Edward L. Glaeser discusses how the proliferation of unfair laws and regulations is walling off opportunity in America's greatest cities at the Manhattan Institute’s 2019 James Q. Wilson Lecture . We like to think of American cities as incubators of opportunity, and this has often been true—but today's successful city-dwellers are making it harder for others to follow their example. In this year's Wilson Lecture, Glaeser addresses the conflict between entrenched interests and newcomers in its ec...
Sep 18, 2019•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast City Journal contributing editor Christopher Rufo joins Brian Anderson to discuss an increasingly influential progressive faction in many cities—one that seeks to rebuild the urban environment to achieve a wide range of environmentalist and social-justice goals. According to Rufo , these "New Left urbanists" rally around controversial (and often dubious) ideas like banning cars and constructing new public housing projects. While all urban residents want to improve their city's quality-of-life, r...
Sep 11, 2019•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Labor unions have dramatically declined as a percentage of the American workforce over the last 30 years. A new proposal from presidential candidate Bernie Sanders seeks to double union ranks, City Journal senior editor Steven Malanga reports , which would mean adding nearly 15 million new members. Malanga joins associate editor Seth Barron to discuss Senator Sanders's proposal, which would put new restraints on employers, limit workers' rights to opt-out of union membership, and make other chan...
Sep 04, 2019•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Corey Johnson, Speaker of the New York City Council, joins Seth Barron to discuss the state of New York City’s transit system and his plan to break up the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), allowing the city to take control of its buses, subways, bridges, and tunnels. According to Johnson, direct control of the MTA would enhance its responsiveness, accountability, and transparency.
Aug 28, 2019•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast Brian Riedl and Shai Akabas discuss the U.S. federal budget, budget negotiations, and why Congress hasn’t addressed the rising national debt—even as it gets worse. The case for a “grand deal” on the budget has never been more evident: within a decade, annual budget deficits are projected to exceed $2 trillion. Entitlement programs are projected to drive trillions in new government debt over the next few decades. Yet increasing partisanship and political polarization—both in Washington and among ...
Aug 21, 2019•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast James B. Meigs joins Seth Barron to discuss last month's power blackout in Manhattan, California's self-inflicted energy crisis, and potential energy sources for the future. "As power outages go," Meigs writes , "the Broadway Blackout of 2019 was pretty modest." But energy reliability is becoming an issue in states across the country. California's largest power supplier, Meigs reports , recently announced that it will begin shutting down parts of the grid to help reduce the risk of wildfires. En...
Aug 14, 2019•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Milton Ezrati joins Paul Beston to discuss escalating trade tensions between the United States and China. The Trump administration announced new tariffs on $300 billion worth of Chinese goods last week, prompting China to order its state-owned businesses to stop purchasing U.S. agricultural products. Ezrati has written on U.S.-China trade issues for City Journal previously, and he maintains that both sides want a deal of some kind—and soon....
Aug 07, 2019•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast Steven Malanga and Rafael Mangual join Seth Barron to discuss concerns that lawlessness is returning to American cities, a theme that Malanga and Mangual explore in separate feature stories in the Summer 2019 Issue of City Journal . Memories of the urban chaos and disorder of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s have faded, and many local leaders today have forgotten the lessons of that bygone era. Malanga's story, "The Cost of Bad Intentions" (available soon online), shows how a new generation of politi...
Jul 31, 2019•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast City Journal editor Brian Anderson joins Vanessa Mendoza, executive vice president of the Manhattan Institute, for our second annual discussion of Brian's summer and vacation reading list. Summer is upon us, and the City Journal editors are ready for some vacation. We asked Brian to tell us what books he's taking with him to the beach this year and why. Check out Brian's summer reading list, in the order discussed: The Conservative Sensibility , by George Will Curing Mad Truths: Medieval Wisdom ...
Jul 17, 2019•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ray Domanico joins City Journal associate editor Seth Barron to discuss New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza's controversial and divisive leadership of the nation's largest public school system. Domanico details Carranza's emphasis on ridding schools of purported racial bias in his recent essay for City Journal , " Richard Carranza’s Deflections ." Over the past four decades, with varying levels of success, Carranza's predecessors in the chancellor's job have launched numerous polic...
