Maybe the subsidized transit is normal in europe, and universal childcare in some parts of europe (definetly not all of western europe), but this article is stretching when claiming state run grocery stores are normal.
Its also conveniently leaving out the policy ideas on reducing policing, and introducing mental health crisis workers which have been tried in the US (SF) and worked disastrously.
On policing, Urban Alchemy is the company that was contracted in SF. Having worked directly with Urban Alchemy for years in LA, their staff are severly underqualified and 95% of the time will do nothing once arriving on site. The most I've ever seen them do is break up a fight. Is doing nothing better than actively harming people and making the situation worse, as the police often do? Yes. Is it improving the situation? No.
Also, what is your definition of success? No first responder can prevent a crime from happening, all responders arrive after crime has occurred. Putting people into cages as the only option actually leads to worse outcomes for crime. And after decades and billions of dollars spent on the failed war on drugs, we know that is not a viable or successful approach. Part of the job these alternatives are supposed to be doing, is addressing root upstream causes of crime.
On the other hand, the alternative to policing pilot in Denver, Support Team Assistance Response (STAR), has been a wild success.
Per the article, they exist elsewhere, including elsewhere in the US. Most European cities don't typically really suffer from the problem that New York apparently has (where groceries in New York are apparently significantly more expensive than outside, and significant areas don't have proper supermarkets at all). If they did, in many countries there would absolutely be some sort of intervention.
>"State run grocery stores" perhaps aren't, but consumers' co-operatives [...] are
That's a pretty important difference you're eliding. "state run" is where most of the objection is. Coops get nowhere near the pushback (if any) that state run businesses (ie. "communism") get from Americans.
We've got plenty of state run businesses though, that's certainly normal as well. Just not grocery stores in particular, or at least I'm not aware of any around.
"state run" is also probably incorrect. AFAIK Mamdani will be the mayor of New York City, which is a city, not a state. Cities in Europe tend to run businesess outside of their core competency quite often. Is that not the case in the US?
So long as the money comes out of their state and local taxes, it's a worthwhile effort. Then once they've proven it, we can take it broader. To be honest, federal income taxes should go down and we should let the states and cities take a far more active role in tax collection and execution of policy.
There's obviously the failure mode of California where no town wants to have new homes and all of them want jobs, so perhaps the state is the right level for this.
Have most Western countries mostly given up on supply side policies for housing price stablisation as an option ? Odd given how much construction tech has improved.
Housing prices won't ever stabilize as long as land is a tradeable commodity that 'stores' value. If people can make money with man-in-the-middle techniques and cheap money (low interest rates), then they will, and this will drive the real-estate boom-bust cycle we have that runs on ~18 year cycle (last bust was late 2008, early 2009, prior bust was around 1990)
Become communist (or communist lite) and reserve land ownership to the state, lock land price to its productive capacity (as assessed by the state), mediate sales and usage taxes based on the same. Prevent resale/sublet between individuals. Allow transfer of control only from individual -> state -> individual.
Or use a regulatory approach where only the state can set the price of land, and the price is based on well-defined factory (productivity, proximity to population centers, population density, etc).
All value in an economy arises from real estate. Real estate (and the related businesses, including banking and lending) drive all economic activity in the world.
The walls of a house are already cheap to build with a low skill barrier etc. Land, foundation, windows, doors, roof, plumbing, appliances, yadda yadda add up, but everyone seems to focus on walls.
If you really want to drive down the cost of housing figure out cheap windows or start convincing people they don’t need nearly as many of them.
Don’t believe me? Compare the cost of a large 2 story prefab shed ~10-20$/sf without amenities like plumbing vs a house of similar size.
Even that could run you near 2,000$ on a modest new home ignoring the rebate.
But my point was more that price savings are easy to slip into the new construction pipeline for a wide range of homes. Similarly Argon helps r with insulation on day 1, but only lasts ~20 years on a window that may be in use for 100.
But I think they are "normal" left wing policies in Europe in the sense that parties in various countries/cities/regions have campaigned on them or implemented them.
But my understanding of some US media is these are depicted as borderline communism.
You are getting downvoted because that statement is false dichotomy. Left wing drug policies are about affordability and access. Nationalization is one extreme rare end of that but far more common are negotiations and regulations of prices.
This is funny because I remember having to pay a euro to take a leak at public train stations, and telling people that if they tried to implement this at Port Authority or Penn Station that people would lose their minds at the indignity.
Well, let me see, America's sitting president recently demolished one third of the historic presidential residence to build a ballroom, government workers are not being paid for a month, and government-employed thugs are snatching people off the street based on skin color.
I find it almost quaint that we are still concerned about whether buses should be free. (No, for the record I don't think buses should be free, but honestly, who cares? In today's America, any elected representative willing to give a middle finger to Trump is a step in the right direction. We can fix buses later.)
No, Europeans will recognize NYC's policies as normal, Zohran or not. Afterall, It's one of America's only European-ish cities.
