages, foreclosed homes and shrunken retirement plans, the truth is that the effects of this meltdown won't be all bad in the long run. In one regard, it could offer our society a net positive: Forced into belt-tightening, Americans are likely to strengthen our family and community ties and to center our lives more closely on the places where we live.

Infrastructure and Economic Opportunity

For more than a decade, rising asset prices have driven the economy, benefiting the wealthy but doing relatively little to improve either the economic status of the majority of Americans or the country’s overall competitiveness. Rising stock and housing prices created staggering short-term increases in wealth for some, but did little to bolster the nation’s preeminence in technology, industry, or agriculture.

The value of a workplace diversity program may be best shown by the decisions made during economic downturns.

Do the programs stay, continuing their goal of making the working environment reflective of society at large and promoting awareness of different cultures and lifestyles?

Or do they get cut and possibly send a negative message to the employees – and the non-business world – that the company no longer considers diversity to be important.

No generation has lauded their revolutionary status more fervently than baby boomers. In documentaries, articles and books they are portrayed -- by themselves and others -- as agents of epochal change who, in the representative words of American University communications professor Leonard Steinhorn, have built "the inclusive, tolerant, free and equal America we have today."