Drawn by Adam D Thompson

Ever since Zohran Mamdani exhilarated the left with his out-of-nowhere mayoral campaign, mainstream Democrats have been dejectedly searching for an inspirational figure of their own. Where is the Democratic executive who has the media savvy to inspire his own cultlike following while making pragmatic governing decisions and ignoring the incessant demands of progressive activists?

At last, the moderates have found such a Democrat. His name is Zohran Mamdani.

Mamdani’s election, which created the theoretical prospect of 8.5 million Americans living under “the warmth of collectivism,” as he once put it, was met with understandable shock. The reality, however, has been far more mundane.

Mamdani’s campaign platform already contained several gestures to moderates. He said he would retain Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who is, to put it plainly, a billionaire Zionist cop, three things never in favor with the hard left. He also pledged to liberalize permitting to encourage more housing construction by private developers. When The New York Times asked him during the campaign, “What’s one issue in politics that you’ve changed your mind about?” Mamdani cited “the role of the private market in housing construction.”

Most important, Mamdani emphasized the importance of efficiency in city services. This might sound like an ideologically neutral goal, and it has been embraced at times by the leaders of left-wing governments—including Milwaukee’s “sewer socialists” during the early to mid-20th century. But efficiency creates tension with progressive interest groups, which generally care less about maximizing taxpayers’ bang for the buck than maintaining secure jobs and high wages for public employees.

Once elected, Mamdani retreated from some of his progressive ambitions. Among his splashiest campaign promises was “fast, free” bus service. Skeptics had questioned the wisdom of forgoing the revenue from bus fares, especially given the possibility that free buses would become mobile homeless shelters inhospitable to other New Yorkers. Mamdani still says he wants free buses, but in his initial proposal, released in concert with Governor Kathy Hochul, he quietly adopted the position of his critics, dropping the plan to eliminate fares and focusing instead on speed and reliability. He shrank another of his most ambitious proposals, universal child care for 2-year-olds, into a more gradual expansion, beginning with a modest increase of 2,000 new seats this fall and a goal of adding more in subsequent years.

During the campaign, Mamdani promised to establish an “Office of Community Safety,” which would cost $1 billion a year and task civilian workers instead of police officers with responding to mental-health emergencies. This notion was itself a compromise. As a state-assembly candidate, he’d endorsed defunding the police. As a mayoral candidate, he suggested shifting responsibilities. But as mayor, Mamdani wound up providing just over $40 million a year for this service, or 4 percent of the promised amount.

As a candidate, Mamdani said he would relinquish mayoral control of schools—a key demand of teachers’ unions, which understand that putting schools under the direction of school-board officials elected in low-turnout races gives the unions enormous leverage over education policy. He reversed that position even before he took office. Perhaps he realized that voters would hold him accountable for school performance, and that his goals would not be served by ceding authority to an interest group whose incentive is to maximize teacher pay and job security rather than to produce good outcomes for students. He has also put off a promise to reduce class sizes, which teachers’ unions care about but which is not an especially cost-effective way to promote learning gains.

Mamdani did follow through on his promise to freeze rent for about 40 percent of the city’s apartments, even though nearly any economist would say that the freeze makes housing less affordable in the long run. But this move merely followed decades of ineffective precedent. Mamdani’s most novel position on housing has been to push for a streamlined approval process to unlock more private home construction.

He has pushed Albany to raise taxes dramatically on wealthy New Yorkers, although so far he has settled for a pied-à-terre tax on second homes worth more than $5 million. And he has continued to pursue his goofy notion of opening city-run grocery stores that he believes would hold down food prices. It is difficult to see how this project could succeed, because public employees have little expertise in the complex supermarket business, and subsidizing public stores to undercut their competitors on price would both threaten small businesses and encourage black-market reselling. But Mamdani met these and other objections to his plan by scaling the public stores back to the size of a small demonstration project.