NYC has subsidized world-class transit, rent-stabilization, high taxes and free-childcare. Pretty European.
Zohran is classic of case of 'the dose makes the poison'. Instead of subsidized buses, he wants free buses. Instead of rent-stabilization, he wants rent freezes. He wants to increase an already high tax rate in a city that's bleeding billionaires to Florida. NYC spends an eye-watering billion dollars on child-care subsidies, and Zohran's intended expansion will add billions more in costs.
NYC has European public services with American over-regulation. It would be untenable unless it were the world's richest city. Thankfully, it is the world's richest city. But, that doesn't mean that NYC's systems are efficient. It means that the city hopes to get away with policies (some forcefully imposed on it by the state) that no other place would because it assumes the money train will never end.
NYC is better run than American suburbia and California. But, NYC doesn't have California's infinite money glitch or the ruthless demographic segregation of suburbs. So, efficiencies must be found in policy making.
I think Abundance does a good job of summarizing the problems (over-regulation) and suggesting solutions (de-regulation). But for some reason, democratic socialists refuse to engage with the book earnestly.
Economic historian Trevor Jackson engaged with Abundance (together with eco-radical book Overshoot) in the September issue of the American left-ish publication NYRB, if you're curious about an earnest essay [0].
Since it's behind a paywall and the Overshoot book also gets reviewed, I picked out the most substantive quotes to highlight the actual critique:
> The evidentiary core of each chapter consists of a summary of the academic work of a few experts, usually economists, with frequent and lengthy quotations, as well as the occasional interview, whose conclusions are repeated uncritically. (To take one example, they quote without scrutiny the claim of Zoom CEO Eric Yuan that he is requiring employees to work in person in order to foster trust, rather than to impose discipline or to recoup the costs of commercial real estate.) They give no sense of the unruly literatures on their subjects, the ranges of disagreement, the difficult problems and mutually exclusive solutions. They claim to set an agenda for a new liberal political order, but what they have done is read some economists and argue, again, for deregulation.
> Klein and Thompson are opposed to redistribution, which they refer to as “parceling out the present” and which they claim is “not enough,” and instead of imagining “social insurance programs,” they propose that we make “technological advances.” [...] Klein and Thompson do not seem to realize that their proposals would also entail large-scale redistribution and that the ills they seek to cure are the result of inequality rather than regulation, because they do not seem to understand how prices and property work in capitalism. Translating higher profits to shorter workweeks would require a scale of redistribution that far outstrips anything Bernie Sanders has proposed. Claiming that profits will be shared because they are based on “the collective knowledge of humanity” opens up a wider set of imperatives than they realize. Most profit, labor, and technology is in some way built on the collective knowledge of humanity, in the sense that education, work, and knowledge are shared, social, and cumulative, and all workers are the result of collective social reproduction.
> They devote no serious thought to the basic political problem that homeowners are a large and powerful constituency, especially at the local level, who are likely to oppose (or already do oppose) the reforms Klein and Thompson suggest because driving down the cost of housing will drive down the value of homes. That constituency has produced undeniably regressive politics—which is a political fact to be reckoned with. So must the fact that homeowners organize to protect their asset prices because decades of American policy have used mortgages to substitute for the welfare state and wage growth. Any plausible agenda to drive down the cost of housing is going to require things like social housing, rent controls, and some mechanism to keep Blackstone and other private equity giants from buying up all the new housing and holding it empty until prices rise. Housing abundance calls for redistribution, in other words, as well as an aggressive state willing to confront property owners ranging from homeowner coalitions to asset managers.
> Klein and Thompson likewise seem unaware that technologies are owned by people. Despite an entire chapter on the problems of scaling technologies to mass consumption, they do not pause to consider that the self-driving cars, the lab-grown meat, and the solar electricity of their imagined future will be property, whose owners will have an interest in higher profits, higher rents, and higher prices. Klein and Thompson’s agenda is predicated on avoiding distributional conflicts by increasing supply so as to lower prices, yet they do not address the problem that lower prices are good for buyers but bad for sellers, and therefore are themselves a kind of distributional conflict, though one mediated through markets instead of politics. Their faith in markets is axiomatic. In passing, they describe “modern liberal politics” as an effort to “make universal” a set of “products and services.” Not justice, equality, dignity, or freedom, but products and services. This is the vision of the future that has attracted millions of dollars to remake the Democratic Party.
> Klein and Thompson do not cite but bring to mind John Maynard Keynes’s 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” which also imagined a future of abundance and shorter workweeks. Keynes predicted future GDP almost perfectly, but he thought economic growth would be widely shared, and his future included a solution to technological unemployment as well as the end of the accumulation of wealth as a source of social importance. Klein and Thompson do not consider why this future was superseded, and now, ninety-five years later, they set out to imagine it again, believing the past is a long trajectory of technological progress temporarily held back by regulation and social protections enacted by procedural liberals. For them, the relation of the past to the future is part of a story of overcoming, not a tragedy of lost possibilities. They are right that much of the blame for our current predicaments can be traced to the forms of liberal governance since the 1970s, but they are mistaken to blame, more specifically, its predilection for environmental regulation and building codes. Rather, it is the way liberal politicians have either acquiesced to or actively encouraged the rise of an unaccountable tech and finance oligarchy that now threatens the continued existence of democracy itself and that claims a monopoly on the capacity to imagine and create the future.
