A few weeks ago, on June 4, a Philadelphia real estate columnist posed a question that had been hanging over City Hall since winter: whatever happened to Mayor Cherelle Parker’s 20-year tax abatement for converting Philadelphia’s empty office towers into housing? The answer was that nothing had. The legislation needed to create the abatement had never been introduced. Amid a debate over school closures and a bruising budget fight, the bill meant to unlock the city’s conversion future spent six months in limbo. Parker insists it isn’t dead. But for now, the marquee policy sits exactly where it was in January: untouched.

Here is the strange part. While that policy gathered dust, Philadelphia became the fastest-growing office-conversion market in the country.

Over the past year, the metro’s pipeline of office-to-apartment conversions more than doubled — a 119% jump to 2,697 units, vaulting Philadelphia from 18th place nationally to seventh. It was the first time the city had ever cracked the top ten. Of the twenty largest conversion markets in America, only three saw their pipelines more than double, and Philadelphia led them all. The change didn’t arrive because of the new abatement. It arrived without it.

A national pattern

Step back, and Philadelphia is one of many cities riding this national trend. At the start of 2026, the U.S. office-to-apartment pipeline reached a record 90,300 units, a 28% jump in a single year. Since 2022, the pipeline has grown roughly 290%. What began as a desperate response to pandemic-era vacancy has hardened into something more permanent: a standard tool in the urban development playbook, with office buildings now making up nearly half of all adaptive-reuse projects nationwide. New York leads the pack by a wide margin, trailed by Washington, D.C., and Chicago.

In Philadelphia, the Wanamaker Building — Daniel Burnham’s 1911 “cathedral of commerce,” its Grand Court organ still playing above the marble — is the face of this change, and is being converted into more than 600 loft apartments on its upper floors. Its last tenant, Macy’s, closed in early 2025; by mid-year, the building had passed through a bankruptcy auction into the hands of a New York developer, and construction is now underway. A century ago, it was where Philadelphia went to shop. Soon, it will be home to several hundred residents.

Why didn’t the wave wait for the policy?

The conventional assumption is that conversions happen because cities incentivize them. Philadelphia’s success complicates that narrative by illustrating underlying conditions, including the market's power. Its pipeline doubled on the strength of fundamentals the city had built long before Parker’s abatement was ever drafted: a downtown with a genuine residential core already in place, dense transit, walkable streets, and rents meaningfully below New York or Washington. Developers converting Philadelphia offices aren’t conjuring residential demand out of nothing. They are expanding an existing ecosystem that is desperate for more capacity.

That distinction matters because it means the surge is partly a story about accumulated structural advantage — the slowly built conditions that make a place ready to absorb change when it arrives. A city without that foundation can put in place all the tax incentives it likes and watch nothing happen. A city with it can lead the nation, while its signature tax policy stalls.

Which raises the obvious question: if conversions are happening without the tax abatement, why does the abatement matter at all?

What the stall is really about

Because the easy conversions are only one part of the story. The buildings being converted now are, by and large, the ones that don’t need help — prominent towers in prime locations, converting into apartments aimed largely at the upper end of the market. To date, most of Philadelphia’s conversions have targeted high-end renters. The abatement was never really about accelerating those. It was about reaching the buildings and the residents that the market won’t reach without help — and that is exactly where the politics seized up.

City Council didn’t sit on the bill out of indifference. Members balked because they wanted the abatement to produce homes at below-market rates, and a tax break engineered to deliver affordability is a far more contested instrument than one that simply rewards regardless of income. Some experts have even questioned whether an affordability requirement would survive a legal challenge. The holdup, in other words, is the messy reality of policymaking and of a city negotiating who these conversion projects are actually for.

That argument is the signal worth reading. The pipeline number indicates that Philadelphia will continue to generate conversions and build, regardless of policy. The stalled tax incentives suggest it hasn’t yet decided where it’s headed or who it is for. Those are different civic capacities, and a place can be strong in one while still working out the other.

Not a Philadelphia quirk

Lest this look like one city’s idiosyncrasy: Denver’s conversion pipeline grew 114% over the same period, and St. Louis’s 110%. Across very different cities, the same surge is underway, which means the same question is coming for other markets. Filling a pipeline and directing it are not the same thing, and the cities now discovering the former will, before long, have to face the latter.

This is the kind of distinction the Geography of Prosperity Index was built to surface — the difference between a city where momentum is happening and one that is consciously shaping where it goes. The Index has its own way of weighing that gap. What Philadelphia shows, in the meantime, is the gap itself: a downtown filling with newly converted housing for the wealthy, and a City Council still deciding what all that motion is supposed to build, for whom, and where.

A stalled bill is not a verdict on a city. Philadelphia is, by the most telling national measure, doing this well. But it is mid-stream — riding a wave it genuinely caught, and still learning to steer at the same time.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that.

Everything you need is here

You’re invited to the first Geography of Prosperity Maproom
Thursday, June 18 · 12:00 PM EDT

Join me for an informal conversation about the Geography of Prosperity Index and my forthcoming book, The Geography of Prosperity: A New Map of the American Dream (MIT Press, 2027). I’ll share early insights from the research, walk through what the Index reveals about where opportunity is moving in America, and take your questions.

Bring your curiosity—and your city.

Register Here

Index in the Wild: The Prosperity Lens Goes Global

The Geography of Prosperity Index was featured in a long-form Podcast Portugal conversation with co-creator Bradley Schurman, applying the framework’s logic — demographic shifts, longevity, labor shortages, migration, and climate resilience — to the question of which Portuguese cities are positioned to prosper over the next two decades, and whether smaller regional centers can compete with Lisbon and Porto.

Why It Matters: The Index was built on 250 American urban areas, but the diagnostic logic — that traditional economic measures are lagging indicators, and that resilience lives in systems rather than single metrics — travels. The Portuguese framing (can secondary cities compete, what role does immigration play in sustaining prosperity) is the same question the Index poses domestically, and a useful reminder that “future-readiness” is a structural condition, not a national peculiarity.

Source: Podcast Portugal, “The Geography of Prosperity: Why Some Cities Thrive and Others Decline” with Bradley Schurman (June 2026)

👥 DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE

The Labor Market Refuses to Break

The U.S. economy added 172,000 jobs in May, more than doubling the roughly 80,000 economists had penciled in, while unemployment held at 4.3%. Gains clustered in leisure and hospitality, local government, and health care; financial activities shed jobs. The report also revised March and April upward by a combined 93,000, and prompted one economist to declare the hiring recession over. The release was the first full data point since the BLS leadership change last summer, and it landed firmly on the resilient side of the ledger.

Why It Matters: A national headline number this strong can mask how unevenly the gains are distributed across places. Leisure, hospitality, and local government hiring tend to track population and consumer presence, not the high-wage knowledge sectors that move a metro on Automation Readiness. A city can ride a strong national labor market and still be adding the jobs most exposed to the next downturn or the next wave of automation. The Index treats employment composition, not just employment levels, as the signal worth watching.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Situation — May 2026 (June 5, 2026); CNBC

The Immigration Math Behind the Slowdown

Fresh analysis this period underscored how quickly reduced immigration is reshaping the demographic floor under American cities. The Census Bureau’s own projection puts net international migration for the year ending June 2026 at roughly 321,000 — down from 1.26 million the prior year and 2.73 million the year before that. Brookings’ metro analysis found that the places most dependent on foreign-born workers for population and economic growth are precisely the major metros now facing the steepest slowdown, with some large states already tipping from growth into outright population loss.

Why It Matters: This is Population Renewal in real time. For two decades, immigration quietly compensated for below-replacement fertility in the metros that drive the national economy. Remove it, even temporarily, and the arithmetic turns negative faster in cities that built their growth assumptions around newcomers. The diagnostic point is not that these cities are failing — it’s that a variable they didn’t control is now exposing how thin their domestic demographic margin had become.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau population projections; Brookings Metro analysis (William H. Frey)

🌍 CLIMATE CHANGE

Cities Are Heating Faster Than They’re Counting

A study of 1,400 cities published in Communications Earth & Environment this period quantified something urban planners have felt but rarely measured: over two decades, global exposure to extreme daytime heat in cities rose 51%, driven by warming and population growth compounding each other. The researchers separated the two forces and found that climate warming amplified the increase in exposure by roughly 82% beyond what population growth alone would have produced. The effect was strongest in cold-winter and arid cities — places whose infrastructure and habits were never built for heat. Hot nights are now 47% more frequent in arid cities.

Why It Matters: This is the empirical core of Climate Resilience. The finding that cold and arid cities are heating fastest is the dangerous part — these are the metros least likely to have heat-adapted building stock, tree canopy, or cooling infrastructure, precisely because heat wasn’t historically their problem. A low Climate Resilience score in a place like this isn’t a verdict that the city is doomed; it’s an early warning that the adaptation clock started late and is running fast.

Source: Naserikia et al., “Two decades of urban heat intensification and exposure across 1400 cities,” Communications Earth & Environment (June 1, 2026)

Europe’s “Exceptionally Early” Heat Gets Its Post-Mortem

Carbon Brief’s June research digest examined how the scientific and media community is processing western Europe’s record-shattering late-May heatwave, which pushed temperatures past 40°C in Portugal, 36°C in France, and to a record 35.1°C in the UK — with France’s weather service attributing a “heat dome” producing temperatures more than 10°C above normal. The digest also surfaced new research linking human-caused emissions to a ninefold increase in the likelihood of landfalling oceanic heatwaves, and findings that wildfire disturbance has been flipping Canada’s forests from carbon sink to carbon source since the 2000s.

Why It Matters: The timing is the story. A heatwave that would once have been a July event now arrives in May, and the cluster of research around it points to compounding feedback loops — forests that stored carbon now releasing it, ocean heat driving land extremes. For the Index, this is why Climate Resilience can’t be scored as a static hazard map. The baseline conditions a city plans against are themselves moving, and the cities that treat last decade’s normal as this decade’s design spec are the ones most exposed.

Source: Carbon Brief, “Cited 9 June 2026” research digest (June 9, 2026)

🤖 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

AI Policy Becomes Industrial Strategy

Synthesis of the period’s AI developments points to a consolidating shift: governments are treating compute, chips, and data centers as strategic national assets rather than optional technology investments. The week’s reporting tracked the U.S. accelerating AI deployment for national security and examining direct stakes in AI companies, the UK announcing a major AI hardware and infrastructure program, and — notably — the distribution of AI’s productivity gains and questions of “workforce legitimacy” emerging as explicit political issues rather than abstract economic ones.

Why It Matters: When AI moves from a technology question to an infrastructure question, it becomes a geography question. Data centers need power, water, land, and grids — and they don’t distribute evenly. The metros that capture AI infrastructure investment may see Automation Readiness gains, but the ones absorbing the energy and water burden without the high-wage jobs face a Governance and Foresight test: can local institutions negotiate terms that leave the community better off? “Workforce legitimacy” entering the political vocabulary is the early sign that the distributional question is now unavoidable.

Source: AI sector synthesis, period of June 1–10, 2026

🔗 CROSS-BEAT CONNECTION

This week’s three beats rhyme on a single uncomfortable theme: the systems were calibrated for conditions that no longer hold.

The labor market looks strong on the national scorecard, but that scorecard was built for an economy where job growth meant durable prosperity — and it can’t account for the fact that the gains are concentrated in sectors most exposed to automation and most dependent on a population base that immigration policy is quietly draining. The urban heat study delivers the same lesson in physical form: cities that assessed their risk against a 20th-century climate are discovering that the cold and dry places — the ones that never had to think about heat — are warming fastest, even as infrastructure assumed they wouldn’t. And the AI buildout turns an abstract technology race into a concrete contest over power, water, and land, where the question of who absorbs the cost and who captures the benefit is now openly political.

The connective tissue is the lag between a metric and the reality it’s supposed to measure. A strong jobs number, a manageable climate risk rating, an AI investment headline — each can look like good news while the conditions underneath shift faster than the measure updates. That gap is exactly what the Geography of Prosperity Index was built to close: to read the structural signals before the lagging indicators catch up. Not as a verdict on which cities win or lose, but as a diagnostic for which places are still planning against a world that has already moved on.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that. Reach out today to learn more.

Everything you need is here

Just in time for summer, water is flowing again from some of Washington’s most recognizable fountains — basins that residents and visitors had spent years walking past as dry stone behind construction fencing. For the first time since 2007, the year the first iPhone shipped, the Columbus Fountain outside Union Station is running. The 45-foot marble shaft, dedicated in 1912 as part of Daniel Burnham’s grand vision for the capital’s gateway, had sat dry for nearly two decades. In late May, the Department of the Interior cut a ribbon, foreign ambassadors attended, and the plaza reopened after five months of work.

It is hardly the only one. Dupont Circle’s fountain is once again a functional centerpiece at the heart of one of the city’s most walkable neighborhoods. At Meridian Hill Park — known to many as Malcolm X Park — the National Park Service reopened the lower plaza and its famous Italian-inspired cascading fountain on May 14, after roughly seven years dark since 2019; the terraced water feature is the visual spine of a park equally known for its Sunday drum circle and sweeping views. The historic fountains in Lafayette Park, directly across from the White House, returned ahead of summer after most of the park had been fenced off for construction since January. And along Embassy Row, the Sheridan Circle fountain is once again one of the quietest and prettiest landmarks in the District.

It is a genuinely good thing when a beautiful, long-neglected piece of civic infrastructure is repaired — and these are the kinds of places, the gathering spots and people-watching circles and shaded benches, where a city’s public life actually happens. It is also worth looking closely at how this particular round of repairs is being narrated, because the story Washington tells about its own public spaces is itself a kind of infrastructure — one that shapes who feels welcome in them.

The work itself

The National Park Service is rehabilitating fountains across the District in phases, repairing some that have been inoperable for years and upgrading others still running. The full roster spans some of the city’s most recognizable water features.

Nine inoperable fountains are being returned to service: Columbus Plaza at Union Station, Freedom Plaza, John Marshall Park, the John Paul Jones Memorial, Lafayette Square, Meridian Hill Park, the Philip Sheridan Memorial, Rawlins Park, and the Simón Bolívar Memorial.

Another nine operational fountains are getting maintenance and system upgrades, including Dupont Circle, the FDR Memorial, the George Mason Memorial, the Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial, the Taras Shevchenko Memorial, the U.S. Navy Memorial, and the World War II Memorial.

This is real money spent on real conservation, and most of these fountains genuinely needed it. Decades of weathering and outdated mechanical systems don’t fix themselves. The price tags are roughly what this kind of work costs: the Columbus Fountain contract runs about $11.8 million, in line with the $8–10 million the Obama administration estimated for the same job back in 2016, once you account for inflation. Ripping out and replacing corroded pipes in century-old plumbing is not cheap, and these aren’t padded numbers.

The harder question is not how much the work costs but where the money comes from.

Where the money comes from

According to a New York Times analysis of federal contracting records, the Park Service is using at least $67 million in national park entrance fees to fund the Washington beautification push. Nearly $60 million of that — fees paid by visitors to parks across the entire country — is going to repair nine of the capital’s fountains, with another $7 million directed to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation (a $13.1 million project overall). The spending is legal: under a 2004 law, at least 80 percent of entrance-fee revenue must remain in the park where it was collected, but the remaining 20 percent may be spent at fee-free sites, such as the National Mall.

What stands out is the scale of the redirection. The Times found that of the roughly $75 million the Park Service committed from its recreation-fee account between December 2025 and March 2026, more than three-quarters went to the Washington fountains and more than 90 percent to D.C. projects overall. In the same fund earlier in Trump’s second term, D.C. projects accounted for about 2 percent of spending; under Biden and the first Trump term, the figure was 5 percent or less. The single largest fee-funded project under Biden was a Grand Canyon water pipeline.

That redirection lands against a documented backlog. The Park Service estimated roughly $23 billion in deferred maintenance across the system at the end of 2024 — crumbling retaining walls along Shenandoah’s Skyline Drive, potholed roads and mold-closed staff housing at Crater Lake, a failed sewer system at Zion that replaced flush toilets with port-a-potties. Conservation groups have objected that visitor fees collected nationwide are being steered toward, as one put it, projects the president can see out his window, while urgent safety repairs elsewhere wait. The Interior Department defended the spending and pointed to deferred-maintenance work continuing around the country.

Not every park advocate objects. Some welcomed the fountains finally running, and one D.C. parks leader called it a fitting use of fee dollars — while making a pointed observation: the entire country benefits from free entry to D.C.’s national parks, yet the city’s inner-city park sites go underfunded because the District has no voting representation in Congress and “has to beg for crumbs.” That tension — national money, national landmarks, a local population with no vote over either — sits at the center of this whole effort.

The framing

NPS attributes the effort to two executive orders. The first, EO 14189, directs federal agencies to prepare for the nation’s 250th anniversary on July 4, 2026 — uncontroversial as a deadline. The second, EO 14252, “Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful,” is where the story gets more complicated.

That order is not primarily about fountains. Signed in March 2025, it established a federally appointed D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force whose mandate pairs beautification with law enforcement: directing the removal of homeless encampments and graffiti on federal parkland, expanding the federal law-enforcement presence around the National Mall and Union Station, accelerating concealed-carry permitting, and monitoring the District’s sanctuary-city status. By August 2025, a related crime-emergency order had deployed a multi-agency task force to the streets of D.C.

The order has drawn pointed objections from civil-liberties groups and local advocates, who argue it overrides the District’s right to self-governance and that “beautification,” framed alongside encampment removal and immigration enforcement, criminalizes poverty under an aesthetic banner. Supporters in Congress have moved to codify the order, casting the capital as a symbol of national pride that the prior administration let decline. Both readings now travel attached to every restored fountain, whether NPS intends it or not.

The clearest illustration came in May, when the White House posted a before-and-after meme: a gleaming Columbus Fountain labeled “Trump” beside a graffiti-covered version labeled “Biden.” Snopes found the contrast misleading. The grimy image was authentic but captured a specific, short-lived episode — pro-Palestinian graffiti sprayed during Prime Minister Netanyahu’s July 2024 visit, cleaned up shortly after — not a state of general neglect. A real restoration was being used to manufacture a narrative of decline-and-rescue that the underlying facts don’t quite support.

Why it matters

A fountain is not just a fountain. It is a piece of shared civic infrastructure, and the condition of a city’s shared spaces is one of the clearer signals of its long-term viability — a place where the Infrastructure, Governance and Foresight, and Social Cohesion dimensions all converge. On the Geography of Prosperity Index, deferred maintenance of public assets is a structural vulnerability, and reversing it is exactly the kind of intervention that strengthens a place. By that measure, water flowing in the Columbus Fountain is a point in Washington’s favor.

But the funding pattern is itself a Governance and Foresight signal, and it cuts the other way. Foresight, in the Index sense, is the discipline of allocating finite resources toward the most consequential long-term needs rather than the most visible short-term ones. Concentrating a national fee pool on the capital’s ornamental fountains on a July 4 deadline, while a $23 billion safety-and-maintenance backlog waits elsewhere in the system, is close to the inverse of that discipline — optically driven allocation, legible from a particular window. A place can score a near-term Infrastructure gain on the back of a Governance choice that, examined system-wide, looks like the opposite of foresight.

But Social Cohesion is not only about whether the stonework is clean. It is about whether residents experience public space as theirs, as a commons that belongs to the people who live alongside it. The Meridian Hill drum circle is a useful emblem here: the park is on the official maps as Meridian Hill, but generations of residents have called it Malcolm X Park, and its life as a gathering place was built by the people who use it, not by a ribbon-cutting. That is where coupling restoration to an enforcement regime gets analytically interesting. The same coordinated federal action that returns water to a fountain also concentrates federal authority over a city whose 700,000 residents have no voting representation in the body now legislating their parks. You can improve the physical condition of a public space while narrowing the sense of who that space is for. Those are different ledgers, and a serious read of a city’s prosperity has to keep both open.

This is the diagnostic point, not a verdict. The restoration work is, on its own terms, an investment worth making, and Washington’s fountains will be better off running than dry. The question the Index asks is not whether the marble gleams. It is whether the people who walk past it every day are counted among those the gleaming is meant to serve — and on that question, a ribbon-cutting answers less than it appears to.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that.

Everything you need is here

👥 Demographic Change

Immigration Is Now the Whole Story of U.S. Population Growth

Recent federal projections continue to land on the same conclusion: net immigration has become the engine of nearly all U.S. population growth, and as it slows, so does the country’s demographic momentum. The Census Bureau’s latest estimates project that net immigration could fall to roughly 321,000 in the year ending June 2026, down from 1.3 million a year earlier, the consequence of tighter immigration rules and expanded deportation efforts. With fertility below replacement and the share of the population aged 65 and older climbing, the arithmetic is stark: without immigration, the U.S. population would begin shrinking around 2030 rather than continuing to grow.

