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Per Politico, Zohran Mamdani set to topple Andrew Cuomo in NYC mayoral race, at least the Democratic primary. Live results here if that changes. The general election is in November -- Cuomo left the door open as he conceded tonight already to run as an independent; current mayor Eric Adams already is intending to run as an independent. This is nothing short of a massive political earthquake. Here's what I see as the most important questions raised:
Did ranked choice (and associated strategy) make a major difference?
We don't know yet quite how much. In percents, Mamdani leads 43.5 - 36.4 with 91% reporting as of writing, this means on Tuesday ranked-choice results will be released as he didn't clear 50% alone, since Brad Lander who cross-endorsed Mamdani has 11.4, Adrienne Adams who did not for anyone has 4.1. But it seems a foregone conclusion he will win. I'm not certain how detailed a ranked-choice result we get. Do we get full ranked choice results/anonymized data, or do we only see the final result, or do we get stage by stage? The voter-facing guide is here which I might have to peruse. I think the RCV flavor here is IRV (fewest first-place votes eliminated progressively between virtual "rounds" until one has a majority)
In terms of counterfactuals, I believe the previous Democratic primary system was 40%+ wins, under 40% led to a runoff between top two, so Mamdani would have won that anyways. But the general election is, near as I can tell, not ranked choice, it is instead simply plurality, no runoff. This creates some interesting dynamics. Of course, it's also possible the pre-voting dynamics and candidate strategies of this race were affected.
My thoughts? It seems Cuomo was ganged up on, and I think ranked choice accelerated this. It will be very interesting to see how this did or did not pay off for Lander specifically -- was he close-ish to a situation where people hate Cuomo most, but are still uncomfortable enough with Mamdani to hand Lander a surprise victory from behind? Statistically this seems unlikely in this particular case, but it could still happen, and how close he comes could offer some interesting insights about how popular a strategy like this might be in the future.
Will Democratic support and the primary victory make a difference in the general election?
The literal million-dollar question. Cuomo might very well run again as an independent -- otherwise his career is kind of extra-finished, no? I suppose he could always try and run for Congress later, but this is a black eye no matter how you spin it. Eric Adams, the former Democratic candidate, has also had his share of scandals, so potentially there is some similarity with Cuomo on that level. But he does have an incumbency advantage, and has expected some kind of fight for a while. Republicans might back him more, however, depending on how much they dislike Mamdani. It's hard to say. Also, Mamdani would have the Democratic party machinery and resources behind him. How much will they pitch in? That's an open question for sure. It will certainly help to some extent, for legitimacy if nothing else.
Will these results generalize nationally? And if so, what part of the results?
First of all, you must see this as an absolute W for grassroots. Cuomo is a political super-insider, despite being a major bully who is widely disliked. Yet many former enemies have backed him anyways, especially more "moderate" ones. Interesting article link. Bloomberg for example backed him. He formed a super PAC "Fix the City" and it spent a ton of time on negative attacks against Mamdani, especially on his pro-Palestinian comments framing them as anti-Israel. There's that angle of course. I'd rather not get into it personally, but I'm sure there will be some observations about if the Israel-Palestinian issue was big or not, whether it was fair, etc.
Then there's the socialism angle. Do Democrats want more extreme left candidates? Are socialists ready for the big time? Was this Cuomo's unique weaknesses? Was is just crazy turnout among young people? Did AOC and friends help a lot? All things we will be thinking about for a number of months to come. Personally, I see this as Mamdani doing much, much better among kitchen-table issues for the median voter. All about affordability. Of course, the merit of his attempt is a separate question. He's pro rent control (economically sketchy but not unheard of), wants to create public supermarkets (horrible idea all around, supermarket margins are very small), taxing the rich (will they flee or not?), and is obviously young and not super experienced.
Something I would note is that for all handwringing about socialism*, none of this is particularly atypical of a progressive candidate. Which is not the strongest endorsement, but he seems well within norms for silly-but-popular policies. The public option for Bodegas is the most out there, and even that isn't as out there as people think (it's still a bad idea, but it's a tried and proven bad idea). Some of these things aren't even new polices. NYC has rent control!
