I admit, to no small degree, I likely ask this question out of a bruised ego, but my ego or not, I think this question is enlightening.

I asked this question to Manuel Pastor a few weeks ago when I interviewed him for the podcast. Now, Manuel is one of the greatest, if the greatest, scholar I know. *He* is an important urbanist. It took USC way too long to get its poop together and start heaping him with endowed chairs and university titles, but it finally did, and it’s way well-deserved. ( Please do pick up Manuel’s book and listen to the podcast if you get a chance because it’s a very nice, unwonky policy/politics book from an excellent policy scholar. Oh and you can watch Manual talk about it here. )

Manuel called Kotkin “an important urbanist” in his (otherwise excellent) book, State of Resistance, and I called him out on it, and it got uncomfortable even though Manuel is one of my favorite people in the world, and I think most of the time he likes me, too (not always an easy or pleasant thing.) Bugging him about it wasn’t particularly nice.

But when genuinely, authentically important scholars like Manuel validate people like Kotkin as important, I die a little.

Manuel didn’t have a good answer to this “Why are you calling Joel Kotkin important” question, and I think it’s because Manuel’s very fast brain, in mid-interview, made the connections that I see, only after he couldn’t do much about it: Kotkin gets to be important because he gets published in various media outlets and the rest of us validate this. Why? He’s a white male contrarian who writes decently well, and self-appointed contrarians get to be treated seriously because Americans love “balanced” things in an uncritical way because it allows us to substitute virtues like “listening to both sides” as an end in itself instead of a means to “a resolved, deliberated course of action.” The former allows us to feel like good, nice people without having to deal with the latter’s hard work of rhetoric, conflict, sacrifice, and rigor.

You can make a really good living exploiting this tendency (see Brooks, David). Much more seriously, if you are one of 4,000 scientists who are like, yep, we’re cooking planet with likely disastrous consequences, you have a 1/4000 chance of getting the call to comment when a reporter from the NYT calls. If you are 1 of 20 scientists willing to say anything, no matter how factually or morally wrong, to feather your own nest, your shot is better at being a “singular” expert in the NYT. Journalists seek “balance.” If other university administrators reward media hits as much as USC has done (learning the hard way that not all publicity is good publicity), the latter strategy has real merits for becoming an “important” scientist without having to do any real work.

I see Kotkin the same way. Why be one of the 12,000 urban scholars who agree that infill is a good idea when you can stand up for suburbs which, btw, are in general growing and many doing fine without you? Deploy finger guns here.

Normally, I can stand this stuff. Even relatively superficial contrarianism like Kotkin’s “if a New Urbanist says one thing I’ll say the opposite” strategy can help us think more rigorously if good critical scholars pull apart the trolling and see what kind of weaknesses there are in things around which a consensus has formed. I’ve generally told people to hold their fire, don’t get too wound up, the noisy world of pundits is full of fluff, and the more attention you pay to dumb stuff, the bigger platform you give it. And there’s always work to be done empircally examining various claims among the dominant paradigmers and the contratrians.

Kotkin’s recent garbage essay in the Daily Beast, is, however, a bridge too far. And I’m not linking to it because not today, clickbaiters. Here, Kotkin wants us to understand the American, European, etc baby factories (aka women) are a problem, speaking just demographically, natch, except among those EN-VI-RO-mentalists who see procreation as a practically a sin. Why, employers gotta scramble for labor! And of course immigration isn’t an answer because those people are all uneducated and poor and competition for US’s own uneducated and poor people. They aren’t sending us their best! Instead, baby factories should flip to “on.”

Kotkin just keeps repeating this “immigrants can’t be the answer, it must be the baby factories” claim over and over and over in this painfully long exercise in bad thinking. Why is immigration just an impossible way to have young laborers join an economy? Wait for it: “immigration upsets people.”

Gee, the rest of us hadn’t noticed that, Joel. Thanks.

This is the level of insight it takes to be “important”? This is rewarmed 1980s demographic thinking and FoxNews-level xenophobia provided a gentler intellectual cover. Stahhhhhhp. No wonder the rest of us are fed to the teeth with old dudes telling us how great they are when this is the game they bring. We’re bored.

And we should be.