Tim Oren's Due Diligence

Review: Joel Kotkin's "The Next Hundred Million"

(This blog has been suffering its usual fate during California's spring. Neglect, that is. I've been out putting some miles on my hiking boots, thereby completing my rehab from getting the metal out of my leg. I'll try to unload a few things from the blogging queue before heading East to Virginia for vacation in a couple of weeks.)

I first noticed Joel Kotkin through bumping into links to his regular Forbes column. That led me on to the New Geography blog, where he's a frequent poster. A feed well worth following for those, like myself, looking for data and analytic points of view on location options.

For any who follow Kotkin at all, the main theses in this book - subtitled "America in 2050" will come as no surprise:

• Unlike other developed nations, America is still growing its population, and this is a good thing if we take advantage of it.


• The suburbs and exurbs are alive and well, will continue to prosper from the growing population, and are shifting from strictly bedroom communities to multi-faceted hubs in their own right.


• There is little sign of an aging population moving back to the urban cores.


• Locales that welcome development are growing and prospering, while those with regulatory land rationing stagnate.


• The American Heartland may be poised for a resurgence, due to overall population growth coupled with regulatory ossification of the coastal states.


• Race is diminishing as a factor in American life, while class and social mobility remain important.


• The biggest challenge facing America is finding work for the growing population which permits class mobility, while retaining the benefits of healthy seniors who wish to continue to work. The biggest threats to that future are centralized planning and overcommitment to foreign adventures.

If you're a believer in American exceptionalism, this is all good red meat. If you're an adherent of the 'New Urbanist" school, you'll hate it. What makes this book worth having, even if you've already ingested Kotkin's ideas elsewhere, is his exhaustive footnoting of analysis and forecasts, including both primary demographic and other data, and more accessible secondary sources. That's a luxury tough to fit into the blog post or opinion column formats, and if you're doing your own analysis, you'll almost certainly find something new in Kotkin's massive bibliography.

This also serves to highlight another valuable distinction of Kotkin: His work is largely descriptive and evidence based, grounded in both demographic fate and observable aggregate behaviors of people, rather than polls and theories. When he uses 'is' or 'will be', he's earned that formulation by observation. Contrast the futurist schools whose works are studded with 'should' and 'must', and are willing to lend their credibility to those who would use coercion to make it come out their way. (I consider it highly ironic that while 'progressives' of a century ago agitated to get the working classes out of tenements, those with the same label today seem determined to put them back there.)

Kotkin builds his theses of (sub)urbanism, ethnic blending, class, and Heartland resurgence brick by brick. In the his final chapter, titled the same as the book, he both sums up and inevitably ventures into politically-freighted territory. While he's no friend to GWB-style interventionism, and repeatedly cites the election of Obama as a positive in the decline of race consciousness, his conclusions on demographic outcomes, and what can be done to benefit from continuing American growth, are all at odds with the instincts and policies of the current administration, and the nanny-state Democrat majorities in DC and Sacramento.

Could California Borrow This Guy II

Chris Christie of New Jersey:

You know, at some point there has to be parity. There has to be parity between what is happening in the real world, and what is happening in the public sector world. The money does not grow on trees outside this building or outside your municipal building. It comes from the hard working people of our communities who are suffering and are hurting right now....

We need to understand we are all in this together. And you know, all of you know in your heart, what I am saying is true. You all know that these raises that are being given to public employees of all stripes, we cannot afford. You all know the state cannot continue to spend money it does not have. And you all know that the appetite for tax increases among our constituents has come to an end.

Yes. When the average wage in the private and public sectors are once again in line (and the unemployment rates ditto), then 'justice' will be served.

And we get girly-man Ahnuld and reruns of the Governor Moonbeam show. Poor California!

It's The Uncertainty, Stupid

An NRO reader reports a Q&A with a Fed economist:

Did he believe that the healthcare reform and related tax proposals, the proposed cap and trade legislation and the consequent increase in energy costs, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, the agitation for higher taxes on the wealthy, the proposal to increase corporate tax rates, the proposal to increase capital gains taxes, the trial floating of ideas such as a national VAT and removal of the earnings cap on FICA, the more robust regulatory bureaucracy . . . did he believe any of these uncertainties were depressing hiring?

He stated yes, without a doubt and proceeded to relay a conversation he had with a local chemical company regarding their 2010 capital expenditure budget. When asked what the company intended to invest in 2010, the response was ‘nothing,’ not due to a paucity of good opportunities, but because it was impossible for the company to calculate a rate of return given all the uncertainty over cost of labor, energy prices, regulatory mandates and the like....

