Our Neo-Feudal Future | Joel Kotkin

The Reagan era has reached its limits and can’t sustain the economy. The failure is in the process of creating a new set of competing social classes. This is reflected in the intensifying political crisis of the Trump presidency, in which the new social forces begin battling each other. This crisis will last through to the 2020s. In 2024, a new pre

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The last 1,000 years can be roughly split into two 500-year chunks: feudalism & capitalism. Feudal lords controlled all of the land, farms, buildings and capital. This was passed down inside families and never distributed to the workers. There was no way for anyone to create new forms of capital because they could not get access to any in the first... See more

After the 1970s, meritocracy began to look more and more like Michael Young’s dark satire. A system intended to give each new generation an equal chance to rise created a new hereditary class structure. Educated professionals pass on their money, connections, ambitions, and work ethic to their children, while less educated families fall further beh

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would be managed by technicians invested with a sort of dictatorial power. The conditions of this new economy, the system of distribution, the currency based on the “unit of energy”—all these are but details. The essential thing was this idea, which has, so we are told, occupied the attention of all Americans for some time, of replacing the capital

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what do I say? That the internet is to the USA what the Americas once were to the UK—a frontier territory, where all the action is. That just as the Western frontier once gave rise to an American pioneer class, the internet frontier has given rise to a global technology class. That this class is not defined by inherited wealth (many are born poor i

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