I scraped 27,662 comments from six videos discussing AI from the Senator’s YouTube channel, including his widely viewed conversation with Claude. I then classified the comments using the message batches API with Claude Sonnet, across a series of sentiment and thematic labels. A supplementary keyword based classifier was then applied to identify pop culture references. Of course, none of this is easily generalizable to the public at large, but it at least gives some idea of how Sanders’ audience is responding. Most comments are noise, but let’s see if we can find some interesting takeaways in the data.

“We got Bernie speaking to Claude before GTA 6” (1,900 likes)

1] Political content:

20.9% of the comments were purely partisan or political, mostly straightforward condemnations of the GOP or praising of Sanders, such as

“Bernie was mentioned in the epstein files... as being hated!!! If hes hated by those monsters then he is a great guy. I wish he won” (4,200 likes)

2] Safety concerns:

16.5% of the comments were classified as expressing existential safety concerns. Given the content of the videos, this is perhaps unsurprising, and AI-optimist comments (7.8%), also received low engagement rates (2.5 likes on average vs. 10.2 for the whole sample.

“Claude’s literally saying ‘You need to stop me. But you won’t.’” (4,300 likes)

"...And it gives me cold chills how AIs mimic us, being fed off vast loads our data, but they aren't really like us at all. It's a mask. (109 likes)

3] Changed views:

Vanishingly few of the comments had real epistemic shifts, with 90 updating in favor of being more concerned and 6 less concerned, YouTube comments are probably not the place to look for self-reflection, but these comments are 5x as long as the dataset average. None of the videos seemed to trigger more changed views than any other.

there might be a danger that a stupid AI granted a lot of permissions might start running a dystopian script. I didn't think this before watching this video, but it seems possible that something like that could actually happen." (6 likes)

4] Calls for Regulation:

Of 2,655 pro-regulation comments, 51% are vague without specifics, simple calls to action, and only 17.1% specifically called for a pause, ban or moratorium. While only 2% of commenters mentioned UBI, almost all who did (89.3%) also mentioned job loss. Unexpectedly, the concern that provides the strongest bridge to demands for regulation was privacy (2.98x). I’m skeptical that this generalizes, and would worry about privacy regulations providing no real gain on safety or egalitarianism.

“We need to understand yesterday that these AI companies will not regulate themselves. Until they are given guardrails they will do whatever they can in order to get a competitive advantage” (784 likes)

“The development of AI must become the central political question of all political debates, the one on which people vote.” (141 likes)

5] Terminator

By far the most common cultural reference was the Terminator, or Skynet, appearing in 296 comments, with The Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Black Mirror all appearing 50-100 times. I continue to think that the simple Skynet analogy is underrated by AI safety advocates in its efficacy. 59% of pop-culture comments co-occurred with the existential risk classification, many people’s mental model of the technology is a movie where the robot literally kills you!

Shout out to the 7 commenters who mentioned Roko’s Basilisk.

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Should the left continue in this epistemically flawed equilibrium and fail to take advantage of the situation, the space of bad worlds combining political outcomes with rapid capabilities is vast:

1. A Vance administration utilizing the national security state to select a national champion under executive control, resulting in oligarchic concentration of power with no precedent, enforcing a set of norms and values antithetical to human flourishing.

2. A Newsom administration, unwilling to take a hard line against the lab CEOs, gradually ceding power to the labs as more and more jobs and more and more government functions are automated by the models.

3. Or either, unable to enforce a safety-first regulatory regime or embark on the scale of a national project required to solve the technical problem of alignment, resulting in catastrophic loss of control.

4. Or a left-wing administration that simply bans new data center construction or AI deployment in the workforce, permitting China to advance ahead and develop potentially unsafe and unaligned AI systems.

However, if the left simply recognizes the world around them and locks in, the window for wildly good, flourishing futures crashes open. We have an opportunity to embark upon the central and noble task of our politics: freeing the human hand from the plow. A world of abundance and freedom is there for the taking.

The labs and VCs have become quite used to their enemies being unable to effectively politically mobilize or communicate, content to post about reducing the rest of the population to a permanent underclass, lobbying against any and all regulations, and ridiculing the left for not understanding that they are transforming the world. I think that if the left wakes up, rises to the occasion, and mobilizes the American population against their displacement and immiseration, they will have wished they had embarked on a more cooperative course.

This was a timed post, with the draft to be deleted if not completed by the end of a 1-hour timer. Please excuse all derelictions of sourcing and quality, but I felt I needed to get these thoughts out without obsessing over details. I have pretty low confidence in many of the claims above and seek to discuss them extensively in the future.

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Stone’s arguments are quite poor critiques of a decades-long system of stifling, terroristic white supremacy, nearly entirely relying on crude peer comparisons and even conceding that White minority rule may have been “optimal for growth.” Laird’s post proceeds without a modicum of causal inference. His arguments consist of some statements about national IQ, a misreading of the history of Botswana, an evidence-less claim about the impact of sanctions, some nonsense peer comparisons, and the fact that South Africa has had a higher murder rate in recent years.

Aren’t we supposed to be economists here? Aren’t we supposed to use something a little more substantive, a little more scientific in our argumentation than “erm don’t you see graph go down.” Do neither of these people, or for that matter any of the many intellectuals who have come out in favor of Apartheid revisionism have any curiosity about any evidence beyond the most basic, reflexive puttering about?

I do! Apartheid was definitely bad, and the historical political economy research gives us reasons why even outside of basic commitments to human ethical equality.

