New Geography

Category: Politics

  • How Obama Lost Small Business

    Financial reform might irk Wall Street, but the president’s real problem is with small businesses—the engine of any serious recovery. Joel Kotkin on what he could have done differently.

    The stock market, with some fits and starts, has surged since he’s taken office. Wall Street grandees and the big banks have enjoyed record profits. He’s pushed through a namby-pamby reform bill—which even it’s authors acknowledge is “not perfect”—that is more a threat to Main Street than the mega-banks. And yet why is Barack Obama losing the business community, even among those who bankrolled his campaign?

    Obama’s big problems with business did not start, and are not deepest, among the corporate elite. Instead, the driver here has been what you might call a bottom-up opposition. The business move against Obama started not in the corporate suites, but among smaller businesses. In the media, this opposition has been linked to Tea Parties, led by people who in any case would have opposed any Democratic administration. But the phenomenon is much broader than that.

    The one group that has fared badly in the last two years has been the private-sector middle class, particularly the roughly 25 million small firms spread across the country. Their discontent—not that of the loud-mouthed professional right or the spoiled sports on Wall Street—is what should be keeping Obama and the Democrats awake at night.

    Small business should be leading us out of the recession. In the last two deep recessions during the early 1980s and the early 1990s, small firms, particularly the mom and pop shops, helped drive the recovery, adding jobs and starting companies. In contrast, this time the formation rate for new firms has been dropping for months—one reason why unemployment remains so high and new hiring remains insipid at best.

    Here’s one heat-check. A poll of small businesses by Citibank, released in May, found that over three quarters of respondents described current business conditions as “fair or poor.” More than two in five said their own business conditions had deteriorated over the past year. Only 17 percent said they expect to be hiring over the next year.

    It’s not hard to see the reasons for pessimism. Entrepreneurs see bailed-out Wall Street firms and big banks recovering, while getting credit remains very difficult for the little guy. In addition, many small businesses are terrified of new mandates, in energy or health, which makes them reluctant to hire new people. Small banks—not considered “too big to fail”—fear that they will prove far less capable of meeting new regulatory guidelines than their leviathan competitors.

    The small business owners I’ve spoken to—like most of the public—generally don’t seem convinced about the effectiveness of the stimulus, even if the administration claims it helped us avert an economic “catastrophe.” Barely one fourth of voters, according to a recent Rasmussen poll, think it helped the economy.

    Obama’s troubles with the bigger firms are more recent. Initially, President Obama wowed the big rich, leading The New York Times to dub him “the hedge fund candidate.” By the time he won the election, he enjoyed wide support from the Business Roundtable, the Silicon Valley venture community and other titans.

    Initially, big business was happy with Obama’s stimulus plan, and more or less was ready to acquiesce to both his health-care reforms and cap and trade. After all, most large companies generally provide some health coverage to their employees. For Wall Street, cap and trade represents just one more wonderful way to arbitrage their way to more profits.

    Of course, some corporate titans will remain loyal to the White House. Take the lucky folks from Spanish- based Abengoa Solar, who are now getting $1.45 billion in federal loan guarantees for an Arizona solar plant that will create under 100 permanent jobs while providing expensive, subsidized energy to perhaps 70,00 homes. If this is stimulus, it’s less jarring than a decaf from Starbucks. Also let’s dismiss those on Wall Street who whine about the administration’s occasionally tough anti-business rhetoric. Wolves should have thicker skins. The Obama administration and Congress have delivered softball financial reform dressed up as major progressive change. They should be grateful, not petulant.

    But there’s clearly something more serious than hurt feelings at play here. The pain felt by small businesses is hitting the big boys, too. After three straight bad years, small businesses buy a lot less stock, business services, and equipment. Big companies can hoard their money and sport big profits, but ultimately they have to sell to consumers and small firms. Maybe that’s something that the media moguls—who after all have to sell to the hoi polloi—have been picking up on, too.

    This has led some Obama allies, like GE’s Jeffrey Immelt, to grouse that Obama does not like business, and vice versa. “Government and entrepreneurs are not in sync,” he explained to reporters in Europe. So, too, has Ivan Seidenberg, the head of the once Obama-friendly Business Roundtable, who denounced the administration recently for creating “an increasingly hostile environment for investment and job creation here in this country.”

    Among businesses of all sizes, there is now a pervasive sense that the administration does not understand basic economics. This is not to say they believe Obama’s a closet socialist, as some more unhinged conservatives claim. That would be an insult to socialism. Obama’s real problem is that he’s a product, basically, of the fantastical faculty lounge.

    For the most part, university professors do not much value economic growth, since they consider themselves, like government workers, a protected class. Many, particularly in planning and environmental study departments, also embrace the views of the president’s academic science adviser, John Holdren, who suggests Western countries undergo “de-development,” which is the opposite of economic growth.

    Of course, such ideas, if taken seriously, have economic consequences. You want to see the future? Come to California, where the regulatory stranglehold is killing our economy. Subsidizing favored interests also is not a winning strategy. There’s simply not enough money to maintain a federal version of Chicago-style baksheesh. The parlous state of Obama’s home state of Illinois—which manages to make even California or New York appear models of prudent management—demonstrates the futility of the subsidize-the-base game.

    The worst part is that none of this was necessary. A stimulus plan that helped workers and communities by recreating a WPA for the unemployed youths might have gained wide support on Main Street. Credits for hiring, reductions in payroll taxes or a regulatory holiday for small firms also might have bolstered business confidence. Business people, particularly at the grassroots level, would also like to see a return for the detested TARP in a freer flow of credit for their firms. They are not so much hostile to Obama as puzzled by his inability to address their needs.

    But for now, the stimulus is widely seen as a wasted opportunity and proof of Washington’s enduring incompetence. As a result, roughly 80 percent of Americans, according to Pew, say they don’t trust the federal government to do the right thing, which does not bode well for a second round of pump-priming.

    This leaves business turning back to the Republicans. Not because most see them as competent or even intelligent; GOP rankings are also at a low ebb. Business owners across the spectrum are forced to embrace the “party of no” because Obama and the Democrats have given them so little to say “yes” to.

    This article originally appeared in The Daily Beast.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

    Official White House Photo

  • The Democrats’ Middle-Class Problem

    Class, the Industrial Revolution’s great political dividing line, is enjoying Information Age resurgence. It now threatens the political future of presidents, prime ministers and even Politburo chiefs.

