“Searching for the American Dream? Go to Canada”

My buddy Parag Khanna blew my cover in the The Globe and Mail:

In the early 2010s, my colleague Greg Lindsay and I set out to answer the question, “Where will you live in 2050?” The answer could simply have been “high-tech cities,” but which ones? Some will be sites of predatory surveillance while others will allow residents to preserve some privacy. Some will be in areas resilient to climate change, while others may well have been submerged by then. Some will have thriving service economies and lively culture, while others will have become the discarded “factory towns” such as those littered across Michigan. As we scanned the world for geographies that offer abundant freshwater, progressive governance, and could attract talent to innovative industries, we decided on … Michigan.

More broadly, we pointed to the emergence of a “New North,” a collection of geographies such as the Great Lakes region and Scandinavia that are making significant investments in renewable energy, food production and economic diversification. Not too long after living through Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Greg and his family moved from New York to Montreal.

Greg’s relocation to Canada is far from unique, and it represents a bet not only on Canada’s climate resilience but also its physical and economic mobility. These are the tenets of what used to be called the “American Dream.”

Read the whole thing.