Of course, if you have an ethical presumption of liberty, you will immediately see that Apartheid is impermissible. I highly doubt that such arguments would appeal to anyone with ‘Apartheid was good’ as a prior, so I will be focusing on the economic performance of the Apartheid regime and other utilitarian considerations.

In economics we have methods beyond pointing a single graph for determining causal inference, development economics has quite different answers to the problems of economic growth than the reactionaries would have you believe. Their error is the same as the Marxists: the crude assumption that capitalist economies best perform under conditions of elite institutional domination. This is a rather strange claim in a world in which Acemoglu and Robinson are Nobel prize winners, or one in which the evidence suggests democracies outperform autocracies.

Long-run prosperity depends on inclusive economic institutions - rules that secure property rights ,enable market entry, and distribute opportunity. These institutions emerge only when political power is broadly held and the state is strong, otherwise elites create extractive institutions to maximize rents, stifling growth. With secure property rights, higher investment in capital - especially human capital, better resource allocation, and openness to creative destruction, democratic states with high capacity experience more rapid economic growth and technological progress. 

Minority rule in South Africa preserved a set of inefficient, extractive economic institutions that led South Africa’s economy to underperform. Labor market institutions were enormously constrained (in any other context our libertarian interlocutor would likely identify these regulations as inefficient, a curious error!). The white-only job reservation barred Black and Colored workers from skilled posts, forcing firms to overpay scarce White artisans or operate below efficient scale. Pass laws and contract policing generated monopsony power in the Black labor market, driving real wages in core industries well below efficient equilibrium. 

The Bantustans that characterized Apartheid outside of White plurality areas created massive spatial immobility for workers. Some 13 million people were confined to ‘homelands’, an inefficiency that persists in ~17% lower wages than observationally similar workers a decade following the end of Apartheid. All of these factors contributed to a labor market that was anything but free, causing underemployment, artificially low wages for Blacks, and subsidized wages for White workers. Preventing migration to the Cape prevented firms from achieving agglomeration economies, reducing national output.

Racialized over-regulation of the labor market is only one component of the Apartheid regime’s extractive economy. To support buffer zones around the homelands, Pretoria subsidized factories in border regions and imposed burdensome location permits on firms. Studies document higher transport costs, infrastructure duplication, and other inefficiencies in these areas. The mercantilism of the regime shielded White-owned heavy industry from international competition, locking in obsolete technologies. 

Maintaining Apartheid was wasteful. Apartheid was not simply widespread taste-based discrimination, a strict system of racial segregation, effectively a deep system of individualized, firm-level, and spatial regulations on autonomy that again, in any other context, a libertarian would denounce as wasteful and authoritarian. There were significant ‘Guard Labor’ costs in enforcing the regime, including additional police, military patrols, and bureaucrats, which consumed an increasing share of national income. Of course, this does not even include the disastrous and costly military interventions of the Apartheid regime, in Mozambique, Angola, Botswana, and Zambia, all motivated to strengthen the position of Apartheid and often targeting pro-democracy forces. By 1990, defence consumed 13% of government spending and required the conscription of White South Africans. These costs crowded out private investment and consumed tax revenue that could have been used for education, infrastructure, and so on.

Then, we can consider the under-investment in the human capital of the Black and Colored population. Blacks were excluded from quality schooling and apprenticeships, meaning that the White workforce could not expand quickly enough after mining revenues began to fall. The resulting bottleneck depressed total factor productivity growth and forced costly and inefficient capital substitution. There was also chronic under-investment in the Colored population. The fact that Blacks in the Bantustans were restricted from becoming anything other than unskilled workers combined with the industrial policy of the regime which concentrated manufacturing requiring semi-skilled labor in border areas. Firms then inefficiently substituted capital and survived behind tariff walls, dragging down labor productivity. Growth accounting shows that TFP peaked in 1970, and then fell for two decades after as skill bottlenecks built. This arrangement also harmed White workers, with one study demonstrating that each additional year of Colored and Black education raises White wages as the economy as a whole is able to make Pareto improvements. These artificially low wages undermined domestic demand and intensified need for guard-labor as immenseration intensified - a vicious cycle. 

All of these factors provide plausible mechanisms for the results of the best counterfactual analyses of the South African economy, which find that free labor markets alone would have generated a 5-10% increase in GDP from baseline. We can thus be reasonably confident that Apartheid South Africa, which possessed a dense network of inefficient economic institutions, had lower economic growth than a counterfactual South Africa with inclusive institutions predicated on democratic majority rule. A comparative study demonstrates that booming mineral revenues obscured this under-performance, but after the softening of commodity prices in the 1980s, the trend in GDP per capita growth turned negative. It is not simply enough to point at South Africa’s economic growth during the period and establish a causal relationship between that growth and Apartheid - otherwise a leftist would be able to do the same with the Soviet Union. The evidence suggests instead that South Africa’s economy grew despite, not because of, its peculiar institutions. Of course, none of the above analysis fully includes the disutility of Black South Africans. The Apartheid government imposed a regime of racial exploitation and segregation through ruthless terrorism. Black wages were artificially suppressed, resulting in lower living standards.