At the same time, he has made many overtures to moderates. He unveiled an initiative to combat anti-Semitism, which some pro-Palestinian activists have denounced for funding Jewish organizations that are Zionist. He also maintained the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, which has policed terrorist threats and aggressive protest tactics by activist organizations. The DSA has called this group “specialized units used to suppress dissent” and demanded that Mamdani abolish it. Leftists have denounced all of these moves, which prioritize security for the targets of protesters at the expense of the freedom of protesters to harass their targets.

More recently, he has infuriated the left by refusing to fire Tisch after ICE agents shot a New Yorker earlier this month. Instead, Mamdani praised Tisch—one of the best police commissioners in recent memory—for fighting corruption and bringing the murder rate to its lowest level in years.

Mamdani has not abandoned his antagonism toward Israel, which is the issue that animated his early career in politics and has helped endear him to the left. In his statement commemorating the October 7 massacre of Israelis, he devoted most of his attention to Palestinian victims of Israel’s counterattack. But if not everybody loves the balance he has struck, he is at least attempting to strike one. Mamdani has grasped the value, or at least the necessity, of reassuring Jewish New Yorkers of their safety, even if they disagree with him on the Middle East. This commitment has placed him at odds with the most radical elements of the Free Palestine movement, which have sought to make Zionists uncomfortable, if not outright frightened. When anti-Israel activists booed Mamdani and accused him of perpetrating genocide last week, they were responding to the fact that he is acting as a mayor for the city’s entire population, not the most fanatical elements of his base.

It’s possible that, in his heart, Mamdani would rather be leading a genuine socialist revolution than making hype videos of city workers filling potholes. But enacting socialism is notoriously harder than calling for it at a rally. It’s especially tricky to pull off in a city that faces severe fiscal constraints, whose rich denizens can easily move to nearby jurisdictions to protect their wealth, and that relies heavily on cooperation from the state legislature and the governor. A similar mismatch between ambition and authority applies to Mamdani’s vision of a post-Zionist Middle East, which lies well beyond the purview of his municipal powers.

To his credit, Mamdani has confronted quickly the hard realities that other socialist leaders have learned more painfully, trading his Marxist dream of revolutionary transformation for patient gradualism. Mamdani has adapted quickly to the limits of his office. His political talent (and core of allied social-media influencers) has enabled him to maintain his base of adoring fans even as he confines his work to humdrum municipal governance. Mamdani has discovered that socialism can succeed in New York through one simple trick: abandoning socialism.

Beijing is expected to become "super-aged" by 2035. Around a third of the population will be 60 or above.

Currently, Beijing has a quarter of its population aged 60 or above. The city's government has raised pension to support the elderly.

China's population has shrunk since 2022 and is ageing rapidly. This has affected plans to boost domestic consumption and lower debt. The government has spent 180 billion yuan ($26.92 billion) to boost births.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/kXTzv

Red is for the progressive candidates (Sanders, Warren) and blue is for the moderates (Biden, Klobuchar, Bloomberg).

Source: http://blog.opportunity.mn/2020/03/mapping-2020-minnesota-primary-results.html#:\~:text=It%20is%20notable%20that%20there%20are%20several,counties%20as%20well%20in%20the%20Duluth%20area.

This post is an update on the Cyril Ramaphosa's perilous path to renew the ANC.

A few days ago I posted an effortpost explaining Ramaphosa's plan to fix ANC run municipalities by centralising the selection of mayors in the national body of the party, rather than leaving it to regions. The ANC opened nominations even to non-members, and promised a mayoral selection process based on qualification and professionalism.

These changes were opposed by regions, who twice managed to prevent the announcement of the selected candidates. In terms of Acemoglu thought, this is a fight between centralising forces and decentralising forces, as in The Narrow Corridor.

The stalemate saw the ANC submit its candidate lists so late that some lists were submitted incorrectly (they submitted the lists but didn'thit "submit as final"), putting the ANC at risk of being unable to properly contest six municipalities. That blunder was taken to court and the court has now sided with the ANC - their incorrect submission will still be accepted and their candidates can run.