This more or less comports with my expectations. To one side, Mamdani seems kind of vacuous - he mostly seems to agree with whoever he's talking to. A useful trait for a politician, but not particularly indicative. To the other side, it's unsurprising mirror of the right-wing. The Right hates the aesthetic of radicalism, and will try to present their policies as common sense even when they're completely bonkers. The Left loves the aesthetic of radicalism, and will try to gloss normal policy as revolutionary.
Aside: Mamdani winning the primary seems to have aroused a spectacularly unhinged fury from certain sectors, e.g. one representative calling for him to be denaturalized and another saying he was the vanguard of an effort to turn NYC into a Shia Caliphate.
*illustrative: I once had an argument with a guy who was stridently advocating for socialism, and when I pressed him for specifics on what that would entail, it basically boiled down to UHC + a sovereign wealth fund.
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Has he been on the radar a long time? I literally heard of him for the first time like a week ago.
He didn't really break out until mid-March of this year. He was getting some local coverage before that, and it's very interesting how much of that is puff pieces with little actual 'when what where why' behind them, but even the actually newsworthy stuff wasn't NYC-wide newsworthy.
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There seems to be a large cohort of fairly far-left educated millennial voters that frankly scare me a bit. Call it the Reddit generation. It's the same group that powered Bernie Sanders into stardom. They have the politics of university campus but they are larger than in the past due to the expansion of college education and they keep ideological coherence longer into adulthood due to reinforcement over social media.
We rely on older voters to notice when their policies are going off the rails and elect center-left liberals to clean up their messes. But boomers are a scarce resource and overall it seems like the ideological mix of the American voter is heading in a bad direction, with Mamdani as the latest symptom. The more ideological voters seem to be indifferent to how their policies affect their city or economy. Politics is a badge of righteousness rather than a tool for governance.
It reminds me of the sage, soft-speaking Islamic cleric speaking with profound meaning "democracy means government by the people, of the people, for the people... but the people are retarded"
It's the same with economics. It's known how to do economics to increase prosperity. You need to do capital deepening and R&D. The more the better. It's a little more complicated than that but only a little!
Capital deepening and R&D isn't even a topic of discussion in politics, outside of maybe Singapore, China or the UAE. Instead it's 'how much money can we take from productive people and give to old people?' Or 'how can we make things more expensive, can it take longer to build out any capital?' Could we make irritating popups appear on all the world's websites? Let's cap the number of doctors we train for zero rational reason, while lawyers proliferate beyond all control. How about invading and conquering an incredibly low-value, poor country and spending huge amounts on it? How about demolishing our industrial base and offshoring it? How about making medicine 'free' (funded by taxes)?
'Let's build some infrastructure at ludicrously uncompetitive prices' is at least capital deepening but it's not very good.
The closest they come to R&D is more spending on education which is 90% unrelated to capital deepening or R&D, it's Ipads or laptops in schools or making low value university degrees cheaper (funded by taxes) - or just administrative bloat.
Point of correction: Rajneesh (AKA Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain), the man in that video, was an Indian "godman," guru, and founder of the eponymous "Rajneesh movement," which had an intentional community in Oregon in the 80s:
Interesting, never knew that.
He seems to be rather like the Mule in terms of charisma, which is to be expected if such a simple clip of him can get 16 million views on youtube, forever memorable:
After watching the video and some others on the same channel, it seems mostly interesting as a really extreme example of the art of generating gravitas by speaking slowly and pausing a lot. Somehow, he manages to get you to slow down your mental clock to match the pace of his speech, rather than getting bored or distracted.
(And yes, he does come across as wise and witty, but a lot of people could probably muster this level of wit if they actually could take that long to decide what to say without losing their audience. The ability to keep the listener suspended seems to be key.)
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Tbf, I think in both parties, filter bubbles are removing the natural flow towards the center that used to exist in politics. Politics in the 21st century has more of a hold on a person than religion would. No one cares what you think about reformed Christianity. They do care if you have the right opinion on immigration, taxation, woke, etc. and furthermore, people are often choosing interests and hobbies and lifestyles based on their political views. If you’re on the right, you collect guns and drink beer and watch football or hockey. If you’re on the left you’ll be interested in art and vegan or organic foods, drink tea, and meditation.
What about people who collect guns to eat organic food(a good portion of hunters rambling on about the health benefits of venison) or who drink tea while they watch football?