Why did these institutions persist for so long? This is a textbook case of elite capture. The state was an instrument to secure the interests of White, especially Boer, organized labor, farmers, and rural capital. The central mechanism of Afrikaner state capture was state-owned enterprises that controlled state industries and provided patronage to Boers. In many cases, these firms were created explicitly to bypass the power of the Anglo business class. The state sector became a mechanism for rent-seeking. Alongside the institutions discussed above, Afrikaners were able to use state enterprises accrue extractive rents and capture national income that could have been directed to investment. This rent-seeking behavior was unsustainable. As economic growth contracted and the White population sought gains from liberalization, it became more efficient for many Whites to abandon Apartheid.

Apartheid collapsed under its own weight. It was no longer even in the interests of the White population, as evidenced by public choice models of White political behavior. Sanctions had minimal effect on the South African economy, as was noted at the time. Apartheid South Africa’s agricultural and manufacturing sectors were already under the protectionist umbrella of the state’s tariff and subsidy policy and had minimal impacts on the viability of the regime. Rather, democratization was the result of the alignment of incentives between the Black majority and large sections of the White middle class and business, which sought to be free from the restrictive economic institutions that characterized Apartheid. In their own economic self-interest, South Africans decided to abolish Apartheid and democratize, but this process did not result in a dramatically dynamic society.

Democratization saw the persistence of the White elite in South African society, now joined by a substantial Black and Colored cohort. Inequality, which suppresses economic growth, and elite capture of institutions has prevented the democratic transition from truly emancipating the South African people - and the South African economy. Dismantling coercive labor institutions did increase wages, and economic outcomes in the 21st Century for a democratic South Africa have likely been better than the counterfactual continuation of a zombie Apartheid regime, but the country is still saddled with inefficient policies that are maintained for the benefit of an extractive elite. In the former Bantustans, the traditional elite maintains repressive and inegalitarian rule. Organized crime syndicates have captured many elements of the state, which has crucially impacted the electricity grid. The history of South Africa following Apartheid has been characterized by a dearth of state capacity, as seen in the murder rate, blackouts, and so on. 

This is still obviously a society with significant frictions to economic growth, but much of this state failure is a result of drastic inequality - a holdover from Apartheid. Even after democratization, the South African state is predominantly captured by misaligned elites whose objective is not to optimize for progress. The solution to this problem is deeper liberalization and land reform - not the restoration of the previous inefficient system! 

I have noticed a recent turn in small sections of the Progress Studies-adjacent space towards a certain fetish for autocracy. I urge libertarians and classical liberals to resist the temptation of this path. At the end of that road is not a dynamic, high-growth equilibrium defended by an enlightened monarch or concentrated political class. The only things you will find upon abandoning egalitarian democracy are stagnation, shanty towns, and the barrel of a gun.

As a post-script, here are responses to the specific arguments advanced by Laird. None of these arguments are particularly plausible.

1] “Mauritians are not Africans”

This is a response to Stone’s argument re: IQ in his disagreement with Deep Left Analysis. As national IQ is not strongly associated with economic growth and it doesn’t respond to the question of whether or not Apartheid was “good”, this argument has no bearing on my own.

2] “Botswana did not have racial apartheid laws, but the black majority was not allowed to govern.”

Botswana was not an autocracy, but a dominant-party democracy with competitive elections. Though Botswana’s democracy was and is relatively shallow, the black majority is indisputably exercising a degree of popular sovereignty. The country holds local popular assemblies that check the authority of chiefs and allow for public contribution to policy making. The state protects basic liberties such as freedom of speech and assembly, and has an independent judiciary and other constitutional constraints. The very fact that Botswana experienced electoral turnover after the ruling party attempted to further centralize power is evidence of the reality of Botswana's inclusive institutional arrangements. Botswana’s government is not maximally democratic, but it is undeniably characterized by inclusive institutions - certainly enough to demonstrate that African self-rule does not preclude economic growth.

The first ruler of Botswana was educated at the London School of Economics and did implement a classical liberal economic agenda, but contrary to Laird’s claim that this program was against the will of the black majority - it is plausible that the BDP was implementing a program with majoritarian support. The party’s base was smallholders, the nationalist middle classes, traditional elites, and the rural bourgeoisie. The BDP’s program of guaranteed property rights and liberal democratic norms, as well as state support for the rural economy, seems to at first glance be similar to the programs of many agrarian-liberal political parties with similar bases. It is actually not uncommon for the rural poor, especially smallholders, to vote for classical liberal policies. If anything, this was the original base of liberal parties in Europe. My confidence in this claim is pretty low though and I would definitely have to pick up a real book on Botswana before having any more confidence in it. 

3] “Sanctions hurt South Africa’s economy. The sanctions were lifted after 1990.”

I discuss sanctions above, but it is in this section where Laird dismisses a study (Bhattacharya and Lowenberg 2009) by claiming that “it’s generally not worth reading a study if the author would have lost his friends and damaged his career had he found a different result.” This is an insane epistemology that would conclude that all research supporting any salient consensus view is illegitimate. If Laird has actual methodological critiques of the study, I would love to hear them!

4] “South Africa’s performance compared to other countries in the region.”

South Africa’s economy began declining in the 1980s during the global downturn, which in South Africa, like other countries with unfree labor institutions (Yugoslavia, Sweden, etc.) experienced declining factor productivity and chronic underemployment. South Africa’s underperformance begins during the Apartheid regime, when compared to its neighbors and to counterfactuals.

5] “Murder”

The high murder rate in South Africa is the result of state capacity failures, rise of organized crime, and drastic inequality and unemployment. Again, these are symptoms of extractive institutions, not of democratic majority rule. It is also unclear to me what the causal argument here is supposed to be? 1] Crime was lower before the end of Apartheid, thus 2] Apartheid prevented crime - is an error of logic so basic as to be obviously made in bad faith.