“No investment means no hiring and no new tax revenues. It’s the uncertainty, stupid.”

And I'll note that 'nothing' for a capex budget really means you are milking the business. Depreciation isn't just an entry on the balance sheet and tax return, particularly not for a chemical manufacturer.

Anatomy Of An Assassination

On January 19th, 2010, a man named Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh died in a hotel in Dubai. Since his day job was a senior leader of the terrorist organization Hamas, with particular expertise in smuggling Iranian arms into the Gaza strip, his demise was mourned only by a select few.

Things became became more interesting when the autopsy apparently showed that what looked like a natural causes death was in fact a murder, possibly a Tazering followed by suffocation. Dubai's public places are well salted with surveillance cameras that are several grades better than those at the corner 7-11, and the local authorities went to work hunting in their captured footage for those who had done the dirty deed.

Leading to this fascinating 27 minute video. Silent, with title cards and subtitles explaining the images you're looking at - as the surveillance teams arrive in country, check into hotels, wait for the target to arrive and go to ground, stake out the premises and rent a room across the hall, rendezvous with a hit team, and set up a perimeter while the killing is done, then clear the area. You see everything but the deed itself. A bizarre, 21st century Day of the Jackal as silent film in miniature.

What you won't find out is whodunnit. (Note that the passports from which the names and faces shown at the end of the video were taken, turned out to be fakes - based on real people, but with bogus passport numbers or other information.) Suspicion has naturally focused on the Israeli Mossad, since they'd have plenty of reason to wish this guy dead. Israel is following their usual 'refuse to confirm or deny' which usually means 'yes', but now the Dubai police have arrested two Palestinians who once worked for Palestinian Authority security (Hamas and the PA are not exactly best buds), so who knows?

Update: A mystery writer speculates.

Could California Borrow This Guy?

Newly installed New Jersey governor Christie lays it down: The state is busted, public pensions and retiree benefits are the biggest single cause, and it's time for the hurt. The same is true in pretty much every state out there, but he's the one with the nuts to say it in plain English, and tell the awful truth about what the pols over-promised on the taxpayers' behalf. Much as I'd like to bring him out here to show the Governator - who's been showing the side effects of his earlier occupation - how to do it, Christie's going to be busy fighting off the smears and counter-attacks already pouring from public employees unions, teachers and other swillers at the public trough.

For those looking at governor candidates in California, and other soon-to-be-busted states, here's a test for the primaries and November: Look at and listen to each of them, and then see if you can envision that speech coming out of their mouth. If you can't, forget it. It's no time for wusses.

Political Counterproductivity

Krugman: "...a vote for a Republican, no matter what you think of him as a person, is a vote for paralysis."

Coyote: "OK, sign me up."

Me too.

Retirement and Relocation Data Sources

Now for something a bit off the beaten path for this blog. A couple of years ago, during my enforced period of inactivity, I began a personal due diligence project that I mentioned in passing: Building a database of information on potential retirement spots. With California continuing its descent into a nanny state tax hell for both business and individuals, that information may get used sooner than later, so I've taken advantage of the current recuperation (which is going well) to revisit and update that database. I'm sure I'm not the only one engaged in such a thought process, so for those who are starting or in the middle of the job and find they way here through Google, here is an annotated list of some of the more generally applicable data sources that I've used, roughly sorted by category. General caveat: I am a spreadsheet-wielding, database wonk, computer scientist and systems analyst trained, libertarian venture capitalist and manager. The types of data and their application are biased accordingly. Season to taste.

"Obama’s offer of small business financing is meaningless."

Here's why.

And here's why that's why:

A Fascinating Geographical Pattern

One of those fun 'found while looking for something else' items:

(Original source here - PDF).

At a time where everything from economic activity to religious beliefs seems to sorting out along a red/blue state divide, here's something quite different. While there don't seem to be any tests for statistical significance associated with this graphic, it sure looks like US public library usage falls into an east-west pattern of stripes across the country. The only basis I can imagine is that this still follows the East to West migrations of the 19th and early 20th century. Assuming that's correct, it's a cultural pattern that's persisted in spite of all the economic and politically induced mobility of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Fascinating!

Climategate in Plain English

Apparently it takes a Finnish television station to put a narrative to the Climategate disclosures, since our own MSM unaccountably seems to have checked out on the story. The link is to the English transcript; I'm sure the original video is quite interesting should you happen to speak Finnish.