Book Review: The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, by Joel Kotkin

  In his new book The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, Joel Kotkin attempts to extrapolate current trends for forward 40 years to create a vision of exactly where and how the next hundred million Americans will live. I heard about this book in Tom Barnett's WPR column last week and immediately ordered it, looking forward to a nice bit of Utopian futurism. What I found was a somewhat meandering history of urban politics in America that is at once informative about the future of medium sized cities and uninformed about international politics and economics. The book is also long on description but short of prescription, preferring to say "this will happen" as opposed to "this is how things will happen".

   Kotkin begins his book by taking down a couple pieces of conventional wisdom about the United States - mainly that the U.S. is currently in a state of decline. Kotkin is especially rough on the notion that either China or India is poised to overtake the U.S. economically, pointing out that both countries still have a large percentage of their populations living in poverty and that China in particular is set to age rapidly, having over a third of their population over the age of 60 by the mid 2030s. Kotkin is certain that this rapid aging (which also impacts Japan and the E.U.) will bedevil most other major powers while the America's ability to integrate new immigrants will allow us to remain dynamic. Ultimately, Kotkin offers a vision for a healthier, wealthier, post-racial, post-ethnic America that will remain the global leader in innovation even in the mid 21st century.

What's Useful About this Book:

As a resident of Columbus, Ohio, I know that Kotkin's analysis of the folly of a medium sized mid-western city trying to become a "luxury city" is 100% accurate. Kotkin calls out Cleveland and Dayton specifically, but as I watch the local debate about whether or not to bail out the local NHL franchise (money looser - big time) I think his point is dead on. Kotkin's advice is that medium sized cities need to focus on what he call "vanilla" services, such as police, fire and local schools, as opposed to marque projects "downtown" which are designed to attract the "creative class" but typically wind up money pits in all but the largest and wealthiest cities. Kotkin compares the results of Potemkin luxury cities, like Cleveland, Philadelphia and Dayton, with vanilla cities like Austin and Phoenix, and suggests that the path of the latter is a better strategy for 21st century sustainability.

On the topic of sustainability, Kotkin is bullish on not only on America but the global environment as well, taking a very Lumborgesque "wealthier is healthier" outlook. And Kotkin is skeptical that the current environmental obsession with urban living, believing that Americans are unlikely to ever give up their preference for owning their own home and living in the suburbs. Kotkin believes that current Great Plains small towns in states such as Iowa and Nebraska will become the suburban boom towns of the next several decades.

Less Useful Sections of the Book: Unaddressed Issues:

1. Kotkin spends exactly zero time addressing the coming Medicare implosion. I think it's beyond remiss to write a book in 2010 about America in the year 2050 without seriously addressing the financial issues the U.S. government faces. 

2. Kotkin's read on international politics is, at best, short sighted. He seems to embrace the notion of America as an ever-evolving institution but quickly reverts to The Clash of Civilizations when discussing other world powers such as China and Russia. He takes the so-called Beijing Consensus way too seriously, seemingly ignoring the myriad of problems which plague China's political system - and which justify his belief that China will not surpass the U.S. - and suggests that China will develop a sort of Sino-Globalization opposed to the United States. Can't have it both ways guy - either China has a long way to go or they've discovered a longer lasting light bulb - can't be both. For what its worth, I'm a big supporter of his first proposition - China has a long way to go before they are truly strong and what we've seen in the last 3 decade basically amounts to China picking a lot of low hanging fruit.

Kotkin's read on Russia is even worse, bordering on silly even. He suggests that Russia will successfully embrace something called neo-Czarism. This supposition completely ignores the failure of the Russian economy in the wake of the financial crisis and also ignores Kotkin's earlier read on Russia's weakness.

3. Perhaps the biggest weakness of Kotkin's book has to do with point #1. Kotkin makes a series of vague suggestions for policies but offers no way to pay for them. He writes vaguely about energy policy and industrial policy but doesn't explain how America can square the circle, so-to-speak, with regard to the increasing share of overall government spending going to entitlement spending and the need, if we are to pay for Kotkin's policies, to increase discretionary programs.