Why It Matters: This is the single most important variable in any city’s long-term viability, and it’s the one most exposed to policy whiplash. Demographer William Frey has called the current trajectory a “demographic shock” whose effects outlast the administration that triggered it. The Index treats Population Renewal as the foundation beneath every other system — a city can have strong governance and climate resilience, but without people of working age, the tax base that funds road maintenance, schools, and emergency response erodes from underneath. The places that plan now for a lower-immigration future, rather than assuming the spigot reopens, are the ones building a durable footing.

Source: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/reduced-immigration-slowed-population-growth-for-the-nation-and-most-states-new-census-data-show/

🌍 Climate Change

Wildfire Smoke Is Quietly Erasing Two Decades of Clean-Air Gains

A study published Thursday in the journal Science found that smoke from increasingly large wildfires is reversing one of the great public-health success stories of the century. National smog levels — ground-level ozone — fell 11% between 2003 and 2015 as federal rules tightened on power plants, vehicles, and diesel engines. But since 2015, as fires have grown, average national ozone has risen 4%, and researchers estimate the trend has added roughly 318 American deaths per year since 2013. Lead author Weizhi Deng of the University of Iowa warned that if smoke continues increasing at the current rate, smog could climb back to 2003 levels within two decades. The team used satellite data, pollution monitoring, and AI modeling to build a high-resolution national picture, compensating for the EPA’s sparse monitor network, which covers only about 2% of the country.

Why It Matters: This is a climate risk that crosses the line from environmental to economic. Clean air is infrastructure — it underpins worker health, healthcare costs, and a region’s basic livability. The finding also exposes a hard truth in the Index’s Climate Resilience dimension: a city can do everything right on local emissions and still inherit deadly air from fires hundreds of miles away. Resilience isn’t only about preparing for the disaster at your doorstep; it’s about institutional capacity to monitor, warn, and protect residents from harms that originate elsewhere and arrive on the wind.

Source: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/jun/4/wildfires-reversing-progress-cleaner-air-making-us-smoggy/

The 2026 Fire Season Is Starting Early — and Dry

As peak wildfire season approaches in the West, Inside Climate News reported at the end of May that 2026 is already off to an alarming start. The National Interagency Fire Center had logged roughly 2.4 million acres burned in incident-reported fires — nearly double the ten-year average for this point in the calendar. Much of the early burning has concentrated in the Southeast and Plains states, including Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma, largely as grass fires. The greater concern now shifts west, where the moisture that keeps forests from igniting through summer depends on slowly melting snowpack — and this year, that snowpack is thin.

Why It Matters: Fire seasons that start earlier and run longer are a textbook example of the Index’s Climate Resilience stress test, but the deeper signal is about preparation versus exposure. Two cities facing identical fire risk can have radically different outcomes depending on whether they’ve invested in fuel management, evacuation planning, and emergency response capacity. The diagnostic question the Index asks isn’t “is this place at risk?” — nearly everywhere is — but “does this place have the institutional muscle to respond when risk becomes reality?”

Source: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31052026/experts-warn-of-upcoming-wildfire-season/

🤖 Artificial Intelligence

A Bipartisan Bill Would Override State AI Laws for Three Years

On Thursday, Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) and Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) released a 269-page discussion draft of the Great American Artificial Intelligence Act, a sweeping framework to establish federal governance of frontier AI models. Its most contested provision: a three-year preemption of state laws “specifically regulating the development” of AI models. The draft would federalize frontier-safety laws in California, New York, and Illinois and override measures such as California’s training-data disclosure rule, while leaving intact state laws governing how AI is used or deployed once released. The bill arrived days after President Trump signed a June 2 executive order centralizing federal review of frontier models. Civil-liberties groups pushed back fast — the ACLU noted that Congress has twice rejected similar preemption efforts, including a 99-1 Senate vote last year against a ten-year state moratorium.

Why It Matters: This is a direct fight over the Index’s Governance and Foresight dimension — specifically, who gets to govern. States like California, New York, and Illinois have spent two years building AI guardrails tailored to their residents; federal preemption would consolidate that authority in Washington for a critical window in the technology’s development. For cities and regions, the stakes are concrete: the layer of government writing the rules determines how responsive those rules are to local conditions. Foresight isn’t just about having a plan — it’s about which institutions retain the authority to adapt as the technology moves.

Source: https://rollcall.com/2026/06/04/bipartisan-ai-draft-proposes-three-year-preemption-of-state-laws/

Who Pays for AI’s Power Bill? Arizona Becomes a Test Case

The fight over who shoulders the cost of AI’s enormous electricity appetite is playing out in real time at the Arizona Corporation Commission, where hearings on an Arizona Public Service rate case continued into early June. APS has asked regulators to raise residential rates roughly 14% while imposing a separate increase of more than 45% on “extra-large energy users” like data centers — an explicit attempt to make AI infrastructure pay its own way rather than shifting costs onto households and small businesses. Arizona’s attorney general is contesting the residential increase, calling the broader proposal unbearable for ratepayers. The administrative law judge is expected to wrap testimony by the end of June, with a final commission decision later this year.

Why It Matters: Data centers are where AI, climate, and local governance collide on a single utility bill. The 24/7 power demands of AI infrastructure are straining grids and pushing up rates across the country, and how a region structures who pays is fast becoming a defining test of governance. The Index’s framework treats this as a convergence point: a city courting data-center investment for tax revenue and “tech hub” status must weigh it against grid strain, higher resident costs, and climate exposure from new generation. The metros that get this right will be those that capture the economic upside without quietly transferring the bill to the people who live there.

Source: https://www.redrocknews.com/2026/06/02/arizona-regulators-weighing-electric-utilitys-request-for-a-14-increase/

🔗 Cross-Beat Connection

This week’s stories share a single fault line: the gap between a system’s surface readings and its structural health. National clean-air policy can be working exactly as designed, while wildfire smoke erases its gains outside the regulatory framework. A federal AI bill can promise coherent national standards while stripping states of the authority to govern conditions on the ground. And population growth that looks steady on paper can rest entirely on an immigration flow that policy is rapidly throttling. In each case, the headline metric and the underlying reality have come unbolted from each other.

That gap is precisely what the Geography of Prosperity Index is built to detect. The old scorecard — population inflows, clean air, cheap power, new investment — measures what a place looks like right now. But growth built on a narrowing immigration pipeline, clean-air rules undone by imported smoke, and a data-center boom that quietly loads costs onto residents are all examples of apparent strength masking structural fragility. The throughline across demographics, climate, and AI this week is that resilience is never about today’s reading; it’s about whether the institutions beneath it can absorb what’s coming. The cities that thrive over the next three decades won’t be the ones that look best on the old scorecard. They’ll be the ones honest enough to read the gauges underneath it — and prepared enough to act before the gap closes on its own.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that.

Everything you need is here

Most big-city mayors don’t cold-call companies. There’s no need to. The big cities like New York and Chicago have inbound demand, site selectors who already know the address, and a gravity that does the work for them. Corey O’Connor doesn’t have that same gravity in Pittsburgh, so he picks up the phone.

I sat down with Pittsburgh’s mayor in his sixth-floor office this spring, while reporting on my forthcoming book on what makes some American cities prosper, and others falter. His office is an archive of the city’s past—old photographs, a podium from the first city hall, a portrait of his father, Bob, who held the same job and was known as “The People’s Mayor.” But the thing I kept coming back to afterward wasn’t what was on the walls. It was the standing appointment on his calendar.

Every week, the mayor’s office conducts 10 company calls with firms around the globe, which O’Connor leads personally. Some recipients think it’s a prank, but once they realize it isn’t, he told me, they’re mostly just grateful anyone called. The pitch isn’t a tax abatement or an incentive package. It’s the city itself, delivered as a question: Why are you not in Pittsburgh?

It’s a small thing that reveals a larger strategy. O’Connor has given up on the move that Pittsburgh, and many cities like it, have spent decades chasing: the one giant employer that relocates, builds a campus, and fixes everything at once. “It’s coming, it’s coming, and it never happens,” he said. “So why not pick off the five jobs here, the ten jobs here?” Five jobs may not sound like much, but tens of thousands of them, accumulated over a term, are a diversified economic strategy.

The reason the calls land more than not is that almost everyone, somewhere, has a Pittsburgh tie. The Carnegie Mellon graduate who decamped to Silicon Valley. The kid from the South Hills who is running a startup in Austin. The tech CEO whose mother, O’Connor noted, has been guilt-tripping him to bring jobs home. When the steel industry collapsed two generations ago, hundreds of thousands of Pittsburghers scattered across the country—and, as economic development director Steve Wray put it to me, they carried the city with them. “You’re selling it (Pittsburgh) whether you know it or not,” he said.

That sentence stuck with me because it points to something most economic-development playbooks miss. The departure of people was the real loss. The attachment that survived the departure might be the asset. Wray, who helped lift student retention from 30% to 50% in a previous job in Philadelphia, is now trying something similar in Pittsburgh—treating the region’s 100,000 students at its colleges and universities as a four-year test drive, and the far larger diaspora as a population the city already owns and has barely begun to call home. Wray is a three-time returner himself: grew up here, left, came back, left again for twenty-eight years in Philadelphia, and came back three years ago. Pittsburgh’s pull is real. The open question is whether it’s strong enough to move the numbers that matter.

And there are numbers that matter, more than the comeback story usually admits. Pittsburgh ranks 40th of 250 metros on The Geography of Prosperity Index, a new tool I co-created to measure prosperity without leaning on the usual economic indicators—and the interesting part isn’t the city’s rank. It’s that Pittsburgh scores near the top of the country on some dimensions and near the very bottom on one in particular, the one that’s hardest to change: population stagnation. The cold calls, the student and diaspora outreach: they’re all quietly aimed at recruiting people to Pittsburgh or retaining them there.

What I can say from the office that morning is that O’Connor doesn’t talk like a man waiting to be rescued. He rightly boasts about the city’s assets. He talks earnestly about the things he’s done already, like relighting the Smithfield Street Bridge, freshly painting the railway trestles in the Strip District, and, of all things, purchasing pool chairs—$30,000 spent in total to reach every neighborhood, the first time the city had ever bought them—as if small, kept promises were a governing philosophy, which, for him, they are. “If you can do little things well, people trust you,” he said. Pittsburgh has already rebuilt the big things. What it’s testing now is whether trust scales the same way steel once did.

Pittsburgh is one of the cities in my forthcoming book, The Geography of Prosperity: A New Map of the American Dream, out from MIT Press in 2027.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that.

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DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE

The Birth-Rate Debate Gets a Reframe: Maybe It Isn’t a Catastrophe

As the U.S. fertility rate sits at a record low, a piece from Marketplace this week pushed back on the reflexive alarm. Last year, the U.S. fertility rate fell to a record low, with births at 53.1 per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 — a 1% decline from the prior year and a 23% drop since 2007. The conventional worry is well-rehearsed: fewer workers to support Social Security and fewer people to share the national debt burden. But the reporting surfaced a dissenting strand among economists — that a lower fertility rate does not necessarily translate into lower economic growth.

Why It Matters: The Geography of Prosperity Index treats demographic decline as a diagnostic, not a death sentence — and this is the same logic at the national scale. A shrinking population is only a crisis where governance, economic design, and adaptive capacity fail to adjust to it. The places that will prosper through a low-fertility century are not those that reverse the trend, but those that build systems resilient to it. Decoupling prosperity from raw population growth is the central adaptive challenge of the next several decades.

Source: Marketplace, “Can the U.S. economy survive with a declining birth rate?” — May 22, 2026. marketplace.org

CLIMATE CHANGE

The Next Five Years Will Break Records — and 1.5°C Is No Longer a Wall, but a Rearview Mirror

The World Meteorological Organization released its updated five-year outlook this week, and the framing from its own scientists is the story. Report co-author Melissa Seabrook of the UK Met Office stressed that 1.5°C is not a cliff edge we fall off — but that every additional 0.1°C carries more severe impacts. The projections are stark: the mean near-surface temperature for 2026–2030 is projected to reach up to 3.4°F above the 1850–1900 average, with an 86% chance that one year in that window will surpass the 2024 heat record. The Arctic is the sharpest signal — the WMO projects the next five winters will average 5.1°F warmer than the recent 1991–2020 normal.

Why It Matters: Climate Resilience is a core dimension of the Index precisely because the baseline is moving. City planning, agriculture, and infrastructure were calibrated for a climate that the WMO now confirms is behind us. Prosperity over the next decade will concentrate in places whose built environment and institutions are designed for the arriving climate, not the one they were built for — and the gap between those two will widen fastest in the communities with the least capacity to close it.

Source: PBS NewsHour / Newsweek, on the WMO five-year climate update — May 28, 2026. pbs.org; newsweek.com

Americans Are Giving Up on the Fix — Even as Most Still See the Problem

A new Pew Research Center report, published this week, found rising pessimism about the world’s capacity to act. About six-in-ten Americans now say countries, including the U.S., will not do enough to avoid the worst effects of climate change — and among Democrats, that share rose from 51% in 2022 to 69% in 2026. Pew explicitly tied the shift to a period in which the Trump administration has dramatically reshaped federal climate policy. The partisan gulf remains the dominant feature: 68% of Democrats say climate change is harming Americans a great deal or quite a bit, versus 22% of Republicans.

Why It Matters: Institutional response depends on public mandate, and the Index’s Governance and Foresight dimension assumes a baseline of civic will to act. Eroding public confidence is itself a prosperity risk — it weakens the political capacity that adaptation requires at exactly the moment the climate data says it matters most. A society convinced the problem can’t be solved will underinvest in solving it, and that underinvestment compounds geographically.

Source: Pew Research Center, “Growing Pessimism Among Americans on Climate Change” — May 28, 2026. pewresearch.org

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Hassabis Pulls His AGI Timeline Forward — and Names a “Warning Shot”

At Google I/O this week, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis told Axios that the ground has shifted under his own forecasts. He said he still broadly expects AGI around 2030 but now sees 2029 as a real possibility, framing the next wave of AI agents as a societal stress test for far more powerful systems still to come. He described the coming agentic year as “a little bit like a practice run.” Notably, he pointed to a rival’s model as evidence of unpreparedness: the power of Anthropic’s Mythos to catch businesses and governments unawares, he said, showed how unready we are for how fast these systems are advancing — “probably a good warning shot across the bow.”

Why It Matters: Automation Readiness in the Index has never been about which cities adopt AI fastest — it’s about which have the institutional capacity to absorb the disruption before it becomes an emergency. A compressed AGI timeline shortens the runway that every community has to prepare for. The places that thrive will be those whose governance and workforce systems can metabolize a “practice run” into genuine readiness, rather than being caught unawares by the warning shot.

Three Labs, One Week, Nine Erdős Problems: A New Benchmark Emerges

The same week delivered a striking convergence in machine mathematics. Google DeepMind disclosed that its AlphaProof Nexus system autonomously solved 9 of 353 open Erdős problems and proved 44 of 492 open conjectures from the OEIS — generating machine-checkable formal proofs at a cost of a few hundred dollars per solved problem. Where OpenAI and Anthropic produced natural-language proofs requiring human verification, DeepMind’s pairing of a language model with the Lean proof assistant eliminated the room for logical errors to slip past review. The convergence of three frontier labs on Erdős problems in a single week suggests mathematical problem-solving has become a primary capability benchmark — and that the frontier is advancing faster than many researchers anticipated. Mythos, the model behind Anthropic’s contribution, remains unavailable to the public, with no announced release timeline.

Why It Matters: When the cost of solving decades-old problems drops to a few hundred dollars, the economic geography of expertise begins to shift. Capabilities once concentrated in a handful of elite institutions and the cities around them become diffuse — but the gains accrue first to the places already positioned to deploy them. For the future of people, places, and prosperity, the question is whether this diffusion narrows regional gaps or widens them, and that depends entirely on which communities have built the absorptive capacity to put the capability to work.

Sources: Axios, “Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says we’re close to AGI” — May 26, 2026. axios.com. MLQ.ai, on the Erdős-problem convergence — May 27, 2026. mlq.ai

CROSS-BEAT CONNECTION

This week’s stories circle a single tension: the gap between what we now know and the capacity of our institutions to act on it.

In climate, the WMO told us the next five years will break records and that 1.5°C is already behind us as a guaranteed annual reality — and in the same week, Pew told us that a growing majority of Americans no longer believe the world’s governments will rise to it. Knowledge and confidence are moving in opposite directions, and that divergence is itself a risk: institutional response depends on public mandate, and the mandate is thinning even as the evidence thickens.

In demographics, the birth-rate reframe is the inverse move — an argument that a trend long treated as a catastrophe may be more manageable than the panic suggests, provided governance and economic design adapt. The common variable across both beats is institutional adaptive capacity: not whether change is coming, but whether the systems meant to absorb it can recalibrate in time.

And AI is the accelerant running underneath both. Hassabis pulling his AGI estimate into 2029 and calling Mythos a “warning shot,” alongside three labs independently cracking decades-old math problems in a single week, is the same story told in a different register — capability is compounding faster than the governance, the public understanding, or the institutional muscle needed to metabolize it. The Geography of Prosperity has always argued that the places and societies that thrive are those whose civic and governance capacity enables them to adapt in real time. This week was a reminder of how steep the update curve is becoming.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that.

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Ann Arbor ranks third in the Geography of Prosperity Index out of 250 American urban areas — not because it excels at one thing, but because it has built functioning systems across nearly every dimension the Index tracks. It sits in the top decile for both Population Renewal and Automation Readiness, and in the top quintile for Governance and Foresight and Social Cohesion. That kind of alignment across multiple dimensions is rare. It is also, as Ann Arbor makes clear, still unfinished.

At the center of this is the University of Michigan.

The university does not simply anchor the city. It precedes it. The University of Michigan was chartered in 1817, three years before Michigan achieved statehood, and its constitutional status has never been a formality. Under Michigan’s constitution, the university’s elected Board of Regents holds authority that neither municipal nor state government can meaningfully override on property the institution acquires. When the university buys a parcel, that land leaves the city’s tax base. Every expansion of the university’s footprint is, by definition, a contraction of the city’s fiscal capacity. Paul Krutko, who leads Ann Arbor SPARK, the region’s public-private economic development organization, shared: “Every time the university expands, that property is lost forever to the municipal government.”

None of this is unusual for an anchor institution relationship. What makes Ann Arbor distinctive is the scale. The University of Michigan runs a research enterprise that exceeded $2 billion in annual expenditures last year. Its Office of Innovation Partnerships processed 673 inventions in a single year, second only to MIT. It has ranked second or third nationally in startup company launches for five consecutive years. Kelly Sexton, who leads the university’s commercialization and innovation activities, describes arriving from North Carolina’s Research Triangle and finding something unexpected: “One of my colleagues describes his job as working in a diamond mine.” The image is accurate. The question Ann Arbor has spent decades trying to answer is who gets to keep the diamonds — and increasingly, the university is asking it too.

The honest answer, at the moment, is mostly: not Michigan. Of the U-M startups that succeed in raising venture capital, roughly half leave the state. Those that leave outperform those that stay four to one in terms of the capital they attract. More than ninety percent of the venture funding flowing into University of Michigan startups comes from outside Michigan. Sexton describes the tension: “We know that the inventions created on our campus have the ability to improve and save the lives of people around the world. That’s our responsibility. At the same time, we’re a public university, and we want to do this work in a way that benefits the citizens of Michigan.” The university has created a dedicated evergreen fund to back spinoffs that stay in Michigan, and the state has contributed to it. The architecture for retention exists. What remains is building the ecosystem so that staying is the better choice.

Krutko is clear-eyed about the challenge: “We’re really good at getting companies ready to scale. The state isn’t doing a very good job of harvesting them after that.” Ohio, its neighbor to the south, has been more aggressive, more consistent, and more effective at capturing the talent Michigan produces. The federal government is no longer a reliable partner. The state’s support has been uneven. “You need to figure out what you’re going to do regionally.” That framing — regional self-reliance as strategy, not fallback — may be Ann Arbor’s most transferable insight.

Two miles from the university’s campus, southeast of I-94, the city has already demonstrated what that strategy looks like at the neighborhood scale.

The Bryant neighborhood was built in the late 1960s by a single developer using two basic designs. The drainage ditches meant to carry stormwater were never maintained and were eventually filled in by homeowners who didn’t know what they were. The result, decades later, was a neighborhood that flooded. The majority of its roughly 260 households qualify as low-income. Missy Stults, the city’s Director of Sustainability and Innovations, has spent several years working there on what has become a national model for equity-centered climate investment: weatherization, solar panels on the community center roof, and now 160 geothermal wells planned for 262 homes — the first network geothermal system attempted at neighborhood scale in the country.