Jul 10, 2019•15 min•Transcript available on Metacast Stephen Eide joins City Journal editor Brian Anderson to discuss how homeless services are putting pressure on one of New York City's most valued cultural institutions: the New York Public Library. Eide describes the situation in " Disorder in the Stacks ," his story in the Spring 2019 Issue of City Journal . Homelessness has been a challenge for every New York City mayor since the 1970s. Prior to the city's revitalization, the homeless were mostly concentrated in destitute neighborhoods of Manh...
Jul 02, 2019•17 min•Transcript available on Metacast Anthony Daniels (known to readers as Theodore Dalrymple ) joins Brian Anderson to discuss Daniels’s quarter-century of writing for City Journal and his new book, False Positive: A Year of Error, Omission, and Political Correctness in The New England Journal of Medicine . “Theodore Dalrymple” first appeared in the pages of City Journal in 1994 with an aptly titled essay, “ The Knife Went In ,” which recounted conversations he had had with violent felons during his time as a physician in a British...
Jun 26, 2019•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Nicole Gelinas and Howard Husock join Seth Barron to discuss New York's landmark rent-regulation law and its potential impact on housing in the city and state. Lawmakers in New York recently passed the toughest rent-regulation law in a generation, imposing new restrictions on landlords' ability to increase rents, improve buildings, or evict tenants. The bill made permanent the state's existing rent regulations, meaning that future legislatures will find it harder to revisit the issue. Housing ex...
Jun 19, 2019•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast James R. Copland joins Rafael Mangual to discuss how activist investors are turning corporate America’s annual shareholder-meeting process into a political circus. Most of corporate America is wrapping up the 2019 "proxy season" this month—the period when most publicly traded companies hold their annual meetings. It's at these gatherings that shareholders can (either directly or by proxy) propose and vote on changes to the company. Since 2011, the Manhattan Institute has tracked these proposals ...
Jun 12, 2019•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast Erica Sandberg joins City Journal associate editor Seth Barron to discuss the deteriorating state of public order in San Francisco. The Bay Area's most densely populated and desirable neighborhoods are being destroyed by lawlessness and squalor. San Francisco now leads the nation in property crime, according to the FBI. "Other low-level offenses," Sandberg reports for City Journal , "including drug dealing, street harassment, encampments, indecent exposure, public intoxication, simple assault, a...
Jun 05, 2019•17 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kay Hymowitz joins City Journal editor Brian Anderson to discuss a challenge facing aging populations in wealthy nations across the world: loneliness. Her essay in the Spring 2019 issue , " Alone ," explores this subject. "Americans are suffering from a bad case of loneliness," Hymowitz writes. "Foundering social trust, collapsing heartland communities, an opioid epidemic, and rising numbers of 'deaths of despair' suggest a profound, collective discontent." Evidence of the loneliness epidemic is...
May 29, 2019•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Economist Allison Schrager joins City Journal editor Brian Anderson to discuss her new book, An Economist Walks Into A Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk . Risk is a universal fact of life, but some of us manage more of it than others. Schrager examined how a broad cross section of people handle it: horse breeders in Kentucky, members of an elite tank unit during the Gulf War, paparazzi who stalk celebrities, prostitutes in Nevada brothels. She lays out five principles for d...
May 22, 2019•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast Charles McElwee joins Seth Barron to discuss the decline of the Catholic Church in the Rust Belt and the impact of immigration on a working-class community in Pennsylvania. The Catholic Church faces a crisis in an area that remains disproportionately Catholic. In 2018, a Pennsylvania grand jury report detailed how clergy covered up the abuse of children by more than 300 priests over a period of 70 years. Congregations continue to shrink, deepening the region’s fragmentation and leaving a hole in...
May 15, 2019•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast Myron Magnet joins Brian Anderson to discuss his new book, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution . Magnet contends that Justice Thomas's originalist jurisprudence offers a path forward for recovering our nation's "lost Constitution" and restoring America as a free, self-governing nation made up of self-reliant citizens. Author of The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817 and other books, Magnet was City Journal' s editor from 1994 through 2006 and is now editor-at-large....
May 08, 2019•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Urbanist Alain Bertaud joins Michael Hendrix to discuss how urban planners and economists can improve city management. Bertaud's book Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities argues that markets provide the indispensable mechanism for cities' growth. The book is a summation of what Bertaud has learned in a lifetime spent as an urban planner, including a stint at the World Bank, where he advised local and national governments on urban-development policies. Previously, Bertaud worked as a re...