Ah, "Europeans." This is the Guardian pretending an editorial is a news story. I can find plenty of Europeans who recognize the world as flat and think that Mamdani is a Soviet agent.
That being said, I like all the named policies in this story, and of course we could have them if we have a moral country. Mamdani says a lot of random, stupid (other than these policies), trendy stuff though: the proof will be in what is done. Free public transportation would have a positive ripple effect across the entire country, along with city run groceries for food deserts.
The Guardian strikes again... as an European those policies are not "a given"... shockingly, we need to buy tickets to ride the bus, childcare is not usually free overall, and rent freezes don't work. It is also not so normal to claim to be a bona fide socialist (and Europe knows more than most what this means).
I think you can nitpick the detail but the broader point is still true. Yes, you still pay for the bus, but it’s heavily subsidised. Yes, you still pay for childcare but government subsidies make it wildly more affordable than it is today for New Yorkers.
The general pitch is “raise taxes to make life more affordable for all”. That’s an idea Europeans can identify with.
The bus (and the subway) in NYC are also already heavily subsidized. There is also already heavily subsidized childcare in NYC (3k, preK).
The article in general takes the approach of listing a small handful of (usually very small) polities that have one of Mamdani's proposed policies, and then claim that the full suite is therefore "normal" across Europe.
Based on some of the hysterical commenters yesterday, you'd think that Lenin himself is moving into the mayor's office. People's sense of scale and the Overton window are so wacky right now.
As a New Yorker it’s been exhausting. So many ill-informed takes, like “he wants rent control!!”, ignorant of the fact that NYC already has rent control and has in some form or another since WW2.
It turns out that wide swaths of the electorate are some combination of ignorant, uneducated, and low functioning with a tad of fear thrown in. It’s unfortunate.
Kentucky voters were wondering why polls weren’t open Tuesday to vote in these elections, for example, so someone being wildly misinformed about policy proposals or their mechanics would come as no surprise.
> We’re getting calls about polls being closed. They are closed because we do not have elections today. Kentucky votes next year. You cannot vote today in Kentucky for the mayor of New York City or the Governor of Virginia. Sorry. — Michael Adams, KY Secretary of State
> From September 24, 2023 to August 31, 2024, five MTA bus routes — Bx18A/B, B60, M116, Q4, and S46/96 — were fare-free. Passengers on these routes were able to ride without paying the fare.
> The purpose of the pilot was to study how fare-free service affects ridership, access, equity, and fare evasion. It was made possible thanks to funding from the New York State FY2024 budge
I realize this is difficult for you, but if you read my first response to you, it was talking about Europeans (which I am), and what they identify with, we as Europeans, have little say in how we are taxed.
To stop dancing around the obvious: I understand that you don’t want to pay taxes and are annoyed that you live in a society that has decided, via very regular democratic process, that people should pay taxes.
That doesn’t mean democracy is a failure, it just means your opinion is in the minority.
Americans have control over what they're taxed as long as they make 8 figures or more per year. The rich and corporations here are paying a share, but not as big of a share of their pie as those who make less. What people were looking to elect is someone who will treat those who can afford it the same way those who can't. Just like elections that went the other way the deciding factor is perception. If politicians would set a transparent flat tax, the elections could be about facts and not feels. Right now it feels like politicians are leveraging the pain of the many to get votes without making any change, because they're not generally affected financially y their policies.
Last time I spent a month in Norway I repeatedly had various residents explain to me that various things were the way they were "because we are a socialist country".
If they call themselves "socialist" then I will too.
That's OK! There are a lot of things you don't know. What's important is that you're learning.
Consider that your assumption that Norway is not socialist is incorrect. Just because Norway may not meet whatever definition the Heritage Foundation is telling you when you look it up, doesn't mean that Norway does not nevertheless use the word "Socialist" to describe their own government.
Hilarious comment. I am hoping it is tongue in cheek.
If not, it does highlight something worrying: Too many people either don't understand what "socialism" means or, perhaps even worse, think you can make it mean whatever you want it to mean.
1. The European model is either Democratic Socialism, or Social Democracy, depending who you ask.
2. The US government is essentially bankrupt, and has been spending far beyond its means for decades.
But countries are not households. Sovereign countries cannot run of money. But they can run out of confidence.
For a nation state, bankruptcy happens when its currency is no longer respected and essential imports become so expensive they cause hyperinflation.
By any objective measure, the US today is closer to that today than Europe. (It's mostly the fault of tariffs, but the cause doesn't matter.)