In conclusion, The Next Hundred Million offers a welcome dose of optimism but is long on assertions and short of policy national policy suggestions. On the other hand, Kotkin's observations about housing patterns could be very useful to students or practitioners of state and local politics. In fact, I recommend Columbus mayor Micheal Colman read this book ASAP.  Beyond local politics, however, Kotkin's theories could use a bit of fleshing out, and I might recommend he look into writing a follow up which examines what type of economic policies would best empower state and local governments to follow his policies.

I give this book 3 out of 5 stars.

Obama's Middle East Endgame: Part III - Getting to Moscow through Tehran

Yesterday I caught John Limbert n CSPAN's BookTV talking about his new book: Negotiating With Iran: Wrestling With the Ghosts of History.

Limbert has a Ph.D. from Harvard, has served in the State Department and is currently a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy. When someone in the audience asked him about Iran and Russia, his answer sounded oddly familiar to anyone who reads this blog.

He said that Russia has two great fears:

1. The U.S. will attack Iran
2. The U.S. will normalize relations with Iran

On a couple of firearms/shooting sports related forums where I post regularly (under a pseudonym), I am often castigated for having the crazy idea that Russia and Iran are natural enemies. The other forum users tend to believe what they see on CNN; Russia and Iran are "allies", Russia protects Iran in the U.N. and so on and so forth. I attempt to calmly explain that Persian and Russians have so much historical antipathy, that any "alliance" between Iran and Russia is bound to be fleeting and could easily be torn asunder were the U.S. to make the Iranians a better offer.

So now the Obama administration is trying to find a way to wind down the tension between the U.S. and Iran. This is a sensible policy choice. As soon the Shia/Sunni/Israeli tensions are stabilized in the middle east - both through accepting Iran's status as a de facto nuclear power and through bringing Israel, Jordon, Egypt and the Gulf States under a true "nuclear umbrella" that does more than just guarantees a second strike but also greatly reduces the chances that an Iranian strike would even get through. Once those ducks are in a row Iran will be better positioned to focus its energy on containing Russia.

But that's okay - because that is what Russia wants.

In stabilizing the Middle East through detente - and freeing up Iran to focus its foreign policy energies on fighting global warming - President Obama, Secretary Clinton and Secretary Gates are building a future worth creating. Obama has the potential to be the most successful foreign policy president since Richard Nixon if he manages to normalize relations between the U.S. and Iran before he leaves office.

Now, let's see if the president decides to get interested in building a future worth creating in Afghanistan.

 

Poland Must Take the Lead on Combating Global Warming! And they should ask Pakistan, Iran and North Korea for help on the matter...

This picture depicts global warming and the 3rd Reich, up to no good.


This is an excellent article about why Poland is so afraid of global warming.

Poland should be terrified of global warming.

Global warming considers Poland part of it's sphere of influence.

And, as before, global warming is making a deal with Germans to divide Western and Eastern Europe:

Currently, Russian gas has to be piped through Eastern Europe to reach Western Europe. If Russia shuts off the gas to pressure a neighbor in the east, it is felt in the more powerful, wealthier countries to the west, where it touches off loud protests.

The new Nord Stream pipeline will change that equation. By traveling more than 750 miles underwater, from Vyborg, Russia, to Greifswald, Germany, bypassing the former Soviet and satellite states, it will give Russia a separate supply line to the west.
As a result, many security experts and Eastern European officials say, Russia will be more likely to play pipeline politics with its neighbors.

“Yesterday tanks, today oil,” said Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, a former head of Poland’s security service.

But fear not! We all know that the antidote to global warming is alternative energy. 

As a matter of fact, global warming has recently agreed that its ok if Iran develops alternative energy, so global warming should not object if Poland, the Baltic states, and other Eastern and Central European countries join together to develop alternative energy as well.

As I've said before, global warming has made its choices. Global warming wants more alternative energy.

Of course, this post makes more sense if you realize that when I say global warming, I mean Russia.

And when I say "alternative energy" I mean a break-out nuclear capacity, similar to what Japan has and Iran and is reaching for. 

