Why American Cities Cost So Much and Deliver So Little

0:00Tired of rage scrolling through AI Slop and ClickBape just to get a handle on today's news? Meet InPress, the algorithm-free news app that makes it fun and rewarding to stay informed. Track your media literacy and rediscover reality. Download today at inpress.app. That's I, N as in NewsNerd. Press. From rethink the creative marketing studio at the Atlantic and Walmart, OnSolid Ground is a new podcast exploring the increasing threat of natural disasters. I'm journalist Caroline Modoresi-Torani and I spoke with those on the front lines of disaster response to understand how communities build resilience before, during and after a storm. Listen to OnSolid Ground wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to the David Frum show.

1:05I'm David Frum, a staff writer at the Atlantic. My guest this week will be Rihon Salam, president of the Manhattan Institute, and we'll discuss how American cities can deliver better government to their residents at more reasonable costs than they now do. This week's book will be a masterpiece of strategic thinking. Every war must end by Fred Charles E. Clay. But before either the dialogue or the book discussion, some opening thoughts on a new story you may have seen this past weekend. The sudden recall of 12 B1 bombers from their base in the south of England to the mainland of the United States. As so often with Trump administration military stories, there may be less or there may be more to this story than meets the eye. The Trump administration is staffed by people who look for any opportunity and any excuse to recall military assets from allies and especially from European allies back to the American mainland. This recall may be something that people in the Trump administration wanted to do anyway for their own reason and we will find out more about that in the days ahead.

2:06But the first reports may also be true that there was some sudden threat to these bombers that necessitated their removal from England back to the American mainland. What might that threat be? Either a terrorist attack in Britain or else possibly a drone and missile attack, like those that have been experienced by American forces in the Persian Gulf. We don't know. But what we do know is that through the Persian Gulf, the Iranians have had great success, much greater success than it first reported, pushing back American force from their parameters. The American naval base in Bahrain was badly damaged by Iranian drones and missiles. As we have seen in Ukraine, suddenly individuals far from the battle scene controlling these small comparatively inexpensive new technologies can inflict tremendous damage anywhere on the enemy's territory. The Ukrainians have done it to Russia and the Russians have done it to the Ukrainians. We may be living through a revolution in military technology as dramatic as when the advent of gunpowder made obsolete the night on horseback and the castle made of stone. The United States is

3:10poorly adapted to this revolution and especially poorly adapted under the Trump administration. There are deep reasons why the United States is poorly adapted to this revolution. The United States has made an enormous investment in very costly, very sophisticated platforms, bombers, fighters, aircraft carriers, tanks, equipment, machinery that moves above ground on the land, on the ocean, in the air. And it is reluctant to accept that this enormous investment may now be obsolete in ways that empower weaker adversaries who master the new technology of drone warfare first. The United States is also poorly adapted because of the way America finances and improves its military technology. The congressional system, the iron triangle of lobbyists and administrations in Congress, tends to regard weapons as not just tools of war, but also as tools of economic development back at home and oftentimes as income support strategies for retired members of the military. And so the United States invests very deeply in systems that are driven by domestic

4:14needs and not by the needs of the battlefield. In the Trump era, these difficulties are augmented by two special problems. The first is the nation that is the pioneer and leader in drone warfare is Ukraine. And the United States under President Trump is terribly reluctant, brutally reluctant to learn lessons of war from Ukraine. President Trump, vice president Vance and others around them decided early that the Ukrainians were losers, that they were doomed, that they were dependents, they were welfare recipients, they were moochers, they deserve nothing and they had nothing to offer. Now it turns out they may be the leading military innovator of the modern era. And suddenly it's very embarrassing to turn around and say maybe these guys of whom the Trump administration has so little good to say, maybe they have something to offer that America needs. So the reluctance to learn lessons from Ukraine and the eagerness to fire the generals and admirals most ready to learn the lessons from Ukraine, that is handicap the United States. There's another handicap in the drone warfare era and that is ideological. Secretary Hegseth is a man with a vision of the military as a

5:16tool for waging culture war, not real battlefield warfare. He is invaded against troops who wear beards against troops who are overweight against troops who don't have enough testosterone. He wants to promote troops that look a certain way that can do certain physical exercises. It is said in a rolling stone profile of just retired secretary of the army, Dan Driscoll, does Hegseth's vision is an of an army that is ready for Instagram, not ready for war. And as he systematically goes through the army firing those generals who want to learn the lessons of the new, Hegseth has left the United States vulnerable to the lessons of the new. My wife's grandfather was the founder of the Canadian armored corps. He's contested through his life with the old and outdated proponents of cavalry warfare. And he lamented there's something about senior military command that has the effect of transforming brain into bone. Something like that seems to be going on in the higher reaches of the Trump Defense Department. And it's happened at a time when we desperately need all the brains we can get. As I said, there may be less or more of the story of B1 bombers being recalled