The story of how Bryant got there starts not with grants but with fruit trees. Stults and her office came in asking what residents loved about the neighborhood and what they wished it had. When residents said they wanted fruit trees along the path to school, the trees were planted. That was the beginning of trust. Twenty million dollars in total neighborhood investment followed. Residents now describe homes that feel like assets again — no longer a source of anxiety, but a foundation for something more stable. The community liaison who works in Bryant two days a week was chosen not by City Hall but by residents themselves. “They are experts in their lives and their bills,” Stults says. The process worked because it started from that assumption.

A city that ranks third in the country can simultaneously contain a neighborhood where families were a month from losing their homes because of their utility bills. Those two facts are not contradictory. They are, in fact, the same fact — a measure of how far alignment can reach when a city commits to extending it.

Detroit sits 14 miles east of Ann Arbor and ranks 59th in the Index — nearly the inverse of Ann Arbor on the dimensions that matter most for long-term prosperity — but it is improving. The two cities are connected by a freeway, and the University of Michigan is building a Center for Innovation in Detroit. An autonomous vehicle corridor connecting the university to Michigan Central Station has been discussed. The aspiration for a genuine Ann Arbor-to-Detroit corridor of shared prosperity is real, and the institutional pieces to build it are coming into place.

Ann Arbor is doing extraordinary things. What the Index sees — in the gap between a top-ten Automation Readiness ranking and a mid-tier Social Cohesion score, between the diamond mine and the low-income neighborhood two miles away, between Ann Arbor and Detroit — is not a city falling short of its potential, but one that has demonstrated, repeatedly, that it knows how to close gaps when it decides to. The alignment that got Ann Arbor to third in the country is the same alignment that built geothermal wells in Bryant. The question is how far it travels next, and whether prosperity extends to more people.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that.

Everything you need is here

Demographic Change

1. Immigration’s Vanishing Role in the American Workforce

New data released this week by both the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Indeed’s Hiring Lab documents just how dramatically immigration has receded as a labor market engine. The BLS’s annual foreign-born worker report, published May 19, shows that immigrant workers now represent nearly 19 percent of the civilian labor force — near an all-time high in absolute share — even as the pipeline of new arrivals has collapsed. Net international migration peaked at nearly 2.7 million in 2024 and is now projected by the Census Bureau to fall to just 321,000 by mid-2026, a decline of nearly 90 percent in two years. The Indeed Hiring Lab analysis, published May 21, notes that the labor market implications are inseparable from a longer-term demographic reality: immigrants, on average, are more likely to be of prime working age than native-born Americans, and the U.S. is aging rapidly. The combination of fewer arrivals, accelerating retirements, and persistent below-replacement fertility means the country’s labor force is being squeezed from every direction simultaneously.

Why It Matters: The workforce crunch is no longer theoretical. The same communities that lost population during the immigration pullback are now also facing structural labor deficits that no near-term policy reversal can quickly fix. For cities and regions tracking the Geography of Prosperity, labor force participation and workforce vitality are among the most sensitive leading indicators of long-term economic viability — and the data this week suggests those indicators are deteriorating faster than projected.

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Foreign-Born Workers: Labor Force Characteristics — 2025, May 19, 2026, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/forbrn.pdf | Indeed Hiring Lab, “A Shifting Pipeline: What Indeed’s Data Reveals About Immigrants’ Role in the US Labor Force,” May 21, 2026, https://www.hiringlab.org/2026/05/21/immigrants-role-in-the-us-labor-force/

2. America’s Oldest Boomers Turn 80 — And the System Isn’t Ready

The oldest Baby Boomers mark their 80th birthdays this year, and a wave of new data confirms what demographers have long warned: the financial, health, housing, and care systems built to support aging Americans are structurally underprepared for the scale of what’s coming. Retirement confidence fell this year to its lowest level since tracking began — 73 percent of retirees say they are confident they have enough money, down from 78 percent last year, with worker confidence dropping to 61 percent. Nearly half of all retirees — 46 percent — left the workforce earlier than planned, up from 40 percent in 2025, with the majority citing circumstances outside their control, including illness, disability, and caregiving burdens. Meanwhile, the senior housing sector is approaching a supply crisis: the 80-and-older population is set to grow by more than 36 percent over the next decade, while the average age of senior housing properties is already 24 years. The new Longevity Preparedness Index from John Hancock and MIT AgeLab, released this spring, found that financial preparedness alone is no longer sufficient — gaps in care, health infrastructure, and social connection are equally consequential.

Why It Matters: The 80th birthday milestone for the leading edge of the Boomer generation is not a symbolic threshold — it is an operational one. The inflection between healthy aging and high-need care happens in this decade of life, and it will hit communities very differently depending on their housing stock, healthcare capacity, social infrastructure, and fiscal condition. The places least prepared are often the ones already most demographically stressed.

Sources: Argentum / Retirement Confidence Survey 2026, via Senior Housing News, https://seniorhousingnews.com/2026/04/22/retirement-confidence-slips-in-2026-signaling-warning-for-senior-living-operators/ | John Hancock / MIT AgeLab, Longevity Preparedness Index 2026, via Fortune, https://fortune.com/2026/04/12/longevity-ready-america-aging-boomers-retirement-planning/

3. Cincinnati Plans for Climate Refugees — and Sees an Opportunity

In a signal that American cities are beginning to plan seriously for the population reshuffling that climate change will drive, Cincinnati’s Office of Environment and Sustainability released its Climate Migration Readiness Plan on May 13. The plan, covered by WVXU this week, examines how climate migration could reshape the city by 2050 and outlines strategies for managing a potential influx of new residents. Cincinnati’s case is compelling: the city offers abundant freshwater, relatively low natural disaster risk, affordable housing, and room to grow — precisely the attributes that climate scientists and demographers identify as markers of a future “climate haven.” The Cincinnati Regional Chamber of Commerce has projected that Greater Cincinnati’s population could increase by as many as half a million residents by 2050 in a high-growth scenario. The city’s readiness plan identifies strategies that serve both current residents and potential newcomers: accelerating housing development, increasing civic participation, and investing in resilient infrastructure including stormwater management and public transit corridors. OES Director Ollie Kroner notes that Cincinnati is already nearly 40 percent of the way to its 2030 emissions reduction goals — progress made largely without federal support.

Why It Matters: Cincinnati’s readiness plan is one of the first in the country to treat climate migration not as a distant hypothetical but as a near-term planning reality. That framing matters. Cities that build adaptive capacity now — housing pipelines, infrastructure resilience, governance that can absorb newcomers — are positioned very differently than those that don’t. The diagnostic framing here is exactly right: strong Climate Resilience and Governance scores are not just environmental metrics. They are population and economic ones.

Source: WVXU / Nick Swartsell, “Cincinnati releases Climate Migration Readiness Plan,” May 18, 2026, https://www.wvxu.org/local-news/2026-05-18/cincinnati-climate-migration-readiness-plan | City of Cincinnati Office of Environment and Sustainability, Climate Migration Readiness Plan, May 13, 2026, https://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/oes/news/climate-migration-readiness-plan-published/

Climate Change

4. Scientists Retire the Apocalypse Scenario — But the News Is Still Bad

One of the most significant and misunderstood climate stories of the week: the United Nations’ IPCC quietly published a new generation of climate modeling scenarios this week, and in doing so formally retired RCP8.5 — the extreme worst-case emissions pathway that has dominated climate research, policy debates, and media coverage for more than a decade. The scenario, which assumed essentially no action on climate change, has become implausible given the dramatic fall in renewable energy costs and the emergence of global climate policy. A Washington Post analysis published May 19 and an IPCC clarifying statement published May 20 together lay out the new picture: the most extreme warming scenarios are off the table, but the path society is currently on still leads to roughly 3 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels by 2100 — and up to 3.7 degrees by 2150. Trump responded on Truth Social over the weekend claiming the IPCC had admitted its projections were “WRONG,” a characterization that climate scientists and Carbon Brief forcefully disputed: retiring the most extreme scenario is not the same as concluding the climate threat was overstated. The world is still on track to breach 1.5°C. The moderate scenario remains deeply serious. The news is genuinely more nuanced than either triumphalism or despair.

Why It Matters: The retirement of RCP8.5 matters for how we plan, not just for how we feel. Infrastructure investments, migration projections, insurance pricing, and urban adaptation plans built on the worst-case scenario may be calibrated too high — but those built assuming the 3°C middle scenario is “manageable” remain dangerously wrong. The challenge is recalibrating toward a realistic and still deeply serious middle path without allowing the nuance to become an excuse for inaction.

Sources: The Washington Post, “U.N. climate panel says RCP8.5, the worst-case scenario, is ‘implausible,’” May 19, 2026, https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2026/05/19/un-climate-panel-says-rcp-85-worst-case-scenario-is-implausible/ | IPCC News Comment, May 20, 2026, https://www.ipcc.ch/2026/05/20/ipcc-news-comment-scenarios/ | Carbon Brief factcheck, updated May 21, 2026, https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-trumps-false-claims-about-the-ipcc-and-rcp8-5-climate-scenario/

5. An Antarctic Glacier Collapsed 15 Miles in 15 Months — and Scientists Are Only Now Telling Us

A new NASA Earth Observatory report published May 19 documents one of the most dramatic glacial collapses ever recorded: Antarctica’s Hektoria Glacier retreated approximately 25 kilometers — roughly 15 miles — between January 2022 and March 2023, setting a modern record for grounded ice loss. The collapse was driven by the glacier’s unusually flat bedrock, which allowed the ice to begin floating once it had thinned sufficiently, triggering rapid buoyancy-driven calving that disintegrated nearly half the glacier in just two months. Scientists warn that the same underlying conditions — flat seabed topography enabling glaciers to float and fracture — are present beneath far larger Antarctic glaciers. While Hektoria itself covers only about 115 square miles, comparable events on glaciers like Thwaites would have consequences for global sea-level rise measured not in millimeters but in feet.

Why It Matters: The Hektoria story is both a scientific finding and a warning signal. The mechanism its collapse revealed — flat bedrock acting as a hidden threshold — means that glaciologists can now identify other glaciers with similar profiles and assess their vulnerability. That is useful. What is unsettling is the speed: the kind of change that was thought to unfold over decades can apparently happen in months. That changes what infrastructure resilience planning needs to account for — particularly in coastal cities and low-lying delta regions.

Sources: NASA Earth Observatory / ScienceDaily, “Antarctic glacier collapses at record speed as Hektoria retreats 15 miles in just 15 months,” May 19, 2026, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260518041417.htm | NASA Science Earth Observatory, https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/record-setting-retreat-of-hektoria-glacier/

6. Super El Niño Is Coming — and 2026 Is Already “Extraordinary”

Before El Niño has even fully developed, the World Weather Attribution research group declared this week that 2026 has already been an “extraordinary” year for weather extremes. Meteorologists now expect a potentially powerful El Niño pattern — characterized by unusually warm Pacific sea-surface temperatures — to emerge as early as this month, and some forecasters warn it could be particularly strong. The combination of a strong El Niño layered on top of a world already running 1.3°C above pre-industrial levels risks producing what climate scientists are calling “unprecedented” weather extremes: more intense droughts, fires, and flooding in vulnerable regions simultaneously. The World Meteorological Organization is expected to issue its next formal guidance in late May. Meanwhile, the FIFA 2026 World Cup, which begins in weeks, is drawing separate warnings: a team of 15 researchers calculated the likelihood of matches taking place under heat conditions exceeding what the global players’ union deems safe across a significant portion of the tournament schedule.

Why It Matters: El Niño events are not new. What is new is that they are now arriving in a world where background warming amplifies every one of their effects. The compound risk — El Niño plus climate change — is not just a weather story. It is a migration story, a food security story, an infrastructure story, and for the communities that depend on stable conditions to hold their populations, it is an existential planning challenge.

Sources: Climate Change News / World Weather Attribution, “Scientists warn El Niño could intensify climate extremes in 2026,” May 15, 2026, https://www.climatechangenews.com/2026/05/12/scientists-warn-el-nino-could-intensify-climate-extremes-in-2026/ | Earth.Org, “This Week in Climate News (May 2026, Week 2),” https://earth.org/this-week-in-climate-news-may-2026-week-2/

Artificial Intelligence

7. The Take It Down Act Goes Into Effect — AI-Generated Deepfakes Now a Federal Crime

A significant milestone in AI governance landed quietly this week: the Take It Down Act (TiDA) went into effect on May 19, making it a federal crime to knowingly publish or threaten to publish nonconsensual intimate images — including AI-generated deepfakes. The law, which passed with bipartisan support and was signed by President Trump earlier this year, represents one of the first pieces of federal legislation specifically targeting AI-generated content and its potential for harm. As noted in Wilson Sonsini’s analysis published this week, the law lands amid a broader and still-contested fight over AI governance at the federal and state levels: Colorado’s comprehensive AI legislation is set to take effect June 30; California’s AI Transparency Act and Texas’s Responsible Artificial Intelligence Governance Act are already in effect; and the White House’s National Policy Framework for AI, released in March, is urging Congress to adopt a single federal approach rather than allow the current patchwork of state laws to proliferate.

Why It Matters: The Take It Down Act is narrow in scope but significant in precedent. It is the first federal law to treat AI-generated content as a distinct harm category requiring specific legal remedy. What happens next — whether Congress acts on the White House’s call for a unified national framework, or whether state laws continue to multiply — will determine whether American AI governance coheres or fragments. The answer will matter most for the communities and individuals least able to protect themselves through litigation.

Sources: Wilson Sonsini, “Recent AI Regulatory Developments in the United States,” updated May 2026, https://www.wsgr.com/en/insights/recent-ai-regulatory-developments-in-the-united-states.html | Vorys, “Battle for AI Governance,” https://www.vorys.com/publication-battle-for-ai-governance-white-houses-plan-to-centralize-ai-regulation-and-states-continuous-opposition

8. Enterprise AI Moves from Pilots to Production — With Governance Lagging Behind

Two major enterprise AI announcements this week illustrate both the acceleration of AI deployment and the governance gap that is widening alongside it. On May 19, Automation Anywhere unveiled new capabilities for its Agentic Process Automation platform, designed to help organizations become “Autonomous Enterprises” in which AI agents run business-critical processes across systems and teams with minimal human direction. The same week, Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas featured a cascade of agentic AI infrastructure announcements — including a new Deskside Agentic AI product that runs AI agents locally on enterprise hardware, keeping sensitive data off external cloud networks. Yet a standing warning from Gartner’s 2025 research remains relevant: of the thousands of vendors claiming to offer agentic AI, only around 130 are delivering genuinely autonomous capabilities — and more than 40 percent of agentic AI projects are predicted to be canceled by 2027 due to escalating costs, unclear business value, or inadequate risk controls.

Why It Matters: The move from AI as a productivity tool to AI as an operational system is the defining enterprise technology transition of this moment. When AI agents move from answering questions to executing workflows, the governance stakes change fundamentally. The communities and organizations that manage this transition thoughtfully — with accountability structures, human oversight, and clear business rationale — will capture the productivity gains. Those that don’t will absorb the failures.

Sources: Automation Anywhere press release, May 19, 2026, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/automation-anywhere-unveils-2026-platform-enhancements-to-run-ai-driven-processes-across-the-enterprise-302776109.html | Dell Technologies World 2026 coverage, https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/dell-technologies-world-2026-enterprise-ai-announcements-this-week/ | TechRadar, “2026: The year enterprise AI finally gets to work,” https://www.techradar.com/pro/2026-the-year-enterprise-ai-finally-gets-to-work

Cross-Beat Connection

This week’s stories share a common thread: the gap between what we know and what we’ve built to respond to it.

Climate scientists have now formally confirmed that the worst-case warming scenarios are off the table — but the path we’re actually on still leads to 3°C of warming, and a glacier that was supposedly stable collapsed 15 miles in 15 months. The news is less catastrophic than feared and more serious than convenient. The question is whether the institutions and plans we have are calibrated to that middle, difficult, honest reality — or to the extremes of either alarm or reassurance.

In demographics, the same gap: we’ve known for decades that the Boomers would turn 80, that fertility would fall, that immigration would be the backstop, and that the backstop was politically vulnerable. The BLS data this week confirmed that immigration’s contribution to the labor force is in freefall, and retirement systems are visibly buckling under the weight of people leaving work earlier than planned. The knowledge was always there. The preparation wasn’t.

Cincinnati, quietly and practically, is doing something different. Rather than waiting for climate migration to arrive as a crisis, the city is treating it as a planning variable — building housing, infrastructure, and civic capacity ahead of the wave. That is what resilience looks like in practice: the institutional capacity to absorb change before it becomes an emergency.

The AI governance story this week — a new federal law that is real but narrow, and a wave of autonomous enterprise deployments that is outpacing any meaningful oversight — fits the same pattern. We are building the capability faster than we are building the accountability. The communities and institutions that will navigate the next decade well are those that close that gap.

Signals & Shifts is published weekly by Population Next. Subscribe and read past issues at populationnext.substack.com.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that.

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DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE

1. The Baby Bust Has Two Drivers — And One of Them Surprises Researchers

A new working paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta breaks fresh ground on why American birth rates keep falling. Using decades of data from the National Survey of Family Growth, researchers identified two distinct forces at work: a sharp drop in the desire to have children among Gen Z specifically, and a separate, longer-running rise in the medical difficulty of having children across all generations since the Boomers. The second driver — growing rates of infertility and impaired fecundity — has been largely absent from public discourse, which has focused almost entirely on economics and personal choice. Researchers flagged microplastics as a potential contributor to the biological trends, though the causal link remains under investigation.

Why It Matters: The policy debate over falling birth rates has operated on the assumption that the problem is primarily economic — that people want children but can’t afford them. This paper complicates that framing. If a significant share of the decline is driven by biological factors, cash incentives and childcare subsidies may be necessary but insufficient responses. The distinction has enormous implications for what interventions actually work, and for how honestly governments communicate the problem to citizens.

Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Working Paper 2026-5, May 13, 2026 — https://www.atlantafed.org/research-and-data/publications/working-papers/2026/05/13/05-whats-behind-declining-birth-rates-in-the-us

2. What the World Would Look Like If Birth Rates Had Never Fallen

A May 11 post from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis uses global historical data to model a counterfactual: what would population levels and distributions look like today if fertility rates had remained at their 1960s baseline? The exercise reveals how dramatically the demographic map has been redrawn in sixty years. Sub-Saharan Africa remains far above replacement at 4.0 children per woman. Europe trails at 1.4. Asia and the Americas sit at 1.7. The United States is now at approximately 1.6 and declining, with the Congressional Budget Office projecting a further drop to 1.53 by the mid-2030s.

Why It Matters: The fertility gap between Sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the world is not a distant abstraction — it is the engine of future global migration pressure and the source of the labor supply that aging wealthy nations will increasingly need, even as immigration restrictionists in those same nations work to contain it. Understanding where future people are being born, and where they will need to go, is prerequisite to any serious conversation about economic sustainability in the decades ahead.

Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, On the Economy Blog, May 11, 2026 — https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2026/may/declining-birth-rates-global-population-change

3. Nearly One in Five Americans Over 65 Is Still Working — Most Because They Have No Choice

A CBS News investigation documents a quiet but significant transformation in the American workforce: nearly one in five adults 65 and older is now employed or actively seeking work, the highest share in decades. Bureau of Labor Statistics data and Pew Research underpin the reporting, which puts faces to the numbers — seniors working retail and service jobs not out of choice, but because the average Social Security benefit of roughly $2,071 per month falls far short of the estimated $4,641 monthly baseline cost of living for a single adult. The median retirement savings balance for Americans who have any savings at all is $40,000.

Why It Matters: The aging population narrative has focused on the demand side — the strain that older Americans place on healthcare systems and public programs. This story redirects attention to the supply side: what happens when people can’t afford to exit the labor force? Older workers staying longer compresses entry-level opportunity for younger workers, concentrates physically demanding jobs in aging bodies, and signals a structural failure in the retirement security system that policy has yet to reckon with honestly.