Tribal tendencies are just tendencies. I think we all know that but I also think the causation goes the other way; people who think driving a pickup truck is a marker of a respectable man belong to a particular culture, and it's a culture that Trump appeals to. People who seek solace in Buddhist practices divorced from spirituality belong to a different culture that really cares about LGBT rights.
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What I haven't seen much commentary on yet is, will Adams and/or Cuomo run against him as an independent? I figure, winning the Democrat nomination makes Mamdani a shoo-in by default in the general. To have a shot at defeating him would probably require a temporary alliance between a very substantial number of more centrist Democrats and pretty much all of the Republicans to all vote for one particular alternate Democrat running as independent. Having a shot at that actually working seems much less likely if both Adams and Cuomo run, especially if they start openly attacking each other.
Yeah, there's a basically no chance if they (or even a not-joke Republican candidate) split the not-Mamdani vote. The sane option to my eyes would be organizing behind Adams, sad as that sounds, but it's also a massive coordination problem. But I don't get why they tried Cuomo in the primary to start with, so maybe there's something that would overrun the 'already lost this fight once' problem. And my low opinion of Cuomo is part of why I don't think they can coordinate.
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Cuomo's also just about the single worst political candidate available. People talk about 'scandals' like it was 'just' him being a gropey bastard, but the COVID nursing home policies killed thousands, possibly ten+ thousand.
New York City isn't the same Literal Worst in the way Cuomo is, but that's mostly because California and Newsom exist and can't rebuild a home after a fire. The punchline to all the Abundance Liberalism is either congestion pricing, or Eric Adams treating the invention of 'trash cans' like a major success.
And that's kinda the critical bit. There's a temptation among progressives to think of this as some failure of advertising or sufficiently innovative policy recommendation, but that's like trying to out-crude Trump. You're not going to beat socialists at making up policies with great advertising and 'novel' policy, and even trying to compete with them on those metrics will drive you to start making awful policies yourself.
The alpha centrists try to advertise themselves on is about actually improving the actual situation on the ground. But Cuomo and NYC (and Newsom and California) can't do that, either.
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The real question comes down to if Cuomo runs against Adams as an independent- I think Adams has a decent chance if he does not.
In New York City? Probably. In broader America? No.
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Then who makes money from the food industry. And this is a very serious question. Farmers are on thin margins, Supermarkets are on thin margins and yet you have manyfold increase in the price from farm to table.
I actually approve this as an experiment. Create couple of stores. Cut direct deals with some farmers in the Midwest, olive oil produces in California, the big corn and wheat mills. Organize distribution and see if you can deliver fresh produce and other staples, pay wages and sell at near cost. And if the whole operation is financially sane - scale it.
Also when will the Dem party figure out that their tactics for stopping Trump like figures don't work as good as they think? People are tired of economic stagnation and hate the establishment.
They have thin margins but they make it up by turning over inventory quickly. This doesn't mean supermarkets aren't profitable, just that taking radical steps to lower prices won't really work because they don't have much room to cut.
People are mad that prices went up 40%
Cutting the supermarket's 4% margin to 3.7% (or whatever) isn't going to matter.
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When margins are low but volume is high you can still make good money. But in a commodity market, economic forces will generally push average profit margin to $0, so it's not surprising that margins are usually low and sometimes negative.
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Processing and manufacturing adds a great deal of value, the actual industrial part of the food industry is huge.
You also got commodity traders and other middlemen, the people who profit from price volatility, storage, transportation, etc; whom you need to stabilize prices.
Then there's input suppliers, the people that sell farmers seeds and equipment.
And I'm not going to name all the other middlemen like the various distributors, who in turn have their own suppliers and logistical needs.
Food supply chains are at once critical, complex and old, which means that they are very highly regulated, involve a ton of actors and have been optimized to absurdity.
There are ways a public option could actually cut prices, but they all involve unacceptable tradeoffs like compromizing food safety standards, not having reliable output or operating at a loss. Not having to pay taxes (which is advanced here as the main method of savings) is far from enough.
You can actually operate at a loss if you want, the commissaries operated by DeCA seem like an obvious example. But you have to accept one of the tradeoffs. There's simply no beating capitalism at making interchangeable consumer goods cheap, it's the one thing it's incredibly good at.
