Zohran Mamdani’s Bread and Circuses

‘Here our smart clothes are beyond our means, here in Rome. A little bit extra has to be borrowed from someone’s purse. It’s a common fault; here we all live in pretentious poverty. What more can I say? Everything in Rome comes at a price.’
From Satires, by Juvenal.

There was a time in Ancient Rome when many citizens could barely afford to eat, while slaves undercut their chances of work. And the solution from the imperium? The familiar panem et circenses – bread and circuses.

There are echoes of Roman times in a New York mayoral race that ultimately came down to the cost of living. That, in essence, is what New Yorkers (or at least a sizeable minority) voted for on Tuesday – the bread and circuses of Zohran Mamdani.

They may want to hold their breath as their new 34-year-old mayor, who easily beat former governor Andrew Cuomo, tests out his bag of tricks. He promises to halt all rent increases, impose a $30-per-hour minimum wage by 2030, and subsidise bus fares, daycare and even grocery stores. While Roman emperors once handed out bread, Mamdani plans to dispense free rides, babysitters, peanut butter and steak at discount prices.

Mamdani’s programme suggests an attempt to transform the world’s capitalist capital into a First World version of Havana. The biggest casualties won’t be the much-maligned rich but, as analyst Nicole Gelinas suggests, moderately affluent small property owners. They make up 30 to 50 per cent of rent-controlled landlords and some won’t survive a rent freeze. Similarly, mainly immigrant-run bodegas and small grocery stores will struggle against the city-subsidised competition, while bus riders will find themselves increasingly sharing space with the city’s feral youth and plain old crazies.

Of course, much of what Mamdani proposes may never come to pass. The state controls most of his taxation power, and many proposals will face legal challenges. Still, New York’s political shift shouldn’t be minimised. Mamdani may be more of a social-media performer than a policymaker, but his ascent has ramifications not just for New York, but also for the West’s other great cities and the nation at large.

Regardless of how daft his ideas are, Mamdani’s rise reflects a legitimate anxiety about the cost of living, especially housing. New Yorkers spend more of their income on housing than residents of any other major US city, while also paying among the highest taxes. It has the lowest homeownership rate in the country, standing at half the national average. And job growth has increasingly been confined to low-wage employment. Indeed, since 2020, New York has lost 76,000 middle-income jobs.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

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Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

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