Source: CBS News, May 2026 — https://www.cbsnews.com/news/retirement-older-americans-going-back-to-work/

CLIMATE CHANGE

4. Record Wildfire Season — Before El Niño Even Arrives

An international press briefing organized by World Weather Attribution, covered by Inside Climate News on May 12, delivered a striking early-season assessment: 2026 has already logged the worst start to the global wildfire season on record. More than 150 million hectares have burned worldwide so far this year. Africa accounts for 85 million of those hectares — 23 percent above the previous record — driven by the rapid swing from extreme wet to extreme dry conditions. Fire crews in Argentina, Chile, Japan, and the United States have been overwhelmed. Scientists emphasized that human-driven warming is the primary and persistent driver of worsening conditions, but warned that a developing El Niño — expected to peak later this year — raises a “serious risk of unprecedented weather extremes.” Primary hotspots include the Amazon, Canada, the western United States, and Australia.

Why It Matters: The El Niño cycle typically adds another 0.3°C to global average temperatures above an already-elevated baseline. Layered on top of a climate system that has now recorded three consecutive years of record global heat, this year’s combination has scientists warning of fire and drought conditions without modern precedent. The communities most exposed — in fire-prone regions across the globe — are being asked to prepare for a historically difficult year with shrinking institutional infrastructure to support them.

Source: Inside Climate News / World Weather Attribution, May 12, 2026 — https://insideclimatenews.org/news/12052026/el-nino-climate-extremes-heatwaves-wildfires-floods/

5. “Danger Season” Opens With Half the Country in Drought and Science Capacity Hollowed Out

The Union of Concerned Scientists released its annual Danger Season report on May 13, marking the formal start of the May–October extreme weather period. The 2026 edition arrives with more than half the continental United States already in some stage of drought, concentrated in the Southeast, High Plains, and West. The organization warned that this year’s fire, flood, heat, and hurricane threats are compounding with two structural vulnerabilities: an affordability crisis limiting communities’ capacity to prepare and recover, and the Trump administration’s sustained reduction of federal climate science capacity — including chronic National Weather Service staffing shortfalls and the continued effort to eliminate NOAA’s research arm. An initial Colorado State University forecast projects a below-average Atlantic hurricane season due to El Niño suppression, but noted that a single landfalling storm is sufficient to make any season catastrophic.

Why It Matters: Extreme weather preparedness depends on exactly the public infrastructure now being systematically reduced — weather forecasters, regional climate data centers, and federal emergency coordination. The UCS report documents a widening gap between accelerating climate risk and the retreating institutional capacity to respond. This is not an abstract future scenario; it is the operating environment for the summer of 2026.

Source: Union of Concerned Scientists, Danger Season 2026, May 13, 2026 — https://www.ucs.org/about/news/danger-season-extreme-weather-arrives-amid-widespread-drought-looming-el-nino

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

6. The White House Just Did a 180 on AI Regulation

The Register reported on May 8 — confirmed subsequently by Fortune — that the Trump administration is preparing a significant policy reversal on AI oversight. After entering office by rescinding Biden’s AI safety executive order and replacing it with a directive to remove regulatory “barriers to American leadership in AI,” the White House is now quietly assembling an AI working group of technology executives and government officials to explore mandatory pre-deployment reviews for high-risk frontier models. The pivot — from deregulation to something resembling the FDA-style oversight previously scorned — reflects growing internal concern about liability exposure as AI systems are deployed in consequential domains.

Why It Matters: The Trump administration’s deregulatory posture on AI was explicit and defining for the first year of the second term. The quiet reversal signals that pressure to govern powerful AI systems is structural, not ideological — it follows the liability. The question now is not whether frontier AI will be regulated, but how coherently: whether a thoughtful federal framework emerges, or whether the U.S. ends up with an improvised patchwork of agency guidance, state legislation, and litigation.

Source: The Register, May 8, 2026 — https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/05/08/trump-jumps-from-anything-goes-to-strict-regulation-ai-policy/5234687; Fortune, May 6, 2026 — https://fortune.com/2026/05/06/trump-administration-embraces-ai-oversight-policies-it-once-rejected-anthropic-mythos-caisi/

7. AI Is Boosting Individual Productivity — But the Gains Aren’t Reaching Organizations

An interview published May 13 with Atlassian’s Chief AI Officer, paired with new Morgan Stanley data, surfaces what many enterprise AI buyers are confronting: AI is making individual workers more productive, but those gains are not appearing at the organizational level. The Morgan Stanley AlphaWise analysis of UK firms showed 6 percent net job losses from AI alongside 10.3 percent individual productivity gains — with the efficiency dividends failing to register in aggregate output figures. Atlassian’s executive was direct about the gap: “Individual productivity is increasing, but not the overall productivity of the organisation.” The analysis suggests a modern Jevons paradox — where efficiency gains expand the scope of work rather than reducing cost or headcount.

Why It Matters: The public debate about AI and labor has focused almost entirely on displacement. This week’s data raises a different and arguably more troubling question: even when AI is working as intended, who captures the benefit? If productivity gains accrue to individuals but not to organizations, and companies are still cutting jobs, workers may simultaneously be bearing the disruption costs and being excluded from the gains. That is a distribution problem, and it is one that existing policy frameworks are not designed to address.

Source: ResultSense / Atlassian, May 13, 2026 — https://www.resultsense.com/news/2026-05-13-atlassian-firms-not-making-ai-productive/

8. State AI Regulation Is Accelerating While Washington Stalls

A roundup published this week by Kelley Drye & Warren documents the accelerating pace of state-level AI legislation as the federal preemption fight remains unresolved. Connecticut advanced Senate Bill 5, one of the most comprehensive state omnibus AI bills in the country. California gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra released an 11-point AI governance platform on May 4, positioning his state as an explicit counterweight to what he called “federal abdication.” Colorado, meanwhile, is revising its own AI Act to strip its most expansive risk-management requirements in favor of a narrower documentation and rights-based framework. The EU’s AI Act continues its compliance calendar, with a key December 2026 deadline approaching for brands using generative AI in consumer-facing applications.

Why It Matters: Whether Washington can — or will — preempt state AI regulation is one of the defining governance questions of this technology era. This week’s dispatches from California, Connecticut, and Colorado illustrate that states are not waiting for resolution. The result is an increasingly fragmented compliance landscape for any organization operating across jurisdictions, and an AI governance environment being written, de facto, by whichever state legislature moves fastest.

Source: Kelley Drye & Warren, AI Regulatory Roundup, May 2026 — https://www.kelleydrye.com/viewpoints/blogs/ad-law-access/ai-regulatory-roundup-recent-developments-in-colorado-connecticut-and-california

Cross-Beat Connection

This week’s stories share a common structure beneath their surface differences: systems designed for one set of conditions are being stress-tested by conditions they were never built to handle.

The American retirement system was built on assumptions — about how long people would live, how much they would save, what Social Security would cover — that no longer hold for tens of millions of people. The result is nearly one in five Americans over 65 still in the workforce, not because retirement has been reimagined, but because the floor has dropped out. That same fiscal stress is baked into the birth rate data: researchers now believe that part of the decline is biological, not just economic, which means the policy tools aimed at the economic problem are aimed at only half the target. The demographic system is straining, and the instruments we have to manage it were calibrated for a different era.

The climate system is straining in the same way. “Danger Season” is a framework built on historical wildfire and hurricane baselines. This week’s news is that the historical baseline no longer applies — 150 million hectares burned globally before El Niño has even arrived, half the country in drought before summer begins, and the forecasting infrastructure that would help communities prepare being systematically reduced at the precise moment when it is most needed. The system for managing climate risk was calibrated for a world that is already gone.

And in AI governance, the same dynamic: a deregulatory framework designed in an era when AI risk was largely theoretical is now running into the reality of AI deployment in high-stakes domains, producing a hasty and as-yet-incoherent pivot toward oversight. Meanwhile, the productivity systems enterprises have built around AI are generating individual gains that fail to aggregate into organizational improvement — a mismatch between where the technology operates and where the benefits were promised.

What connects all three beats is not pessimism — it is the urgency of institutional update. The communities best positioned to navigate these compounding pressures are those whose governance, social cohesion, and adaptive capacity allow them to recalibrate in real time. The rest are running legacy systems in a world that has already moved on.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that.

Everything you need is here

Earlier this year, I took the train from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi. It was a deliberate choice — the kind of ground-level arrival that strips away the abstractions of data and forces you to see a place as it actually is. I had come as part of the research for my forthcoming book, The Geography of Prosperity, which examines what makes some American cities thrive while others struggle to hold on. Jackson, by most conventional measures, belongs squarely in the second category. But what I found there was more complicated — and more hopeful — than the numbers alone suggest.

Walking through downtown Jackson that February day, one could not ignore the desolation. In the time I spent on those streets, I counted maybe ten people. A few police officers. Some government workers. A television reporter standing in front of the federal courthouse. The sidewalks were quiet in the way that only happens when a city has lost its reason to gather. I thought of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks — that famous painting of a late-night diner surrounded by empty streets, where the neon glow only makes the darkness outside feel heavier. Jackson’s downtown had that quality, even in daylight.

That evening, I had dinner at The Mayflower Cafe. A young woman there told me it would be a crime if I didn’t order the onion rings. She was right. They were the best I have ever had. And in that small, warm exchange — in the generosity of everyone I met that day — I found something the data doesn’t capture: a profound and stubborn civic pride. Despite the visible challenges all around them, the people of Jackson want their city to succeed. That kind of resilience doesn’t show up in an index score, but it may ultimately matter more than any single metric.

What the Index Shows

As part of my research, I developed the Geography of Prosperity Index with Jaymes Cloninger at Motivf — a place-based framework that evaluates 250 American cities on their long-term civic viability across multiple dimensions. Jackson ranked 198th out of 250, with an overall score of 45.3 out of 100.

The heaviest drag on that score is governance. Jackson’s Governance & Foresight rating is 19.5 out of 100 — 231st in the nation — reflecting persistent gaps in institutional capacity that have compounded over time. These show up in the quality of public services, in the ability to attract and retain investment, in the confidence — or lack of it — that residents and businesses place in city leadership. When I was in Jackson, I had hoped to speak with city officials as part of my due diligence. No one made themselves available. As I told the Mississippi Clarion Ledger, “When city leaders are not willing to talk, that says loads. It says more about the problem.”

But I want to be clear about what the Index is and isn’t. It is a diagnostic tool, not a verdict. A score of 198 out of 250 doesn’t mean Jackson is beyond help. It means Jackson has a clearer picture of what needs to change — and, in cities, change is always possible.

The Green Shoots

Jackson’s population decline has been severe. From a peak of more than 200,000 at the 1980 census, the city has fallen to fewer than 136,000 residents today, making it the fastest-shrinking city in the United States with at least 50,000 people. That trajectory is daunting. But even as the population has contracted, something else has quietly been taking shape downtown.

Kumar Bhavanasi, a New Jersey-based developer, has spent the past two years assembling ownership of a significant number of buildings in Jackson’s central business district — the Pinnacle Building, the Deposit Guaranty Building, Regions Plaza, the Electric Building, and, most recently, the former Marriott hotel. His portfolio now spans more than a million square feet of downtown real estate, with plans to invest over $100 million in renovations. I wasn’t aware of Bhavanasi’s work when I visited — a gap in my own due diligence that I’ll readily acknowledge, and has since been remedied in the manuscript — but the significance of what he’s doing is hard to overstate.

Private investment at that scale doesn’t happen without conviction. And in February, that conviction started to pay off: Bhavanasi signed his first major tenant, the law firm Cosmich Simmons & Brown, which moved nearly 50 employees into the Pinnacle Building’s eighth floor. Fifty people buying lunch downtown, filling a parking garage, stopping at a coffee shop on the way in — it sounds modest, but in a district as quiet as Jackson’s has been, it’s a genuine signal. As Bhavanasi told WLBT in February, “I knew it was going to work, but when you get your first lease, you know it’s working.”

There are other threads worth watching. The Jackson Redevelopment Authority’s 2025 Union Station Transit-Oriented Development Master Plan — published in March 2025 and available on the JRA’s website — sets out a strategic vision for economic growth across six downtown districts within a half-mile radius of Union Station, encompassing residential, commercial, and mixed-use development. Downtown Jackson Partners President Liz Brister wrote in Mississippi Today in July 2025 that approximately 700 people currently call downtown home, and that developer Bhavanasi’s planned residential conversion of the Deposit Guaranty Building could accelerate that number, with the kind of residential density that tends to pull grocery stores, restaurants, and neighborhood businesses in its wake. Mississippi lawmakers are also advancing legislation to relocate state agencies paying above-market rents to downtown Jackson — a move that would simultaneously save taxpayers money and inject a steady stream of workers into the business district each day. As State Senator David Blount told lawmakers, according to The Beat of the Capital, “It’s a win-win proposition to move state agencies that are paying high rents into Jackson to pay less rent. It saves the taxpayers of the state of Mississippi money, and it brings people downtown to revitalize downtown Jackson.”

None of this resolves the governance gap. Private investment and planning documents don’t automatically translate into institutional capacity. The history of American urban revitalization is full of promising starts that stalled when the government couldn’t keep pace with the momentum around it. Jackson’s leadership will need to meet this moment — and that means being present, being responsive, and being willing to engage with the people and organizations trying to help.

What Other Cities Can Teach

In The Geography of Prosperity, I spend considerable time with cities that were written off — places that looked, at some point in recent memory, like Jackson looks today. South Bend, Indiana, is one of them. For much of the late twentieth century, South Bend was a byword for post-industrial decline, having shed nearly 30,000 residents from its 1960 peak as the collapse of Studebaker and the broader manufacturing sector hollowed out its economy. Then came a series of deliberate interventions. The SMART Streets initiative — a conversion of downtown one-way arterials to two-way streets, with new sidewalks, bike lanes, and street trees — was credited by city officials with catalyzing more than $90 million in private investment in downtown. The former Studebaker plant site was redeveloped as Ignition Park, a technology campus that today anchors South Bend’s pivot toward knowledge-economy industries. The city’s population, which had fallen to a low of around 101,000 in 2012, has since stabilized at roughly 103,000 — modest, but a meaningful reversal for a city that had been losing ground for decades. As of April 2026, WSBT reported that 19 active downtown projects represent a combined investment pipeline of $785 million, a sign that the early bets on South Bend’s recovery are continuing to compound. South Bend didn’t recover by accident. It recovered because its leadership decided to face its problems directly and build the institutional capacity to act on them.

Jackson has analogous assets. It sits at the intersection of two major interstates. It has a significant healthcare cluster, a functioning rail connection, the Two Mississippi Museums complex — home to both the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and the Museum of Mississippi History — and, as I discovered over onion rings at The Mayflower, a population that still believes in the place. Those are the raw materials that a city could use, with the right governance and sustained investment, to write a different story.

The Geography of Prosperity Index gave Jackson a score of 45.3. That number is a starting point, not a finish line. As I told the Mississippi Clarion Ledger, Jackson’s low score “isn’t a condemnation or a death sentence — it’s a diagnostic.” The question now is whether Jackson’s leaders are ready to use it as one.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that.

Everything you need is here

Demographic Change

American Men Are Vanishing From the Workforce

New Labor Department data released this week shows that one in three American men was out of the workforce in April 2026 — the lowest male labor force participation rate on record outside the opening months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The decline is being driven by two ends of the age spectrum at once: Baby Boomer men exiting into retirement, and younger men stepping away from work to pursue education or because of illness and disability. Male-dominated industries have also shed jobs at a significant pace, accelerating the trend. According to economists at the University of Michigan, the pattern reflects challenges that “leave too many men disconnected” — a structural shift that will not reverse simply by waiting out a business cycle. The overall labor force participation rate fell to 61.8 percent in April, its lowest level since 1977 outside of the pandemic.

Why It Matters: This is not a cyclical downturn — it is a demographic reckoning. As Boomers retire and younger men disengage from a labor market reshaped by AI and economic uncertainty, the erosion of male workforce participation deepens the structural labor supply crisis already fueled by slowing immigration. For communities that depend on steady employment to sustain tax bases, household formation, and local economic vitality, this convergence is a multiplier of vulnerability.

Sources: The Washington Post, May 8, 2026, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/05/08/men-labor-force-drop-outs/ | The Daily Beast, May 8, 2026, https://www.thedailybeast.com/american-men-are-vanishing-from-the-workforce/ | U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Situation April 2026, May 8, 2026, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

UN Migration Forum Concludes With Progress — and a Warning

The United Nations’ second International Migration Review Forum wrapped up this week at UN Headquarters in New York, where member states gathered to assess progress on the 2018 Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Secretary-General António Guterres told delegates that while countries have taken meaningful steps to expand legal migration pathways and improve data systems, the results on the ground remain alarming: over a four-year period, at least 200,000 people were trafficked, more than 15,000 died or disappeared along migration routes, and families and children continue to be detained and denied labor protections. Guterres underscored that “restricting migration does not stop people from moving — it often pushes them into more dangerous routes.” The forum produced an intergovernmentally agreed Progress Declaration.

Why It Matters: The gap between the governance framework the world has agreed to and the reality migrants face is growing wider. As climate change, economic dislocation, and demographic imbalances between aging and youthful populations intensify migration pressures globally, the failure of states to manage movement safely and orderly will have cascading consequences — for origin countries losing workers, destination countries that need them, and the millions caught in between.

Sources: UN News, May 7, 2026, https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/05/1167459 | UN Network on Migration, https://migrationnetwork.un.org/international-migration-review-forum-2026

Jackson, Mississippi Fights an Uphill Battle for Economic Development

A new analysis by the Clarion Ledger, published May 6, 2026, examines why Jackson, Mississippi — the fastest-shrinking large city in the United States — faces relentless structural obstacles to economic development. The city contends with high poverty rates, low property values, and poor economic mobility, a combination that former planning directors describe simply as “math.” While the broader Mississippi region has attracted significant outside investment — Amazon Web Services announced an additional $12 billion in data center commitments to suburban communities like Ridgeland and Canton — Jackson itself has largely been bypassed by that wave. Former city planning officials note that most urban development is market-led, and Jackson’s fundamentals continue to deter private investment despite ongoing public efforts. The city’s new mayor, John Horhn, has pushed for accountability measures targeting absentee landlords, and the state Senate has launched study committees on Jackson’s economic and housing prospects.

Why It Matters: Jackson’s story is a concentrated version of the challenges facing dozens of majority-Black, post-industrial, and fiscally stressed American cities. When investment migrates to suburbs while city cores hollow out, the gap between the Geography of Prosperity and the geography of poverty deepens. Understanding what makes some places persistently left behind — and what interventions can interrupt that logic — is essential for anyone thinking seriously about equitable economic development.

Sources: Clarion Ledger, May 6, 2026, https://www.clarionledger.com/story/business/2026/05/06/jackson-mississippi-may-have-one-battle-after-another-for-economic-development/89889317007/ | Mississippi Today, August 19, 2025, https://mississippitoday.org/2025/08/19/setting-the-runway-or-flying-the-plane-in-jacksons-economic-development-department/

Climate Change

New Orleans Has Reached a “Point of No Return,” Scientists Warn

A peer-reviewed study published May 4 in Nature Sustainability has concluded that New Orleans has reached a “point of no return” and that planning for the managed relocation of its residents should begin immediately. Southern Louisiana is facing sea-level rise of 3 to 7 meters, compounded by land subsidence and the loss of three-quarters of its remaining coastal wetlands — conditions that could push the shoreline as much as 62 miles inland before the end of this century. “Even if you stopped climate change today, New Orleans’s days are still numbered,” said Jesse Keenan, climate adaptation expert at Tulane University and a study co-author. The billions spent on levees and pumps after Hurricane Katrina will ultimately prove insufficient, researchers conclude. Rather than a sudden evacuation, they call for a managed, planned transition that could begin by investing in infrastructure north of Lake Pontchartrain.

Why It Matters: New Orleans may be the most dramatic American case, but it is not an isolated one. Sea-level rise, subsidence, and wetland loss are threats shared by coastal communities across the Gulf South, the Eastern Seaboard, and beyond. This study forces a policy concept — managed retreat — that the U.S. has never confronted at scale, and underscores that climate adaptation planning must begin before a crisis arrives, not after.

Sources: NPR, May 6, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/05/06/nx-s1-5810941/new-orleans-ocean-study | Yale Environment 360, May 6, 2026, https://e360.yale.edu/digest/new-orleans-sea-level-rise | Nature Sustainability, May 4, 2026

Amazon Rainforest Could Cross Its Tipping Point by the 2040s

A landmark study published in Nature on May 6, 2026, found that the combination of global warming and deforestation could push the Amazon rainforest past a catastrophic tipping point far sooner than previously estimated — potentially as early as the 2040s. Researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research determined that deforestation of just 22 to 28 percent of the Amazon, combined with 1.5 to 1.9 degrees Celsius of warming, could trigger a transformation of more than two-thirds of the biome into dry savannah, disrupting rainfall systems and triggering drought across South American agricultural regions. Around 17 to 18 percent of the Amazon has already been lost. The authors emphasized that halting further deforestation and restoring degraded forests are the critical levers available to prevent collapse — and that the window to act is narrowing rapidly.

