Joe Kotkin is a Washington Fellow at The Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. Described by The New York Times as “America’s uber-geographer,” he 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 (Encounter Books, 2020), deals with the issue of declining upward mobility and growing inequality in almost all middle and high-income countries.

Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange, California and Executive Director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. He is Senior Fellow for Heartland Forward and Executive Editor of the widely read website NewGeography.com. A regular contributor to the National Review, City Journal, Daily Beast, Quillette and Real Clear Politics, he also writes a weekly column for Digital First Media, which owns numerous daily newspapers in the greater Los Angeles region.

Kotkin recently completed several studies on Texas urbanism, the future of localism, the changing role of transit in America, and, most recently, California’s lurch towards feudalism. He is co-author of a report published in 2018 on the revival of the American Heartland for the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. As director of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman, he was the lead author of a major study on housing, and recently, with Marshall Toplansky, published a strategic analysis for Orange County, CA.

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