The Feudal Future .
Bycast .
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Feudal Future podcast . I'm Marshall Teplansky , I'm Joel Kotkin , and welcome to 2024 . Joel , it's a pleasure to have you .
Yeah , and , as you may notice , we now have new digs which we think look a lot better and really good people working with us .
Big shout out to Clickmo . Our buddies Angel and Jason Glad to have you on the team and , as you can tell , the production quality has improved quite a bit of higher quality definition , more camera angles . So hopefully that will be a great backdrop for what we want to talk about for the year . So here's what we thought we would do .
We thought that would make sense for the start of 2024 to walk you through what we think are the biggest issues that we're going to be facing in 2024 and around which we will be creating new shows . So Joel and I have both put together our top five list and we thought we'd walk you through . Joel , you want to start with your biggies .
Yeah , well , I mean , we're going to start off with education . Obviously it makes sense , since we do work for an educational institution , and of course , the big issues there are . Really , let's face it , the education system is in terrible shape . You can start with Harvard , but you can go all the way down to the kindergarten and the elementary schools .
One of the big problems is kids are coming out of school , particularly kids from poorer families , with very few skills , very little knowledge , and of course , you don't have to be poor to be ignorant , because a lot of rich ignorant people out there . But the reality is that we are facing an educational crisis .
For the first time maybe in our history , we have a generation coming up who , in many ways , is less educated than the generation before .
Well , you know , the thing that hits me about the education question is what is the purpose of education ? To begin with ? Right , if you look back in history , to become educated meant to become a leader in society , and now , with the world of social media , the world of almost leaderless society , it seems as though the role for education is changing .
So we're wondering if education is changing . It's changing because of market forces ? One of the big questions we have is what is going to happen and this is on my top 10 list what is going to be happening to all of those high end professional jobs that we've been training people for in our educational institutions ? Are they going to be there ?
Are we going to have them ? And if they're not going to be there because AI or some other technology is taking them over , what is the role of a university education ? What is the role of vocational education ? It's going to be a really interesting question .
Yeah , and I mean I think you raise the issue of AI in particular , because when we think of , let's say , new technologies , first thing we think about it's going to be the Amazon warehouse workers .
It's going to be the person working at Walmart who's going to get it , or the person working at a GM factory , but increasingly it's going to be the very people that we've been saying as an educational institution go get your STEM degree and your life will be a jolly one and you'll always make money .
That's not the case anymore and we really don't know what the social impact is of AI is going to be . Marshall and I are teaching a class at Chapman on this spring . I think it's a major question . I think the impact on the class structure in America and the impact on education is going to be profound .
I think new models of how we organize our economy and how we organize our education system are going to have to be developed . We hope to bring in this year lots of people who have different ideas , that some people are starting new universities , some people that are new models that are coming out about .
How do you actually create a new university and what is it really all about ? I mean , you know , the thing that is , I think , underlying a lot of the assumptions that people have made over the years is that if you have a university education , it's going to put you in the leadership class of society . Well , do we still have a leadership class of society ?
I don't know whether we do or not , and what's the model of a university if that leadership structure has really fundamentally changed ?
And we've even seen the beginnings of that . If you think about the people who are shaping our society , many of them are college dropouts , bill Gates , steve Jobs being probably two of the most prominent ones what you're seeing is that maybe we have to go back to the idea of apprenticeship , about learning by doing , I mean just from my field of journalism .
Somebody comes to me and says , oh , you know what ? I have a degree from Columbia Journalism School and my response is the typical New York response was that and a subway token will get you a ride on the subway . Subway tokens is how you used to pay for a subway Before apps before the digital economy . Right .
But you know , you really have to see that people are really in a situation where they really don't know what's happening . And I think when we look at , for instance , what's happening at Harvard and many schools used to be , you went to Harvard . I knew you were smart and you had a good education , do I think that ? Now ? I'm not so sure .
Well , you know the whole issue of Harvard and the controversy around the elite schools . The fundamental assumption at Harvard is that everybody should have an education , because then they have an equal shot at achieving , as opposed to ensuring that everybody has the same outcome .
That's where I think we've seen the corruption of the educational system is that we've walked away from the notion that education should be about giving everybody an equal opportunity to prove their medal , to prove what they can do , and so I think we're in for some major shake-ups there .
Yeah , and I think that people are going to look for alternative institutions and that's something we're going to be covering this year is very interested in people with new universities , universities within universities and even some very more radical models , which many of our colleagues won't like because they won't have tenure and they won't be the sort of cushy jobs
that , let's face it , academia has provided . So what's your number two issue ? Well , I would say that the issue of what's happening with net zero .
