"Joel Kotkin" is a fellow in urban studies at Chapman University in Orange, California. He writes about demographic, social, and economic trends in the U.S. and internationally. He is a regular contributor to The Daily Beast and Forbes.com and is on the editorial board of the Orange County Register. Kotkin attended the University of California, Berkeley. A native of New York City, he now lives in Los Angeles.

Kotkin is the author, most recently, of The New Class Conflict, published in September 2014 by Telos (journal)/Telos Press Publishing. In this book, Kotkin assesses the changing complexities of Social class in the United States/class in the United States, which he argues can no longer be understood in terms of traditional political divisions between left and right or conservative and liberal. For Kotkin, the new class order of the twenty-first century is marked by the rise of a high-tech oligarchy, a culturally dominant academic and media elite, an expansive government bureaucracy, and a declining middle class.

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People want to know whether a place is a credible first-world city. What they found in New Orleans was that underneath the gloss and facade of a first-world tourist attraction was a third-world reality. It will take a lot of work to erase that view.

Cities will themselves to be great. It's an underappreciated factor.

You now have options in suburbia that never existed before. If you're nomadic in the tech world, you're really moving from one suburb to another.

New Orleans has to rebuild not just its buildings and its political culture, but its image, ... The City: A Global History.

[But the Orange Line] doesn't go anywhere you would want it to go, ... It's a tour of the industrial bowels of the Valley. And there's no place to stop to get a cup of coffee.

There's always going to be a Mardi Gras -- at least, a lot of Americans hope there will always be, ... But that doesn't mean that has to be the only reason for your economic existence.

[Add to the list of recovery factors an intangible: spirit.] Cities will themselves to be great, ... It's an underappreciated factor.

You have a declining urban core (in Baltimore) and a fairly buoyant state. And that's tough if you're the captain of what can be seen as a sinking ship, ... He's dealt a fairly hard hand.