Good rule of thumb is that whenever you look in any complex system in the USA of lately usually you have shitload of rent seeking and not capitalism. I am not sure that the food chain is an exception from this - I already know that farmers have great problem with rent seeking behavior from John Dreeres and Monsantnos of the world.
Ok, but supermarkets are not dodging rent seeking from farm suppliers- thats the wrong step in the chain. My guess is there’s a bunch of rent seeking in the processing/middleman stage too. And further I’d assume the bulk of the rent seeking in the supermarket side is mostly contractors that the supermarket cant easily replace.
I was talking about the whole food chain. And that small and medium farmers are squeezed on both input and output is well known. And this is why I think that those kinds of experiments are worthy. The government has enough heft to shake things a bit.
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Why should these be opposed to each other?
Not a market theorist but rent seeking is extracting value and not generating. I have never seen consumers being better off when there is lack of interoperability, DRM, vertical integration, walled gardens, monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, drm on printer ink and other anticompetitive practices.
So it is not the best use of the capital in the society.
No, I just meant why define capitalism in a way that only includes the good things it enables and not the bad.
I see a parallel fault line within socialism, with Syndicalism in conflict with Central Planning. For me, this goes back to the 1973 miners' strike in the UK. The mines were owned by the National Coal Board(NCB), a branch of the government. Much of the coal was sold to the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), another branch of the government. The basic idea of the strike was to raise electricity prices (by government fiat) to get the money for higher coal prices to get the money to pay the miners higher wages. Or just subsidise the NCB out of general taxation. That was the Trades Union perspective, but the Socialist Planning perspective was that the British coal fields were pretty much worked out. Paying high wages for the horrible job of going under the North Sea to mine small amounts of coal from narrow, wet, fractured seams was a bad plan. Much better was to send the miners to work in factories above ground manufacturing things and stuff to trade for coal from places with more favourable geology.
Basically the National Union of Mine Workers was butting heads with the planners in the socialist part of the British economy and seeking rents based on their ability to crash the economy by coming out on strike.
In a capitalist economy, with fragmented private ownership of the means of production, and lacking national trades unions, this specific kind of rent seeking works badly. The employees at one company come out on strike. They win an excessive pay rise. Their employer starts losing money, and goes bankrupt. The workers lose their well paid jobs. Whoops! Both capitalism and socialism suffer from rent seeking and capitalism has some internal defences to it. Capitalists are entitled to say that rent seeking is not narrowly specific to capitalism; they don't have to own it.
The plot of Heinlein's 1940 The Roads must Roll
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Are there actual examples of companies going under because of excessively high salaries? AFAIK unions where they damage companies mostly do it by protecting poor performers.
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Two things that strike me about Mamdani:
his main proposals really go beyond Bernie-style "Do what they do in Nordic countries!" style stuff. While there are still elements of rent control in Nordic countries, I haven't heard anyone put a total rent freeze, even in public housing, on the table. Free public transport is not really on the table either, apart from some small Danish towns (and Tallinn if you think Estonia can get into Nordic). I don't remember anyone even suggesting publicly owned grocery stores. Even a failed attempt to do these in the "capital of the world" would probably put all these on the table all around the West.
Mamdani's platform, as presented, seems like a specific attempt to do what many class-first leftists have proposed doing and run on lunchbucket issues instead of idpol. There's a LGBTQ+ page, sure, but if one drills down to proposals then there are some specific Black and Hispanic appeals but way less and way less prominently than I'd expect most Democratic candidates in a similar position to include. My understanding is that there's more idpol stuff if one drills down to Mamdani's old tweets and like, but if we're talking about a specific campaign strategy, it seems to have worked.
Melbourne has free trams in the CBD. Making the whole Victorian public transport network free (other than on Christmas Day, when it already is) is not really talked about, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone floats the idea; the fares got bid so low in the last election that it's questionable whether they pay for the infrastructure needed to collect them (ticket barriers, ticket inspectors, etc.).
If Mamdani gets in and starts implementing his platform, his proposals will probably get on the table basically all around the Western world, or at least the large/capital cities.
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I don't know, man...
I specifically contrasted his current platform with his old tweets.
I still don't know, man...