    As in the Industrial Age, new technology is displacing whole groups of people — blue- and white-collar workers — as it boosts productivity and creates opportunities for others. Inequality is on the rise — from the developing world to historically egalitarian Scandinavia and Britain.

    Divisions are evident here in the United States. Throughout the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama lagged in appealing to white middle- and working-class voters who supported Hillary — and former President Bill — Clinton.

    Now, these voters, according to recent polls, are increasingly alienated from the Obama administration. Reasons include slow economic growth, high unemployment among blue- and white-collar workers and a persistent credit crunch for small businesses. These factors could cause serious losses for Democrats this fall — and beyond.

    This discontent reflects long-term trends. Since 1973, for example, the rate of growth of the “typical family’s income” in the United States has slowed dramatically. For men, it has actually gone backward when adjusted for inflation.

    The past few years have been particularly rough. About two in five Americans report household incomes between $35,000 and $100,000 a year. Right now, almost three in five are deeply worried about their financial situation, according to an ABC poll from March.

    This should give Democrats an issue, theoretically. But to date, Obama and his party seem incapable of harnessing the growing middle- and working-class unrest.

    In fact, according to recent polls, these have been the voters that Democrats and the president have been losing over the past year as the economic stimulus failed to make a major dent in unemployment.

    Part of this problem lies with the party’s base, which the urban historian Fred Siegel once labeled “the coalition of the overeducated and the undereducated.” Major urban centers like New York, Chicago and San Francisco might advertise themselves as enlightened, but they have lost much of their middle class and suffer the highest levels of income inequality.

    Representatives from these areas now dominate the party and reflect their bifurcated districts. They often stress the concerns of the educated affluent on issues like climate change and gay marriage, while their economic policies focus on the public-sector workers, “green” industries and maintaining the social welfare net.

    Not surprisingly, this agenda does little for the middle-class — mostly suburban — voters.

    Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), for example, won his margin of victory in largely middle- and working-class suburbs, where many voters had backed Obama in 2008, according to demographer Wendell Cox. Brown lost by almost 2-to-1 among poor voters — and also among those earning more than $85,000 a year.

    Given the danger revealed by these numbers, Democrats and other center-left parties around the world should refocus their policies on issues — such as taxes, private-sector job creation and small business — that affect such voters.

    For this growing class divide can be found globally: In China, for example, technological change and globalization have produced a new proletariat that, unlike in the past, is disinterested in warmed-over Maoist ideology.

    Perhaps nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the unrest at the Foxconn Technology Group. Workers produce cool products — for companies like Apple, Dell and Nintendo — but under such oppressive conditions that some have been driven to suicide.

    Mounting protests about Foxconn’s employment practices, and a recent rash of strikes in China’s Honda plants, reveal the disruptive potential of this class conflict.

    Even as China’s corporations and government become richer, inequality is widening. Indeed, over the past 20 years, China has shifted from an income-distribution pattern like that of Sweden or Germany to one closer to Argentina’s or Mexico’s. By 2006, China’s level of inequality was greater than that of the United States or India.

    Not surprisingly, class anger has reached alarming proportions. Almost 96 percent of respondents, according to one recent survey, agreed that they “resent the rich.”

    China’s class divides may be extreme, but similar patterns can be found almost everywhere. From India to Mexico, economic growth has led to a striking increase in the percentage of urbanites living in slum conditions.

    In 1971, for example, slum dwellers accounted for one in six Mumbaikars. Today, they are an absolute majority.

    This almost guarantees greater class conflict in the future, even as India’s economy booms.

    “The boom that is happening is giving more to the wealthy,” said R.N. Sharma of Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Social Sciences. “This is the ‘shining India’ people talk about. But the other part of it is very shocking — all the families where there is not even food security.We must ask: ‘The “shining India” is for whom?’”

    This growing inequality in the developing world is already shaping global politics. The failure of the Copenhagen climate change conference can be largely ascribed to the unwillingness of China, India, Brazil and other developing countries to sacrifice wealth creation opportunities for ecological reasons.

    Like their counterparts in New Delhi and Beijing, politicians in wealthier countries also face class conflict.

    In Britain, for example, even a massive expansion of the welfare state has done little to stop the U.K. from becoming the most unequal among the advanced European democracies.

    Alienation among white working-class voters — particularly those in the public sector or with modest small businesses — may have contributed to the Labour Party’s poor showing in the recent elections, according to Liam Byrne, the former Labour treasury secretary.

    A similar phenomenon appears in Australia. Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, an icon among upper-class liberals, resigned in large part because of a precipitous decline in the polls among middle- and working-class suburban voters.

    What is not clear is whether conservative parties can abandon their often slavish devotion to big corporate interests to take advantage of these new dynamics. For years, these parties have relied on divisive social issues, like immigration, to win working- and middle-class voters. But it’s possible that a focus on profligate government spending might yet increase the right’s appeal among mid-income voters.

    As this current shift to greater inequality continues, the self-styled “popular” parties’ tendency to ignore class issues could prove disastrous.

    Unless they start addressing class issues in effective ways, they may lose not just their historical base but the political future.

    This article originally appeared in Politico.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in Febuary, 2010.

    Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

  • Entrepreneurship Fuels Recession Recovery in Sweden

    In a time when many European nations are burdened by high debts and difficulties to get spending under control, the Swedish economy is amongst the most well managed in Western Europe.

    The nation’s GDP fell dramatically, by more than four percent, when the financial crisis struck. This decline was twice the average of the OECD-15 countries. Despite this, Swedish employment actually increased between the last quarter of 2006 and 2009.

    Sweden was hit hard by the crisis since the country relies heavily on exports. On the other hand, the new center-right government that was elected in 2006 has implemented considerable supply side reforms in terms of tax cuts and tightening of welfare and social insurance benefits. These reforms have encouraged work rather than dependence on handouts, balancing out much of the negative impacts of the crisis.

    This reformist trend is rarely acknowledged in the United States. However, during the last two decades both center-right and social democratic governments have implemented free market reforms, tax reforms, pension reforms, privatization of state owned firms and increased reliance on private production of public services such as education and health care.