I think that's going to be a constant , and what we're seeing now and I saw it , it's really been clearer in Europe than here is to get to net zero in the time frame that they want , without nuclear power and with solar and wind , is just a fantasy .
It's just not going to happen anything like in the schedule that they want and there's going to be a lot of collateral damage . You don't have to go very far to see it . You look at California with the number of people in energy poverty because of the state policies trying to phase out nuclear power , trying to phase out natural gas .
Well , those are the sources of reliable energy .
And so the question really becomes is the trade off between achieving net zero and the economic problems that come along with trying to get there in as strident a way as we've seen thus far ? Is it really worth it ?
And I think that this is a question people are asking that is a very legitimate question about do we really want to put this cost , this economic burden on society for what appears to be a relatively marginal gain in terms of our impact on the environment ?
And just one last point which is very critical is and this has become very clear in Europe is that the shift to EVs , electric vehicles what it really has done is hand the automobile industry to China , which totally dominates it , and the great irony is that domination is powered by coal and by unclean energy , if you want the least clean energy that you could
find . So , fundamentally , what we're looking at is , in order to achieve an impossible goal , we're going to wipe out all these jobs and , in the process , hand the economic future to our biggest rival . Somehow , it doesn't seem to me to make a lot of sense .
Well , and you know , joel , the other thing in my take , my number two issue really is related to that , which is can you really walk away from the infrastructure that we've built in the 19th and 20th centuries in favor of completely remaking it with a new infrastructure , whether it's energy , or whether it's bridges , whether it's roads ?
We need to figure out some way of being able to maintain that infrastructure , otherwise we're going to have complete chaos in the shift over to completely new infrastructure .
Nobody's complaining about the notion of having new infrastructure , new ideas , new technology to move society forward , but we can't do it at the expense of throwing away the base that we've built that allows the economic engine to thrive .
And I think one of the really philosophical questions is those of us who think that we still need economic growth . We have a lot of people who are poor . We have a lot of people who are struggling . Can we have an economy that lifts people up ? Very , very difficult to do it in an environment where we're not building infrastructure that makes us stronger .
You know , when we go to the historical experience of the new deal Now the new deal there's a lot of debate about how right the new deal was as a solution to the depression . But one thing we do know is we would not have defeated first Germany and Japan in World War II and then the Soviet Union , if we didn't have the best infrastructure in the world .
And it's very hard to say today that we have the best infrastructure in the world . We really have to redo how we do our infrastructure and what we're doing , and it doesn't make a lot of sense to spend a lot of money on things that are going to be very difficult to achieve at the cost of things that will help people today .
It doesn't help America and it doesn't help , you know , particularly working people to not have a modern infrastructure in order to reach some unrealized , unrealizable goal .
I just think that we really need to think about not just what infrastructure we need , but how we build it , and I've just been , and we'll deal with this question right now in the sense that it's taking us so much money to do things that even in other countries they do easier . Look at the California high speed rail . It's just a joke .
The railroad to nowhere .
That costs a hundred billion dollars which was supposed to cost a fraction of that .
But you think about these . That's a really great example of a wishful thinking infrastructure where you could have invested in other areas to improve the transportation system without that huge cost overrun .
It always would have made sense to me and this is not just for California , but I'll use a California example , which is we have the trains that go along the coast . It goes into all the downtowns of , you know , all through the central coast , santa Barbara up to the Bay Area . Why didn't we just modernize what we already had instead of building something ?
And the problem is and the studies that I've worked on , what they say is the reason is because you build new infrastructure , there's more opportunities for economic advancement for people who are well placed . I won't necessarily say that it's just wastage and corruption , but we should think about being reasonable .
Like , maybe fix the roads that we have , fix the bridges that we have , fix the trains that we have . I mean , one reason people don't take the train , let's say , from here to San Diego , is that the trains are late , but a great deal of the time .
Right , and part of that is because we haven't paid attention to the infrastructure Right . We haven't paid attention to the fact that we get , you know , landslides along the coast in Southern California that screw up the train schedule .
So if we had spent a little less than the hundred billion that's being spent on the high speed rail and just created a new rail line through slightly interior of Orange County , we would have a very effective train system .
And to our friends in New York anyone who's looked at the Second Avenue subway , which is incredibly expensive , why not fix the subways that we already have ? New York's population is not growing . We already have a tremendous subway system .
But you know , the fact is and I'll hold this out directly people felt that this would be a great way to increase the property values in the richest parts of New York and meanwhile , people who are living in Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx have to continue to ride on very inadequate trains . I think we have to .
When we look at infrastructure , you have to look at priority , what works economically and also what helps people who are trying to achieve upward mobility .
Well , and that's actually .