Why It Matters: The Amazon is not just a forest — it is a climate system that generates rainfall for millions of people and agricultural operations across an entire continent. Its potential collapse would be felt in food prices, water security, and displacement far beyond Brazil’s borders. This study also illustrates a broader principle: tipping points are crossed before they are visible, and the window to prevent them is shorter than our policy timelines typically accommodate.

Sources: Nature, May 6, 2026 | Mongabay, May 7, 2026, https://news.mongabay.com/2026/05/deforestation-and-warming-could-push-amazon-to-tipping-point-by-2040s-study/ | Carbon Brief, May 8, 2026, https://www.carbonbrief.org/debriefed-8-may-2026-eu-eyes-fossil-fuel-exemptions-wind-and-solar-save-uk-1-7bn-amazon-tipping-point/

Trump Administration’s Wildfire Prevention Cuts Leave Forests at Record Risk

As wildfires are already burning across a drought-stricken U.S. and fire season accelerates, an NPR investigation published May 4 reveals that the U.S. Forest Service conducted hazardous vegetation reduction on nearly 1.5 million fewer acres in 2025 than in 2024 — the largest single-year drop on record. Prescribed burns fell by almost half, from more than 1.6 million acres to roughly 900,000. The agency lost 16 percent of its workforce in 2025 as part of DOGE-driven staff cuts, with 5,860 personnel departing in the first six months of Trump’s second term. Forest ecologist Matthew Hurteau told NPR: “The clock is ticking — we’ve got relatively limited time to do the work that needs to be done.” With approximately 60 percent of the continental U.S. currently in drought, fire conditions across much of the West and South are severe heading into summer.

Why It Matters: Wildfire risk is not simply a natural phenomenon — it is compounded by policy choices. The decision to hollow out the Forest Service while drought deepens and fire seasons lengthen represents a direct stacking of governance failure onto climate risk. The communities most exposed to the consequences tend to be rural, lower-income, and already economically fragile — precisely those with the least capacity to absorb them.

Sources: NPR, May 4, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/05/04/nx-s1-5801475/forest-service-wildfire-prevention-vegetation-burns | OPB, May 4, 2026, https://www.opb.org/article/2026/05/04/wildfire-prevention-work-declines-under-trump-administration/

Artificial Intelligence

The “Big Freeze”: AI Is Killing Careers Before They Start

Yale School of Management’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and co-authors published a widely-cited analysis this week arguing that AI’s most consequential labor market impact is not the mass layoffs that dominate headlines — it is the quiet elimination of entry-level opportunities before young workers ever arrive. Hiring has slowed to levels last seen in 2010, when unemployment was nearly 10 percent, yet today’s overall unemployment remains low. The pattern, which economists are calling a “big freeze,” reflects companies meeting headcount targets by simply not replacing workers who leave voluntarily rather than conducting visible large-scale layoffs. Junior-level job postings fell 7 percent last year. The study warns that without entry points, the talent pipeline that trains future managers, analysts, and specialists will atrophy — “the first steps into the workforce that quietly disappear before anyone notices.”

Why It Matters: The disappearance of entry-level work is a generational mobility crisis, not merely a labor market fluctuation. Stepping-stone roles have historically been how people without elite credentials or connections built skills and moved up. Their erosion risks creating a bifurcated economy where geography, family wealth, and educational pedigree determine access to a shrinking number of professional on-ramps — accelerating the very inequality that already divides prosperous places from struggling ones.

Sources: Yale Insights / Fortune, May 4, 2026, https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/the-real-job-destruction-from-ai-is-hitting-before-careers-can-start | Scripps News, May 7, 2026, https://www.scrippsnews.com/politics/economy/class-of-2026-faces-tough-job-market-and-ai-concerns-as-graduation-season-approaches

Trump Pivots to Oversight: Considering FDA-Style Review for High-Risk AI

In a notable reversal, the Trump administration — which came to power tearing up Biden-era AI safety requirements — is now reportedly considering requiring all new “high-risk” frontier AI models to undergo formal government review before deployment, according to reporting published today by The Register. National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett has compared the proposed process to FDA drug approvals, suggesting frontier AI systems should be “released into the wild after they’ve been proven safe.” The shift reflects escalating national security and cybersecurity concerns. Separately, the EU reached a political agreement May 7 to simplify its AI Act rules while banning apps that generate non-consensual intimate imagery — continuing real-time adjustments to AI governance on both sides of the Atlantic.

Why It Matters: The governance of AI is a live, rapidly shifting contest. The Trump administration’s reversal from “anything goes” to a potential FDA-style review process reflects growing recognition that powerful AI systems pose risks that market-led deployment cannot manage alone. For workers, communities, and institutions navigating the disruptions AI is already producing, the governance decisions being made right now will shape who bears the costs and who captures the gains.

Sources: The Register, May 8, 2026, https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/05/08/trump-jumps-from-anything-goes-to-strict-regulation-ai-policy/5234687 | European Commission, May 7, 2026, https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory-framework-ai

AI Job Apocalypse Debate Intensifies — With the Stakes Made Plain

A prominent Andreessen Horowitz essay published May 7 declared the concept of an “AI job apocalypse” to be “unhelpful marketing, bad economics and worse history” — marshaling a century of economic evidence that technological displacement consistently produces new categories of work. The piece drew immediate pushback: economists at the Yale Budget Lab noted that the very productivity gains Wall Street is pricing in would, under any plausible model, displace millions of workers, and that the mismatch between disrupted jobs and newly created ones demands a policy infrastructure to absorb displaced workers that currently does not exist. Goldman Sachs data shows AI is already cutting approximately 16,000 U.S. jobs per month, with Gen Z workers in entry-level roles taking a disproportionate share of the impact.

Why It Matters: The debate between techno-optimists and displacement economists is not abstract — it carries direct policy stakes. If decision-makers adopt the venture capital view that the labor market will self-correct, investments in retraining, safety nets, and place-based economic development may never be made. The communities with the most to lose from that bet turning out wrong are the ones already most exposed: smaller cities, less-educated workers, and places that never fully recovered from the last wave of economic disruption.

Sources: Fortune / a16z, May 7, 2026, https://fortune.com/2026/05/07/ai-job-apocalypse-unhelpful-marketing-bad-economics-worse-history/ | Fortune / Goldman Sachs, April 6, 2026, https://fortune.com/2026/04/06/ai-tech-displacement-effect-gen-z-16000-jobs-per-month/ | Noah News, May 7, 2026, https://noah-news.com/ai-driven-job-shifts-in-2026-reveal-uneven-disruption-and-strategic-adaptation

Cross-Beat Connection

The Geography of What Gets Left Behind

This week’s signals converge on a single thread: the places and people who don’t make it into the future being built around them.

In Jackson, Mississippi, the logic is nearly mathematical. The city is losing population, property values are low, private capital flows to the suburbs, and the tax base erodes. Former city planners call it “math.” But it is math with a history — shaped by decades of disinvestment, racial inequality, and the structural tendency of capital to seek paths of least resistance. While Amazon pours $12 billion into data centers just outside Jackson’s city limits, Jackson watches from the other side of the county line. The story is a geography lesson: prosperity concentrates, and the borders of concentration are not drawn by accident.

The demographic signals this week tell the same story at national scale. The U.S. labor force is shrinking in absolute terms — immigration has plummeted, male workforce participation has hit historic lows at both ends of the age spectrum, and the April jobs numbers reflect a participation rate not seen since the late 1970s. At the UN Migration Forum, the Secretary-General reminded member states that restricting migration does not stop movement — it just makes it more dangerous. The places that most need workers and the workers that most need places are being kept apart by policy, not by necessity.

The climate signals add compounding weight. New Orleans at a point of no return. The Amazon approaching its tipping point. U.S. forests under-managed and drought-parched, heading into a fire season with a hollowed-out Forest Service. These are not separate crises — they share an underlying structure: systems pushed past the threshold of resilience by a combination of long-term pressures and short-term decision-making. What the Amazon tipping point study reveals is particularly sobering: we are already 17 to 18 percent of the way toward the deforestation threshold that triggers self-reinforcing collapse, and the margin is smaller than most people realize.

And then there is AI — the force reshaping work, governance, and opportunity faster than the institutions built to manage change can respond. The Yale analysis published this week and the a16z essay the day after are arguing about the same thing from opposite directions: whether the labor market will absorb AI-driven disruption gracefully, or whether the mismatch between disrupted jobs and newly created ones will leave millions of workers stranded in the gap. The communities that will feel that gap most acutely are already identifiable — they are the Jacksons, the rural fire-risk counties, the coastal communities already being depopulated by climate — places where the infrastructure of opportunity is thinnest and the buffers are fewest.

What connects it all is not fate — it is the geography of investment, governance, and policy attention. Prosperity does not distribute itself. Neither does resilience. Understanding where the gaps are and why they persist is the first step toward closing them. That is what the Geography of Prosperity is for.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that.

Everything you need is here

Last week, Jaymes Cloninger — my collaborator and the co-creator of the Geography of Prosperity Index — and I flew to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to spend time in a city that our research keeps pointing toward as one of the most promising urban areas in the country. It ranks third out of 250 urban areas on the Index, and is a signal worth following.

What I found there confirmed what the data suggested — and then complicated it in the ways that only a place visit can.

What the Numbers Say

Before I get to the streets and the conversations, let me tell you what the Index actually shows, because the profile is unusually coherent.

Ann Arbor finishes in the top ten nationally on Population Renewal — a dimension that measures demographic vitality: birth rates, geographic mobility, the share of young adults, foreign-born population, and dependency ratios. A city can’t build a durable future without a population capable of building it, and Ann Arbor’s numbers here are strong. It’s a city people are moving toward, not away from.

On Automation Readiness — which captures STEM job concentration, broadband access, postsecondary attainment, and workforce development investment — Ann Arbor ranks sixth in the country. Sixth. In a nation of 250 measured urban areas, that puts it in a rarefied class. The University of Michigan is an obvious contributor, but the story is larger than the institution. The research ecosystem, the startup pipeline, the talent that stays after graduation: these are structural advantages that don’t disappear when any single administration or industry trend shifts.

Governance and Foresight lands in the top 20. This dimension is about whether a city is actually planning for the future, not just managing the present. Ann Arbor scores well on civic participation, strategic planning, and public investment per capita — a combination that suggests a local government oriented toward the long game.

The one dimension where the Index shows more room — Climate Resilience — isn’t a story of vulnerability so much as a story of geography. The Great Lakes region doesn’t face the same FEMA risk profiles or extreme heat exposure as cities further south or west. That relative middle performance doesn’t undermine the city’s overall strength; it reflects a specific regional context. And notably, Ann Arbor’s A²ZERO plan — the city’s commitment to reaching community-wide carbon neutrality by 2030 — is one of the most ambitious climate roadmaps in the Midwest.

What the Streets Say

Numbers are a starting point. They tell you where to look. The reported time in a city tells you what you’re actually looking at.

What struck Jaymes and me about Ann Arbor — almost immediately — was the quality of attention its leaders pay to the future. Not the performative kind, where cities publish strategic plans and then fund the same things they’ve always funded. The operative kind, where you can trace a clear line from stated values to actual decisions.

Take land use. Ann Arbor has been rewriting its zoning framework in ways that create room for people — not just those already there, but those who might come seeking stability in the Great Lakes. Long corridors of exclusionary, low-density zoning are being reimagined for taller buildings, mixed-use development, and significantly more housing. The city is betting that the future requires density and affordability working together, and it’s putting its zoning map where its mouth is.

That kind of governance isn’t accidental. It requires leaders willing to absorb short-term friction — the neighbor who doesn’t want a four-story building at the end of the block — in service of a longer-term outcome. Ann Arbor has developed a civic culture that makes that kind of decision-making possible.

There’s also the University of Michigan, which operates less like an anchor institution and more like a civic partner in this urban area. The relationship between the university and the surrounding city is genuinely integrated — in the talent pipeline, the research ecosystem, the social fabric, and the physical landscape. Ann Arbor has figured out something that a lot of university towns haven’t: the institution is most valuable when it’s in conversation with the place, not walled off from it.

The Equity Dimension

Here’s where the visit complicated the data in useful ways.

Ann Arbor’s Social Cohesion score — which measures income diversity, integration, volunteering rates, housing diversity, walkability, and commute times — lands in the top 35 nationally. That’s solid, but it’s the weakest of Ann Arbor’s dimensional performances. And when you spend time in the urban area and talk to people doing the work there, you understand why that dimension gets harder.

Ann Arbor is an expensive place to live. The same university presence that drives innovation and demographic renewal also creates housing pressure and displacement risk. The city’s land-use reforms are partly a response to this — an attempt to create more room in a market that has increasingly priced people out. But the honest truth is that equity work in Ann Arbor is ongoing, not resolved.

What I heard from civic and business leaders wasn’t triumphalism about this. It was a clear-eyed acknowledgment that the same forces creating prosperity in the aggregate were creating pressure for specific communities. That kind of honesty — the willingness to look at the full picture — is itself a governance signal worth noting.

Why Ann Arbor Matters Beyond Ann Arbor

Ann Arbor is a university city, and some readers will dismiss it on that basis. The argument goes: of course it does well — it has a Big Ten research institution, a steady supply of students and faculty, federal research dollars, and an educated workforce baked in.

I’ve heard this argument about Durham, too, and I find it increasingly unsatisfying. Having assets doesn’t mean you use them well. Plenty of university cities have squandered exactly the advantages Ann Arbor is capitalizing on. What distinguishes places that convert institutional presence into civic progress is governance — the quality of decision-making, the long-term orientation of civic leaders, and the ability to manage growth in ways that don’t simply reproduce inequality at a higher price point.

Ann Arbor is doing more of that well than most. The third-place infrastructure is genuine. The housing ambition is real. The workforce pipeline is functioning. The leadership, from what we observed, is focused on the right things.

The city also sits in a region — the Great Lakes — that is increasingly relevant to the national conversation about climate migration and water security. As the Southwest continues to grapple with heat and water stress, the Midwest’s relationship to those pressures looks very different. Ann Arbor isn’t just a strong performer on a current snapshot. It may be well-positioned for the next several decades in ways that aren’t yet legible in the national narrative about where America’s future is being built.

The Takeaway

Every city I visit for this book teaches me something about the difference between a city that is managing its present and a city that is designing its future. Ann Arbor, unmistakably, is in the second category.

That doesn’t mean it has solved everything. It means the orientation is right, the tools are serious, and the people doing the work are honest about what’s still unfinished. In a country where that combination is rarer than it should be, that’s worth naming.

The Geography of Prosperity Index scores Ann Arbor third in the country. After spending time there, I understand why.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that.

Everything you need is here

DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE

The Shrinking of America Is Preventable — But Requires a Different Attitude

A Washington Post opinion piece published April 24 confronts the prospect of U.S. population decline head-on, arguing that while contraction is probably likely, it is not inevitable. The shrinking of America’s population — perhaps probable, certainly regrettable — is not inevitable, the piece argues. It requires an attitude adjustment among Americans who do not understand that people are resources immeasurably more valuable than rare earth minerals. The intervention call lands at a moment when the data is pointing in a consistent direction. U.S. birth rates hit a record low in 2025, down 23% from their recent local peak in 2007. The sharpest drop followed the 2008 financial crisis, and rates have never fully recovered. Short-lived rebounds, including after COVID-19, have not reversed the long-term decline.

Why It Matters: The CBO’s January 2026 demographic outlook, which now projects the U.S. population will stop growing entirely in 2056, frames the policy stakes clearly: starting in 2030, annual deaths will exceed annual births, and net immigration will account for all population growth. The policy choices being made right now — around immigration enforcement, family support, and workforce investment — are not abstractions. They are the levers that will determine whether the contraction is managed or accelerates.

Sources: The Washington Post, April 24, 2026 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/04/24/us-population-decline-avoiding-demographic-disaster/); Visual Capitalist/CDC, April 24, 2026 (https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-u-s-population-by-generation/)

The Visa Freeze Is Emptying Hospital Wards

The Department of Homeland Security has frozen adjudication of almost every immigration benefit for nationals of 39 countries judged to pose “elevated vetting risk.” The hold has stopped USCIS from renewing work authorization, approving H-1B extensions, and issuing green cards for thousands of foreign-born physicians already practicing in the United States. The fallout is being felt directly in communities that already struggled to recruit doctors. Immigrants account for about 25% of the physician workforce. Rural areas and underserved regions rely heavily on them to fill gaps, making the interruption to work authorization renewals especially acute for hospitals already struggling to recruit and retain staff. More than 10,000 physician H-1B visa holders and 17,000 with J-1s, along with thousands of nurses, lab technicians and other healthcare workers, have been subjected to the visa pause. The Bush Center’s April 2026 immigration update noted that a growing number of foreign-trained doctors are being forced out of the workforce as visa processing delays drag on, leaving American hospitals short-staffed and patients without care.

Why It Matters: This story is the demographic consequences of immigration enforcement policy playing out in real time, at the bedside. The U.S. faces a projected shortage of 86,000 doctors by 2036, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. That outlook has sharpened concern that immigration delays are sidelining physicians at a time when demand for care is rising. The communities most exposed are the same ones that consistently underperform on health access and economic resilience indicators — rural counties and low-income urban areas where the physician workforce is disproportionately foreign-born. The administration’s position — that more vetting is needed — is colliding with a structural shortage that pre-existed the current policy and will outlast it.

Sources: Axios / Politico (ongoing coverage); Bush Center Monthly Immigration Update, April 2026 (https://www.bushcenter.org/publications/monthly-immigration-update-april-2026)

CLIMATE CHANGE

Scientists Warn the Next El Niño Could Lock in a Permanently Hotter World

Even a moderately strong El Niño during the next 12 to 18 months could drive the average global temperature to about 1.7 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial level, climate scientist James Hansen told Inside Climate News. Hansen doubts the world will meaningfully cool back down to below the 1.5 degree Celsius mark after the El Niño fades. The concern is not just one season of extreme weather. Research published in Nature Communications found that strong El Niño events can trigger lasting climate regime shifts — abrupt, lasting changes in heat, rainfall, and drought patterns that may push parts of the Earth system into new states. According to the World Meteorological Organization, almost every major climate model now points to El Niño arriving by May, with average sea surface temperatures on track to rise 1.5 degrees Celsius above normal by early summer — qualifying as a “strong” El Niño.

Why It Matters: The 1.5°C threshold that the Paris Agreement treated as the guardrail was already under strain before this cycle. A strong El Niño layered on top of baseline warming from greenhouse gases could produce a sustained breach of that threshold — one that Hansen and others argue may not reverse after the event ends. For the populations and communities that Signals & Shifts covers — aging, climate-exposed, economically precarious — the cascading consequences of regime shifts in rainfall, agricultural productivity, and extreme heat are not future risks. They are the context in which community planning, infrastructure investment, and health systems will operate for the next several decades.

Sources: Inside Climate News, April 25, 2026 (https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25042026/el-nino-earth-warming/); Gizmodo, April 27, 2026 (https://gizmodo.com/this-growing-el-nino-could-irreversibly-alter-earths-climate-experts-warn-2000751194)

Federal Judge Blocks Trump Administration’s Renewable Energy Permitting Blockade

A federal judge on Tuesday blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a series of decisions that wind and solar developers say have throttled hundreds of renewable energy projects across the country. Chief Judge Denise J. Casper of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts ruled that a coalition of plaintiffs representing wind and solar developers were likely to succeed on the merits of their claims that the administration’s actions violate federal statute and will cause irreparable harm if the court did not intervene. At the center of the case: an Interior Department directive requiring all solar and wind energy projects on federal lands and waters to be personally approved by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. The ruling was the latest in a series of judicial rebukes to the Trump administration’s efforts to block federal approvals for wind energy projects or stop work on multi-billion-dollar offshore wind farms under construction on the East Coast.

Why It Matters: The legal pattern is becoming clear: the administration’s strategy of administrative obstruction — using permitting reviews and agency memos rather than legislation — keeps running into the Administrative Procedure Act. Courts are consistently finding that policy reversals of this magnitude require explanation, and that the explanations offered have been insufficient. A law approved last year by the Republican-controlled Congress phases out tax credits for wind, solar and other renewable energy while enhancing federal support for coal, oil and natural gas — meaning that even as courts push back on executive overreach, the legislative trajectory is moving in the opposite direction. The injunction is a win for developers; the broader policy environment remains hostile.