    The country has also followed a surprisingly conservative fiscal policy. The welfare state remains, but Sweden is no longer an extreme case in terms of socialist policies. This now helps Sweden stay on top as Europe starts on the road to recovery.

    Bu what are Sweden’s long-term prospects for turning the crisis into an opportunity for growth? As history shows, when the macroeconomic shocks subside, growth to a large extent depends on innovation and entrepreneurship. Typically, entrepreneurship is not included as a factor in economic models. In real life however, the business climate matters.

    This is illustrated by how well Sweden handled the great depression. Between 1930-33 170,000 jobs were lost, leading to a six percent drop in employment. However, the downturn soon turned to growth.

    At this time, Sweden was far from a socialist welfare state. The nation boasted low taxes, a flexible labor market and a good business climate. The solution for many who lost their jobs was to start their own business.

    Job creation spurred. Already in 1935 more people were employed compared to before the depression. One reason is that the Swedish economy already had gone through a recession in the 1920s, sparking structural changes.

    New and innovative ventures were started to replace the jobs that had been lost. Several famous Swedish firms, that still today remain as top employers, were formed during and shortly after the depression, such as: Volvo Aero, the mining company Boliden, Securitas and SAAB.

    Swedish social democrats have a surprisingly strong tradition of being quite pro-growth, and even pro-business. However, the hard left resurgence in the 1960s, culminating in the turmoil of 1968 radicalized the Social Democratic party. The tax level started climbing (through hidden taxes on labor and consumption), the labor market became dominated by labor union influence and regulations and the incentives for work, education and entrepreneurship were severely limited.

    As policy shifted, the growth of highly successful entrepreneurial ventures stagnated. A study by economist Sten Axelsson (Axelsson 2006) has examined the entrepreneurial ventures that had the highest revenues in Sweden in 2004. Only two out of 38 firms had been formed after 1970. If the firms were instead ranked after how many the employed, not a single one was shown to have been formed after 1970!

    Another study by economist Jonny Ullström (Ullström 2002) has looked at all the firms that were started in Sweden between 1986 and 1996. Among the 180,000 examined firms, 90 percent had fewer than five employees in 1997. Less than one among a thousand firms had 50 employees or more. Only eight of all the firms had 200 employees or more.

    The drop in entrepreneurship affected Sweden’s ability to deal with downturns. In the beginning of the 1990s, a new crisis hit Sweden. The global economy was growing strongly, but major obstacles faced the Swedish welfare state. Employment fell with almost twelve percent between 1990 and 1993. Within a few years the economy began to grow again. But employment stagnated. It remained until 2008 until Sweden reached the same level of employment as before the crisis.

    However, due to the previously mentioned reforms, the Swedish economy in 2008 was far more flexible than previous years, and thus better able to withstand the international downturn. Since the beginning of the 1990s, Swedish politicians amongst both the right and the left have realized the importance of moving towards greater share of economic freedom and following a generally fiscally conservative path In this time of worldwide crisis, this has helped Sweden’s economy to perform better than many others.

    This is not to say that more reforms are not needed to promote growth and entrepreneurship. Labor market regulations and taxes still depress successful entrepreneurship. For example, a person increasing her or his income with 100 Swedish Kronors has to pay fully 74 Kronors in hidden and visible taxes on employment and consumption taxes.

    Successful entrepreneurs are often highly educated people who already have a good career within large firms. But why spend time and energy on a new venture if up to three quarters of the gains are taxed away?

    Sweden is a nation with a strong history of entrepreneurship, great scientific institutions and strong working ethics. Today the nation stands stronger thanks to reforms towards greater level of economic freedom. But as long as taxes and labor market regulations block the way of growing businesses, the country cannot hope to repeat its stellar recovery course seen during the 1930s.


    Nima Sanandaji is president of the Swedish think tank Captus. He is the author of the book ”Entrepreneurs who go against the stream – what the 90s successful entrepreneurs can teach us” (Swedish title: ¨”Entreprenörer som går mot strömmen – vad 90-talets succéföretagare kan lära om dagens utmaningar”) for Fores.

    Photo by: jdlasica

    References:
    Axelsson, Sten (2006). ”Entreprenören från sekelskifte till sekelskifte – kan företag växa i Sverige?”, in Dan Johansson och Nils Karlsson (ed.), ”Svensk utvecklingskraft”, Ratio.

    Ullström, Jonny (2002). ”Det svenska nyföretagandet 1986-1997: förändringar i företagsstruktur och sysselsättningseffekter”,Vinnova.

  • Stagnation in the City of Angels: Whatever Happened to Ideas?

    It’s only been a couple of years since a red-hot real estate market had our city riding high. The market turned out to be a bubble, of course, and it eventually burst. Gone is the giddiness that comes when folks convince themselves that real estate or high tech stocks or any other trend or commodity can defy gravity and continue upward forever.

    Yet giddiness isn’t the only thing that’s been lost. Ideas have disappeared from the political landscape of Los Angeles.

    That’s particularly unfortunate because there’s plenty of work to be done after bubbles burst—everything from big efforts on the macro-economic level to the everyday challenges of mending lives torn asunder by financial strains. Local government can play a key role in such efforts. That means that politics is part of the picture—and that means that our city’s politicians have a chance to help by coming up with new ideas on how to spur a recovery.

    Yet our recovery is dragging along in Los Angeles. The federal government’s own struggles and the dire straits faced by state officials surely complicate the job at the local level, but those don’t fully explain the malaise we’re living through right now.

    It’s more likely that our city suffers from a dearth of ideas because our politicians became addicted to the red-hot real estate market. It’s looking more and more as though that became their one and only idea. They skimmed off the rising tide of real estate, used the money to buy political points, and stopped thinking about any new ideas.

    It worked for 10 years or so. The values of homes and other properties went up, and so did the city’s revenue. Developers paid fees to build residential and commercial units, buyers paid higher property taxes in the rising market, homeowners borrowed against their houses and spent freely, paying sales taxes along the way.

    All of the action sent streams of revenue to various levels of government, and much of the money found its way to the city’s coffers. Local politicians used the money to take care of donors with favorable deals, satisfy labor unions by expanding payrolls and paychecks for city employees, and provide basic services to enough voters to maintain the status quo.

    Now the revenue streams have dwindled, and there’s not enough for our politicians to finance their old scheme.