Q.E.D.

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Andrew Cuomo will likely be the next mayor of New York City. This is unfortunate, as he appears to be uninterested in governing and is instead running to pursue a four-year revenge tour. The idea that many New York Democratic luminaries are certain that the man who was Governor for a decade is the optimal candidate for a city rapidly losing population and experiencing an acute cost of living crisis is quite strange to me!

Turning to the opposition, Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander both have programs promising to make the city more affordable for its working class residents. Some of these proposals, such as Lander’s (insufficient) housing plan and Mamdani’s advocacy for the elimination of parking minimums, are attractive. There is one plank of the Mamdani campaign that I am enormously skeptical of: his proposal to open city-owned grocery stores. While I am sympathetic towards an agenda of a cornucopia of public options in housing, transportation, banking, and broadband, city-owned grocery stores are likely bad policy and would fail to efficiently address the concerns they are intended to ameliorate. 

While Mamdani’s plan is not particularly detailed, he has made the rough outline clear. The city would open grocery stores on city-land, one in each borough. These stores would, according to the campaign, be able to sell groceries at reduced prices due to a lack of property taxes, rent, and profit, passing on savings to consumers and lowering the market price of food. Advocates of a municipal public option for groceries have provided two justifications for the intervention: food deserts and grocery costs. Below, I will discuss these two arguments in detail.

Justification #1: Municipal grocery stores would address urban food deserts.

Though not the core of Mamdami’s rhetoric, other efforts to establish public grocers have emphasized serving areas without convenient access to food retail. Food deserts, which can be defined as an urban tract with at least 500 people, or 33% of the population, living more than 1 mile from the nearest supermarket, supercenter, or large grocery store, are plausibly a problem for which municipal grocery stores would be a direct solution. 

The literature on the health impacts of food deserts is spotty. While communities considered food deserts have higher rates of chronic diseases, I am very skeptical of the causal relationship here. Several studies have shown that interventions to expand access to healthy food, such as the opening of a new supermarket, had no impact on BMI or other health outcomes in food deserts. There is little evidence that food access drives negative health outcomes for low-income people and other risk factors associated with poverty drive unequal health outcomes. 

Nutritional inequality is primarily driven by demand-side differences driven by costs of healthy food, time for preparation, and differential tastes. The most sophisticated study on this topic concludes that differential local supermarket density explains no more than 1.5% of the difference in eating between high and low-income households, but that a 15% increase in the SNAP budget would increase low-income household’s healthy eating to the level of high-income households. Why might food deserts not be particularly harmful? American consumers appear to have high willingness-to-travel, and most people living more than 1-mile from the nearest supermarket simply drive to said supermarket. Of course, for those with mobility impairments the ability to travel does not ameliorate a lack of access, but neither would a closer supermarket. 

Regardless, should I be misreading the evidence on the harms of food deserts, food deserts are driven by factors that can be addressed with policy interventions other than public grocers, at lower cost. 

The first narrative explaining the existence of food deserts comes from antitrust advocates, who argue that dollar-stores, scorched-earth covenants preventing other grocers from entering an area, and other noncompetitive arrangements drive abandonment of low-income areas by food retailers. They point to the lack of enforcement of the Robinson-Patman Act, which prohibited price discrimination by suppliers, as a reason why small, independent grocers have collapsed. I do not see how this explanation accounts for why small grocers protected from price-discrimination and illegal covenants would be able to sustainably earn profit in an area where a supermarket, benefiting from economies of scale, would be unable to. However, I would love to see some policy experimentation on this front, and would be convinced by enough evidence that antitrust enforcement may revitalize areas with low access to food retail.

In my reading of the evidence, urban food deserts are overwhelmingly a problem of housing, land use, and transport. Urban sprawl is strongly associated with risk of low access to food retail. This is initiative: density provides the demand for supermarkets; more consumers in a given tract means a higher likelihood that such an enterprise can remain profitable. The other cause of a plausible under-supply of urban supermarkets is high rents, which squeeze the already tiny profit margins of grocers and make operating a supermarket non-viable in low-income, but high-rent areas. 

This point becomes obvious when we glance at the food deserts in New York City itself. According to the USDA Food Access Research Atlas, there is not a single census tract in New York City that is both low income and is more than 1 mile from the nearest supermarket. Note that this categorization of food desert excludes access to ethnic markets, bodegas and corner stores, dollar stores - which now often carry fresh produce, farmers markets, or any other food retail location. 

When we narrow the search to census tracts that are both low-income and more than ½ mile from a supermarket, 31 census tracts appear. 12 are in Staten Island, and are thus overwhelmingly in R1, R2, R3, R4, and R5 zoning districts, that is, in single family and low-density neighborhoods. The same is true with a small census tract in Fort Hamilton, the three tracts in Canarsie, another in Rockaway Beach, and so on. The food desert in South Ozone Park is almost entirely Resorts World New York City and the Aqueduct Race Track, with the remainder R4 zoning. In the Bronx, Hunts Point has often been labeled a food desert, and ironically so given the presence of the Hunts Points Market, the largest food producer in the city. It thus seems worth noting that most of the neighborhood is zoned for heavy industry or light industry! 

As we will return to later, it is far too difficult to build supermarkets in light industry districts in New York City. Up-zoning neighborhoods with low food retail access is the lowest-cost intervention to lower the cost to open a supermarket, and should be attempted before engaging in the costly step of opening a public grocer.