Sources: The New York Times / AP / CNBC, April 21–22, 2026 (https://dnyuz.com/2026/04/21/judge-halts-trump-actions-aimed-at-throttling-renewable-energy/; https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/21/us-judge-blocks-trump-administration-actions-stymieing-wind-solar-projects.html)

First International Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels Opens Amid Energy Crisis

The first-ever international conference dedicated specifically to transitioning away from fossil fuels (TAFF-1) convened this week, bringing together heads of state, scientists, Indigenous Peoples’ representatives, and diplomats to map a pathway out of fossil fuel dependence. Fossil fuels drive energy insecurity, economic vulnerability, and climate change. Speakers reframed fossil fuels as inefficient, wasteful, and even dangerous to open the conference. Three-quarters of the global population relies on fossil fuel imports and shares a vulnerability to price shocks and fuel shortages despite living in very different economic and political systems. The conference also surfaced a stark financing gap: Africa boasts 60% of the world’s solar potential and 30% of critical minerals, but attracts only 2% of global clean energy investments.

Why It Matters: With the U.S. formally absent from multilateral climate leadership, events like TAFF-1 reveal what the international order looks like when it organizes around climate without Washington. The financing gap for the Global South is not a technicality — it is the central equity question of the energy transition, and one that will shape migration, conflict, and the political stability of the regions already most exposed to climate disruption.

Source: IISD Earth Negotiations Bulletin, April 28, 2026 (https://enb.iisd.org/transition-away-fossil-fuels-1-28Apr2026)

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Goldman Sachs: AI Is Both Destroying and Creating Jobs — With a Net Drag So Far

AI isn’t just a risk to jobs — Goldman Sachs Research estimates that it also increases the number of jobs in some sectors. In occupations where workers face a high risk of being substituted by AI, jobs are being lost. But in roles where AI is more likely to augment human labor, employment levels are rising. Overall, this has created a modest net drag on U.S. labor markets. The research distinguishes for the first time between substitution (where AI replaces human tasks) and augmentation (where AI makes human workers more productive), finding that AI is reducing monthly payroll growth by roughly 16,000 jobs in the past year and raising the unemployment rate by 0.1 percentage point.

Why It Matters: The 16,000 jobs per month figure is, at current scale, relatively contained. But the direction matters more than the current magnitude. As agentic AI expands from task automation to workflow automation, the substitution-to-augmentation ratio will shift — and the workers in the substitution column are concentrated in specific demographic and geographic profiles: women, clerical workers, early-career professionals, and communities dependent on service-sector employment. The bifurcation between who benefits from augmentation and who absorbs substitution is a distributional question, not just a productivity question.

Source: Goldman Sachs Research, April 24, 2026 (https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/the-jobs-ai-is-likely-to-boost-and-those-it-may-disrupt)

The AI Labor Crisis May Already Be Here: 92,000 Tech Layoffs and Counting

Many economists and industry experts are fearful that a labor crisis may be upon us today — not coming sometime in the future — given how quickly AI is sweeping across corporate America. As of this week, over 92,000 tech workers have been laid off so far in 2026, according to Layoffs.fyi, bringing the total to almost 900,000 since 2020. The pattern is stark: the same companies that are collectively spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year to build out AI infrastructure are also seeking efficiencies from AI by slashing head count. A 2026 Motion Recruitment study found that AI adoption is slowing hiring for entry-level and “generalized IT roles,” while AI positions are in high demand. Tech salaries remain largely flat from 2025 with the exception of some specialized jobs like AI engineers.

Why It Matters: The acceleration is real: companies are growing with fewer people. Block CEO Jack Dorsey, announcing a 40% workforce reduction, said the shift is not cyclical but structural — that intelligence tools have permanently changed what it means to build and run a company. The entry-level worker population being squeezed out is disproportionately young, diverse, and without the graduate credentials that correlate with AI augmentation exposure. The question for community planners, educators, and policymakers is not whether this is coming — it is arriving — but whether the workforce pipeline being built today will produce workers positioned for the augmentation side of the ledger or the substitution side.

Source: CNBC, April 24, 2026 (https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/24/20k-job-cuts-at-meta-microsoft-raise-concern-of-ai-labor-crisis-.html)

CROSS-BEAT CONNECTION

This week’s stories converge on a single structural theme: the erosion of the institutional middle.

The physician visa freeze is not primarily an immigration story. It is a healthcare access story about what happens when the foreign-born workers who built a functional, if imperfect, system of care in underserved communities are administratively removed from it. The communities bearing the cost are the same communities that the Goldman Sachs AI labor analysis identifies as most exposed to substitution risk — places where the workforce is concentrated in roles AI is already displacing, and where the human services infrastructure that softens economic disruption is itself now understaffed.

The El Niño warning and the TAFF-1 conference frame the external pressure that will bear down on those same communities over the coming decades. A super El Niño that permanently breaches 1.5°C will not distribute its impacts evenly. It will concentrate them in the regions and populations with the least adaptive capacity — which is to say, the regions already dealing with physician shortages, declining labor markets, and shrinking tax bases.

The renewable energy injunction is a small piece of resistance in a larger story about the U.S. policy environment. Courts keep blocking the most aggressive anti-clean-energy actions. Congress has already passed legislation phasing out the tax credits that made clean energy buildout financially viable. The judicial wins are real but fragile; the legislative trend is moving in the other direction.

What connects the birth rate story, the physician story, the labor story, and the climate story is not pessimism. It is the recognition that the systems designed to buffer disruption — healthcare access, workforce pipelines, clean energy infrastructure, international climate cooperation — are under simultaneous pressure. Managing that compound stress, rather than treating each pressure as a separate policy problem, is the governance challenge of the decade.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that.

Everything you need is here

There’s a digital creator called PONDLESS — a popular TikTok account — who has been making the rounds lately with a deceptively simple thesis: every American city is either a Houston or a New York. Houston cities are cheap, sprawling, car-dependent, and growing. New York cities are dense, expensive, transit-accessible, and — depending on who you ask — either aspirationally livable or functionally broken. The argument is compelling because it is simple. Walk (or drive) around most American urban areas for a few days, and you’ll find yourself reaching for one category or the other — I know I have.

PONDLESS’ assessment is also incomplete and misses nuance, which is one of the biggest challenges facing digital creators forced to squeeze complex ideas into roughly 90 seconds of video — I’ve been there; I know. And the places it leaves out may be the ones that matter most right now.

I’ve spent the past year building the Geography of Prosperity Index with Jaymes Cloninger and his team at Motivf — a five-dimensional ranking of 250 American urban areas across Population Renewal, Climate Resilience, Automation Readiness, Social Cohesion, and Governance & Foresight. The Index isn’t designed to declare winners and losers. It’s designed to surface the structural conditions that determine whether a place is building toward something durable in the future. When I ran both cities through it, I didn’t find two clean archetypes. I found two complicated and cautionary tales — and a much more important story hiding in the details.

New York is #1. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect.

New York–Jersey City–Newark tops the Geography of Prosperity Index. Its Social Cohesion score — the dimension that measures integration, civic participation, walkability, and the texture of everyday public life — is the highest in the country, by a wide margin. Its Climate Resilience score is in the top quintile, a product of dense, transit-anchored infrastructure that yields a per-capita environmental footprint most Sun Belt urban areas can’t match. Its Automation Readiness is solid. Population Renewal is strong — top quintile as well. But its Governance & Foresight score sits in the middle of the pack, a crack in the foundation that matters for a city regularly confronting the hard realities of rising tides, flooding, and an affordable housing crisis.

The case for New York as an archetype is real. Density works, transit works, and the sidewalk-level social infrastructure — the eyes on the street, the mixed-use density — that Jane Jacobs described in 1961 still produces measurable outcomes six decades later: lower rates of loneliness, higher civic participation, and stronger economic mobility. If you want to understand why walkable, mixed-use, transit-connected urban design produces better long-term outcomes in this measure, look to the vast majority of cities with the highest Social Cohesion scores that match the New York model — places like Boston, San Francisco, and Washington, DC.

But here’s the problem with making New York the aspirational model: almost no American city can become it, at least not with great ease, and it’s not because of a lack of will. It’s often due to a century of decisions — zoning codes, highway construction, mortgage policy, tax incentives — that made the Houston pattern the default everywhere else. You cannot simply retrofit your way to New York, and the cost of developing mass rail transit is out of reach for many American cities.

Houston is not what its boosters say it is.

If New York’s numbers are impressive, Houston’s are instructive in a different way. The city ranks 14th in the entire Index for Population Renewal — a top-quintile finish that reflects something most cities would dream of in the era of demographic stagnation. Houston has continued to grow through every economic cycle by attracting people from abroad, both domestic and foreign-born. Its Social Cohesion score is similarly strong — 11th overall — a finding that surprises people who picture Houston as a sprawling, atomized car city, but one that tracks with what you find on the ground. The city is genuinely diverse, and people are managing to build community across that sprawl.

But then you look at Climate Resilience. Houston ranks 238th out of 250 urban areas, squarely within the bottom decile. And you look at Governance, where it ranks 206th — also near the bottom. Houston has experienced catastrophic flooding events that have killed hundreds of people and displaced hundreds of thousands more. It has no zoning code, which is culturally celebrated as a form of freedom and, structurally, results in an urban area with no coordinated mechanism for managing growth, environmental risks, or long-term infrastructure needs.

The Houston model — low cost, low regulation, high growth — is often sold as the pragmatic alternative to the sclerotic, expensive, NIMBYism-afflicted New York model. Houston is a city that has grown enormously as a result. However, its poor governance and high climate risk raise serious questions about whether it is really built for the long run.

The cities that are missed entirely

Here’s the biggest challenge with the PONDLESS thesis: most American urban areas aren’t clearly Houston or New York. There are cities like Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Minneapolis, which have New York-like centers and Houston-like sprawl. Cleveland sits near the bottom of the Index overall, weighed down by population loss and governance gaps despite a walkable urban core. Pittsburgh scores better — stronger governance, a resilient civic culture — but remains caught between its industrial past and an uncertain demographic future. Minneapolis sits near the top of the Index, a city that has built genuine institutional capacity while managing the same sprawl-versus-density tension. All three defy the binary.

The New York-or-Houston frame assumes that the defining variable is density. Build dense, walkable places, pay for it with high costs and taxes, and get New York. Build sprawling and cheap, accept the car dependency and governance gaps, and get Houston. But density is a proxy, and the underlying question isn’t what a city looks like. It’s what a city can do under stress and over time. The Index measures that, and it shows that the real fault line in American urban life isn’t between dense and sprawling. It’s between cities that are building capacity for the future and cities that aren’t.

Houston is growing, New York is dense, and neither of those facts tells you whether either place will be better or worse in twenty years. The Geography of Prosperity Index was built to help answer that question. And the answer across 250 urban areas is a spectrum — and where a city sits on it has very little to do with what its skyline looks like, and everything to do with how it functions under pressure.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that.

Everything you need is here

DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE

1. Immigration Collapse Is Hollowing Out America’s Major Metro Areas

A new analysis from the Brookings Institution, released April 22, examines the latest Census Bureau metropolitan-area population estimates and finds that the sharp decline in immigration is already registering as a demographic emergency for major U.S. cities. The new Census Bureau estimates, released March 26, 2026, cover the period through mid-2025, and Brookings researcher William Frey finds that major urban areas need to brace for even greater demographic slowdowns if current immigration reductions continue. In two-fifths of large U.S. metro areas, only immigration prevented population loss in 2024. Now a steep drop in immigration is threatening household growth for a decade.

The scale of reversal is stark. The U.S. added just 1.78 million people between July 2024 and July 2025, roughly half the 3.2 million added the year before. The primary driver of that slowdown was a 54 percent decline in net international migration, from 2.7 million to 1.3 million. And the trajectory is projected to worsen: the Census Bureau has projected that immigration could be reduced to just 321,000 people for the 12-month period ending June 2026, with other projections from CBO and Brookings showing similarly low or negative immigration for calendar year 2026.

Why It Matters: The cities most exposed to this slowdown are the same cities that have relied on immigration to compensate for natural population decline — older, larger metros where deaths are beginning to approach or exceed births. The 2026 Brookings Metro Monitor finds that between 2014 and 2024, metro areas with larger increases in their foreign-born working-age population saw stronger growth in gross metropolitan product, employment, and other economic metrics. As immigration falls, so does the labor force growth, tax base, and economic dynamism that metros depend on. This story is still in its early chapters. The data being analyzed now reflects conditions through mid-2025 — before deportations and visa restrictions reached their current pace.

Source: Brookings Institution, April 22, 2026 — https://www.brookings.edu/articles/an-immigration-slowdown-led-to-widespread-declines-in-population-growth-in-americas-major-metro-areas/

CLIMATE CHANGE

2. Wildfires Have Learned to Work the Night Shift

A peer-reviewed study published April 17 in Science Advances documents a significant and underreported climate feedback loop: wildfires in North America are now burning through the night at rates that were essentially unknown 50 years ago, eroding the critical window when firefighters have historically been able to suppress blazes. The study, co-authored by researchers in British Columbia and Alberta, suggests the number of fire-friendly hours has surged across North America in the past 50 years, and especially in Western Canada’s wildfire hotspots.

Annual potential burning hours are estimated to have increased by 36 percent between 1975 and 2024, with particularly sharp rises in western regions and during the spring and autumn months — between 48 percent and 57 percent — as climate change weakens the natural nighttime constraints that once slowed fires after sunset. Places such as California now have 550 more potential burning hours than the mid-1970s. About 14 percent of active fire days now see peak intensity occurring at night, significantly narrowing the window for effective firefighting intervention.

Why It Matters: Firefighting strategy, staffing, and equipment are built around a model of fire behavior that no longer accurately describes reality in large portions of the continent. By mid-century, researchers say Canada’s record-breaking 2023 fire season could be “rapidly normalized” — extreme fire seasons will become the expected baseline, not the exception. This has direct implications for insurance markets, public land management, community siting decisions, and federal firefighting budgets that are already under strain from broader agency cuts. The study is one of the most precise quantifications yet of what climate change is doing to the operational conditions for wildland fire response.

Source: Science Advances, April 17, 2026 — https://lethbridgeherald.com/news/national-news/2026/04/17/climate-change-is-eroding-typical-nighttime-breaks-in-wildfire-activity-study-says/

3. The UN Declares Extreme Heat a Systemic Threat to Global Food Security

Released for Earth Day on April 22, a joint report from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) delivers one of the most comprehensive assessments yet of how extreme heat is restructuring global agriculture. Extreme heat is already causing half a trillion work hours to be lost each year, threatening the livelihoods of over a billion people as rising temperatures and more frequent heatwaves redefine how food is produced worldwide.

The mechanisms of disruption are compounding. For many major crops, yields begin to decline above 30°C (86°F). Livestock experience stress at even lower temperatures, particularly pigs and poultry, which cannot cool themselves efficiently, resulting in reduced growth, lower dairy yields, and in severe cases, organ failure. Every one-degree rise in average global temperatures cuts yields of the world’s four major crops — maize, rice, soya, and wheat — by about 6 percent. In 2025, more than 90 percent of the global ocean experienced at least one marine heatwave, threatening fish stocks as dissolved oxygen levels decline.

Why It Matters: The intensity of extreme heat events is expected to roughly double at 2 degrees Celsius of warming and quadruple at 3 degrees, compared with 1.5 degrees. The food security implications compound the demographic story: the populations most dependent on subsistence and smallholder agriculture — in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and parts of Latin America — are also the populations growing most rapidly. Heat-driven yield losses in these regions translate directly into nutrition insecurity, rural-to-urban migration pressure, and political instability. The report calls for heat-resilient crop varieties, adjusted planting schedules, and financial protection mechanisms — but notes that none of those solutions substitute for a decisive emissions reduction.

Source: FAO / WMO, April 22, 2026 — https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/04/1167352

4. The Hormuz Blockade Is a Food Security Crisis That Has Nothing to Do With Weather

While the UN’s Earth Day report on extreme heat drew attention to climate-driven threats to global agriculture, a separate and more immediate food security emergency is unfolding in the Persian Gulf. The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed since early March, following the U.S.-Israel military campaign against Iran, and the consequences for global fertilizer supply are now moving from warning to crisis. About a third of the world’s fertilisers are transported through the Strait of Hormuz to Asia and Africa; if fertiliser arrives late or becomes more expensive, this will affect the planting of crops for the next harvest and into 2027 as well.

The mechanism is specific and urgent. Urea, ammonia, sulfur, and phosphates — the core inputs of industrial agriculture — flow through the strait from Gulf producers to the world’s most food-insecure regions. The FAO has estimated that fertiliser prices could be an average 20 percent higher in the first half of 2026 if the crisis is not resolved; after a brief uptick over the weekend, maritime traffic in the strait has returned to a trickle since Tehran announced that ships will be restricted as long as the U.S. maintains its blockade of Iranian ports.

The UN is attempting an intervention. UN Secretary-General Guterres has yet to win full buy-in for his proposal to secure safe passage for vessels ferrying fertiliser and other agricultural products through the blockaded strait — an initiative that would involve a UN task force ensuring safe, orderly, and predictable maritime transit despite the conflict. Iran’s UN envoy signaled support on April 21, but the plan has stalled on the refusal of other key parties to commit.

Why It Matters: The countries most exposed — Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia in Africa, and Pakistan and Myanmar in Asia — are already threatened by famine, and are being hit by a conflict they have nothing to do with. The planting calendar does not pause for diplomacy. Fertilizer that doesn’t move this month doesn’t produce crops this fall. The downstream effects — higher commodity prices, retail food inflation, acute shortfalls in already-fragile markets — will persist for years regardless of when the strait reopens. This is the food crisis inside the food crisis: Story 3 describes what climate does to agriculture over decades; Hormuz shows what geopolitics can do to it in weeks.

Source: Al Jazeera, April 21, 2026 — https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/4/21/as-iran-crisis-drags-on-fears-of-global-food-crisis-grow; France 24, April 22, 2026 — https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20260422-food-security-why-guterres-un-plan-get-fertiliser-hormuz-stalling-iran-war

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

5. Google Declares the Agentic Era Is Now — and Its Own Code Is the Proof

Google Cloud Next ‘26, running this week in Las Vegas, served as the industry’s most visible declaration yet that enterprise AI is no longer about chatbots and copilots — it is now about autonomous agents operating continuously across organizational workflows. At the conference, Google announced the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, a comprehensive infrastructure for building, scaling, governing, and optimizing agents at enterprise scale. The flagship stat of the conference: 75 percent of all new code at Google is now AI-generated and approved by engineers, up from 50 percent last fall — a shift Google described as moving from AI assistance to “truly agentic workflows.”

The trajectory has been steep and deliberate. In April 2025, Pichai had put the figure at “well over 30 percent.” By late 2025, Google’s CFO was citing “nearly half.” Now it stands at three-quarters. Meta is pushing in the same direction: for the first half of 2026, 65 percent of engineers in its creation org are expected to write more than 75 percent of their committed code using AI.

Why It Matters: The 75 percent figure is not merely a productivity metric — it is a signal about what “software engineering” means as a job category going forward. CEO Sundar Pichai noted that a particularly complex code migration done by agents and engineers working together was completed six times faster than was possible a year ago with engineers alone. When the largest technology companies in the world are describing their human engineers as reviewers and orchestrators rather than primary authors of code, the labor market implications for the next generation of technical workers are significant. The question is not whether this transition is happening — it is whether the institutions responsible for training those workers are moving at the same speed.

Source: Google Cloud Blog / Business Insider, April 22–23, 2026 — https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/infrastructure-and-cloud/google-cloud/cloud-next-2026-sundar-pichai/

6. Covered California Deploys AI to Manage Health Eligibility for Millions — and Sets a Public-Sector Benchmark

An often-overlooked dimension of the AI story is the public sector deployment picture, and a significant announcement on April 22 fills that gap. Covered California announced an expanded partnership with Google Public Sector and Deloitte to scale AI across its CalHEERS health insurance eligibility and enrollment platform, reducing manual tasks by 40 percent and accelerating real-time eligibility verification for millions of Californians. The integration of Google’s Document AI across document verification workflows marks what the state is calling a national standard for public health innovation.

Why It Matters: The public-sector AI deployment story has been systematically undertold relative to the private-sector narrative. Covered California managing eligibility for millions of residents is a different category of application than a tech company improving code velocity — it is AI operating inside the safety net. The efficiency gains are real, but so are the questions about what happens when automated eligibility systems make errors, and what recourse exists when they do. This announcement is a preview of a much larger wave of government AI adoption that will reshape how public services are delivered — and who gets them.