    There have been many reactions to our city’s challenges, but not much in the way of ideas. Our politicians have jumped from budget projection to budget projection, cutting here, threatening to cut there. Outside City Hall is a different story, as the populace begins to sense that this is all reaction with no basic idea. Whatever happened last week means nothing this week because the next budget report could prompt any sort of reaction from the politicians. There are no guiding principles or declared values—no ideas—for our city.

    This became clear to me when I realized that our City Councilmembers and our mayor used to send out all sorts of press releases back in the days of the real estate boom. There were notices that some project had been completed or another had just started. They almost always involved the expenditure of city funds, and went on about the politician who flipped whatever switches made the money flow.

    Now the money has dried up, and press releases are few and far between.

    That makes sense—if you accept the premise that spending money is the basis of any and all ideas when it comes to public policy.

    The truth is that more ideas are needed when there’s no money to spend. Yet I can’t remember the last time I saw a press release about an idea from the mayor or a City Councilmember on how to save money without cutting jobs or programs. I don’t recall any notices of a new idea that will maintain services without adding costs. I haven’t seen any communications that indicate our politicians have come up with any new ideas to meet the challenges our city now faces.

    It appears that we have an entire generation of politicians who see spending money as the whole idea of government.

    Well, we’re out of money.

    We need to know if our politicians have any other ideas.

    And they shouldn’t worry if they’re all out—voters are getting a few ideas of their own.

    Jerry Sullivan is the Editor & Publisher of the Los Angeles Garment & Citizen, a weekly community newspaper that covers Downtown Los Angeles and surrounding districts (www.garmentandcitizen.com).

    Photo by: AndrewGorden

  • Singapore’s Demographic Winter

    Over the past half century arguably no place on earth has progressed more than the tiny island state of Singapore. A once impoverished, tropical powder keg packed into 268 square miles at the foot of the Malay Peninsula, the Mandarin-led republic has ascended from its difficult founding in 1965 to one of the richest economies on the planet. Today, in terms of purchasing power, its per capita income stands higher than most European countries’ or Japan’s and is roughly equal to that of the U.S.

    But a catastrophic plunge in the country’s birthrate–a problem plaguing many of the world’s affluent economies–could undermine Singapore’s success. In 1965 Singapore’s leaders feared it could not survive an unsustainable fertility rate above 3.5 and embarked on a campaign encouraging citizens to have smaller families. Today the country’s fertility rate–the number of children per female–has sunk to roughly 1.2 , a rate lower than all but a handful of countries and well below replacement level.

    This pattern poses a threat to the republic’s continued progress over the coming decades. The dependency ratio between retired persons and those 15 to 64–far lower than Europe, America or Japan in the 1970s–will reach the unsustainable levels of places like Japan, Germany and Italy by 2030. By then there could well be more people over 65 than under 15.

    This shift in demographics is a common challenge for almost all advanced countries–even the U.S., which enjoys the healthiest demography of any major wealthy nation. In Europe and particularly Asia, once challenged by overpopulation, there is the looming prospect of what a new documentary calls the “demographic winter.”

    Of course, not everyone finds this “winter” a chilling thought. A growing chorus of environmentalists, particularly in Europe and the U.S., sees the shrinking numbers of “little monsters” a boon for the planet.

    Peter Kareiva, the chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, one of the more levelheaded environmental organizations, has concluded that not having children is the most effective way of reducing “carbon scenarios” and becoming an “eco hero.” Meanwhile the more extremist Voluntary Human Extinction Movement promotes the lovely notion of terminating the species through voluntary childlessness.

    For their part, Singapore’s leaders have focused on providing parkland, building a functioning subway and recycling city wastes. But these pragmatists show little tolerance for such Western-style species self-hatred. A society proud of its accomplishments, its agglomerated cultures–Chinese, Indian, Malay–continue to value family as the supreme societal unit.

    At the same time, many leaders trace the depth of their demographic problem to their own campaign to limit families back in the 1970s. “We have been very successful in reducing the birthrate,” observes Lui Pao Chuen, adviser to the National Research Foundation and a prime architect of Singapore’s defense systems. “The society will die if it goes on like this. We want our society to live on.”

    In the past decade Singapore’s leaders have tried to change course, attempting to raise the birth rate by offering generous cash incentives and other inducements for baby-making. But so far, they admit, these efforts have had little effect.

    Part of the problem may lie with high densities, an inescapable reality in a city-state with literally no suburban periphery. Singapore’s public housing–80% of citizens live in government flats–is generally better and larger than those in other Asian countries. Still the prospect of raising children in a 1,000-square-foot, two-bedroom flat may seem less appealing than doing so, say, in a suburban housing estate in Australia, New Zealand, California or Texas.

    Equally intractable may be the very competitive spirit at the heart of the republic’s success. Singapore possesses two great natural advantages: a strategic location between the Pacific and Indian Oceans and a motivated population. The city’s leaders have done a brilliant job of capitalizing on both, developing one of the world’s largest ports and one of Asia’s best-educated, hardest-working populations.

    This in turn has created a population that often places education and career advancement over child-raising, marriage and even dating. Some 85% of singles still express a desire to get married, and nearly 80% want two or three children. But the pressure to succeed often prevails. “The pace of life has people putting things on hold,” admits NG Mie Ling, coordinating director for the government’s Family Development Group.

    Despite these challenges, Singapore may not be doomed to follow Europe and other advanced east Asian nations into the demographic dustbin. For one thing, the city’s bureaucracy is cleverer than most and may be able to change some policies–placing more emphasis on leisure time for mate-chasing and child-raising to building larger apartments–to reverse the current birth dearth.

    Singapore’s unique ethnic and national identity may prove an even bigger asset. Unlike its Asian rivals, Singapore–though mainly Chinese–remains a truly multiracial society. Like America, it is a nation of immigrants. Few can trace their local roots there more than two or three generations. This makes the Republic more suited for accommodating newcomers from China, India and Malaysia, as well as from countries like the Philippines or Vietnam.

    Newcomers can find a kindred ethnic or religious community. Many also intermarry with Singaporeans; over 40% of all marriages are between citizens and noncitizens, up from only 30% a decade ago. Interracial marriages are also increasingly common. Whereas it is virtually impossible to become Japanese or Korean, one can become a Singaporean.