I also said that there is a LGBTQ+ page. The point is that the main trust of the campaign is the lunchbucket stuff, not the woke stuff.
I'm not sure what the point you're striving to make here is? That he's not campaigning on lunchbucket stuff? The last person I'd trust on giving a honest estimation on what the particular place of importance of trans policies is in his current campaign is an one-issue anti-trans campaigner like Billboard Chris.
I think that's called "burying the lede". "There being a LGBTQ+" page does not give full picture of what he supports and plans to do.
No, the thing you said just before that: "seems like a specific attempt to do what many class-first leftists have proposed doing"
You know you can just listen to what the guy says himself in the clip, instead of relying on said campaigner's summary?
I was specifically talking about the main thrust of his campaign (in this election), which is different from what he actually supports and plans to do. The campaigns that politicians run don't always correlate on what they will actually do.
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I believe KF - Konsum filled that role in Sweden. It wasn't technically publically owned but was so intimately tied with the workers movement that it filled much of the same role that a state owned enterprise would. Nowadays noone talks about it, especially due to the commercial failure and consistently higher prices of COOP. Dissatisfaction is mostly channeled toward some kind of market interventions like anti-monopolistic actions agains the largest commercial actors and in the more radical sphere, price controls.
Wait, Wikipedia says that KF and Konsum were specifically the predecessors of Coop?
The Finnish grocery market is similarly dominated by the co-operative S Group, which has also attracted the attention of American progressives, but co-operatives have also always been specifically an alternative to not only standard private enterprise but also public ownership, and have been pushed by non-socialists, too, as such an alternative.
Example of non-socialists pushing co-operatives for those who are curious about this claim.
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Yes?
Absolutely and there was some criticism to that effect in the 19th century and early 20th century but the cooperatives and the workers movement got so intertwined that the criticism died down.
Never mind, I probably interpreted your post wrong.
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One take is that Mamdani's able to massage a lot of traditionally idpol issues as anti-Trumpist or under legalisms, and thus been able to avoid explicit proposals by having the whole thrust of his lunchbucket politics also imply them.
((eg, "affordable housing" doesn't mean housing people can afford; it means a ton of Section 8.))
Another, more cynical one, is Darwin's old "it was never about being gay". Idpol doesn't care, specifically, about gay rights, or African-Americans, or Hispanics, or even about winning their votes. It cares about the cause of the day, with no more honest motivation than it being the cause of the day. And Mamdani's
tongue-bathing Hamasanti-Zionism is the cause of the day among the upper-class demographics he needed to win the primary.Edit: I was tempted to use
hating the Joosabove, but couldn’t find a good summary to support it. Not a problem anymore! /EDITThere's some silver lining on that cloud, in the sense that the Idpol cause of the day can swap out on a minute's notice. But it's not gonna.
I think that Mamdani's middle-class/upper-middle-class appeal may in large part be simply due to the Mr. Smith Goes To Washington idea of a honest, non-corrupt outsider against a corrupt machine creature.
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This is just a re-run of the “stunning” surprise justice-reform prosecutor / mayoral wins in some big cities during Trump I. The core of progressive ideology is only temporarily vulnerable to reality-based criticism (for example ‘crime just doubled, the streets are now full of psychotic homeless vagrants, the subway is unsafe, these guys want to defund the police’).
As soon as the issue is even partially resolved, the progressive voter returns to his comforter position (electing candidates like Mamdani) because he never actually questioned whether his own ideas were wrong; his shift to the center was ‘pragmatic’ (fear based), as crime stabilizes he again has the luxury of voting ideologically.
More generally, the Democratic establishment is at least partially responsible for screwing over Adams. Corrupt? Maybe, but there are 50 Dem mayors of major cities over the last 100 years who were more corrupt than him.
Do perceived crime rates really change that quick on average though?
Perceived crime rates change much faster than actual crime rates.
I bet 'perceived crime rates' includes observations of crime-adjacent activities that wouldn't ever be measured in 'actual' rates: the appearance of ubiquitous graffiti (see pictures of 80s subway cars), or of loitering ne'er-do-wells in the park isn't necessarily a wrong perception about crime rates.
You don't have to fully endorse the broken windows theory of (causing) crime to accept that frequent observations of broken windows can cause a true perception of rising crime rates.