Merkel Reduces Germany's Carbon Footprint: OR: Russia gets what it wants

Dan, of TDAXP, has developed a useful E.U.-speak to English translation algorithm. It works like this: when ever an E.U. country talks of "global warming" just assume they mean "Russia".

And so it was with great interest that I read a story today, about one of the side effects of Angela Merkel's reelection. Germany will be keeping its nuclear program alive and kicking.

Ostensibly, Germany wants to have a means of creating clean energy without resorting to less reliable "alternative" energies such as wind and solar. Of course that clean energy mean less reliance on Russian gas:

Had the Social Democrats prevailed, the nation could have become much more dependent on Russian natural gas and the political baggage which has emerged as a cost of doing business with Gazprom, which has become an unpredictable supplier. In January 2009, the Russians cut off natural gas exports to a dozen European nations, including Germany, in a political dispute with the Ukraine. The Russians accused western European nations of siding with the Ukraine.

But Germany's nuclear program is important for another reason. I've recently predicted that several countries in Europe, espeically Poland and the Czech republic, may soon reach for some strategic ambiguity WRT nuclear weapons. To that end, Germany's nuclear program is notable because it is considered so advanced as to make Germany a de facto nuclear state.

Germany has yet to weaponize, but could probably do so fairly quickly. Perhaps more importantly, they could choose to share their nuclear technology with neighbors such as Poland, the Baltic state and the Czech republic, any one of which may take the leap.

Russia, this is what you wanted.

Were the Russians really surprised by Iran's Secrete Nuke Site?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say, "defiantly, maybe" .

The Russians seem to greet the news that Iran had a nuclear site that has been thus far secrete with an angry statement.

So are they really angry? Maybe.

Actually, Russian anger over Iran having a secrete program fits nicely with my thesis that Russia has more to fear from an Iranian nuke than America does. So, if the Russians had been in contact with Iran about its nuclear sites thus far and perhaps were somehow sure that the Iranians either were not going to weaponize or were otherwise on a tight leash, then the revelation that Iran had secrete site would scare them, because it means that Iran felt the need to hide their real intentions from the Russians as well as the Americans and everyone else.

Of course the Iranians feel the need to hide this site from the Russians, they have more to fear from Russia than from the U.S.

Putin Gets Everything He Wants: Or: Obama hands Putin a Beautiful White Elephant

"Everyone gets everything he wants."

- Capt. Willard, Apocalypse Now





I don't know how to say "when the Gods wish to punish us, they will answer our prayers" in Russian, but Putin and Co. should hope somebody inside the Kremlin does. To that end, God (or Obama) answered one of the Putin's favorite prayers this week by agreeing to pull GBI (ground based interceptors) out of Poland and the Czech Republic. Given Russia's truculence of late, and given Poland's history since 1939, its not surprising that Poland is none too please with Obama's decision.

Putin and his droogs really ought to take a minute to consider why Margret Thatcher asked Gorbachev not to "tear down that wall" in 1989. What Thatcher understood was that Europe had been at peace, at that time for 45 years, because it had been outsourcing its security to the U.S. and to a lessor extent to the Soviet Union. The Warsaw Pact-NATO axis preserved stability and kept the formerly rampant nationalism of Southern, Eastern and Central Europe in check. Thatcher was old enough to remember the last time no outside power would step in to guarantee the security of Eastern Europe and the massive war that followed.

In the end, thankfully, history has so far proved Thatcher completely wrong, in a way, because the former Soviet nations in Europe have, with the exception of Yugoslavia (never really part of the Soviet block anyway) remained fairly calm.

Of course another way to look at Thatcher's fear is to say, yes, she was absolutely right, and that Europe did need an outside power to whom it could outsource its security - it's just that that power could be the U.S. And indeed, after the Cold War the U.S. stepped in immediately to begin expanding NATO, first into East Germany and then all the way to Poland, the Baltic states and maybe someday Georgia and the Ukraine.