    Immigration allows Singapore’s population and skilled workforce to grow at a healthy clip despite the low birth rate. Today barely 3.2 million of the current nearly 5 million Singaporeans are citizens; many others immigrate to enjoy the excellent schools, the high degree of safety and cleanliness and a political stability that is rare in the region. Last year 60,000 people were granted permanent residency and nearly 20,000 became citizens.

    “We are still trying to figure out what it is to be a Singaporean,” observes Calvin Soh, chief creative officer in Asia for the Publicis advertising company. This evolving identity may not be obvious in the city’s impressive but hardly unique office, hotel and condo complexes. It is best illustrated in the city’s remarkable neighborhoods with their open air markets and a strikingly diverse food culture flourishing both in small, family-owned restaurants and hawker stalls.

    The city’s internationally recognized food scene, Soh believes, could serve as a model for other cultural products, from media and fashion to product design. Ideally suited to serve as the crossroads culture of 21st-century Asia , Singapore can emerge like 14th-century Venice, which flourished by connecting Europe with the civilizations further to the east.

    Like their counterparts in other successful countries, Singapore’s executives and administrators face enormous demographic challenges. But if any Asian society can confront, or at least ameliorate, the great fertility crisis, it is this tiny island country with a track record of solving seemingly insurmountable problems.

    This article originally appeared in Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in Febuary, 2010.

    Photo by FeebleOldMan

  • Chicago Stimulus Program: A Family Affair

    Even though cities all over the United States are running large deficits, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley feels that an investment in one particular charity is an investment for the future. After School Matters, founded by Mayor Daley’s wife Maggie Daley, funds l youth programs and helps low-income youth obtain job skills. It has received more than $46 million from the city since 2005, with nearly one-third of that total coming in 2009 alone ($15 million). This is a 50% increase from 2008, when the charity received $9.36 million.

    The city has even given some of its federal stimulus package to fund After School Matter’s job program, which pays low-income 14 to 24 year-olds $9-$10 an hour for four and a half hours of work each workday. The contract, signed in 2009, has allotted $1.31 million to the charity for three years. However, Illinois lags behind its projected job growth, and Mayor Daley must find a way to create sustainable jobs for these new workers if he is going to justify this allotment of stimulus money.

    Aside from that, companies that have contracts with the city are donating money to the project as well. Mayor Daley may not be accepting money from city contractors for his campaign, it certainly does not hurt that these contractors are giving millions to his wife’s charity. The Mayor has encountered a lot of criticism for patronage in City Hall after his nephew was found to have used city pension money to buy union land. After School Matters may represent a much more righteous investment, but the Mayor’s seems determined to make Chicago’s budget a family affair.

    Hat tip to Steve Bartin’s Newsalert

  • McChrystal Exit: Obama and His Generals

    General Stanley McChrystal may be the first commanding general in the history of warfare to be relieved of his command because he groaned over the receipt of an email from an ambassador, or because one of his aides whispered to a Rolling Stone reporter that the president had looked “intimidated” in a meeting with the military brass.

    In terms of carrying out strategy, it has been stated that the president had no military complaints about the heavy metal general, who was walking the impossibly thin red line between a general war in Afghanistan and a campaign waged only with assassinations and drone missiles.

    Just a month before his firing, McChrystal successfully packaged a tour of the White House and Capitol Hill for President Hamid Karzai. In earlier media campaigns — notably when the president flew into Kabul in the dead of night to lecture a pajama-clad Karzi over corruption — the Afghan president was deemed unworthy of an American war effort.

    However briefly, McChrystal had succeeded in integrating the Afghan government into the order of battle. So why was he sacked for humming a few bars of Satisfaction in the presence of a rock reporter?

    No doubt McChrystal had his enemies within the bureaucracy, including the ubiquitous ambassador Richard Holbrooke, and the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, former general Karl W . Eikenberry. Along with these two add in a legion of jealous Army politicos, all of whom would love to wear combat fatigues to a presidential photo-op.

    In relieving General McChrystal, perhaps as part of a search for his mojo, President Obama joins a long line of presidents who never figured out how to command their commanders. Here’s a brief summary of some of the more complicated relationships between American presidents and their field generals:

    President Lincoln— Often praised for his habits of command in the Civil War, he nevertheless promoted, endorsed, and endured the incompetence of such generals as McClellan, Meade, Burnside, Pope, and Rosecrans before winning the war with Grant and Sherman, both of whom would horrify a Senate confirmation hearing, let alone the editors of Rolling Stone.

    Grant was a drunk who killed thousands at Shiloh and Spotsylvania, and Sherman once celebrated the drowning of a boatload of reporters, pointing out that maybe their “heavy thoughts” had taken them to the bottom. He also burned Atlanta. Both understood how to win modern wars.

    President Madison— In the war of 1812, he had to endure generals who botched several invasions of Canada, allowed Washington to burn, and, in the case of Andrew Jackson at New Orleans, fought battles after the peace was signed. (But the Battle of New Orleans did more than Yorktown to forge American independence.)

    President Kennedy— He loathed his top generals, blaming them for the Bay of Pigs fiasco and for pushing him into Vietnam, saying “They always give you their bullshit about their instant reaction and split-second timing, but it never works out. No wonder it’s so hard to win a war.” Kennedy’s skepticism about the military command, however, pushed him to ignore their advice for invasion and air strikes in the Cuban Missile Crisis, possibly averting nuclear war.

    Presidents Carter and Johnson— In the style of the Obama White House, these two both micro-managed their war efforts. Jimmy Carter was the air traffic controller for Operation Blue Light, the failed attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran. Lyndon Johnson boasted that the Air Force could not hit so much as “a shithouse” in Vietnam without his authorization. Both presidencies were lost due to the foreign entanglements of the commander-in-chief.

    President Roosevelt— A successful example of a commander-in-chief; no president handled generals better than FDR, who was a shrewd judge of character. Roosevelt spent many months of the war in proximity to his fighting forces (including his own sons, who were serving officers). He vested authority in a number of competent commanders, starting with General George C. Marshall.

    Roosevelt was clear in his strategic objectives and did not meddle, for example, in the deployment of 30,000 troops. Nor did he fire General Patton when he slapped a fatigued soldier. Imagine what General MacArthur would have said about FDR to Rolling Stone? Would FDR have cared? (Eisenhower remarked: “I spent seven years under MacArthur studying dramatics.”)

