![]() ![]() He is a regular contributor to City Journal, Daily Beast, Quillette and Real Clear Politics. He is Senior Fellow for Heartland Forward and Executive Editor of the widely read website. Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The New Urban Crisis.Ībout the Author Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange, California and Executive Director of the Houston-based Urban Reform Institute. A gripping cautionary tale by one of the most provocative and original thinkers of our time, this book is a must read for all those concerned about the future of our cities and our society." ![]() John Russo, Visiting Scholar, Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and Working Poor at Georgetown University, Co-editor, Working-Class Perspectives "Our society and economy is no longer progressing but regressing into a kind of "neo-feudalism." As Joel Kotkin describes it, our once-great middle class is being eviscerated and America is dividing into a small group of uber-wealthy oligarchs who have colonized luxury cities like San Francisco and New York. He suggests that technological oligarchs are already controlling our economic future while creating a high-tech neo-feudal society that undermines democracy and economic mobility for the middle and working classes." ![]() "Kotkin has written an essential and critical study of emerging class structures at the intersection of technological determinism and post-industrial capitalism. The trends are mounting, but we can still reverse them-if people understand what is actually occurring and have the capability to oppose them. Ascendant for much of modern history, this class is in decline while those below them, the new Serfs, grow in numbers-a vast, expanding property-less population. This includes the yeomanry, which is made up largely of small businesspeople, minor property owners, skilled workers and private-sector oriented professionals. Below these two classes lies what was once called the Third Estate. These two classes correspond to the old French First and Second Estates. At the apex of the new order are two classes-a reborn clerical elite, the clerisy, which dominates the upper part of the professional ranks, universities, media and culture, and a new aristocracy led by tech oligarchs with unprecedented wealth and growing control of information. The new class structure resembles that of Medieval times. If the last seventy years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical society is emerging. The trends are mounting, but we can still reverse them-if people understand what is actually occurring and have the capability to oppose them"-īook Synopsis Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism. About the Book "Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism.
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