Apr 30, 2019•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast At the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, Professor Jacob Howland writes in City Journal , "a new administration has turned a once-vibrant academic institution with a $1.1 billion endowment and a national reputation in core liberal arts subjects into a glorified trade school with a social-justice agenda." Speaking with Seth Barron , Howland describes how, in early April, TU's new administration announced a wholesale reorganization of academic departments, including the elimination of traditional l...
Apr 24, 2019•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Nicole Gelinas and Aaron Renn join Seth Barron to discuss recent developments in New York and Chicago. In the first week of April, both cities marked milestones: Manhattan got the nation's first congestion-pricing plan, courtesy of the state legislature, while Chicago elected its first black woman as mayor. New York City's transit system badly needs improvement, but Gelinas argues that this congestion-pricing plan is effectively a state money grab. Meantime, Mayor-Elect Lori Lightfoot is a polit...
Apr 17, 2019•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Joel Kotkin joins Seth Barron to discuss China's urbanization, class tensions in Chinese cities, and the country's increasingly sophisticated population surveillance. Rapid migration from China's countryside to its cities began in 1980. Many of the rural migrants arrived without hukou , or residential permits, making it harder to secure access to education, health care, and other services. The result: the creation of a massive urban underclass in many Chinese cities. Rising tensions in urban are...
Apr 10, 2019•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Steven Malanga joins Seth Barron to discuss expanding efforts to legalize recreational marijuana use, a movement helped along by extensive misinformation about the drug's supposed health benefits. This year, at least eight states are debating laws that would permit recreational pot. Marijuana advocates claim that the drug is therapeutic and that legalizing it will end the unjust imprisonment of casual users, especially in minority communities. But as Malanga writes in City Journal , "Even as the...
Apr 03, 2019•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Rafael Mangual joins Seth Barron to discuss the disturbing leftward trend among urban prosecutors in major cities and the consequences of undoing the crime-fighting revolution of the 1990s. In recent years, cities like Philadelphia and Chicago have elected district attorneys dedicated to the principles of social-justice and the goal of "dismantling mass incarceration." The shift away from proactive law enforcement has opened a rift between police and local prosecutors and points to more trouble ...
Mar 27, 2019•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast City Journal contributing editor Howard Husock joins associate editor Seth Barron to discuss the Manhattan Institute's Civil Society Awards , which recognize outstanding nonprofit leaders who develop solutions to social problems in their communities. History has shown that free markets are the best way to organize economic activity, but a healthy society relies on charitable and philanthropic enterprises to help those in need and prepare citizens to realize their potential. To support these goal...
Mar 20, 2019•16 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hoover Institution fellow and award-winning historian Victor Davis Hanson joins the Manhattan Institute's Troy Senik to discuss the presidency of Donald Trump and Hanson's new book, The Case for Trump . Hanson argues that our 45th president alone has the instinct and energy to upset the balance of American politics. "We could not survive a series of presidencies as volatile as Trump's," he writes, "but after decades of drift, America needs the outsider Trump to do what normal politicians would n...
Mar 13, 2019•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast James B. Meigs joins City Journal senior editor Steven Malanga to discuss the limitations of renewable energy and the need to expand nuclear technology as a source of clean and reliable electricity. For nearly four decades, environmental activists have opposed nuclear power in favor of "green" energy. But as Meigs writes in the Winter 2019 Issue of City Journal , "nuclear power is finding new pockets of support around the world." Meigs is the former editor of Popular Mechanics and cohost of the ...
Mar 06, 2019•17 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ray Domanico joins City Journal associate editor Seth Barron to discuss charter schools in New York City, the growing protests by education workers across the country, and Democrats' weakening support for charters. In teachers' unions protests from West Virginia to California, activists claim that the growth of charters has come at the expense of district schools. New York City's charter school students significantly outperform their state and local peers, and minority children from struggling f...
Feb 27, 2019•15 min•Transcript available on Metacast Daniel DiSalvo joins City Journal editor Brian Anderson to discuss the impact of last year’s Supreme Court decision in Janus v. ASFCME , in which the Court ruled that public-sector unions’ mandatory “agency fees” were unconstitutional under the First Amendment. Unions provide an important source of financial support for politicians—primarily Democrats—around the country. In a new report for the Manhattan Institute, DiSalvo finds that blue states are taking steps to shield their public unions fro...
Feb 20, 2019•12 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