It's true the influence of neoliberal lobbying and opportunism by US corporates has reduced the effectiveness of welfare in the EU. But health and benefits are still higher, and the only country where insured health costs bankrupt 500,000 people a year is the US.
I'm European too and I second this, free transport, free childcare or rent freezes are not givens, they aren't even common.
All of those things _tend_ to be free only if you can't afford them, are a single mother/father. Average childcare in my area is 900 euros per month, which is a lot in Italy where average salary is twice than that.
Public one exists, getting in is hard.
As for him claiming to being a socialist I don't find anything wrong/strange with it. US really needs this kind of politicians too.
It seems like quite a few European countries have a social-democratic party which seems broadly similar to the idea of democratic socialism, which I think I recall is what Mamdani identified with in his acceptance speech.
No. Social democracy is not socialism and "democratic socialism" is just a weasel term to try to sell socialism... Ultimately socialism has to take people's freedoms away to be implemented.
NYC has time and again resisted calls to dismantle the current child care program, which costs the exchequer around $3b [0]. Mamdani's plan is to take the current child care program and make it "universal" at $6b.
> we need to buy tickets to ride the bus
Again, not without a precedent as MTA has ran some routes for free for many months. Besides, MTA sees 40%+ fare evasion, but MTA needs to pay the bills somehow, and Mamdani's proposal, which may go no where, is that rises in corporate tax will fill this ~$800m hole.
> rent freezes don't work
Depends on what the sought / desired outcome from rent regulation is. In Mamdani's case, it apparently is a stop-gap to control cost of living for the working class, until enough newer housing units can be built despite NIMBYs [1].
All his policies being in practice everywhere in Europe is a stretch, sure.
The point is that most of his policies are part of the normal churn of debate in a great many countries and are not seen as extreme, even if not implemented.
eg: "Free" public transport is a thing in Queensland, Australia.
Maybe the subsidized transit is normal in europe, and universal childcare in some parts of europe (definetly not all of western europe), but this article is stretching when claiming state run grocery stores are normal.
Its also conveniently leaving out the policy ideas on reducing policing, and introducing mental health crisis workers which have been tried in the US (SF) and worked disastrously.
17 states have government owned stores, it's common across the US. They sell liquor and in some states they also sell groceries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholic_beverage_control_sta...
On policing, Urban Alchemy is the company that was contracted in SF. Having worked directly with Urban Alchemy for years in LA, their staff are severly underqualified and 95% of the time will do nothing once arriving on site. The most I've ever seen them do is break up a fight. Is doing nothing better than actively harming people and making the situation worse, as the police often do? Yes. Is it improving the situation? No. Also, what is your definition of success? No first responder can prevent a crime from happening, all responders arrive after crime has occurred. Putting people into cages as the only option actually leads to worse outcomes for crime. And after decades and billions of dollars spent on the failed war on drugs, we know that is not a viable or successful approach. Part of the job these alternatives are supposed to be doing, is addressing root upstream causes of crime.
On the other hand, the alternative to policing pilot in Denver, Support Team Assistance Response (STAR), has been a wild success.
Per the article, they exist elsewhere, including elsewhere in the US. Most European cities don't typically really suffer from the problem that New York apparently has (where groceries in New York are apparently significantly more expensive than outside, and significant areas don't have proper supermarkets at all). If they did, in many countries there would absolutely be some sort of intervention.
> introducing mental health crisis workers which have been tried in the US (SF) and worked disastrously.
I've read it has worked very well, though not necessarily in SF in particular. Do you happen to remember where you read that?
It's hard to imagine why having mental health professionals address mental health problems would be a bad idea.
"State run grocery stores" perhaps aren't, but consumers' co-operatives and subsidized milk bars certainly are.
>"State run grocery stores" perhaps aren't, but consumers' co-operatives [...] are
That's a pretty important difference you're eliding. "state run" is where most of the objection is. Coops get nowhere near the pushback (if any) that state run businesses (ie. "communism") get from Americans.
We've got plenty of state run businesses though, that's certainly normal as well. Just not grocery stores in particular, or at least I'm not aware of any around.
"state run" is also probably incorrect. AFAIK Mamdani will be the mayor of New York City, which is a city, not a state. Cities in Europe tend to run businesess outside of their core competency quite often. Is that not the case in the US?
So long as the money comes out of their state and local taxes, it's a worthwhile effort. Then once they've proven it, we can take it broader. To be honest, federal income taxes should go down and we should let the states and cities take a far more active role in tax collection and execution of policy.
There's obviously the failure mode of California where no town wants to have new homes and all of them want jobs, so perhaps the state is the right level for this.
Have most Western countries mostly given up on supply side policies for housing price stablisation as an option ? Odd given how much construction tech has improved.
