Canceled: Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class - Joel Kotkin
Described by the New York Times as “America’s uber-geographer,” Joel Kotkin is an internationally-recognized authority on global, economic, political and social trends. His latest book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class is now available at Amazon. He authored THE HUMAN CITY: Urbanism for the Rest of Us (Agate Press) in 2016 and co-edited, with MIT’s Alan Berger, the 2018 collection INFINITE SUBURBIA (Princeton University Press).
"Our society is being rapidly reduced to a feudal state, a process now being exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Millions of small businesses are near extinction, millions more losing their jobs and many others stuck into the status of a property-less serfs. The big winners have been the “expert” class of the clerisy and, most of all, the tech oligarchs, who benefit as people rely more on algorithms than human relationships.
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. 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..."