So this week, when the President of the United States seemingly bowed to Russian pressure to remove our ground based interceptors from Poland and the Czech republic, Obama began what I suspect will wind up being a long term experiment, conducted on live subjects in real-time, on whether or not Europe still needs to outsource its security to the U.S.

In the short term this is a win for Russia, but over a longer horizon, say, 5 or 10 years, this could go down as one of the worst things to ever happen to Russia foreign policy.

Now that Obama has suggested an answer to the age old question, "Would the Americans trade New York for ________ (insert European city here)" , the Poles, Czechs and Ukrainians have to be looking into other means of resisting Russian pressure. And those means come on two time horizons; short term and long term.

In the short term I expect the Baltic states, the Caucuses, the Ukraine along with Poland and Czech republic will be building up their capacity for asymmetrical warfare including a "leave behind" capacity to wreck Russian supply lines in the event of invasion as well as an increased "asset" gathering inside Russia proper (read: making contacts with Chechnyaians, Mafia types and any other anti-regime elements) and perhaps even the insertion of "sleeper agents" or sleeper cells who will lurk around inside the Russian Federation and go to work if things heat up.

Over the longer term, I suspect Poland and the Czech republic will soon take the lead on reducing their carbon output by building more "peaceful nuclear reactors" (like the reactors Iran is building) and getting themselves pretty quickly up to a "Japanese" level of nuclear ambiguity. Poland may already be in possession of 7 "Frogs", left over from the Cold War, and though an unguided short-range missile is not as effective as a missile that can hit Russia, the Poles should be able to reverse engineer the warheads in short order. Then with the warhead technology and nuclear fuel from their "peaceful civilian program" the Poles should have a hedge against Russian chicanery and can ask Russia "Would you be willing to trade Moscow for Warsaw?"

Of course, Poland is not the only neighbor of Russia which may be on the verge of going nuclear. And therein lies the beauty of Putin getting everything he wants, because, its certainly a short-term black eye for America, but it creates a long term challenge for a wizened, weakened and dying Russian. America's neighbors are friendly and unarmed, whereas Russia is surrounded by pissed off, nationalistic countries that will increasingly see fit to arm themselves lest they get carved up like Georgia , a country which I imagine is examining its carbon-output reduction options as we speak.

To top it all off, Iran, which already posses a missile that can hit Russia, had crowds in the street today shouting "Down with Russia!"


The day will come in the not-too-distant future, when Russia wants to throw its weight around in the Caucuses or central Asia and all of these answered prayers are going to haunt them. Until then, I hope the Poles and Czechs do their part to reduce global warming, I hope the protesters keep going until A-Jad either steps down or "gets Ceascued" and I hope Putin keeps getting everything he wants.

Once again, Joe Biden Screws up by Telling the Truth

Joe Biden is an honest man.

And that is why he will never be president.

A couple months back, Joe Biden screwed up by telling the police the truth about Sotomayor.

Now, the V.P. has screwed up by telling the truth about Russia:

WASHINGTON -- Vice President Joe Biden said in an interview that Russia's economy is "withering," and suggested the trend will force the country to make accommodations to the West on a wide range of national-security issues, including loosening its grip on former Soviet republics and shrinking its vast nuclear arsenal.

He even hinted that a nuclear Iran would be useful in helping the west contain Russia:

The geographical proximity of the emerging nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea is also likely to make Russia more cooperative with the U.S. in blocking their growth, he said.

While he didn't come right out and say that a nuclear Iran, with missiles designed to hit Moscow, would benefit the U.S., his thinking seems to be the same vein: surrounding Russia with nuclear powers is bad for them/good for us.

At this rate, I would expect the V.P. to suggest a joint Sino/American summit in the near future to discuss how the two countries will manage Russia's decline in the wake of the Ruskie's inevitable reverse population bomb. I would also expect the president to half to walk back such a suggestion immediately, but that doesn't change the fact that Joe Biden provides us with an interesting glimpse of what I imagine is some of the clear realist thinking going on within the Obama administration. Biden's only crime is taking private -factually non-controversial but politically poisonous analysis - and saying it out loud.

