Demographia International Housing Affordability assesses housing affordability in 94 major markets across eight nations (Australia, Canada, China, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, United Kingdom and the, United States). The 2024 edition focuses on data from the third quarter of 2023. Key Points Ratings: The report uses a median price-to-income ratio (“median multiple”) to determine affordability. Affordability Categories: Housing markets are rated from “affordable” to “impossibly unaffordable” based on their median multiple (Table (ES-1). Geography: Housing markets are labor markets (which are ..read more

At a time when the Republican Party seems united around Donald Trump and his MAGA vision, the ruling Democrats seem about to tear themselves into pieces. Even with the looming presence of a second Trump electoral triumph, a growing proportion of the party’s traditional constituencies – ethnic and religious minorities, working class people and young people – are detaching from the party. Perhaps the fear of losing in November will be enough to keep this fraying coalition together. Still, there’s little that will unite the party in future elections. Democrats are polling poorly on big issues lik ..read more

Environmentalism in America is dead. It has been replaced by climatism and renewable energy fetishism. The movement birthed by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the early 1960s and Earth Day in the 1970s — a movement that once aimed to protect landscapes, wildlands, whales, and wildlife — has morphed into the NGO-corporate-industrial-climate complex. Rather than preserve wildlands and wildlife, today’s “green” NGOs have devolved into a sprawling network of nonprofit and for-profit groups aligned with big corporations, big banks, and big law firms. In the name of climate change, these NGOs want ..read more

Americans are familiar with steep political divisions on issues like race, class, and gender. Perhaps less understood, but arguably more definitive, is the widening gap between the cognitive elites concentrated in big cities and the rest of the country. In our current “war against the masses,” to quote the late Fred Siegel, geography plays an increasingly dominant role. Even as people move away from big cities and head to suburban, exurban, and rural areas, progressive geography insists that the nonurban majority lives in racist hellholes that produce leaders like the odious Donald Trump. Thes ..read more

Americans drove almost 1.5 percent more miles in March of 2024 than in the March before the pandemic, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. Miles of driving have been at least 100 percent of 2019 numbers in six of the last eight months and at least 99 percent in 28 of the last 36 months. Rural driving was 9.1 percent greater than in 2019 while urban driving was 1.8 percent less. The states with the biggest growth in driving are Indiana (33.8%), Montana (25.2%), Louisiana (23.0%), Arizona (17.0%), Idaho (16.6%), and Rhode Island (13.7%). The District of Col ..read more

U.S. President Joe Biden, in one of his regularly inept utterances, recently castigated Japan and other East Asian countries for being “xenophobic,” compared to the relatively immigrant-friendly United States. The president surely made no friends, but actually spoke something of the truth, or perhaps more of a half-truth. As Biden suggests, western immigration receiving countries like the U.S., Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom have long benefited from mass migration. Canada, for example, ranks eighth among receiving countries, but has a considerably higher percentage of foreign born ci ..read more

Here’s one representation of the Rust Belt. However, just like with definitions of the Midwest overall, people usually identify where they live in the region as the center of it. The Rust Belt has been given up for dead, at least economically, for the last 50 years. The broad swath of territory that covers the Northeastern and Midwestern United States, centered on the Great Lakes, has seen decades of economic retrenchment, out-migration, unresolved racial tensions, and a growing sense of irrelevance — especially when compared to America’s globally-connected coastal cities and fast-growing Sun ..read more

The summer recess is approaching and I would like to suggest an extra-curricular activity for college students: go somewhere different, away from campus, somewhere unlike home, and talk to new people who have had appreciably different life experiences. And once there, listen, learn, and attempt to empathize with what you are hearing and seeing. I hope that these students quickly realize that their worldviews have been severely distorted by being on campus and see that, in reality, so many Americans remain quite reasonable and measured. The sad reality is that recent and current college student ..read more

During the 20th century global prosperity was focused to where technological development was happening, and this has also been the pattern for the initial decades of the 21st century. The development of deep technologies, in various areas, continues to be a good predictor for future progress. In order to better understand where the future growth is happening, ECEPR is with support from Nordic Capital launching the first Deep Tech Index. In this new study, one of the first of its kind, we map out where the top 500 companies in ten areas of deep tech are located. A key finding is that fully 72 p ..read more

Jews, like elephants, tend to have long memories. We see in the past warnings of the future. As Israel marks its 76th birthday on 14 May, perhaps the most relevant and terrifying precedent comes from the days of the Roman Empire. After the First Jewish-Roman War ended in 74 AD, the Jews lost control of Palestine. Their temple was destroyed. Following a second rebellion, they were largely expelled from their promised land. They would not return in force for almost two millennia. The most thorough account of those times was written by Josephus Flavius, a well-born Jewish priest who first joined ..read more