Housing prices won't ever stabilize as long as land is a tradeable commodity that 'stores' value. If people can make money with man-in-the-middle techniques and cheap money (low interest rates), then they will, and this will drive the real-estate boom-bust cycle we have that runs on ~18 year cycle (last bust was late 2008, early 2009, prior bust was around 1990)
Become communist (or communist lite) and reserve land ownership to the state, lock land price to its productive capacity (as assessed by the state), mediate sales and usage taxes based on the same. Prevent resale/sublet between individuals. Allow transfer of control only from individual -> state -> individual.
Or use a regulatory approach where only the state can set the price of land, and the price is based on well-defined factory (productivity, proximity to population centers, population density, etc).
All value in an economy arises from real estate. Real estate (and the related businesses, including banking and lending) drive all economic activity in the world.
May be in an AGI world, basic housing might actually be a part of UBI with some strict conditions, though not sure who will take the first step.
I'm getting AGI will not be benevolent. Humans aren't, and the things we create mirror that reality.
In the US at least I think as a policy matter there is still a commitment to building out of it in the medium to long term.
However it's not politically viable to advocate that as a policy solution without a stopgap policy to make progress in the interim.
You mean building more housing? NIMBYs won't allow housing prices to go down.
We could build strong, very energy efficient houses incredibly fast using Structural Insulated Panels.
The walls of a house are already cheap to build with a low skill barrier etc. Land, foundation, windows, doors, roof, plumbing, appliances, yadda yadda add up, but everyone seems to focus on walls.
If you really want to drive down the cost of housing figure out cheap windows or start convincing people they don’t need nearly as many of them.
Don’t believe me? Compare the cost of a large 2 story prefab shed ~10-20$/sf without amenities like plumbing vs a house of similar size.
This is pretty cheap for windows https://www.menards.com/main/doors-windows-millwork/windows/...
Even that could run you near 2,000$ on a modest new home ignoring the rebate.
But my point was more that price savings are easy to slip into the new construction pipeline for a wide range of homes. Similarly Argon helps r with insulation on day 1, but only lasts ~20 years on a window that may be in use for 100.
I'm a European and this is fake news
Also European, and I partly agree.
But I think they are "normal" left wing policies in Europe in the sense that parties in various countries/cities/regions have campaigned on them or implemented them.
But my understanding of some US media is these are depicted as borderline communism.
Rent freezes are a normal thing for left wing politicians to campaign for, but very rare to actually implement.
Can confirm have paid for the bus.
I'm European and I can confirm that Mamdani is very mild with his leftism.
People should remember that “left wing” isn’t things like negotiating drug prices, it’s nationalizing the drug companies.
You are getting downvoted because that statement is false dichotomy. Left wing drug policies are about affordability and access. Nationalization is one extreme rare end of that but far more common are negotiations and regulations of prices.
Absolutely.
Also shows you they had to search far and wide to find examples.
Free transport? Tallin, Estonia (presumably the only capital city), population: 450k
Government-run grocery stores? Turkey (barely even Europe), only accessible to the poor
Free childcare? Portugal, introduced in 2022, and hardly universal: while the program is open to all, places are limited and can be tough to access
Rent freeze? Established in Berlin in 2020, ruled unconstitutional in 2021.
In other words, garbage article and extremely clickbaity (and lying) title.
Belgrade has free transport since 2025.
Others have already quoted the milk bars all across Poland.
The Netherlands has childcare benefit for the poor that covers 96 % of the costs.
Many European countries have some forms of rent freeze or rent cap. Biggest recent example is Paris since 2019.
I think more examples will follow when my fellow Europeans are on their state mandated lunch break.
Childcare is free in France since forever.
Rent freeze is in place in many cities in France (although this is not exactly a "freeze" but rather a "regulation")
Free transport is in the talks (but don't hold your breath)
Childcare is free or heavily subsidized after paternal leave ends in many european countries.
Luxembourg has had free public transport since 2020.
This is funny because I remember having to pay a euro to take a leak at public train stations, and telling people that if they tried to implement this at Port Authority or Penn Station that people would lose their minds at the indignity.
Definitely not the same thing
Well, let me see, America's sitting president recently demolished one third of the historic presidential residence to build a ballroom, government workers are not being paid for a month, and government-employed thugs are snatching people off the street based on skin color.
I find it almost quaint that we are still concerned about whether buses should be free. (No, for the record I don't think buses should be free, but honestly, who cares? In today's America, any elected representative willing to give a middle finger to Trump is a step in the right direction. We can fix buses later.)
Why this was flagged? Censorship in HN is rampant
No, Europeans will recognize NYC's policies as normal, Zohran or not. Afterall, It's one of America's only European-ish cities.
NYC has subsidized world-class transit, rent-stabilization, high taxes and free-childcare. Pretty European.
Zohran is classic of case of 'the dose makes the poison'. Instead of subsidized buses, he wants free buses. Instead of rent-stabilization, he wants rent freezes. He wants to increase an already high tax rate in a city that's bleeding billionaires to Florida. NYC spends an eye-watering billion dollars on child-care subsidies, and Zohran's intended expansion will add billions more in costs.