Along similar lines to what @WhiningCoil and @TIRM have said i think context and distribution also matter a great deal. As an example, I live in a mid-size American city that has a significantly above average crime rate on paper, but said crime is largely restricted to certain nieghborhoods and classes of people (IE Shitbirds). Respectable citizens know that nothing good happens north of a certain avenue after sundown, while the city PD maintains a visible presence in public spaces and transit (which discourages pan-handlers and loitering ner-do-wells) and actively persues property crimes. As a result the day to day perception and experience of most residents and visitors is mostly that of clean and safe '1' streets despite the ostensibly high rate of criminality.
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I'll bet the crime rates in my local major city are really quite low. Open drug selling and use is not prosecuted. Homeless shantytowns are allowed. Car break ins and retail theft are common but cops don't care. It's not even the cops' fault. Prosecutors won't prosecute so there would be no point in pursuing such criminals.
Indeed, if they decline to arrest and prosecute such criminals, then (convicted) crime rates must be low. My perception of property crime rates is rather higher since I see broken car glass on the sidewalk and many locked up items in stores. I bought a jacket and they were all locked together on cable locks. The employee explained that an organized theft gang rushed in and stole large numbers of coats, so now everything is cable locked. Grocery stores now have locked sections for not very expensive product. Who is stealing detergent? Anyways, I bet a review of local conviction rates would not reveal any of this.
Lots of people, actually.
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Crime rates aren't based on conviction rates, though I broadly agree with your post as at certain point no one even reports some of this stuff.
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A while (a decade or more, now) back, there were a series of articles about Tide being used as street currency for drug sales. I'm uncertain if that is still true, or even was ever particularly common, but it probably is at least known to store managers.
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/01/14/why-would-drug-dealers-use-tide-as-a-currency
Any good explanation of how they were converting it to USD?
They sell it to ghetto stores, who sell it to ghetto dwellers, probably using SNAP, unlawfully.
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I would bet on that being true, but not a complete explanation. I'd add:
A) Crime statistics don't capture all crime. A lot of stuff is never reported. Property crimes so minor that they don't merit the time because you know the cops won't do anything about it, like stuff stolen off your front porch or out of the back of a pickup truck. Scuffles that don't result in major injury. Things that happen to shitbirds while they are engaged in shitbird activities and would prefer not to involve the law. Sexual harassment or assault under gray circumstances. People observe or hear about those even if they aren't reported to police and it figures into their perceptions.
A1) Attempted crimes that don't rise to the level of being worth reporting or prosecuting. I see a guy hanging around my truck in the parking lot and yell hey can I help you and he runs off. The guy that follows my wife for a block or two so she goes into a store and he disappears. Those don't show up in statistics. This largely overlaps with what you are saying.
B) A lot of people are wildly paranoid, and will over-react to news reports of crimes. People will tell me that in a local small city "Two or three people get killed there every weekend;" if I look at the statistics 13 people were killed there in 2021, 9 in 2022, 17 in 2023, 4 in 2024. But that's enough that they can remember a story about a person getting shot, and it makes them start to worry about going downtown.
C) People who are victims of crime talk about it a lot, and typically write over anything they did to "deserve" it.
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Small changes in daily lived experiences can have an outsized impact. The crime rate can hardly budge on paper, but things that might poll as "crime" can increase exponentially in your daily life. Where I used to live was fine on paper. I lived there for about 15 years. Then things started getting really weird. Some things would show up on paper as "crime". Gas station on the corner kept getting robbed repeatedly. There was a shooting and a shooter on the loose in my townhouse parking lot after we had our first child. Women were getting dragged off the trails and raped in attacks so lurid and on the nose you'd think they were made up had there not been so much physical evidence and they caught the guy. Turns out sometimes, just sometimes, rapist do wait in the bushes to ambush women jogging on a trail in broad daylight. Same trail we'd walk our infant daughter on in her stroller.
There were plenty of non-"crime" stuff that just added to the overall ambiance of chaos. People suddenly started stopping me in my car on the street and screaming at me for money. There were more loitering gangs of kids smoking and shouting obscenities at my wife as we walked by. Often on the playgrounds we'd go to take our daughter to... and then think better of it. More stores started locking things up. But if you complained about it, some shithead was always there to remind you "Town USA's crime rate is actually below average per capita! And year and year crime has barely budged!" I don't know how to reconcile those insistences with the stark change in my daily life.
