Mamdani’s Grocery Plan Misses the Real Problem

Arguing that food retailers are scarce in some neighborhoods, New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has proposed city-owned grocery stores. But as Steven Malanga argues, Mamdani’s idea ignores the real problem: retailers have been fleeing the city in recent years because of crime, especially shoplifting. The problem mirrors an earlier one in the city’s history, when the crime and disorder of the 1970s and 1980s drove businesses to close stores and outlets in many neighborhoods.

Malanga chronicles how the city made a turnaround starting in the early 1990s, thanks to the public-safety gains achieved by Mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, which “unlocked whole neighborhoods, attracting both local entrepreneurs and national chains that had previously shunned the city.” But recent years have seen increased social disorder, reduced police enforcement, and misguided state bail reforms, and the city has lost 50,000 retail jobs since 2020.

Mamdani’s criminal-justice agenda, which includes deemphasizing so-called nonviolent offenses like shoplifting—the same thinking that set off the explosion of retail theft—will likely only make the problem worse.  

Between the Supreme Court striking down affirmative action and the Trump administration’s executive actions against elite institutions, many universities are retreating from racial preferences. But according to Neetu Arnold, a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute, several state laws continue to promote discrimination in higher education—and undermine the pursuit of equal opportunity.

Arnold reviews three state laws that enshrine race-based preferences in scholarship and grant programs. “Unless state legislators intervene,” she writes, “racial discrimination will continue in both public education and government.”

Socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani owes his victory in June’s Democratic primary to strong support from what Mark Mills calls the “laptop class” of middle-class knowledge workers, who worry that artificial intelligence will soon replace most of their jobs.

Are projections of AI’s “unprecedented” impact on human labor accurate? So far, Mills writes, “Few AI applications have yet achieved the kinds of transformative productivity leaps seen in past technological revolutions, which repeatedly delivered astonishing economic gains.”

This is not to say that AI won’t be transformative. “Disruption is inevitable,” Mills observes. “How we navigate this upheaval will be one of the defining challenges of our time.” At issue is whether the United States will trust market forces throughout the AI transition or resort to European-style controls of private enterprise.

And this is where the anxieties of the laptop class—with its disproportionate influence in policymaking and media—come in. “We should hope that the political impulses of the disaffected laptop class don’t dictate the course of AI,” Mills concludes. “The best way to nurture the next wave of innovation is not through central planning, but through the messy, decentralized dynamism of the market.”

The Trump administration has issued several executive orders to help rebuild America’s long-neglected nuclear energy capacity. While these actions are a good first step, Juzel Lloyd believes the White House needs to go further to ensure the United States remains competitive with its rivals.

Lloyd, an energy systems and policy researcher, outlines several issues—a shrinking workforce, scant infrastructure for storing spent fuel, and a sclerotic regulatory regime, among others—that prevent the domestic nuclear industry from scaling up production. “Trump’s recent executive orders represent a long-awaited step forward for nuclear power,” she writes, “but this is only the beginning.”

Read Lloyd’s piece, which analyzes the executive orders and proposes additional policies, here.

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