Municipally-owned grocery stores also seem like a poor solution to this problem on their own terms. While they promise to address food deserts directly by opening a store in the areas most in need, this faces the a priori observation that private supermarkets have already identified such locations as being unsuitable for food retail. Furthermore, it is unclear to me that there are viable city-owned lands for siting a supermarket also in areas in need of food retail, or that a lack of demand would not simply nullify any possible benefits a public grocer could have on nutritional outcomes. 

Given the lack of evidence that food deserts have negative health impacts, and the much more efficient solution of upzoning the neighborhoods considered to have low access to food retail, public grocery stores will need to find another raison d'etre. 

Justification #2: Municipal grocery stores would lower grocery prices.

The central argument for municipal grocery stores from Mamdani’s campaign is that a public option for groceries would lower grocery prices. From 2019 to 2023, the consumer price index for food at home increased 25%, higher than inflation on the core goods index. Grocery prices are particularly salient to consumers, as similarly to gas prices consumers encounter price increases more frequently than for other goods and thus experience inflation more vividly. In order for public grocers to reduce prices efficiently, the rise in the cost of groceries must be driven by concentrated market power, or public grocers must be able to provide groceries at lower cost than private supermarkets. The campaign has made both arguments. 

First, let’s address the market power argument. The overwhelming evidence on the post-Covid price surge in groceries concludes that supply-side factors drove grocery inflation, including supply chain disruptions, labor shortages and wage costs, transportation and energy costs, and to a lesser extent, farm commodity costs. The demand-side also contributed to grocery inflation. During the pandemic, households shifted consumption from restaurants to grocery stores, constituting a demand shock to food-at-home. 

Studies of market power in the food retail sector repeatedly demonstrate that while there has been consolidation, it is primarily driven by fixed costs and product differentiation, rather than market power. Some of the rise in gross retail margins is attributable to increased local concentration, with some evidence of market-power effects, but pass-through to consumers is limited. While during the pandemic supply-chain shocks may have enhanced retailer market power, food retail margins have returned to pre-pandemic levels, a narrow average of 1.6%. Local concentration, especially in rural areas, may still play a significant role in rising grocery prices, but I remain unconvinced that public grocers are the optimal solution, rather than enforcing or extending existing antitrust statutes.

Municipal grocery stores would represent limited competition to the quite competitive New York food retail market. Furthermore, rather than force private supermarkets to lower prices to meet the public option, municipal grocery stores may just force private retailers to shut down, crowding out the market and leading to the closure of independent grocers, leading to further market consolidation. There is also a possible effect of entry deterrence, where private firms refuse to enter the market because the subsidized store is present. 

On the ability of municipal grocery stores to offer groceries at lower cost, this is the primary reason for municipal ownership advanced by the Mamdani campaign. It is predicated on the claims that as public grocers would not have to pay property taxes, would not have to make a profit, would centralized warehousing and distribution and buy wholesale, and would partner with local neighborhoods for sourcing, they would be able to offer groceries at lower prices than private supermarkets. Let's address each of these points in turn.

i) Property taxes

While a public grocery store on city owned land would not have to pay property taxes, it would be subject to a wide variety of additional siting costs, including the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure and CEQR environmental review. The selection of a site would likely take months, if not years, of community board and city review. Furthermore, if property taxes inhibit private supermarkets from offering lower prices, perhaps we should reform the NYC property tax system such that commercial properties do not pay an effective tax rate several times that of single-family homeowners. This is probably the best argument for the ability of public grocers to offer lower prices and pass on savings to consumers, but all other considerations greatly outweigh it.

ii) Profit

Though public grocery stores would not have to make a profit, it is unlikely they would in the first place, given the lack of access to economies of scale and the intent to open them in communities where a private supermarket is not economically viable. Thus, it is technically true that New York City could open public grocery stores, run them at a severe loss, and sell at below marginal cost to drive private supermarkets to lower prices or close, it is unclear to me what the point of doing so would be. Without the benefits of economies of scale or the variety of other advantages of state enterprises, we would just be inefficiently subsidizing artificially low grocery prices. Is our goal simply to reduce the prices of groceries at the expense of other goods by funding a ‘national champion’ grocery store with tax revenue? TANSTAAFL.

iii) Centralized warehousing and distribution, wholesale purchasing

Private supermarkets already do this, at a far larger scale than five city-owned grocery stores would be able to access. Public grocery stores, without significant administrative reform, would face enormous constraints to procurement, including competitive sealed bidding or RFPs regardless of urgency or vendor relationships, Minority and Women-Owned Business Enterprise procurement goals (e.g. 30% of total contract value), conflict of interest rules, and the ban on discretionary buying. Fixed price contracts with 1-year duration, the standard for municipal procurement, would be a significant cost for a public grocery store, as supermarkets frequently have much shorter contracts with suppliers. 

Supermarkets often engage in spot buys, exploiting market dips - public grocery stores would be prohibited from doing so. Now, one of the motivating principles of this newsletter is that such regulatory constraints on public enterprise must be lifted as a precondition to the success of said public enterprise, but until Mamdani proposes such dramatic changes to New York City’s procurement regime these costs must be taken into account.

Regardless, it still remains impossible for municipal grocery stores to access economies of scale. With such narrow profit margins, supermarket chains rely scale from on hundreds of stores, volume discounts with national order volumes, slotting fees and trade allowances, private-labels / store-brand goods, large fleets of trucks for backhaul optimization, global sourcing leverage, real-time inventory management systems, dynamic pricing software, standardized training, shared back-office functions, and management training programs. Without the scale of international or national chains, these cost-savings will not be accessed, and attempts at software procurement will face additional regulatory barriers. 