Source: Google Cloud Press Corner, April 22, 2026 — https://www.googlecloudpresscorner.com/2026-04-22-Covered-California-Partners-with-Google-Public-Sector-to-Use-AI-to-Accelerate-Healthcare-Access-for-Millions-While-Reducing-Fraud

CROSS-BEAT CONNECTION

When Three Crises Share the Same Victims

This week produced an unusual convergence: two separate food security emergencies landed in the same issue — one driven by climate, one by geopolitics — alongside a demographic story about the populations most dependent on stable food systems and an AI story about the technology being deployed to manage their access to public services. Taken together, they describe a world in which the same communities bear a compounding and asymmetric share of risk.

The climate beat this week gave us both the long arc and the immediate shock. The Science Advances wildfire study quantifies what decades of warming have done to fire behavior in North America — a slow-building transformation of the operational environment for emergency response. The FAO/WMO heat report extends that logic to agriculture, documenting how rising temperatures are systematically eroding the productivity of the crops, livestock, and fisheries that feed the world’s most vulnerable populations. These are structural, generational threats.

The Hormuz story is something different: a man-made disruption, operating on the planting calendar’s timeline, with consequences that will outlast any ceasefire. A third of the world’s fertilizer moves through that strait. When it stops moving in spring, harvests fail in fall. The countries absorbing that shock — Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Myanmar — are the same countries the FAO/WMO report identifies as most exposed to heat-driven agricultural disruption. They are being hit simultaneously by the slow emergency and the fast one.

The demographic story connects through migration. The Brookings analysis documents how U.S. cities are already contracting as immigration falls. The populations whose migration would historically have helped stabilize those cities — and whose labor sustains American agriculture, construction, and care work — are concentrated in exactly the regions where food insecurity, heat stress, and geopolitical instability are now compounding. The pressure to move is intensifying. The legal pathways to do so are narrowing.

And then there is the AI story. Google’s agentic platform and Covered California’s eligibility system represent two faces of the same technology wave: one accelerating the productivity of the most economically advantaged institutions on earth, and the other being deployed to manage the delivery of public services to the most economically precarious. The efficiency gains are real on both sides. So are the governance questions. What happens when the automated system that determines whether a family qualifies for health coverage makes an error, and the human capacity to catch and correct it has been reduced in the name of efficiency?

This week’s stories don’t describe three separate domains. They describe a single system under compounding stress, in which the communities least responsible for the pressures bearing down on them are the most exposed to the consequences — and in which the tools being built to respond are unevenly distributed by design.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that.

Everything you need is here

I boarded the Carolinian at Washington’s Union Station yesterday afternoon — the Amtrak service that runs south from New York through D.C. and down into North Carolina — headed for two days of meetings with some of the most important leaders shaping one of America’s most interesting cities. Taking the train is always a deliberate choice, because it’s the most efficient mode of transportation. There’s something clarifying about a long ride south, watching the suburban expanse of Northern Virginia give way to Piedmont countryside and Tidewater region, that a flight doesn’t offer. It gives you time to think about where you’re going and why.

I was going to Durham because Durham surprised me.

When we first ran the numbers for the Geography of Prosperity Index, I expected the top of it to look a certain way — some coastal giants, some Sun Belt boomtowns, maybe a few Midwestern standouts. What I didn’t expect was a mid-sized North Carolina city showing up second out of 250 urban areas, and doing so with the most balanced positive score in the entire dataset. That kind of balance is rare. The Index doesn’t tell you why that’s true. That’s what this trip is for.

I’m staying at the Durham Hotel, which turns out to be a good way to get a feel for the city before my meetings begin today. The building went up in 1968 as the headquarters of the Home Savings and Loan Association — a crisp piece of mid-century modern design by architect Perry C. Langston, with a distinct gold-accented facade that has survived intact. In 2015, Raleigh-based Maurer Architecture and Los Angeles-based interior design firm Commune renovated it into what is now the only independently owned and locally operated boutique hotel in downtown Durham. The massive two-story, floor-to-ceiling windows that once flooded the retail banking floor with light now do the same for its dining room and coffee shop, which was filled with students when I arrived, a signal of the city’s dynamism.

It is, in other words, exactly the kind of adaptive reuse that signals something real about a city’s relationship to its own history. Durham didn’t tear this building down, as others might have. It found a new use for it that honored what was already there. That instinct — preserving character while making room for something new — is something I look forward to exploring over the coming days.

What the Numbers Show

Durham’s Automation Readiness score is near the top of the entire Index, which is not surprising once you remember that Duke University, Research Triangle Park, and a dense concentration of biotech, pharmaceutical, and technology employers are all operating within its orbit. The city has built the kind of workforce infrastructure that looks, from the data, like it’s working. The Governance & Foresight score is nearly as strong — a signal that Durham isn’t just growing, but doing so with some degree of intentionality.

What’s more interesting are the dimensions where Durham is solid rather than exceptional. Social Cohesion sits in the top third, but not the top tier. Population Renewal — a measure of whether a city is attracting and retaining the new residents it needs to sustain its momentum — ranks lower than you might expect for a city with this much going for it. Climate Resilience is good, but not a standout. What the Index can’t tell me is whether these are early warning signs of the fault lines that often open up in fast-growing cities, or whether Durham has figured something out that the data hasn’t fully captured yet.

That’s the question I’m taking into every meeting this week.

The Meetings

The schedule runs two full days, and I’m grateful to Zach Prager of Ternstone Holdings for pulling it together. Zach is the kind of private-sector operator who tends to know what’s really happening in a city — tapped into the underlying current of a place. That’s where I want to start before I walk into any official meetings.

From there, I’ll sit down with JB Buxton, president of Durham Technical Community College. Durham Tech is the institution closest to the question I keep coming back to in cities with strong Automation Readiness scores: who’s actually being trained, and for what? Duke produces extraordinary talent. But what about the people who aren’t in that ecosystem? Who’s building the workforce pipeline for them?

The Durham Chamber of Commerce comes next — Geoff Durham and Matt Gladdek, who leads economic development. A strong Automation Readiness score tells me the economy is producing something. The Social Cohesion score tells me the benefits of that production may not be reaching everyone equally. Those two facts, combined, are the most important thing I want to understand about Durham.

Nicole Thompson, president and CEO of Downtown Durham Inc., will take me into that question from the street level. Downtown health is one of the most legible proxies for social cohesion we have. It tells you who the city is building for — and just as importantly, who it isn’t. From an observational point of view, downtown is clean, vibrant, and filled with small businesses packed on a Sunday night.

Tuesday morning starts with Adam Klein at Duke. Duke is doing real work in economic development, but the university-city relationship in a place like Durham is always worth a close look. A great research university can be both an engine of prosperity and a distorting force in the local economy, bidding up housing, reshaping labor markets, and concentrating opportunity in ways that don’t always benefit the people who’ve been in the city longest.

Then I’ll meet with Mayor Leonardo Williams. I want to understand what it actually feels like to govern a city that’s ranked this well — and where he thinks the Index’s optimism might be getting ahead of reality. Strong Governance & Foresight scores are built from strategic plans, capital investment, and civic participation data. I want to know what those abstractions look like on the ground, and where the mayor thinks the hardest decisions still lie ahead.

Mark Stanford of Capital Broadcasting Company — one of the longest-standing private investors in Durham’s urban core — will give me a different kind of historical depth. And I’ll end the trip at Research Triangle Park with Scott Levitan of the Research Triangle Foundation. RTP is the physical anchor of so much of what the Index is picking up in Durham’s score. But research parks can be prosperity islands — economically potent yet physically disconnected from the communities they’re supposed to lift. I want to understand how deliberately RTP is thinking about the difference between economic output and community benefit.

Why Durham Matters for the Book

Every city in this project is a test of something. Durham is a test of whether balance is possible — whether a city can get the fundamentals right without letting them hollow out the social fabric in the process. The Index says Durham is doing it. Two days of conversations will tell me whether that’s the whole story, or whether there’s a more complicated one underneath the numbers, waiting to be reported.

I’m excited to be here and look forward to sharing more.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that.

Everything you need is here

👥 Demographic Change

1. America’s Fertility Rate Hits Another Record Low

New provisional data released April 9 by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics puts the U.S. general fertility rate at 53.1 births per 1,000 women of reproductive age — a 1 percent decline from 2024 and the lowest level since the federal government began keeping such records. Approximately 3.6 million babies were born in 2025, roughly 710,000 fewer than the peak year of 2007. Driving the trend: a sharp decline in teen births (down 7 percent year-over-year, down 72 percent since 2007), delayed childbearing among women in their 20s, and persistent cost-of-living pressures around housing and childcare. A pronatalist movement has gained momentum under the Trump administration, but the data show no reversal yet.

Why It Matters: When births fall well below replacement level (2.1 children per woman) for multiple decades, the demographic math becomes unforgiving — a shrinking labor force, growing dependency ratios, and accelerating pressure on Social Security and Medicare. The CDC report lands at a moment when immigration — historically the backstop for U.S. population growth — is itself contracting sharply, leaving no obvious demographic offset in the near term.

Sources: CDC/National Center for Health Statistics, April 9, 2026 · NPR, April 9, 2026

2. Immigration Crackdown Is Creating Massive Unskilled Labor Shortages

A Washington Post opinion analysis published April 14 documents the widening labor shortfall following the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement push. Nearly 3 million people left the U.S. in 2025 alone, according to the Department of Homeland Security — 2.2 million self-deported and approximately 675,000 were removed by law enforcement. The piece argues the results have been predictable: industries heavily dependent on immigrant workers — construction, agriculture, hospitality, childcare — are experiencing acute shortages with no domestic workforce pipeline ready to fill them. Employers report rising costs and project delays; economists caution that a shrinking labor force carries long-term GDP consequences.

Why It Matters: The convergence of falling birthrates and sharply reduced immigration is compressing the working-age population from both ends simultaneously. This is the demographic squeeze in real time — not a forecast, but a present-tense economic condition. The industries facing the sharpest shortfalls (construction, home health, agriculture) are precisely those needed to house, feed, and care for a rapidly aging population. The policy tension is acute: the same administration championing pronatalist messaging is presiding over the largest labor force contraction in recent memory.

Source: Washington Post (opinion), April 14, 2026

3. Science Journal Flags the Demographic Future We Can’t See Clearly

A news feature published April 13 in Science magazine raises a pointed concern: demographic forecasting — the foundation of virtually all long-range policy planning — is now operating with degraded data. The piece arrives amid a broader context that this newsletter has tracked for months: mass layoffs of career statistical staff, removal of public datasets, and plummeting trust in federal data collection under the current administration. The Population Reference Bureau has separately noted that between 2023 and 2024, 452 U.S. counties would have lost population without immigration — a figure that may soon be impossible to calculate accurately if data infrastructure continues to erode.

Why It Matters: Good demographic data is the map by which governments plan infrastructure, allocate Medicaid, zone housing, project Social Security solvency, and anticipate workforce supply. When that map goes blank — or becomes contested — the compounding effect reaches every policy domain covered by this newsletter. The Science piece is a reminder that the demographic crisis is not only a population problem; it is increasingly an information problem.

Sources: Science, April 13, 2026 · Population Reference Bureau, 2026

4. New Index Challenges the Conventional Wisdom on Where to Retire

A Yahoo Finance feature published April 15 drew on the Geography of Prosperity Index — developed by Human Change and Motivf — to challenge one of the most durable assumptions in American retirement planning: that warm-weather, low-tax, low-density Sun Belt cities are the safest bet for retirees. The Index evaluates 250 U.S. metro areas across five dimensions (Population Renewal, Climate Resilience, Automation Readiness, Social Cohesion, and Governance & Foresight) and puts New York City at No. 1 while ranking The Villages, FL — the largest retirement community in the United States — dead last. “These features make them structurally fragile over a two- or three-decade horizon,” Index co-creator Bradley Schurman told Yahoo Finance. He cited the Coachella Valley’s looming mandate to cut water consumption by 40% by 2040 as a concrete example of the climate stress already bearing down on Sun Belt retirement markets.

Why It Matters: Most retirement location decisions are made on 20th-century criteria — taxes, weather, cost of living — without stress-testing those choices against the forces that will define the next 30 years: climate risk, demographic hollowing, and automation-driven economic disruption. The Index reframes the question from “where is cheap and sunny today?” to “where will still be livable and economically viable in 2050?” For the 73 million Americans currently over 65 — and the wave of Baby Boomers still making relocation decisions — that reframe has real financial and quality-of-life consequences that the conventional retirement relocation industry has largely ignored.

Source: Yahoo Finance, April 15, 2026

🌍 Climate Change

5. 1.5°C Is Officially Off the Table

Resources for the Future released its Global Energy Outlook 2026 on April 7, concluding that limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels is “no longer plausible.” The annual report harmonizes long-term projections from 15 scenarios across 8 leading energy organizations — including the IEA, OPEC, and BP — and finds that under all reference and evolving-policy scenarios, the world will exceed 1.5°C of warming before 2050. Limiting the rise to 2°C, the report finds, will be “extremely challenging” without substantial new policy action. The report notes that global leaders have increasingly deprioritized climate goals in favor of energy security and affordability.

Why It Matters: The 1.5°C target was always a stretch; what’s new in this report is the formal, consensus-based declaration across the modeling community that it is gone. The implications cascade: infrastructure designed for a 1.5°C world is now misspecified; insurance and financial models calibrated to that threshold need revision; and adaptation spending — long treated as secondary to mitigation — must now be treated as the primary challenge. For communities, the question shifts from “can we prevent this?” to “how do we survive it?”

Source: Resources for the Future, Global Energy Outlook 2026, April 7, 2026

6. Trump Budget Proposes Cutting EPA in Half, Canceling $15B in Renewable Infrastructure

The Trump administration’s fiscal year 2027 budget request, released April 10, proposes cutting the EPA’s budget by more than 50 percent and eliminating approximately $1 billion in agency grants. The plan would also cancel $15 billion in renewable energy infrastructure funding appropriated under the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The EPA has already shed more than 4,000 employees during Trump’s first year in office, reducing staff to the lowest levels since the 1980s. Congress rejected similar proposals for FY2026 — but the annual repetition of deep cuts creates ongoing implementation uncertainty even when Congress ultimately pushes back.

Why It Matters: The budget is a policy signal as much as a fiscal document. Even proposals that fail to pass reshape agency behavior, chill enforcement, and accelerate voluntary staff departures. With the 1.5°C threshold now formally out of reach and the U.S. entering what is likely to become an El Niño year (see story 7), gutting the federal climate and environmental monitoring apparatus limits the nation’s ability to understand, forecast, and respond to the conditions already in motion.

Source: Inside Climate News / Planet Detroit, April 10, 2026

7. La Niña Has Ended. El Niño Is on the Way.

NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center issued its Final La Niña Advisory around April 10, confirming that La Niña conditions have transitioned to ENSO-neutral. The agency now places a 61 percent probability on El Niño developing by May–July 2026, with a roughly one-in-three chance it reaches “strong” intensity by October–December. Warmer-than-average subsurface Pacific temperatures are already in place, and most major modeling centers agree on the trajectory. ENSO-neutral conditions — present now — are themselves associated with increased forecast uncertainty and variability.

Why It Matters: El Niño years are reliably associated with accelerated global surface warming, disrupted precipitation patterns, intensified wildfire seasons in some regions, and severe flooding in others. Coming on the heels of NOAA recording March 2026 as the warmest March in the 132-year record, a strengthening El Niño would layer additional heat and disruption onto an already stressed baseline. For agricultural communities, insurers, disaster planners, and anyone monitoring climate-driven migration, the El Niño watch is the most consequential weather signal of the year.

Sources: NOAA Climate Prediction Center, April 10, 2026 · Wikipedia: Weather of 2026

🤖 Artificial Intelligence

8. Stanford’s 2026 AI Index: Capabilities Racing Ahead of Guardrails

Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI released its annual AI Index Report on April 13 — a 400-plus-page accounting of AI’s trajectory across technical performance, economic impact, public sentiment, and policy. Key findings: AI reached 53 percent population-level adoption within three years of launch (smartphones took a decade to reach similar penetration); corporate AI adoption hit 88 percent; and 4 in 5 university students now use generative AI. On the competitive landscape, U.S. and Chinese models have traded performance leads repeatedly since early 2025 — as of March 2026, Anthropic holds a 2.7 percentage point edge over the nearest Chinese competitor, a margin the report treats as functionally a tie. The report also documents an early labor market signal: employment among software developers aged 22–25 has fallen nearly 20 percent since 2022, with similar but shallower declines in customer service roles.

Why It Matters: The central tension in this year’s index is the one the newsletter has tracked all year: AI capabilities are compounding while the measurement frameworks, governance structures, and workforce adaptation systems meant to manage them are falling further behind. The early-career employment data is particularly notable — it suggests AI is already reshaping entry points into knowledge work, with downstream consequences for career pipelines, skill formation, and ultimately the middle class’s ability to participate in the AI economy.

Sources: Stanford HAI AI Index 2026, April 13, 2026 · MIT Technology Review, April 15, 2026

9. PwC: 74% of AI’s Economic Value Is Going to Just 20% of Companies

PwC’s 2026 AI Performance Study, released April 13 and based on interviews with 1,217 senior executives across 25 sectors, finds that nearly three-quarters of all AI economic value is being captured by one-fifth of organizations. The top performers are not simply deploying more AI — they are using it as a reinvention engine, pursuing new revenue streams and cross-industry opportunities rather than just cutting costs. Top-performing firms invest 2.5 times more in AI than their peers and generate 7.2 times more AI-driven value. The majority of companies remain stuck in pilot mode, generating little to no financial return.

Why It Matters: This finding is the corporate mirror of the broader inequality dynamic playing out across AI adoption. The technology is generating enormous aggregate value — but that value is concentrating rapidly, not diffusing broadly. For communities and workers, the implication is stark: the geography of AI-driven prosperity is likely to follow existing capital and talent concentrations rather than spread organically. The 74/20 split is not merely a corporate performance story. It is a map of where economic power is flowing in the AI transition.

Source: PwC AI Performance Study, April 13, 2026

10. New York’s RAISE Act Takes Effect; Federal Preemption Fight Intensifies

New York’s Responsible AI Safety and Education (RAISE) Act took effect March 19, 2026, making it one of the most significant state-level AI regulatory frameworks in the country. The law imposes transparency, compliance, safety, and reporting requirements on developers of large “frontier” AI models. It arrived weeks after the Trump White House released a National Policy Framework for AI (March 20), which explicitly recommends against creating any new federal AI regulatory body and calls for existing agencies to govern AI through subject-matter expertise — while also laying groundwork for federal preemption of state AI laws. The DOJ’s AI Litigation Task Force, established in January, has not yet filed lawsuits but is building a referral process targeting state laws it deems burdensome.

Why It Matters: The federal-state tension on AI governance is the defining regulatory story of 2026. The administration is simultaneously pushing AI adoption as an economic priority and seeking to block the regulatory frameworks states are building in the absence of federal action. For AI developers, the compliance landscape is a patchwork; for communities, the question is whether any meaningful guardrails will exist on the technology reshaping employment, information, and civic life. The outcome of this preemption fight will shape AI governance for a generation.

Sources: Alston & Bird AI Quarterly, April 2026 · Consumer Finance Monitor, April 8, 2026

🔗 Cross-Beat Connection

The Shrinking Safety Net and Who Will Hold It

This week’s three beats converge on a single uncomfortable question: as the population that needs support grows, who will provide it — and can they?

The demographic picture is increasingly clear. America’s working-age population is contracting simultaneously from two directions: birth rates have fallen to historic lows, and the immigration that previously compensated for those low birth rates is being sharply curtailed by policy. The Washington Post immigration piece this week puts the labor shortage in the present tense — it is not a future risk but a current condition, already rippling through construction, agriculture, and caregiving. And the Geography of Prosperity Index, highlighted this week in Yahoo Finance, adds a granular geographic layer to that story: the Sun Belt retirement markets absorbing millions of aging Americans are, by the Index’s measure, among the least prepared cities in America for the demographic and climate pressures bearing down on them. The places people are moving to in retirement are, in many cases, the places least equipped to support them over a 20- or 30-year horizon.

The climate picture adds pressure. The formal abandonment of the 1.5°C target means the humanitarian and economic costs of climate disruption — displacement, crop failure, infrastructure damage, heat mortality — will be larger than the models that informed most current policy assumed. FEMA is being cut. The EPA is being cut. The federal infrastructure for disaster response and environmental monitoring is eroding precisely as the climate demands more of it. And an El Niño is forming.