NYC has European public services with American over-regulation. It would be untenable unless it were the world's richest city. Thankfully, it is the world's richest city. But, that doesn't mean that NYC's systems are efficient. It means that the city hopes to get away with policies (some forcefully imposed on it by the state) that no other place would because it assumes the money train will never end.
NYC is better run than American suburbia and California. But, NYC doesn't have California's infinite money glitch or the ruthless demographic segregation of suburbs. So, efficiencies must be found in policy making.
I think Abundance does a good job of summarizing the problems (over-regulation) and suggesting solutions (de-regulation). But for some reason, democratic socialists refuse to engage with the book earnestly.
>Abundance
Economic historian Trevor Jackson engaged with Abundance (together with eco-radical book Overshoot) in the September issue of the American left-ish publication NYRB, if you're curious about an earnest essay [0].
Since it's behind a paywall and the Overshoot book also gets reviewed, I picked out the most substantive quotes to highlight the actual critique:
> The evidentiary core of each chapter consists of a summary of the academic work of a few experts, usually economists, with frequent and lengthy quotations, as well as the occasional interview, whose conclusions are repeated uncritically. (To take one example, they quote without scrutiny the claim of Zoom CEO Eric Yuan that he is requiring employees to work in person in order to foster trust, rather than to impose discipline or to recoup the costs of commercial real estate.) They give no sense of the unruly literatures on their subjects, the ranges of disagreement, the difficult problems and mutually exclusive solutions. They claim to set an agenda for a new liberal political order, but what they have done is read some economists and argue, again, for deregulation.
> Klein and Thompson are opposed to redistribution, which they refer to as “parceling out the present” and which they claim is “not enough,” and instead of imagining “social insurance programs,” they propose that we make “technological advances.” [...] Klein and Thompson do not seem to realize that their proposals would also entail large-scale redistribution and that the ills they seek to cure are the result of inequality rather than regulation, because they do not seem to understand how prices and property work in capitalism. Translating higher profits to shorter workweeks would require a scale of redistribution that far outstrips anything Bernie Sanders has proposed. Claiming that profits will be shared because they are based on “the collective knowledge of humanity” opens up a wider set of imperatives than they realize. Most profit, labor, and technology is in some way built on the collective knowledge of humanity, in the sense that education, work, and knowledge are shared, social, and cumulative, and all workers are the result of collective social reproduction.
> They devote no serious thought to the basic political problem that homeowners are a large and powerful constituency, especially at the local level, who are likely to oppose (or already do oppose) the reforms Klein and Thompson suggest because driving down the cost of housing will drive down the value of homes. That constituency has produced undeniably regressive politics—which is a political fact to be reckoned with. So must the fact that homeowners organize to protect their asset prices because decades of American policy have used mortgages to substitute for the welfare state and wage growth. Any plausible agenda to drive down the cost of housing is going to require things like social housing, rent controls, and some mechanism to keep Blackstone and other private equity giants from buying up all the new housing and holding it empty until prices rise. Housing abundance calls for redistribution, in other words, as well as an aggressive state willing to confront property owners ranging from homeowner coalitions to asset managers.
> Klein and Thompson likewise seem unaware that technologies are owned by people. Despite an entire chapter on the problems of scaling technologies to mass consumption, they do not pause to consider that the self-driving cars, the lab-grown meat, and the solar electricity of their imagined future will be property, whose owners will have an interest in higher profits, higher rents, and higher prices. Klein and Thompson’s agenda is predicated on avoiding distributional conflicts by increasing supply so as to lower prices, yet they do not address the problem that lower prices are good for buyers but bad for sellers, and therefore are themselves a kind of distributional conflict, though one mediated through markets instead of politics. Their faith in markets is axiomatic. In passing, they describe “modern liberal politics” as an effort to “make universal” a set of “products and services.” Not justice, equality, dignity, or freedom, but products and services. This is the vision of the future that has attracted millions of dollars to remake the Democratic Party.
> Klein and Thompson do not cite but bring to mind John Maynard Keynes’s 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” which also imagined a future of abundance and shorter workweeks. Keynes predicted future GDP almost perfectly, but he thought economic growth would be widely shared, and his future included a solution to technological unemployment as well as the end of the accumulation of wealth as a source of social importance. Klein and Thompson do not consider why this future was superseded, and now, ninety-five years later, they set out to imagine it again, believing the past is a long trajectory of technological progress temporarily held back by regulation and social protections enacted by procedural liberals. For them, the relation of the past to the future is part of a story of overcoming, not a tragedy of lost possibilities. They are right that much of the blame for our current predicaments can be traced to the forms of liberal governance since the 1970s, but they are mistaken to blame, more specifically, its predilection for environmental regulation and building codes. Rather, it is the way liberal politicians have either acquiesced to or actively encouraged the rise of an unaccountable tech and finance oligarchy that now threatens the continued existence of democracy itself and that claims a monopoly on the capacity to imagine and create the future.