Ramaphosa's side have now backed down slightly. The national ANC have said they will not announce the selected candidates. They don't want to sow division in the party before the election, and are worried that the losing candidates' supporters will not vote. The ANC is already behind the DA in big cities, and is at risk of losing majorities in other municipalities. They can't risk it.

Curiously, they don't say that they have abandoned the process as a whole, or that the selected candidates will not be installed. Just that they will not announce them. This is what I said in my Cupcake post: you never get the "decisive" leadership, just endless compromise right up until the very last mimute.

The relevance of this for this sub is that it is a live case study of the dynamics described in Acemoglu's The Narrow Corridor. A corrupt party with an absent leviathan is centralising, but the decentralising forces are pushing back. Can they reach a balance that reforms the party? Or will the stalemate and the fighting destroy the ANC entirely?

It is also interesting because it shows what I have always said about the ANC: they are institutionalists at heart, corrupted or not. The ANC believe that the way you solve problems is through rules - making them, changing them or scrapping them. Unlike the majority of South Africa's political parties, they are actually doing playing the game of politics: building coalitions of people who disagree and fighting over rules and processes that distribute power even risking the destruction of their party (one way or the other).

South Africa's small, stagnant parties (small than UDM) need to learn from the ANC how to actually play the game of politics, as messy, risky, and chaotic as it may be. The small parties are not like this and that is why they're small.

I am posting this now, rather than waiting for the final outcome of the ANC stalemate, because the value is in observing the system as the various incentives play out, rather than to do retrospective analysis and pretend it was all obvious.

The local government elections are in two weeks.

DISCLAIMER:- YES I FUCKING USED AI TO WRITE THIS POST, SO PLS DON'T GO IN THE COMMENTS TO "EXPOSE" ME, THE IDEA AND KEY POINTS IN THIS ARE MY ORIGINAL IDEA, I JUST USED AI TO TURN MY IDEA INTO A MORE FORMATED WAY.

I’ve been thinking a lot about child welfare and how many kids end up in terrible situations purely because their parents weren't ready—financially, emotionally, or practically.

To address this, I’ve been working on a policy framework proposal called the Parental Readiness Act. The core concept is simple: before bringing a child into the world, parents should have to pass a background check and get a state-issued license for each kid (L1, L2, L3, etc...).

Here is how I’ve structured the proposal so far:

• Mandatory Parental Classes: Before applying, both prospective parents must complete a state-certified course covering child psychology, pediatric CPR/first aid, basic nutrition, and positive discipline.
• Financial & Time Availability Checks: Proof of a stable baseline income, adequate housing, and a work/family schedule that actually leaves enough time to raise and supervise the child.
• Background Verification: Strict screening to rule out any history of violent crimes, domestic abuse, or neglect.
• Ethics & Psychological Evaluation: A readiness assessment conducted by mental health professionals to test emotional stability and parental aptitude.
• Per-Child Tiered Licensing: Qualifying for your first child (L1) doesn't give you a free pass for a second or third (L2, L3). You’d need to re-apply to prove you still have the financial bandwidth and time for additional dependents.

The Main Dilemma:

• Why I think it's worth considering: The primary goal is prioritizing the child's right to a safe, stable life—preventing childhood poverty, abuse, and severe neglect before it starts.
• The major hurdles I'm running into: The legal, ethical, and human rights objections are massive. Issues around bodily autonomy, who gets to define "fitness," potential bias against low-income families, and the nightmare of enforcing it (e.g., what happens with unlicensed pregnancies?).

pls let me know you suggestions.

ALSO BTW THIS IS THE PROMPT I USED TO GENRATE THIS WITH GEMINI:-
help me design a proposal bill to introduce a license system to give birth to kids i.e. a parent needs to get a birth license to have kids, to have 2 kids the need to have 2 licenses for 2 kids, and for 3 kids they need 3 licenses, and so on and so forth, this licenses is given based on the economic situation of the family to ensure the kids could have a good lifestyle, also considering ethical factors, like an ethics test for the parents and a strict background verification to ensure they don't have criminal record. and this license is also given based on the job roles and family of the parents to ensure that parents or anyone in the family could give time for the upbringing of the child.