Given the tiny margins of food retail and the fact that Mamdani’s proposal necessarily only envisions a small number of stores, it is ludicrous to suggest that public grocery stores would be able to access even a fraction of the economies of scale necessary to sell groceries at lower prices than the private sector. That is of course, even if you do not place additional requirements on procurement as part of the proposal itself.

iv) Everything-Bagels

Mamdani’s proposal also calls for partnering with local neighborhoods for products and sourcing. Whether this is an attempt at increasing public buy-in, supporting local neighborhoods, or simply a reflex on the left at this point, it would surely drastically increase the costs of public grocery stores if they were burdened with the obligation to utilize “local” sources, negotiate with local organizations, and so on. 

It would constrict the total contract volume negotiated with national suppliers and create an inefficient subsidy for local food production in one of the largest cities in the world for no apparent reason. While I am happy to be proven wrong, I would expect to see many more requirements added to such a proposal, including requirements for vegan and vegetarian options, as well as ethnic and cultural foods, restrictions on the sale of unhealthy food options, etc.

v) Labor costs

The black hole in the middle of the budgeting for municipal grocery stores is labor costs. Always a core tension in social-democratic public enterprise proposals, they are particularly salient here - in an industry almost always paying minimum wage or near-minimum wage, with low barriers to firing and hiring. Meanwhile, municipal grocery stores would have to pay $25-$35/hour. Workers would likely be represented by municipal unions, driving up costs further with public-sector benefits packages and pay. 

Hiring constraints, including the rigid job posting process, background checks, city HR onboarding, civil service eligibility lists, equal employment opportunity policy, as well as firing constraints, including the “just-cause” standard, due process hearings, union protection, and back pay for wrongful determination all would increase costs by raising the cost of hiring and firing store employees. 

All of this would likely result in at least a doubling of labor costs versus private supermarkets. Though one may justify this as a program of public works creating high-paying, dignified positions in a municipal workforce, I could think of many other possible projects for such a program - such as public housing, passive building retrofits, subways, light rail, street repair, solar installation, modernization of utilities, undergrounding power lines, street tree planting, or broadband. Even more adventurous public enterprises, such as a city-owned modular housing factory, trade schools, or hydroponic farms would be more likely to be investments that would not simply serve as jobs creation programs. It would also help if Mamdani was committed to wholesale civil service reform, though this does not appear to be the case.

Thus, we can conclude that not only would public grocery stores not efficiently address concentrated market power, they would not be able to offer groceries at lower prices than the private sector without essentially acting as a colossal inefficient subsidy for groceries. If this is our goal, just pay people to buy lettuce instead of spending three years arguing with a Community Board to establish a public option in a sector without significant market power or shortages.

The poor record of municipal grocery stores

The above concerns are demonstrated by the experience of municipal grocery stores in the United States, which to say the least is not a catalogue of success.

The St. Paul supermarket is the sole notable success in the history of city-owned grocery stores in the United States. After the town had been without a grocery store for 20 years, St. Paul issued a zero-interest bond to the local rural electricity cooperative to build a grocery store, with distribution handled by a private firm. After the family running distributor retired in 2013, the city purchased the grocer and now runs it as a municipally owned business. The supermarket is now slightly more profitable than the average rural grocer, and is strongly supported by St. Paul residents. 

The success of this enterprise is likely related to the impetus for its creation - the 17 miles between this town of 614 and the nearest grocery store. In such an extreme food desert, with such a small population to be served, local initiatives may be necessary. Given that New York City has no communities that isolated, I don’t believe that the lessons from this program can be generalized, especially given the many other small town public grocery store failures.

In Erie, Kansas, the municipal grocery store did not attract enough customers due to competition with a Walmart 15 miles away and a Dollar General across the street. In 2022, it only had a single profitable month, and was soon handed over to a private operator. In 2019, Baldwin, Florida opened a grocery store to address the lack of food retailers. While this did have the immediate positive effect of incentivizing the local dollar stores to begin selling fresh produce, the market was unable to offer competitive pricing and ran at a loss during the entirety of its operation. This culminated in its closure last year. 

Chicago is the largest American city to seriously consider a public grocery store. Brandon Johnson’s proposal followed a string of failures to induce private supermarkets to open in neighborhoods with low food retail access, including Rahm Emmanuel’s $10 million tax incentive to a Whole Foods Englewood that closed six years later due to a lack of demand. After the closing of the Whole Foods, some residents, organized as the Resident Association of Greater Englewood, protested the opening of a new ‘sub-standard’ grocery-store, delaying its opening for several weeks. The store was eventually opened, benefitting from a $20 million city contract with the operator. 

In 2023, Brandon Johnson’s office began considering a publicly-owned grocery store as an alternative to public-private partnerships. Its advocates hoped that “a Chicago-owned grocery store will become a case study that all cities can look into.” The city hired consultants to produce a feasibility report that recommended the policy. Unfortunately, the report has never been released. Given that the mayor appears to have dropped the proposal entirely, we can assume that the city decided that the endeavor was not a cost-effective way of increasing local availability of food retailers. Instead, Chicago is now considering a municipally-owned public market with individual vendors, similar to Reading Terminal in Philadelphia. This process, and the fact that Brandon Johnson is a leftist with one of the lowest approval ratings in the United States, ought to give Democratic Socialists pause.