Joe Biden should start a blog.

Secretary Gates Inadvertently Makes a Really Strong Pro Iranian Argument...

The secretary of defense says that Russia is scared of Iran.

And well they should be.

With a restive Muslim population and a predilection for going tear assing around and invading countries in Iran's neighborhood, a weakening Russia would have much to fear from a strong Iran.

That is why Iran makes more sense as an ally than as an enemy. Russia and Iran's relationship is one of convenience, with the Iranians willing to make nice with Russia so long as the Ruskies will sell them weapons on a strict "don't ask, don't tell basis" and the Russians willing to do anything for cold hard currency. But a nuclear armed Iran - equipped with missiles that could hit Moscow - would not be in Russia's best interest.

But it would be in America's best interest.

Just one more reason Friday's elections and the Obama administrations reactions to them are very important.

Some perspective on the upcoming Russian elections...

1788: George Washington Elected

His V.P.?

John Adams

1796: John Adams elected.

His V.P.?

Thomas Jefferson.

1800: Thomas Jefferson elected.

His Secretary of State?

James Madison.

1808: James Madison elected.

His Secretary of State (and, during the War of 1812, Secretary of War?)

James Monroe.

1816: James Monroe elected.

His Secretary of State?

John Quincy Adams

1820: James Monroe runs nearly unopposed.

1824: John Quincy Adams elected.

1828: Andrew Jackson finally breaks the cycle.

My point is this: A small group of guys ran this country from 1788-1828. 40 years. All of these men had been active in the Revolution and all but Jefferson (who was in France at the time) had been present at the Constitutional Convention. Now, technically we can't say that the U.S. was a single party state, because by 1800 there were at least two parties, the Federalist and the Democrats-Republicans but I think it is fair to say that power was concentrated between a few fairly like minded individuals. And they stayed in power at least partially by limiting enfranchisement It was only when the first truly post-Revolutionary generation came of age and when democratic (small D) reforms began sweeping state legislatures and enfranchising large numbers of white male voters that we started to get legitimately competitive elections from people that weren't present at creation.

40 years.

So consider this when you hear about Putin essentially hand picking his succesor.Will the elections on Sunday be free and fair?

Probably at least as free and fair as late 18th or early 19th century elections in the U.S.

Which is to say:

Nope.

And that's okay. It doesn't mean that Putin is a new Ivan the terrible or that Russia is heading back towards a Soviet model. Mostly it means that Russia is still working through it's "Founding Brothers" phase with Putin and Medvedev playing the role of Jefferson/Madison to Gorby's Franklin and Yeltsin's Washington. Those ARE NOT good analogies in terms of behavior or ideology, I know, but those analogies allow one to conceptualize a rough time line. Gorby and Yeltsin were still "Soviet", because for most of their lives they had not been "Russian" just as the older Founding Fathers very much considered themselves to be British. Putin is sort of in the middle, spending part of his career as a "Soviet" and part as a "Russian." From the NYT:

Now, Mr. Medvedev, the presidential successor personally selected by Mr. Putin, is creating his own public identity according to a choreographed script. And here, in a mix of Soviet and Russian symbols, the man rising to Kremlin power avoided the stern themes that have often accompanied Mr. Putin’s appearances.

The upcoming transition of power will be part of a slow evolution away from Soviet and towards a Modern Russia. Evolution is a huge step in positive direction for a country that has often been more apt to change through revolution.

But he has made unanticipated moves. In a speech on Feb. 15, he said liberty was necessary for the state to have legitimacy among its citizens. And he has laid out domestic policy goals in what seems like a communiqué to Russia’s expanding consumer class.

His challenge, as I see it, it to bridge the gap between old school Sovs and the first post-Soviet generation (meaning they spent most of their adolescents as "Russian" rather than "Soviet") who should be about my age right about now.

But what about Putin trying to control Russia's media?

Well, it's wrong. But then again so were the Alien and Sedition Acts.

In short, the transition away from single party rule took decades in the world's oldest democracy, so I'd think it may take at least another decade or two in country that was ruled by a royal family until 1917.