When I was six, my Grampa Sam took me to the Waterview Diner in Howard Beach, Brooklyn for dinner.
As he slid into the booth, I saw a gun poke out from under his suit jacket.
“Grampa, is that a gun?!” I asked.
He put a finger to his lips and whispered, “I need it for work.”
He wasn’t lying.
He ran a steel factory at 792 Sterling Place in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Outside the gates were boarded-up brownstones inhabited by drug dealers, addicts, and gangs who loved robbing him and his employees at gunpoint. The trucks hauling his steel to construction sites were driven by union-members under mafia control. Deterring violence was not a side note in his job description. It was central to keeping the business alive.
The New York of my 1980s childhood was a place where hookers propositioned you after Broadway shows. Where the Mets won the World Series with a roster of cocaine addicts. Where we all laughed at a loudmouthed wannabe real estate mogul from Queens named Donald Trump. Where rap was exploding out of the Bronx. AIDS was annihilating the gay community. And the stock market was minting a new generation of the ultra-rich.
In that 1980s New York, you could be anything you wanted as long as you were okay with your affordable apartment getting robbed every week.
My family sold the factory in 2000. The new owners tore it down and built luxury condos. Today, a two-bedroom there costs $5,400 a month. You can buy a matcha latte on the corner. You cannot buy crack.
That factory’s fate is the economic arc of New York in miniature.
The city has become a Birkin bag, a luxury good. A symbol for the Democratic Party that has always run it: exclusive and indifferent to anyone who cannot afford it.
Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York primary last June marks both an overdue death and a welcome birth. I am excited by his meteoric ascent because of what seems to be dying and by the possibility of what he can achieve if he wins next November. He represents a new dawn for my beloved hometown, and also for the decaying Democratic Party.
Mamdani’s victory has united sworn enemies. Trump, the Clintons, Mike Bloomberg, and Andrew Cuomo have all locked arms to brand him an anti-Semitic Communist Muslim. It is a coalition of the ultra-rich, desperately clinging to culture wars to distract from their real mission: keeping prosperity locked in their own vaults. For years we suspected this was the game. Now, in their united outrage, they are playing it in the open.
The Democratic Party has become the bleeding hearts versus the bleeding out. They lose elections in November in Pennsylvania and Florida because they spend August fundraising in the Hamptons and Nantucket. They place greater importance on trans rights and immigration (both important issues) than reversing the decline of America’s Rust Belt, once their most prosperous electoral stronghold. Economically, the Democrats are the party of bank bailouts, NAFTA, and a written-by-lobbyists affordable healthcare bill that made healthcare CEOs richer and made healthcare less affordable.
When I worked as a legislative analyst on Wall Street, the thing that shocked me most was that while Democrats and Republicans fought about abortion, gay marriage, and religion, their leaders like Corey Booker and Hilary Clinton voted in lockstep with their Republican counterparts to strip bankruptcy protection and ban drug imports.
Mamdani has seized on the void this economic collusion has created. Inequality is the biggest, currently unoccupied tent for building an electoral coalition.
But while you can campaign with a wrecking ball, you must govern with a hammer and nails. If Mamdani wins this November, he will need to show that he can lift people up, not just tear billionaires down.
If I could wave a magic wand, I would wish for Mamdani to craft a new economic model that empowers Democrats to run as the party of widespread prosperity. My second wish would be for him to make Harvard economist Claudia Goldin his deputy mayor.
“Who is Claudia Goldin?” you ask.
She is the most relevant economist of our time that no one has ever heard of.
Goldin focuses on the two most important issues of our time: inequality and innovation. In 2003, she found that when innovation outpaces education, it produces rampant inequality and economic instability. She also found the inverse is true: when education keeps pace with technological progress, innovation lifts entire populations out of poverty.
Goldin is the missing voice in the chorus of modern economics. Economists focus on the same things they did 50 years ago: interest rates, deficits, unemployment, government stimulus, and globalization. These issues are still critically important, but they were crafted for a world where the biggest companies were in banking, oil, gas, and heavy industry.
They do not account for the emergence of the digital economy, where NVIDIA, Google, Meta, Apple, OpenAI, and Microsoft carry the most weight.
Goldin’s other great strength is that she is pro-opportunity, not anti-growth. The key to governing innovation is not shutting it down, or regulating the life out of it. It is ensuring the fastest-growing companies send a ladder back down into the schools. The tool for governing innovation is making sure science and math are taught in ways that matter to the fastest-growing companies.
As mayor, Mamdani will have to shift from cutting billionaires down to lifting people up. To do that, he will need to borrow Goldin’s brilliance and shift education from “proficiency for the SATs” to “proficiency that gets you hired.”
Here is what that might look like:
1. Fix STEM for real. There are two STEM curriculums in America: the fringe-useful and the ubiquitous-useless.The useful STEM curriculum is a fringe movement exemplified by P-TECH High School in Brooklyn, where IBM co-designs the curriculum, teams up with CUNY professors, and provides paid internships. Math and science are structured around labor market demand. The ubiquitous-useless STEM curriculum is based on a 19th century model that says math is algebra, then geometry, then trigonometry, then calculus because it will be on the SATs. STEM must be taught according to the skills most in demand, not outdated academic dogma.
2. Make sweaty sexy. If you want to graduate college and be rich, your best bet is SUNY Maritime, a state school in the Bronx that trains merchant mariners, tugboat captains, and ferry captains. They have the highest job placement rate (98%) and median salary ($185,000) of any school in the United States, including the Ivy League. We need more schools like this that prepare students for high-paying, talent-starved, physical-labor industries. We also need a massive brand redesign to make these schools known and sexy.
3. Bypass the obstructionists. In enterprise innovation, rule number one is to always have multiple paths to market because territorial gatekeepers will block you. Education reform faces the same gauntlet: testing standards, Ivy League orthodoxy, and union politics all slow adaptation. New York could transform CUNY into the Harvard on the Hudson it once was, creating a pipeline from high-growth companies to high school classrooms to college graduation with job offers waiting at the other end.
New York and the Democratic Party cannot be run like a country club for the rich. The Democratic Party cannot hope to win national elections if it will not fight like hell to lift the poor into prosperity. Mamdani has an opportunity to redefine the Democratic Party as the Party that fights for prosperity. If he borrows from Claudia Goldin, STEM can be the ladder that lifts people up and revives a desperate Democratic Party.
I’ll be speaking about innovationomics - including the impact of innovation on inequality in NYC, Denver, and Miami this September and October. Email [email protected] for speaking inquiries.