Political capital and alternatives

Though Mamdani continues to argue that his proposal is supported by ⅔ of New Yorkers, and grocery prices are salient, I am not convinced that public grocery stores are worth arguing for given their failure as a policy intervention. Clearly - this isn’t working. Mamdani continues to trail Cuomo by huge margins among non-college primary voters, and continues to have low name recognition. I don’t have polling data that would confirm this, but anecdotal evidence while discussing the policy with others suggests that the grocery proposal reads as technocratic. 

Perhaps Mamdani should focus on the portions of his agenda that most working class primary voters can immediately grok - such as raising the minimum wage, building public housing, or making buses free. A robust plan on public safety would also be worthwhile to cut into Cuomo’s non-college base.

However, public grocery stores do not appear to increase P(defeat Cuomo), and I can’t imagine any world where spending political capital on it after you enter Gracie Mansion makes any sense. I understand the ambition of municipal Democratic Socialism, but attempting to foray into new sectors rather than refining, reforming, or even radically expanding the city’s public investment in areas in which it already has capacity: housing, etc, is a luxury that Democratic mayors, increasingly facing sub-10% approval ratings - cannot afford.

If we actually want to reduce grocery prices, as well as the prices of food in general, there are a host of more efficient and less politically costly options. FRESH Zoning promised to incentivize the opening of new supermarkets by allowing supermarkets to be built in light-manufacturing districts, providing tax abatements and exemptions, and granting a density bonus for including a supermarket on the ground floor of a residential building. 

In order to qualify for these benefits, a supermarket must meet several overly-stringent requirements, including mandating that half of the store’s area must be for home preparation and consumption, 30% of the store’s area (not total volume?) must be dedicated to selling perishable food, 500 square feet must be for fresh produce, etc. Due to these requirements, by 2016 - 7 years after the program was established, only ten new FRESH zoned supermarkets had been opened, in a city that in 2009 was estimated to be able to hold 100 additional supermarkets. 

FRESH zoning does provide a decent basis to begin zoning reforms that facilitate food abundance. The requirements for FRESH Zoning should be greatly reduced, and all food retailers should qualify for the right to build in light-manufacturing districts, as well as the density bonus for residential buildings. Amazingly, FRESH Zoning doesn’t even lift parking minimums, it simply reduces them to 1 spot per 1000 square feet. All parking minimums on food retail should be lifted, perhaps as a first step to lifting them entirely city-wide. 

The city could also identify and rezone areas considered food deserts, streamline the food retail licensing process, impose a statute of limitations on litigation and community board review for new supermarkets, allow small format grocers, bodegas, farmers markets, and other non-traditional food retailers in residential districts, shift to default approval for food retail, and lobby the state to allow grocers to sell liquor and wine. 

We could also reduce costs for food away from home by restoring outdoor dining and lifting the cap on vending permits. Finally, we could implement demand flexibility for grocery store electricity use and encourage grocery stores to end the vestigial practice of leaving some fridges without doors, both reducing electricity usage and reducing costs. The above would address concerns around high food costs, and it is notable that Mamdani supports many of those policies. A particularly skilled candidate could even message seemingly piecemeal reforms as populist common-sense, but I will leave that question to pollsters and strategists.

But wait.

The United States federal government already owns a massive chain of publicly owned supermarkets, with enough locations to benefit from economies of scale. With this system, the government is able to sell groceries at low cost to underserved communities, passing on savings from dodging regulations and taxes faced by the private sector. I am of course referring to the 240 stores of the Defense Commissary Agency. 

The commissaries could be a model for a workable public option for food, as the federal government is able to operate at extraordinary scale and access considerable bargaining power with suppliers, far beyond what a municipal operation would be capable of. The commissary system is more cost-efficient than an equivalent cash transfer and is cheaper than private sector competitors. The most important predictors of commissary success appear to be the density of military customers, which is trivial as they are the only ones with access, but also the price differential between commercial grocery stores and commissary stores. This strongly suggests that the commissaries are a successful program that is operating as an efficient, scaled public enterprise. Annual revenue is roughly $5 billion, two-thirds that of Sprout’s. The Commissary system has even had fascinating knock-on effects, such as the innovations of the Subsistence Research Laboratory, which was largely responsible for the emergence of dehydrated foods and much of the methodologies for the consumer taste testing.

Municipal social-democrats face a crucial constraint: they are running a city. The ability of municipalities to engage in public enterprises is limited by the inability to access economies of scale - as well as path-dependence from existing undesirable regulatory regimes. While cities ought to stick to what they do best and focus on public investments that are net welfare gains on a local level, Project 2029 or what have you may be able to think bigger. Perhaps municipal grocery stores are not viable, but I can’t help but hope for Matt Bruenig to expand on his proposal for the federal government to purchase Kroger. My prior is that a federal supermarket chain would also be inefficient, but after perusing the evidence it has a much better chance of being viable than one in the five boroughs.

