Our Neo-Feudal Future | Joel Kotkin

When I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, the cardinal value of the middle class was stability. Most people had a fixed place in the world and defined themselves through what they were doing in life. As for today, being part of the middle class looks more like the main character in Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike: laboring during the day as a constructi

Feudalism in its various forms was not only a response to ever-present risks of predatory violence. It also was a reaction to appallingly low rates of productivity. The two have tended to go hand in hand in farming societies. Each frequently contributed to the other. When public authority collapsed, property rights and prosperity tended to recede a

The technological revolution might soon push billions of humans out of the job market and create a massive new “useless class,” leading to social and political upheavals that no existing ideology knows how to handle. All the talk about technology and ideology might sound very abstract and remote, but the very real prospect of mass unemployment—or p

A team of researchers at Stanford University, led by an economist named Raj Chetty, used newly accessible data from the Internal Revenue Service to write a series of papers that addressed questions of opportunity in American life. One, titled “The Fading American Dream,” asked a simple question: How likely is it that an American child will be bette

functions. As inequality has widened, the means America once used to temper it—progressive income taxes, good public schools, trade unions that bargain for higher wages—have eroded. As the risks of sudden loss