Good morning,
From the ivory tower to City Hall, MI scholars show why progress depends on questioning orthodoxy and resisting easy answers.
On Wednesday, new MI senior fellow Danielle Sassoon’s speech at Yale Law School was reprinted in The Free Press. A former federal prosecutor and Scalia clerk, Sassoon urged incoming law students to resist the intellectual conformity that dominates elite campuses and to embrace debate—even when it means challenging peers, professors, or powerful superiors. Drawing on her own experience, from persuading Justice Scalia to revise an opinion to resigning from the Justice Department rather than abandon a case against Mayor Eric Adams, Sassoon made the case that true integrity in the law requires the courage to dissent.
Meanwhile, in the Washington Post, City Journal economics editor Jordan McGillis explains why childcare now costs almost as much as college tuition. A classic case of the Baumol effect, child care costs keep rising because it is labor-intensive and resists productivity gains. Parents must pay more to compete with higher-paying sectors. Subsidies, the standard political response, don’t reduce those costs—they merely shift them from parents to taxpayers. McGillis argues the only real fix is to expand supply, starting with reforms that make it easier for more providers and workers to enter the field.
In City Journal, Santiago Vidal Calvo dissects mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s proposal to nearly double New York City’s minimum wage to $30 an hour. Marketed as a windfall for low-income workers, it would instead set a wage floor higher than what half of New Yorkers currently earn—pricing many out of jobs, squeezing small businesses, and driving more employment off the books. As with childcare subsidies, the policy’s promises ignore economic fundamentals, and the workers it is meant to help would be the ones most harmed.
Addressing the high cost of living in New York will also require fixing the city’s broken housing approval process. In a new issue brief, MI senior fellow Eric Kober lays out reforms that voters will weigh this fall, when three Charter Revision Commission proposals go to the ballot. The measures would streamline approvals, curb parochial vetoes, and fast-track affordable housing in underserved districts. Adopting them, Kober argues, would mark the most significant land-use overhaul since 1989—and a crucial step toward sustainable growth.
Finally, in City Journal, Christopher Rufo takes aim at The New Yorker’s fixation on race, exposing how a decade of “reckoning” has enriched activists but left real inequities untouched.
Continue reading for all these insights and more.
Nick Saffran
Senior Editor
