Kerby Anderson
In one of her songs, Carole King asked, “Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?” It’s a good question. People in America move around even more than when she wrote that song. I have discussed these national trends in a previous Point of View booklet on “American Realignment.” Americans have been moving from high-tax states to low-tax states. Conservatives and Christians have been having more kids than liberals and secularists.
Those trends continue. For example, the states with the highest personal income growth are Texas, Idaho, Nevada, Florida, North Carolina, and Arkansas. California ranked last along with Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, and Hawaii.
California’s food and accommodation growth was the second lowest in the country, likely due to the creation of a state council that dictates wages and work conditions at fast-food franchises. California employers may be struggling to find workers because so many have moved to lower-cost and low-tax states.
Yesterday, I talked about some global trends and explained that futurists guessed wrong about which nations would be dominant in this century. Those same futurists also suggested that mayors would be more influential in the world and this country because of the significant growth of major cities.
That has not happened. A professor at Columbia University has observed a “doom loop” in New York City. More people work from home, office space is less valuable, and the city gets less revenue from real estate taxes. People with money, whose work no longer requires them to be in the city, move out, taking their tax dollars and retail spending with them. In ten of the largest cities, half of all offices sit empty. America’s big cities lost two million people between 2020 and 2022.
This is not what the world futurists predicted, and we should take note.

Kerby Anderson
Futurists attempting to predict our global future haven’t been very accurate. Last month while talking about the new book by Senator Marco Rubio, I mentioned the fact that a few decades ago various authors predicted the “end of history” where there would be a liberal global order.
Instead, we have a world that looks more like the book, The Clash of Civilizations, written by Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington. These nations do not share the same global worldview. Some are turned inward, while others are working to be the dominant force in the world.
Futurists assumed the world would be run by the G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the US). But its percentage of global GDP has dropped significantly over the last two decades. And it is unlikely that the woke policies of the current government and corporations are going to reverse that trend any time soon.
By contrast, the greatest percentage increase in global GDP has been among the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). China produces more manufactured goods than Japan, Germany, and the US combined. There are more billionaires in Beijing than in New York City.
As I have mentioned in previous commentaries, China faces significant economic and demographic problems. It has the fastest-aging society in all of human history. Its working age population peaked in 2011 and is declining every year.
On the other hand, India is now the most populous country in the world. It is consistently ranked as the fastest growing large economy in the world. It does have a young population to make the country prosperous.
It is easy to see which nations are rising in influence and which ones are declining in influence. This isn’t what the futurists predicted.