[0] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/09/25/how-to-blow-up-a...
Nope, absolutely not. Rent control has been a complete disaster in Europe - e.g. Stockholm.
A counterpoint: Vienna.
It has been just fine in Eastern Europe until deregulation happened few years ago. Then rent skyrocketed.
Europeans recognise MSNBC's reporting as 'normally biased and untrustworthy' and this is one fine example why this is so.
Ah, "Europeans." This is the Guardian pretending an editorial is a news story. I can find plenty of Europeans who recognize the world as flat and think that Mamdani is a Soviet agent.
That being said, I like all the named policies in this story, and of course we could have them if we have a moral country. Mamdani says a lot of random, stupid (other than these policies), trendy stuff though: the proof will be in what is done. Free public transportation would have a positive ripple effect across the entire country, along with city run groceries for food deserts.
The Guardian strikes again... as an European those policies are not "a given"... shockingly, we need to buy tickets to ride the bus, childcare is not usually free overall, and rent freezes don't work. It is also not so normal to claim to be a bona fide socialist (and Europe knows more than most what this means).
I think you can nitpick the detail but the broader point is still true. Yes, you still pay for the bus, but it’s heavily subsidised. Yes, you still pay for childcare but government subsidies make it wildly more affordable than it is today for New Yorkers.
The general pitch is “raise taxes to make life more affordable for all”. That’s an idea Europeans can identify with.
The bus (and the subway) in NYC are also already heavily subsidized. There is also already heavily subsidized childcare in NYC (3k, preK).
The article in general takes the approach of listing a small handful of (usually very small) polities that have one of Mamdani's proposed policies, and then claim that the full suite is therefore "normal" across Europe.
Based on some of the hysterical commenters yesterday, you'd think that Lenin himself is moving into the mayor's office. People's sense of scale and the Overton window are so wacky right now.
As a New Yorker it’s been exhausting. So many ill-informed takes, like “he wants rent control!!”, ignorant of the fact that NYC already has rent control and has in some form or another since WW2.
It turns out that wide swaths of the electorate are some combination of ignorant, uneducated, and low functioning with a tad of fear thrown in. It’s unfortunate.
Kentucky voters were wondering why polls weren’t open Tuesday to vote in these elections, for example, so someone being wildly misinformed about policy proposals or their mechanics would come as no surprise.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/kentucky-politician-had-...
https://x.com/KYSecState/status/1985734353515671601
> We’re getting calls about polls being closed. They are closed because we do not have elections today. Kentucky votes next year. You cannot vote today in Kentucky for the mayor of New York City or the Governor of Virginia. Sorry. — Michael Adams, KY Secretary of State
NYC also ran a free bus pilot program recently:
https://www.mta.info/guides/riding-the-bus/fare-free-bus-pil...
> From September 24, 2023 to August 31, 2024, five MTA bus routes — Bx18A/B, B60, M116, Q4, and S46/96 — were fare-free. Passengers on these routes were able to ride without paying the fare.
> The purpose of the pilot was to study how fare-free service affects ridership, access, equity, and fare evasion. It was made possible thanks to funding from the New York State FY2024 budge
> That’s an idea Europeans can identify with.
To a point, when we stop seeing a social benefit from our taxes, it starts to look more like theft.
This just in: some people don’t like paying taxes
You may want to review what caused the American revolution.
You don’t think it’s absurdly simplistic to say “taxes = revolution”?
It’s not like Mamdani snuck into power. Voters chose him specifically on the agenda he proposed. Why would they revolt?
If you have no say in how much you are taxed, that is taxation without representation.
Seems you completely missed the point.
But this isn't happening in this case - the people had an actual say with their vote. They chose this.
Yes Gregg, I was speaking as a European using the American revolution as an example, not strictly speaking about NYC right now, I hope that's clear
> If you have no say in how much you are taxed
Which New Yorkers do, because they just voted.
I guess I did miss the point because from where I’m standing this is all a big non sequitur.
“Mamdani seeks to raise taxes and spend the revenue on subsidizing services used by all. This is similar to an approach seen often in Europe”
“Did you know that if you tax people too much they revolt”
…okay?
I realize this is difficult for you, but if you read my first response to you, it was talking about Europeans (which I am), and what they identify with, we as Europeans, have little say in how we are taxed.
> we as Europeans, have little say in how we are taxed.
Do you not have elections?
You understand surely, that just because people vote, doesn't mean their representatives actually do anything that the people that voted want?
come on
To stop dancing around the obvious: I understand that you don’t want to pay taxes and are annoyed that you live in a society that has decided, via very regular democratic process, that people should pay taxes.
That doesn’t mean democracy is a failure, it just means your opinion is in the minority.
now you're just lying, blatantly.
My point was about the degree of taxation.
I believe the saying is "no taxation without representation", not "no taxation without personal approval".
representation is the will of the people, the approval of persons, so I fail to see the difference
I think you’ve been reading too much Thoreau.