    Despite all the media visibility around his decisions on Afghanistan, we know little about President Obama’s habits of military command. When he’s before large audiences, he is good at articulating the role he sees for the United States in the world. For better or worse, he is unafraid to offend traditional allies, such as Israel and Great Britain. He even sided against England in a recent flare-up around the Falkland Islands.

    Strategically, however, Obama rarely contradicts his military-industrial complex. Yes, he fired McChrystal, but he replaced him with his boss, mentor, and near Siamese twin, General David Petraeus, as if to imply that the only problem in Afghanistan was McChrystal’s joke about Vice President Biden.

    While hitching his political star to the Nobel Prize for Peace, Commander-in-Chief Obama continues to fund Israel’s war footing, stations forces in Iraq, widens the commitment in Afghanistan, attacks Pakistan with drones, and pushes for war sanctions against Iran. In the pulpit, he is Woodrow Wilson; in action, he’s George W. Bush.

    Nor has the Obama administration been able to articulate a coherent war aim behind the commitment of additional forces in Afghanistan. Look at the many mixed messages sent to Karzai, who depending on the week is “our man” or the next Diem.

    The president’s current directive to his generals is to avoid casualties, hold a mountainous country the size of Texas with eight divisions, foster rural development in places like Helmand, find bin Laden, pacify the federal tribal areas, make President Karzai look democratic, train the Afghan army and police, leer across the border at Iran, and prop up a wobbly government in Pakistan — although, politically speaking, all the administration wants is enough shock and awe so that the Republicans in the 2010 mid-term elections cannot paint it as “weak on terror” or having “lost” Afghanistan.

    In turning the strategic decisions about Afghanistan into an endless university teach-in (with all the allusions to “accountability,” “transitions,” and “benchmarks”), the president acts as if all the timing questions in this war were on his side. Let’s hope that the Taliban and other insurgents, especially those now planting car bombs in Islamabad, Baghdad, and Kabul, got the departmental memo that the United States would be on sabbatical in 2011.

    In 1815, Andrew Jackson felt he had to attack the British the very night he heard they had landed near New Orleans. By contrast, President Obama spent a leisurely year pondering the Weltanschauung of Afghanistan and publicly ruminating about strategic options. He now feels he can afford the luxury of sacking a field general for failing to sound reverential in an interview. Aren’t there better measures of a commander? (At Bellow Wood, a Marine officer said: “Retreat? Hell, we just got here.”)

    Before Lincoln could become the wartime president that we admire, he needed to find a general “who fights,” and he needed to articulate an acceptable and collective war aim, which he achieved with his Gettysburg address and Second Inaugural. He also had to come to the conclusion that Grant, drunk, made more sense than his other generals sober.

    President Barack Obama meets with Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Official White House photo by Pete Souza.

    Matthew Stevenson is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, winner of Foreword’s bronze award for best travel essays at this year’s BEA. He is also editor of Rules of the Game: The Best Sports Writing from Harper’s Magazine. He lives in Switzerland.

  • G20: The Siege of Toronto

    Excerpts from Steve Lafleur’s personal “View From The Wreckage” diary and photo log from this month’s G20 conference in Toronto:

    June 25th
    10:51 PM:     I arrive in Toronto to a surprisingly vacant parking lot on the Esplanade, in the heart of Toronto’s bustling financial district. Quietest Friday night I’ve ever seen in Toronto. Barely a soul out in the usually packed financial district.

    2:12 AM: On the way back to my lodgings, I pass by the French delegation’s bus. The hotel workers had been on strike for the previous few days. The hotel is owned by a French company, so the workers decided to go on strike while the French delegation was there.

    2:14 AM: The Esplanade is conspicuously devoid of returning bar goers.

    June 26th
    10:39 AM:     I arrive a few minutes after a scheduled keynote speaker at Allen Gardens that I heard about on Twitter. The tent town built by protesters has already been broken up, and its occupants have dispersed. The speaker goes on anyways, with a small crowd.

    10:56 AM: I head to Bay Street, the heart of Canada’s financial district. I figure if there are pre-rally disruptions, they would be here.

    11:11 AM: The Art Gallery of Ontario was one of the many high profile venues that closed for the conference. (Many shows, including the high profile musical, Rock of Ages, were canceled. The Blue Jays were also forced to move three home games to Philadelphia).

    11:29 AM: Arrival at the Security barrier. A few officers hanging around, but surprisingly quiet. The police decided to use tightly meshed chain link fences to make climbing the barriers extremely difficult.

    11:55 AM: The University of Toronto, which was also closed for the conference.

    12:10 PM: Queen’s Park begins to fill up with all of the usual suspects. Union activists, environmentalists, and anti-war protesters seem to be the bulk of the crowd.

    12:34 PM: When I see Greepeace approaching, I know it won’t be quiet much longer… and then I see people in their midst who appear to be Black Bloc anarchists, notorious for their role in the Seattle WTO protests of 1999, where they caused major property destruction.

    12:43 PM: Things get pretty busy at Queen’s Park. Despite the rain, the crowd is estimated to be 5000.

    12:48 PM: A crowd protesting the Ethiopian genocide fills the streets of Queen’s Park. I tell my photographer not to worry about them; that they have nothing to gain from being violent. Spoiler: I am right.

    1:41 PM: The demonstrators have now officially shut down University Avenue. The Queen’s Park subway station, and some other stops, are also closed. Frustrated motorists and streetcar passengers are stuck.

    2:26 PM: Rather than contain the crowds (which would lead to immediate confrontation), the police form a human funnel to shunt the protesters west on Queen Street.

    2:55 PM: As I reach University, the police are once again blockading. Riot police one street south are putting on gas masks. There appear to be police officers fighting with protesters. Police tell us to head north immediately or risk becoming collateral damage. Rioters breaking every window in sight.

    3:48 PM: Smoke is coming from a burning car in the middle of the road. We later find out it was a police car set on fire by protesters with Molotov cocktails (one of at least 3).

    11:46 PM: Stop for a quick drink at Duggan’s, a local microbrewery. Downtown is once again eerily quiet. Some business owners had the foresight to board up in anticipation of the riots.

    11:52 PM: We are greeted by hundreds of riot police outside of our lodgings and escorted across the street. There doesn’t appear to be anything amiss. From the roof, we are able to discover what the police are up to: resting.