The United States guaranteed birthright citizenship at the end of the Civil War, to prevent any decision like Dred Scott, which declared that African-Americans could not be citizens, from again denying the rights of citizenship to those who have spent their whole life here. During the debates over the 14th Amendment, all participants recognized that the language therein would grant citizenship to the children of non-citizens, with some congressmen even voting against the Amendment for precisely that reason. Case after case before the Supreme Court, including Courts whose composition was far more conservative than the incumbents, have affirmed this obvious interpretation of the basic law. James C. Ho, a possible future member of the Court and a doctrinaire originalist conservative, wrote that 

“History thus confirms that the Citizenship Clause applies to the children of aliens. To be sure, members of the 39th Congress may not have specifically contemplated extending birthright citizenship to the children of illegal aliens, for Congress did not generally restrict migration until well after adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment. But nothing in text or history suggests that the drafters intended to draw distinctions between different categories of aliens. To the contrary, text and history confirm that the Citizenship Clause reaches all persons who are subject to U.S. jurisdiction and laws, regardless of race or alienage.”

This arch-conservative of the 5th Circuit, who Vivek Ramaswamy and Ted Cruz have both called to be nominated to the Supreme Court, went on to call a possible future decision to end birthright citizenship “Dred Scott II.” Proponents of the interpretation of the 14th Amendment that preclude citizenship to the undocumented or to temporary legal residents are lying, illiterate, or so blinded by nativism that they cannot interpret the clear letter of the law. 

By unconstitutionally attempting to end birthright citizenship, the Trump administration is preparing to usher in a bureaucratic regime in which people born in the United States will be forced to go through years of paperwork and appeals to be recognized as Americans. It will deprive the United States of millions of people who could work, pay taxes, and enrich civic and cultural life. In this way of course, the Trump administration is trying to make our country like most others - a nation closed off to those who desperately want to become part of it.

An ultranationalist activist of the Zaitokukai screams into a megaphone. “Koreans are cockroaches! Get out of Japan! Throw them into Tokyo Bay!”. He is referring to the Zainichi Koreans, descendants of those brought to Japan as forced laborers when Korea was a colony of the Japanese Empire. Nearly four-hundred thousand Zainichi are not Japanese citizens, as their parents, and their parents’ parents, were not citizens. Many of them, born and raised in the country that imposed a grotesque imperial regime on the home of their ancestors, only speak Japanese. They are barred from running for office, voting, or serving as firefighters, judges, or in other public roles. The naturalization process, which is costly and often takes years, requires applicants to renounce their Korean identity. Still, many Zainichi Koreans have dedicated themselves to making a home in their birth country, and continually struggle for equal recognition under the law. In a country where they have lived all of their lives, Zainichi Koreans still have to fight tooth and nail for the basic guarantees entailed by citizenship, which they are denied at birth.

There are over a million Italians born in the country to foreign citizens, and thus deprived of citizenship. The naturalization process is infamously difficult, a bureaucratic nightmare that can only be begun at the age of eighteen. Many jobs and scholarships are restricted to citizens, creating an underclass of people who speak Italian, who are enmeshed in Italian culture and subject to the laws of the Italian state, but who have limited rights, sometimes never attaining citizenship even after decades of appeals. One Italian, Sonny, who was born in Rome, was required to submit a criminal record from the place of his parent’s birth, Nigeria. The request to submit a document that, for obvious reasons, does not exist, was just one in a long line of humiliations that Sonny has faced in his life-long march to citizenship. When interviewed by Vice, he was 34-years old. 

Even though Israel recognizes an undivided Jerusalem as its capital, the Arab descendants of those who lived in East Jerusalem at the time of its occupation are not citizens. In order to become a citizen of Israel, you must be a Jew making Aliyah under the Right of Return, born in Israel to a citizen parent, or apply for naturalization with years as a permanent resident, proficiency in Hebrew, and renunciation of all other citizenship. The Ministry of the Interior can deny any application for citizenship, and often does in the case of Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, using any family ties to the West Bank, perceived sympathies with the Palestinian national movement, or even unpaid bills as reasons to deny a basic right that any Jew, anywhere in the world, can claim by virtue of their bloodline. Israel’s constitution defines it not as a country for all those who reside within its borders, but as a national home of the Jewish people.

Most countries define citizenship by ancestry, but the United States is, has been, and should be different.

Trump and his billionaire and theocrat hangers-on claim that they are renewing American greatness. Once again we will have a dynamic economy, once again leading the way in scientific progress, once again prosperous and hegemonic. We shall land on Mars! All the while, they will working to annihilate the very thing that has made the United States the greatest country in the world. While other nations turn away the talented, the hard-working, and the brave because their ancestors were not born on their soil, America has accepted them, and allowed their progeny to become Americans, not because of their blood, or their nationality, but because they were born in the promised land. How many of your ancestors were aboard the Mayflower? How many of you are citizens because your parents, or parents’ parents were born in this country?

The Golden Door has been the source of our economic growth, our scientific advancement, and our rich culture. These sycophants who deny this fact while preaching a new frontier are lying to you. Every time J.D. Vance recalls his family’s cemetery plot; he reduces this country to something provincial, pitiful, and small. My country is not like the others! It is not a nation-state patched together by medieval principalities! My country was forged by millions speaking a myriad of tongues. My country contains the world, it is far vaster than some pathetic blood and soil relic. Reactionaries may whine about our sovereignty and proclaim the resurrection of a Golden Age of America, but they want nothing more than to make us like every other country, where parochial nationalist parties obsesses over territorial claims decades old, where the economy lags and our march to the future stalls, but at least their culture is ‘pure’, unadulterated by immigration. The objective of the Trump administration is to turn our commonwealth, our unique and exceptional civic republic, our City on a Hill, into a mere Homeland. If you have even a sliver of devotion to the task of achieving this country, an ounce of patriotism - you must find yourself on the side fighting so that they do not succeed.

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