The AI picture introduces a bifurcation. The Stanford Index and PwC data together describe a technology that is highly productive for the institutions and workers best positioned to use it — and largely inaccessible to the others. Early-career workers are already being displaced. AI economic value is concentrated in a fifth of organizations. The PwC finding lands with particular force when read alongside the Geography of Prosperity data: if AI-driven prosperity follows existing capital and talent concentrations, the cities best positioned to capture it are largely the same cities that already score well on the Index — and the retirement-haven markets at the bottom of that Index are precisely those with the least exposure to the knowledge economy that AI is reshaping.

Taken together, this week’s stories describe a system under compound stress — demographic, climatic, and economic — in which the institutions meant to absorb that stress are being reduced, and the private-sector mechanisms meant to fill the gap are themselves highly unequally distributed across geography. That’s the signal. The shift is still being decided.

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Some of the most instructive cases in the Geography of Prosperity Index aren’t the cities at the top. They’re the ones whose scores contain a contradiction — places that look like success stories by conventional measures, yet register as warnings by the dimensions that actually predict durable prosperity.

Brownsville and McAllen, Texas, and Palm Springs, California, fit that description. Each sits near the bottom of the Index in key dimensions. These cities aren’t failing based on current metrics, and that’s precisely what makes them worth understanding.

The Index isn’t a verdict. It’s a diagnostic, and I traveled to these cities last week to learn from local leaders. Before going further, that point deserves emphasis. The Geography of Prosperity Index wasn’t designed to shame communities or confirm the biases of people who’ve already written places off. It was designed to help cities — their leaders, their business communities, their civic institutions — understand where they stand and what they might do differently. Many of the challenges it surfaces can be addressed with the right interventions. But addressing them requires, first, the willingness to look.

Brownsville and McAllen: Demographic Power, Structural Risk

On paper, the two Texas border cities look like the kind of demographic story that struggling American metros dream about. Both sit in the top quintile nationally for population renewal. They’re growing, attracting immigrants, and producing children at rates that most American cities would envy. In a country where birth rates have cratered, and population decline has become a civic crisis, the Rio Grande Valley is doing something genuinely exceptional.

The Index looks at that and sees something else alongside it: a warning.

Both cities land near the bottom for Climate Resilience, Automation Readiness, and Social Cohesion — three of the five dimensions that determine whether a city can translate demographic power into durable prosperity. Both sit in the bottom quartile for Governance and Foresight. The region faces extreme heat, acute water stress, and growing flood exposure. The Rio Grande itself has run so low in recent years that stretches of the river have gone dry. FEMA hazard exposure across both urban areas ranks among the highest in the entire Index.

The border economy context explains some of this. The Rio Grande Valley has been chronically underfunded relative to its size, with infrastructure investment lagging and federal resources complicated by the politics of immigration and trade. But explanation is not absolution. And the governance scores point toward something local leadership has at least partial control over.

What the numbers can’t fully capture is what’s happening on the ground. McAllen is genuinely, surprisingly large — clean streets, a full retail corridor, an airport serving every major hub in the country at load factors that would embarrass cities twice its size. Elizabeth Suarez, who has spent twenty-six years building the city’s economic infrastructure, describes a business community that shows up even when government doesn’t, a binational retail economy that draws Mexican nationals across the border to shop, and a municipal government that pays as it goes, carries no debt, and holds top financial ratings. The Dillard’s at the McAllen mall generates some of the highest sales per square foot in the entire chain — not because local incomes are high, but because of a binational economy that most national analysts don’t see.

Valeo, a French Fortune 500 automotive supplier, recently chose McAllen over Louisville and Detroit for its first North American expansion. The deciding factor wasn’t incentives. It was its workforce — young, shaped by the immigrant work ethic, with a median age of thirty.

The Index’s scores reflect institutional conditions as they exist in the data. What they can’t yet see is trajectory: whether the desalination project in planning gets funded before water stress becomes a water emergency; whether the CTE pipelines being built in McAllen’s high schools show up in the next iteration’s Automation Readiness scores; whether the governance discipline Suarez describes compounds the way other cities’ long bets have compounded.

Palm Springs: Optimized for a Climate That No Longer Exists

Palm Springs presents a different kind of warning — one about what happens when a city’s entire identity is built around conditions that are eroding.

The Coachella Valley sits atop a heavily managed underground aquifer that has been drawn down steadily for decades. Per-capita water consumption exceeds 200 gallons per day — among the highest in California, a state already in chronic water stress. Golf courses alone consume up to 120,000 acre-feet annually across the valley. Water must also be imported from the Colorado River, where ongoing disputes among seven states have called into question the river's long-term supply stability. The water authority suggests the aquifer will last another 50 to 100 years at current rates — but that projection assumes conditions that climate change is already disrupting. California has already called for a 40 percent reduction in water use by 2040.

The city is also super-aged. The median age approaches 60, and Palm Springs is not attracting younger residents in meaningful numbers, despite locals' observational assertions. The tourism economy that forms its economic core — centered on a handful of large anchor festivals and a substantial Canadian snowbird community — is increasingly fragile. When U.S.-Canada tensions escalated recently, a notable share of that seasonal community withdrew, reverberating across the city’s retail and hospitality sectors and spilling over into multiple industries. The tourist season that once ran nine months now runs closer to six.

Meanwhile, the sectors that drive Palm Springs’ economy — hotel management, guest services, hospitality logistics — are precisely the ones most exposed to AI-driven automation. The city has not built the workforce retraining pipelines or institutional frameworks that would help its residents navigate that transition.

Palm Springs is genuinely beautiful, and it has earned its reputation as one of America’s great getaways. But beauty is not a resilience strategy, and reputation is not a plan.

What These Cities Reveal

Brownsville, McAllen, and Palm Springs land where they do in the Index, not because they are broken, but because the conditions that have sustained them are under pressure — and the institutional capacity to respond hasn’t yet caught up. In the Valley, the asset is real but unprotected. In the desert, the foundation is eroding faster than the city has chosen to acknowledge.

The old metric — population growth for the Valley, tourism revenue for the desert — was never the whole story. It was the beginning of one. The Index exists to ask what comes next.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that.

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👶 DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE

1. U.S. Births Drop Below 3.6 Million — the Lowest Since Records Began

New federal data confirmed that the United States recorded fewer than 3.6 million births in 2025, continuing a nearly two-decade decline that has accelerated sharply under the combined pressure of falling fertility rates and the sharpest drop in immigration in at least 50 years. The CDC’s Brady Hamilton called the ongoing slide — a 23% decline in the general fertility rate since 2007 — a “long-running downward trend.” In raw terms, the country had roughly 710,000 fewer babies last year than in 2007, even though the overall population is larger.

Why It Matters: The U.S. is approaching a structural demographic shift that the CBO has already modeled: starting in 2030, deaths will outnumber births, meaning immigration will become the sole driver of population growth. With net migration now in negative territory for the first time in half a century (per White House data), and no policy consensus on reversing it, the demographic math is unforgiving — fewer workers, a strained Social Security base, and slower economic growth.

Sources: NPR (April 9, 2026) — https://www.npr.org/2026/04/09/nx-s1-5779627/birthrate-united-states-babies-immigration; PJ Media (April 9, 2026) — https://pjmedia.com/david-manney/2026/04/09/americas-birthrate-hits-another-record-low-with-bigger-consequences-n4951630

2. The Labor Participation Squeeze: 4.3 Million Fewer Workers by 2034

A new analysis from Indeed’s Hiring Lab, drawing on Bureau of Labor Statistics projections published this week, quantified what aging demographics mean for the U.S. workforce: roughly 4.3 million fewer workers by 2034 compared to today’s participation rates. The projected decline in labor force participation — from 62.6% to 61.1% over a decade — is being driven primarily by a collapse in youth participation. The population of 16- to 24-year-olds is expected to shrink by 6%, and their labor force participation rate is projected to fall even faster, by 10%.

Why It Matters: The “demographic squeeze” framing is important because it separates structural decline from cyclical recession dynamics. Even in a healthy economy, fewer young people are entering the workforce, and older workers are retiring at a faster clip. For policymakers, employers, and regional planners, this is a slow-moving but predictable constraint on growth — and one that immigration policy could either cushion or worsen.

Source: Indeed Hiring Lab (April 7, 2026) — https://www.hiringlab.org/2026/04/07/why-labor-force-participation-is-projected-to-fall-through-2034/

3. Courts Deliver a Bruising Week for Trump Immigration Enforcement

In a stretch of legal setbacks running April 3–5, federal courts repeatedly ruled against the administration’s immigration strategy. The Los Angeles Times cataloged it as a “bruising week” of immigration losses across multiple jurisdictions. The administration simultaneously faced scrutiny for ICE’s continued arrests of non-criminal immigrants — data released April 3 showed enforcement patterns unchanged despite official statements signaling a more targeted approach. Democrats also filed formal requests for inspector general investigations into third-country deportation policy, which has sent migrants to countries they have no connection to, including some who had never heard of the destination country.

Why It Matters: The legal battles are beginning to define limits on executive authority in immigration enforcement. The Supreme Court’s pending decision on birthright citizenship — expected in June — could have generational demographic consequences: Pew Research data cited this week showed roughly 260,000 of the ~320,000 babies born to undocumented mothers in 2023 would lose citizenship under the proposed limits.

Sources: America’s Voice (April 6, 2026) — https://americasvoice.org/blog/immigration-reform-news-april-6-2026/; Washington Post (April 3, 2026) — https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2026/04/03/despite-signaling-change-ice-still-arrests-many-immigrants-with-no-record/; NBC News (April 8, 2026) — https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/third-country-deportations-trump-democrats-rcna267098

🌍 CLIMATE CHANGE

4. A Super El Niño May Be Coming — and It Could Be the Strongest on Record

The week’s most significant climate development was a convergence of forecasts pointing toward a potentially historic El Niño event forming this summer and peaking in 2026–27. The European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) updated its seasonal model on April 6, showing a high probability of supercharged Pacific warming; ENSO expert Paul Roundy at SUNY Albany said there is “real potential for the strongest El Niño event in 140 years.” NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, while more cautious, confirmed a 62% chance of El Niño emerging by June–August, lasting through year-end. Colorado State University, releasing its 2026 Atlantic hurricane season forecast on April 9, cited El Niño as the dominant suppressing force and projected only 13 named storms — the fewest since 2019.

Why It Matters: A super El Niño layered on top of an already-warming baseline would likely push 2027 to the warmest year on record, triggering droughts in India, flooding in parts of South America and eastern Africa, and intensified heat across the southern U.S. For the Gulf Coast and southern Plains in particular — including Texas — forecasters this week flagged above-normal temperatures and unusual rainfall patterns for Summer 2026.

Sources: Washington Post (April 6, 2026) — https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2026/04/06/super-el-nino-chances-increasing-risks/; Yale Climate Connections (April 9, 2026) — https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2026/04/a-powerhouse-el-nino-event-appears-to-be-brewing-for-2026-27/; CNN (April 7, 2026) — https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/07/weather/super-el-nino-extreme-weather-climate-disaster; Newsweek (April 6, 2026) — https://www.newsweek.com/super-el-nino-predicted-what-means-us-weather-2026-11786847

5. MATS Lawsuit Challenges EPA’s Coal Plant Mercury Rollback

Environmental groups went to court this week to challenge the EPA’s February repeal of Biden-era amendments to the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), which had required coal-fired power plants to reduce emissions of brain-damaging mercury, arsenic, and lead. The original standards, first issued in 2012 and tightened in 2024, had driven a 90% reduction in mercury emissions from power plants since 2015. The repeal, finalized in February alongside the historic rescission of the EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding, now faces its first major legal test.

Why It Matters: This week’s lawsuit is one of several legal challenges working through federal courts against the administration’s sweeping climate and environmental rollbacks. Legal experts note that the Endangerment Finding repeal — described by Trump as “the single largest deregulatory action in American history” — rests on contested scientific claims that courts will now evaluate. The outcomes will determine whether the U.S. has any federal mechanism to regulate greenhouse gases for years to come.

Source: Earth.Org — This Week in Climate News, April 2026 Week 1 (April 5, 2026) — https://earth.org/this-week-in-climate-news-april-2026-week-1/

🤖 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

6. MIT Study: AI Is a Rising Tide, Not a Crashing Wave — But the Tide Is Coming

The most discussed AI story of the week was a landmark study from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, published April 3, that tested 41 large language models across more than 11,000 real workplace tasks drawn from the Labor Department’s occupational database. Human evaluators with field experience scored the outputs on a 1–9 scale. Finding: AI hits a “minimally sufficient” threshold (a score of 7) in roughly 65% of text-based tasks — up from about 50% in 2024. But the probability of achieving a “superior” score (a 9) never exceeded 50%, regardless of how long the model had to work. Crucially, the study describes AI’s advance as a “rising tide” — broad, gradual improvement across many task types — rather than sudden capability breakthroughs in specific fields. At current rates, AI could handle 80–95% of text-based tasks at a minimal standard by 2029.

Why It Matters: The study matters for three audiences at once. For workers, it’s partly reassuring — mass job displacement is years away and will be gradual, giving time to adapt. For employers, it’s a caution against over-indexing on full automation: companies that have tried (Deloitte, Klarna) have hit expensive quality walls. And for policymakers, it reframes the question from “will AI take jobs?” to “how do we manage the gradual shift of work toward AI oversight roles?” MIT Technology Review noted this week that Anthropic’s own researchers are publicly predicting an early-career “ladder breakdown” before AI’s upsides materialize.

Sources: Axios (April 2, 2026) — https://www.axios.com/2026/04/02/ai-jobs-mit-study-workforce-impact; Fortune (April 3, 2026) — https://fortune.com/2026/04/03/mit-finds-ai-mostly-produces-minimally-sufficient-work/; MIT Technology Review (April 6, 2026) — https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/06/1135187/the-one-piece-of-data-that-could-actually-shed-light-on-your-job-and-ai/

7. AI Governance Enters Enforcement Season: Tennessee, Georgia, Nebraska Move on Chatbot Laws

Multiple state legislatures moved AI bills toward enactment this week. Tennessee’s Governor Bill Lee signed a ban on AI therapy bots into law. Georgia’s SB 540 — a chatbot disclosure and child safety bill — advanced closer to the governor’s desk. Nebraska moved companion chatbot safety legislation through committee. The activity is part of a broader state-level wave this spring, as Colorado’s Artificial Intelligence Act (effective June 30, 2026) — the most comprehensive AI employment law in the country — looms on the horizon, and the Trump administration’s December executive order seeking to preempt state AI laws has so far produced little concrete federal action, with multiple required agency reports still unpublished past their deadlines.

Why It Matters: The federal-state tension on AI governance is becoming one of the most consequential policy fault lines of 2026. Employers operating across state lines now face a patchwork of disclosure, bias auditing, and appeals requirements for any AI used in employment decisions. Colorado’s law alone requires annual impact assessments for “high-risk” AI systems and a 90-day reporting window if algorithmic discrimination is discovered — a compliance burden that will reshape how companies deploy AI in hiring and HR.

Sources: Transparency Coalition AI Legislative Update (April 3, 2026) — https://www.transparencycoalition.ai/news/ai-legislative-update-april3-2026; Law and the Workplace (April 7, 2026) — https://www.lawandtheworkplace.com/2026/04/what-president-trumps-ai-executive-order-14365-means-for-employers/

8. USGS Unveils AI That Predicts Drought 90 Days Out

The United States Geological Survey this week unveiled an AI drought forecasting system capable of predicting drought conditions up to 90 days in advance with accuracy above 85% — compared to the 7–14-day reliable window of traditional methods. The system processes satellite imagery, soil moisture, precipitation patterns, and 150 years of historical climate data via advanced neural networks trained on over 10,000 monitoring stations.

Why It Matters: This is the intersection of all three beats in this issue. A tool that can predict droughts three months out is precisely the kind of climate adaptation technology that becomes more urgent as El Niño patterns intensify and demographic pressure on water-stressed regions grows. The American Southwest and southern Plains — already under pressure from migration-driven growth and warming temperatures — are exactly where 90-day drought forecasting has the highest practical value.

Source: Relvai — Best AI News April 2026 (April 4, 2026) — https://www.relvai.com/blog/best-ai-news-april-2026-developments-ranked.html

🔗 Cross-Beat Connection This Week

Three of this issue’s stories converge on the same pressure point: the American South and Gulf Coast. The demographic data shows the region is heavily dependent on immigration for population growth — and growth is slowing fast. The super El Niño forecasts put the Gulf Coast in the crosshairs for heat extremes and unusual rainfall this summer. And the USGS’s new AI drought tool is most relevant precisely to Texas, New Mexico, and the Southwest, where the demographic and climate pressures overlap. The region that may be most impacted by all three of this newsletter’s beats is the one least likely to appear in the national policy conversation.

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I’ve spent the past year building a framework for understanding what makes American cities thrive, along with Jaymes Cloninger and the team at Motivf. The Geography of Prosperity Index scores 250 urban areas across five dimensions: Population Renewal, Climate Resilience, Automation Readiness, Social Cohesion, and Governance & Foresight. I’ve written about the cities that score well — the places building something durable, something that might actually hold as we face compounding challenges. These are the cities with strong civic infrastructure, sensible planning, and institutions that seem to be working, not just today, but for tomorrow.

But a framework that only studies success isn’t a framework. It’s another “best cities” list, and we’ve had too many of those.

So this week, I’m on the road in three urban areas that sit near the bottom of the Index — places where the data tells a story of structural challenge, accumulated risk, and, in some cases, what the book calls “comfortable decline.” I’m here not to confirm what the numbers say, but to investigate them. The Index tells me what. The people who live here will help me understand why — and more importantly, whether the data is missing something our analysis can’t see.

Palm Springs, California ranks 244th out of 250 urban areas in the Index. Its weakest scores are in Governance & Foresight — near the bottom nationally — and in Climate Resilience, where extreme heat days and water stress weigh heavily against it. I can report that it is incredibly hot here, but at least it’s a “dry heat.” This is one of the most climate-exposed urban areas in the country, and the data suggest the local governance response has not kept pace with the risk. The Coachella Valley is stunning, and the appeal is obvious —- people have been escaping here for decades —- but escaping to a place and building a place that’s redolent are two very different things.

I want to understand who’s still choosing to come here, and who’s been here for generations — the folks who were born and raised here and have continued to call it home. Palm Springs has a median age of nearly 58 — it skews heavily toward retirees, and the locals I’ve spoken with so far are not losing sleep over the climate risk. I want to know whether that changes when the heat becomes impossible to ignore, or whether the desert's seductive beauty makes it easier to keep setting the long view aside. And I want to understand whether local leadership has the tools — and the political will — to act before the window closes.

McAllen, Texas ranks 247th, and Brownsville, Texas ranks 245th. Together, these two urban areas anchor the Rio Grande Valley, one of the most economically distressed regions in the country. Their scores on Social Cohesion and Automation Readiness are among the weakest in the entire Index — a troubling combination in a labor market that is being reshaped faster than almost any other in recent memory. Broadband access in Brownsville is the lowest of any urban area in the Index. Postsecondary attainment is well below the national average in both places, and these are structural deficits that are likely to compound over time.

And yet both cities are growing. People are moving to the Valley, though recent shifts in immigration policy could negatively impact these places more than almost any other urban areas in the country. Population Renewal scores for McAllen and Brownsville are actually among the stronger figures in their overall profiles, a fact that sits in tension with nearly everything else the Index says about these places, and that’s exactly why I’ll land there on Wednesday to investigate.

The truth is that the Index is built on aggregate data. It measures urban areas at scale, which means it misses the stories on the ground. It doesn’t capture the woman who moved from Houston to McAllen to be closer to her mother and found that the cost of living made her life better. It doesn’t capture the retired couple who chose Palm Springs because it is — still, for now — warm, walkable, and affordable relative to Los Angeles.

These stories don’t contradict the data. But they complicate it in ways that a responsible analysis has to account for, and one that I owe you.

I work analytically first, building the framework, running the numbers, and looking at what the data says. Then I get on a plane, a train, or in the car, because the numbers are the starting line of understanding what the future will bring, not the end of it.

The forthcoming book that emerges from this research — The Geography of Prosperity: A New Map of the American Dream — is built on the belief that we have to take both the analytical and the anecdotal seriously: the structural and the human. The cities near the top of the Index have a lot to teach us. But so do the cities near the bottom, and sometimes more.

I’ll be posting dispatches from the road this week on my social media channels. If you live in or near Palm Springs, McAllen, or Brownsville and you’re willing to talk, I’d genuinely like to hear from you. If we can’t meet up, we can always schedule a virtual meeting later on.

Are you a leader looking to navigate what’s next? Reach out today to book me to keynote your next event, follow me on social media, or learn more about the future of people, places, and prosperity.

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