    June 27th
    2:09 PM:     Both the Bank of Montréal and The CIBC across the street from it are smashed in. It is surprising how quickly the vandalized establishments were boarded up. No remaining shattered glass visible from the road.

    2:11 PM: The Gap is one of the predictable targets for protesters, but dozens of less prominent shops are also vandalized. Starbucks, of course, the absolute favorite target of anti-corporate vandals; also the CTV news building, as well as several media vehicles.

    2:15 PM: As I continue along Queen Street, I hear a loud rumble. Yet another protest march coming. I quickly pull a U-turn, and exit the city.

    There are plenty of lessons that one might learn from this experience. This was my second G20; my first was last year’s meeting in Pittsburgh. The lesson that I want to impart is simple: Major political meetings should never be held in large cities. They are a magnet for violent protesters, and endanger local residents. The destruction, along with the billion dollar security tab, will hopefully make politicians think twice about foisting these events upon major cities. As I said before the meeting, it should have stayed in Huntsville, a small tourist town outside of the city, where it was initially supposed to take place.

    Photos by Andrew Lafleur.

    Steve Lafleur is a public policy analyst and political consultant based out of Calgary, Alberta. For more detail, see his blog.

  • Millennial Surprise

    The boomer’s long domination of American politics, culture and economics will one day come to an end. A new generation–the so-called millennials–will be shaping the outlines of our society, but the shape of their coming reign could prove more complex than many have imagined.

    Conventional wisdom, particularly among boomer “progressives,” paints millennials–those born after 1983–as the instruments for fulfilling the promise of the 1960s cultural revolt. In 2008 the left-leaning Center for American Progress dubbed them “The Progressive Generation.” The center contrasted them favorably to the Xers, a cohort of 20 million fewer, and their “conservative views.”

    The case for the millennials’ left-leaning views can be traced to when the oldest millennials started to vote, in 2004. That year big loser John Kerry took the 18 to 29 vote by nearly 10 points. In the last election millennials supported Barack Obama over John McCain by a staggering 30 points. He outperformed McCain in every ethnic group, winning 54% of young white voters and a remarkable 76% of young Hispanics. Obama may still have won without millennial support, but only narrowly.

    This vote was shaped by important and perhaps lasting attitudes. Authors Morley Winograd and Michael Hais identified among these young voters a strong communitarian ethos, generally liberal social views and somewhat of a “green” agenda. They wrote that millennials’ embrace of the Democratic Party in 2008 could foreshadow a long-awaited leftward realignment paralleling that which occurred in the 1930s.

    Yet there are signs that millennial voters, if not shifting to the right, may have lost some of their progressive ardor. Recent polls suggest that younger voters are far less likely to vote this year than in 2008. Gallup reports that nearly half of voters ages 18 to 29 are not enthusiastic about turning up at the polls this November, a far higher number than senior or boomer voters.

    One reason for such a dramatic shift is likely the economy. The current recession has been very hard on younger workers–unemployment hits around 20% for workers between 16 and 24. The brunt of the recession has hit blue-collar, high school educated youths, but even the college crowd, the core of the Obama constituency, faces what appears to be dismal prospects in the years ahead.

    Not too surprisingly, a May Allstate-National Journal Heartland Monitor survey of voters 18 to 29 found only 45% of millennials still solidly behind the president’s economic agenda. This could have a depressing impact on the leftward lurch among millennials. Indeed one recent Harvard survey found only half of all young voters planned to vote Democratic for Congress this year, compared with 60% in 2006.

    If the downturn persists, we could see some changes in generational politics. In the 1970s a similarly dismal economy accompanied the boomers as they were entering the workforce in huge numbers. Then, as now, long-term unemployment and underemployment seemed the wave of the future.

    The hard times of the 1970s changed the politics of the boomers. The bungled presidency of Jimmy Carter did not do much for the credit of the Democratic Party. Boomers, who sided with Carter in 1976, ended up voting for Ronald Reagan in large numbers four years later. The relative prosperity of the Reagan years painted a basically conservative tinge to boomer voters, something that benefited both Republicans and more centrist Democrats like Bill Clinton.

    This change could occur again, but other factors may slow a rightward shift among millenials. Republican nativism–exemplified by the Arizona immigration law–may be a boon with boomer voters, who are overwhelmingly white (only one in four are non-white). In contrast, roughly two in five millennials are minority group members. The age group 18 and under is already majority “minority.”

    Another big factor will be social liberalism. On a host of critical issues–from interracial dating to gay marriage–millennials tend to be far more “progressive” than earlier generations. According to a recent Pew study, 63% of millennials believed society should accept homosexuality compared with only 48% of boomers.

    Millennials also tend to disapprove of such things as prayer in school compared with boomers or older generations. Although most express some religious commitment, there are more unaffiliated and basic non-believers than in previous generations. The GOP’s long-term embrace of a hard religious right positions will not pay off among millennial voters.

    Perhaps most troubling for Republicans–and this is a point emphasized by Winograd and Hais–are millennial views on government. Two-thirds, according to Pew, currently favor an expanded government role in the economy compared with roughly 40% of boomers. Not surprisingly, tea partiers, at least for now, are more likely to come from the older set than younger voters.

    Yet there is no lock for the Democrats. For one thing, expansive government is likely to be more attractive to those who are not yet paying taxes. As millenials head into their late 20s and early 30s, they may adopt different somewhat views. If the current public sector expansion proves ineffectual in creating jobs–after all not everyone can work for Uncle Sam–they could, like their boomer forebears, embrace a more private-sector oriented approach.

    More than anything else, both liberals and conservatives need to understand that this emerging generation may prove far less predictable than either side expects. Many “progressive” urbanists, for example, expect that most millenials will be happy to live in dense multifamily housing–largely as renters–as they enter their 30s. This is probably not altogether the case.

    Hais and Winograd argue that millenials may be more attracted to urban settings–as is often the case for younger, unmarried and childless people–than boomers and older generation. Yet their research also shows that more than twice as many–some 43%–identify suburbs as their “ideal place to live.” They embrace suburbs even more than boomers.