So I left. And in the last 5 years I haven't caught a wif of a crime or "crime" anywhere in my proximity. No stores I shop at have gotten robbed, I haven't driven by a house with a squad of police cars trying to disarm a hostage situation (I forgot to mention that one in my old locale). There are no strong "civilization is at the edge of chaos" vibes like I used to get on a daily basis, per capita be damned.
Thanks for the detailed description. I assume these matters are relative in nature. Take the gas station on the corner, for example. Had it never been robbed before, as far as you can tell? Or yes, but only on occasions so rare that the whole neighborhood remembered afterwards for a long time? What about shootings and jogging women getting ambushed by rapists on the trails? Was it unheard of back in the days? And the loiterers and loud beggars?
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Lack of prosecution artificially reduce crime stats. "Crime rates are down, actually" -> our local progressive prosecutor has declined to do their job, so unprosecuted crimes are now much more common.
Unprosecuted crimes are usually still counted in statistics AIUI (specifically as "unsolved"). However, the more indirect route of "progressive prosecutors decline to do their job -> reporting crime now doesn't result in the crime stopping -> people stop bothering to report it" seems to hold water.
If you want to find most accurate crime statistics, look at crimes people have to report for insurance purposes, and this means crimes against cars.
If someone robs you on the street or burglarizes your house, you can just let it slide. If your car is gone, not so.
Far more accurate metric than murder - many people would not be missed by anyone if they went missing. Very few cars.
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Bezos' Addendum to Goodhart's Law: If your anecdotal evidence flies in the face of your data, you are probably measuring the data wrong.
The cynical version of this is "If your anecdotal evidence flies in the face of their data, they are probably measuring the data wrong."
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A sort of opposite example has been the homicide and violent crime rate in Finland up to the late 2000s or so. It used to be quite high officially. The country was also very safe in practise, at least as long as you weren’t a middle aged jobless alcoholic and didn’t start arguments at the hot dog stand queue after bars closed. There used to be a common joke that a typical Finnish murder was an alcoholic drinking at the cottage with his best buddy, getting into an argument, stabbing them with a knife and then calling the cops himself the next morning with no recollection of what happened.
Alas, then immigration and gangs happened and things aren’t as rosy anymore.
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Here are my thoughts on the race:
When those transplants eventually flee the consequences of their votes, what color and letter should they be forced to wear to let everyone know that they are dangerous idiots?
I wonder if Zohran would be open to, say, a 50% wealth tax on people who leave NYC?
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Right, I did mean to mention how Cuomo was basically hiding because he was so sure the name-ID and perceived experience/steady hand/moderation would carry him, but I forgot. But to be honest, usually that strategy works! Also, great point about heat, I did see that mentioned in the lead-up as something that would hurt Cuomo, who is stronger with older folks. Will have to wait for numbers to see how much of a difference that may or may not have made.
Despite thinking Mamdani's (general) election to office would be a disaster, I'm encouraged. I absolutely hate political dynasties, despite thinking they often result in decent governance. One of the few exceptions to my rule, along with poor personal judgement of the candidate. Cuomo basically illustrates that dilemma perfectly: exactly the kind of establishment figure even an avowed moderate, "the establishment actually kind of works" person like myself would normally favor, but where my hate for dynastic figures and corrupt individuals overpowers what would normally be my main interest. I would definitely be a Brad Lander voter (maybe a Mamdani 2, followed by blanks?) though this is double moot because first I don't live in NYC/don't intend to ever, but secondly locally still refuse to register with a party even in my own area, so I'm not ever voting in primaries anyways. Is this somewhat contradictory with my position as a pragmatic moderate who thinks working within the system is almost always the best choice? Yes, for sure, but I like to think I more than offset that by actually volunteering for campaigns (usually state, occasionally local, seldom national) with some regularity. I do sometimes wonder how many people actually to fit in my same boat, though. Probably not many. Though the electorate is far more diverse than most pundits give it credit for, so less-predictable people like me (but on different issues than mine) I think are more then norm than party-line types.
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