Many of the issues that Kotkin highlights have simply deepened and speeded up under our current public health emergency. Given our present Covid world experience you may feel Kotkin’ s hard hitting approach is needed, but let’s not forget that this book was written before the pandemic struck and therefore the trends were well established pre-Coronavirus. The book is not for the faint hearted and you could emerge from reading it feeling somewhat downbeat as you are hit with just about every kind of worrisome prophecy. Kotkin doesn’t pull any punches in cataloguing our present condition. Indeed, this is a bold argument taking in historical analogy, the social control exercised by a new elite, the rise of China, and the urban environment. He describes this as the coming of Neo Feudalism and he hopes that by clearly identifying what is happening we can take appropriate action to challenge and reverse these trends. In this book he has attempted to broaden his argument and see how world-wide trends are conspiring in one direction. He has tracked the rise of a new elite and the new era that people find themselves in. Using modern day California as a template he sees urban planners designing out the middle class family from cities with densification policies (the book’s subtitle is “A warning to the Global Middle class”), and he demonstrates the demise of secure employment in manufacturing that historically gave substance to the American dream in the 50s and 60s. At the heart of his concerns is the tendency of present policies whether economic, social, or urban to restrict and constrain the socially upward mobility of the middle classes. Joel Kotkin who writes out of California has built a reputation as an iconoclast and a challenger to much of the conventional thinking around Urban issues. The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, by Joel Kotkin
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