    Similarly, this generation also shares with the boomers a strong interest in homeownership–refuting the claim of some urban boosters that renting is the wave of the future. Instead they appear surprisingly traditional in terms of wanting marriage, kids and believing in following the rules. They may change things up, but still very much embrace the desire to achieve the “American dream.”

    In these and many ways, millennials are likely to continue redefining our society in ways that neither currently boomer dominated party will appreciate. Given the mess the boomers have left them, that may prove a difference worth celebrating.

    This article originally appeared in Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in Febuary, 2010.

    Photo by rjason13

  • The Downside of Brit-Bashing

    Obama may be spanking BP’s brass today. But the other crisis—Europe’s economic mess—reminds us why it’s important that the U.S. and U.K. stick together.

    The controversy over the BP spill threatens to drive US-UK relations to a historic low point. When recently in London, several people worried that the President may be engaging in “Brit-bashing” at the expense of our historically close ties. This theme has been widely picked up in the UK press.

    “It’s the gushing geyser of Obama’s anti-British rhetoric,” screams Melanie Phillips this week in the Daily Mail,” that now urgently needs to be capped.” Indeed, however much President Obama wants to beat up the Tony Hayward, who certainly deserves to be both tarred and feathered, he might want to consider how “Brit-bashing” may not be in our long-term interest. This is particularly true at a time hat the world’s other big crisis—the collapse of the euro—offers a unique opportunity to shore up our now beleaguered “special relationship.”

    The British Empire may be little more than a historical relic, but the current euro crash could make those old ties between mother country and her scattered former colonies, including America, more alluring. After a decade marked by sputtering movement towards greater integration with Europe, the United Kingdom, particularly its beating heart—London—might be ready to drift away from the continent and back towards America and Canada and the rest of the world beyond.

    This process will be accentuated by the fact that while Europe’s population and economy, particularly on its southern and eastern tiers, seems set to decline even further, the future of North America—largely due to mass immigration and its large resource base—continues to appeal to British investors and companies. In addition, the rise of other parts of the world, notably Russia, India and China, suggests that Britain’s future, like that of North America, rests increasingly outside of Europe.

    Social forces in Britain today will accentuate these trends. In London today you do hear many European languages, but the big money you see around posh places in Mayfair more often speaks not Italian or French, or even German, but Hindi, Arabic , Russian and, increasingly, Chinese. London today is not so much a British city as a global one, with a percentage of foreign-born residents—roughly one-third—equivalent to that of such prominent American multi-racial capitals as New York or Los Angeles.

    Just take a look at the over 200,000 people who became UK citizens last year, up from barely 50,000 annually a decade earlier. The EU accounted for barely three percent of the total; all of Europe, including the former Soviet bloc, represented eight percent. In contrast the biggest source of new subjects was from the Indian subcontinent—roughly 30%—and Africa, which provided another 27 percent.

    This ethnic transformation—much like the one taking place and widely celebrated by Obamanians in the United States—helps tie Britain, despite its proximity to the continent, more to the rest of the world. The UK may not be ready for its own version of Barack Obama, but a post-European future seems increasingly likely through ties of both blood and money. To be sure, in the coming year the level of immigration may decline under the Tories, whose party competes for voters with nativist groups. But economics—and the disastrous state of the Euro—may prove an even larger factor in the country’s transformation.

    Already there is growing concern that the sovereign debt issues of places like Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal—the so-called swilling PIGS—could force Britain, with its already weak economy, to raise interest rates and cut its budgets more than might be advisable. Last month London’s FTSE 100 has lost fifteen percent of its value as a result of the euro crisis, a steep fall made only marginally tolerable by the even worse results on the continent. Future euro-moves could prove even more threatening. Wide ranging attacks on financial speculation, so popular in an increasingly hegemonic Germany, are like a gun aimed at Britain’s economic core. After all, the UK’s exports are built not around cars, steel or fashions but its role as the world’s banker, consultant and business media center. “The euro zone,” complains one columnist in the right-leading Daily Telegraph, “may be leading us into a double-dip recession.”

    But declining euro-enthusiasm is not limited to those considered conservative “nutters” by Britain’s continentally-minded sophisticates. You don’t have to be an unreconstructed Thatcherite to resist tying the country to the future feeding of widely irresponsible “Club Med” countries or kowtowing to Berlin. Rather than the Germans and their PIGS, Britain may be better off linking with both the BRIC countries—Brazil, Italy, India and China—as well as a rebounding North America.

    As the ultimate capitalist entrepot, Britain’s trump lies in being hugely attractive to Americans. In this respect, beating up BP, however justified, may also be squandering an opportunity to solidify a relationship that is needed on so many fronts from battling Islamic extremism—the Brits and the Canadians are our only strong reliable allies—to preventing German-style controls over the global entrepreneurial economy.

    Herein lies our opportunity. Although not “anti-European,” Britons tend to be “deeply skeptical about the institutions of the European Union,” notes Steve Norris, a former MP, onetime chairman of the ruling Conservative party and two times that party’s candidate for Mayor of London. As he puts it: “The British do not want a federal Europe in which significant powers pass from sovereign parliaments to Brussels.”

    Although Labour also resisted rapid integration into Europe, the current government under the new Prime Minister David Cameron, Norris notes, has made it clear that it is even more resistant to this trend. This may prove an embarrassment to Cameron’s historically Europhile deputy prime minister, the Liberal Independent’s Nick Clegg, but the movement away from Europe seems increasingly inevitable.

    For one thing, the future of the euro may depend on expanding Brussels’ control of member nation’s budgets, something few British MPs of any party are likely to embrace. Attempts by France and Germany to expand the power of Brussels to save the Euro are likely to chase away even the most devoted Europhiles in Britain.

    All this is good news for a strengthened US-UK alliance—something that should not be threatened by excessive “Brit bashing.” For all its many shortcomings, Great Britain remains one of the globe’s great outposts of both civilization and dynamic market capitalism. Its economic power may be a shadow of what it once was, but its cultural, political and role as a transactional center keep the place globally relevant.

    A Britain both more Atlanticist and global also can play a more positive role by adding its weight to ours in slowing a shift to protectionism, battling terrorism and in resisting the now ballyhooed trend towards state-based capitalism. And that would bode well for Britain itself, allowing the country to play to fundamental strengths that derive from its unique historical legacy.

    This article originally appeared in The Daily Beast.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in Febuary, 2010.

    Photo by Public Citizen