I have never read anything by him
Americans have control over what they're taxed as long as they make 8 figures or more per year. The rich and corporations here are paying a share, but not as big of a share of their pie as those who make less. What people were looking to elect is someone who will treat those who can afford it the same way those who can't. Just like elections that went the other way the deciding factor is perception. If politicians would set a transparent flat tax, the elections could be about facts and not feels. Right now it feels like politicians are leveraging the pain of the many to get votes without making any change, because they're not generally affected financially y their policies.
I think you're right yes.
We may identify with it. Doesn't mean we'd like to, though.
Err, no, Europeans don't identify with that.
Europeans are not a single opinion entity that is left wing, don't work past 5pm and read Sartre at night, after the union meeting.
Hmm, the things he lists have very little to do with being leftist or rightist.
Moreover, modern rights are often economically more to the left than modern lefts are (see Meloni, PiS in Poland, etc).
I think a big issue some Americans have is that they think socialism is great because it is the European model.
1. Europe is not socialist (Eastern Europe and the USSR were). And, no, social-democracy is NOT socialism.
2. The welfare state is essentially bankrupt in many European countries.
3. Socialism cannot, ultimately be democratic.
My only sane interpretation for an election of a socialist candidate in 2025 is that this is a protest vote not an adhesion to socialism...
Europe is not a monolith.
Norwegians self identify as socialist for example.
> Norwegians self identify as socialist for example
Er.. that's not even remotely true
Last time I spent a month in Norway I repeatedly had various residents explain to me that various things were the way they were "because we are a socialist country".
If they call themselves "socialist" then I will too.
I don't how Norwegians self-identify but Norway is not socialist, so...
That's OK! There are a lot of things you don't know. What's important is that you're learning.
Consider that your assumption that Norway is not socialist is incorrect. Just because Norway may not meet whatever definition the Heritage Foundation is telling you when you look it up, doesn't mean that Norway does not nevertheless use the word "Socialist" to describe their own government.
Hilarious comment. I am hoping it is tongue in cheek.
If not, it does highlight something worrying: Too many people either don't understand what "socialism" means or, perhaps even worse, think you can make it mean whatever you want it to mean.
1. The European model is either Democratic Socialism, or Social Democracy, depending who you ask.
2. The US government is essentially bankrupt, and has been spending far beyond its means for decades.
But countries are not households. Sovereign countries cannot run of money. But they can run out of confidence.
For a nation state, bankruptcy happens when its currency is no longer respected and essential imports become so expensive they cause hyperinflation.
By any objective measure, the US today is closer to that today than Europe. (It's mostly the fault of tariffs, but the cause doesn't matter.)
It's true the influence of neoliberal lobbying and opportunism by US corporates has reduced the effectiveness of welfare in the EU. But health and benefits are still higher, and the only country where insured health costs bankrupt 500,000 people a year is the US.
I'm European too and I second this, free transport, free childcare or rent freezes are not givens, they aren't even common.
All of those things _tend_ to be free only if you can't afford them, are a single mother/father. Average childcare in my area is 900 euros per month, which is a lot in Italy where average salary is twice than that.
Public one exists, getting in is hard.
As for him claiming to being a socialist I don't find anything wrong/strange with it. US really needs this kind of politicians too.
It seems like quite a few European countries have a social-democratic party which seems broadly similar to the idea of democratic socialism, which I think I recall is what Mamdani identified with in his acceptance speech.
No. Social democracy is not socialism and "democratic socialism" is just a weasel term to try to sell socialism... Ultimately socialism has to take people's freedoms away to be implemented.
$2500/month is cheap childcare in NYC. $2K/m for a 1 bedroom is cheap. How much do those things cost in Aalborg or Malmö or Wurzburg?
> childcare is not usually free overall
NYC has time and again resisted calls to dismantle the current child care program, which costs the exchequer around $3b [0]. Mamdani's plan is to take the current child care program and make it "universal" at $6b.
> we need to buy tickets to ride the bus
Again, not without a precedent as MTA has ran some routes for free for many months. Besides, MTA sees 40%+ fare evasion, but MTA needs to pay the bills somehow, and Mamdani's proposal, which may go no where, is that rises in corporate tax will fill this ~$800m hole.
> rent freezes don't work
Depends on what the sought / desired outcome from rent regulation is. In Mamdani's case, it apparently is a stop-gap to control cost of living for the working class, until enough newer housing units can be built despite NIMBYs [1].
[0] https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/spotlight-nycs-publicly-...
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/11/mamdani-...
All his policies being in practice everywhere in Europe is a stretch, sure.
The point is that most of his policies are part of the normal churn of debate in a great many countries and are not seen as extreme, even if not implemented.
eg: "Free" public transport is a thing in Queensland, Australia.
( Okay, it's actually 50 cent flat rate fares: https://translink.com.au/tickets-and-fares/50-cent-fares .. so lets call that 'nominal' )
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