6:18than first reported. But it is a portent of something ominous in the changing world of national security. Something ominous that this administration and this Department of War so-called is uniquely unready to meet. And now my dialogue with Ryan Salam. But first, a quick break. If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage-baiting, day eye noise. Thanks social media. That's where InPress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism. Not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with InPress. Download it today for iOS or Android at InPress.app. That's I, and as in news nerd, press. From rethink the creative marketing studio at the Atlantic and Walmart,

7:21OnSolid Ground is a new podcast exploring the increasing threat of natural disasters. I'm journalist Caroline Modoresi-Torani and I spoke with those on the front lines of disaster response to understand how communities build resilience before, during and after a storm. Listen to OnSolid Ground wherever you get your podcasts. Brian Salam Brian Salam grew up in Brooklyn, the son of immigrants, and went through New York City's public schools. He started out doing research for David Brooks at the New York Times, worked as a producer at NBC News, and became an editor at the Atlantic and National Review. In 2008, he and Rostow thought co-authored Grand New Party, an argument that the GOP, the Republican Party, should do more to appeal to working class voters. In 2018, he published Melting Pot or Civil War, arguing for an immigration

8:25system built on skills. In 2019, he became the fifth president of Manhattan Institute, carrying a warning to all conservatives that a conservatism that does not speak to cities will be marginalized. Canadian listeners be aware that Rihon also possesses an expert knowledge of Canadian politics. Brian is an old and dear friend and it's a pleasure to welcome him to the David Fram show. Brian, welcome. Thank you for having me, David. It's a pleasure to be with you. Well, let's focus on your day job of city government. Back in the Reagan 80s, there was a bumper sticker, very good, nature conservative joke. Thank God we don't get all the government we pay for. I don't know that New Yorkers or San Francisco's or Angelina's, they pay for a lot of government, a lot. And I think mostly inhabitants of these overwhelmingly Democrat blue cities would like to see more reward for the money they pay. This has been the work of the Manhattan Institute. It looks like in 2026, the country is going to take, is going to veer to the left, maybe quite far to the left. State government, local government in these places is already pretty far to the left.

9:26Without telling anyone on the left, not to be on the left, they wouldn't listen. But how do people in New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco in similar cities get more of the government they're already paying for? Well, fundamentally, when I think about a dense, large city, I do believe that it is reasonable to expect that you're going to have a larger government. Density creates enormous opportunities. It creates enormous productivity, but it also creates demons of density as well. When you're thinking about the need for more stringent policing, when you're thinking about the other questions of urban management, public health, when you're thinking about drainage, when you're thinking about environmental pollutants, any number of questions. So my starting point is that it is reasonable to expect that you're going to have a more energetic government in these places. You need a more energetic government to fully unlock that potential of urban life. The problem, as you suggest, is that also that wealth that you create in these dynamic productive

10:30cities also becomes a target for extraction. Though you might have the starting point is, hey, we need to have a capable government to solve problems x, y, and z. Another thing that can often happen, depending on the political dynamic in the city, and whether or not you have meaningful competition and what have you, we can get more to that. But basically, you have this dynamic where, in many cases, that wealth is being extracted by interest groups that become really potent and entrenched. So think about it this way. In New York City, New York City employs 300,000 city employees. That is in some ways an undercount, because you have a lot of other people who are employed indirectly, who are subsidized by city and state government in various other ways. That is already a very potent political constituency unto itself. People who have a vested interest not only in a city government that is large, but also a city government that is offering

11:32very favorable terms of employment to its various employees. What do I mean by favorable term of employment? Well, let's say you don't necessarily want a very high degree of accountability. Let's say you want very strong tenure rules. Let's say you want the job to be a more attractive or appealing job according to various metrics so that the job actually becomes more attractive than the equivalent job in the private sector. So you may well get feather betting over time. You may well employ more people than you need to strictly speaking. Or, you know, though technically, we have civil service hiring and notionally we're hiring people on a meritocratic basis. But it could be that that's not quite how it happens that you're growing the city employment roles, because you're again trying to achieve some larger political objective. In New York City, and I think the supplies to many other cities as well, you could think of this as the friction not between Republicans and Democrats, but call it Tammany Hall and Reform. Tammany Hall being the politics of patronage, the politics of using public dollars, not necessarily solely to achieve a

12:37public purpose, but using public dollars to entrench and grow a given political coalition. And then the party of reform that again could come with a democratic label or a Republican label or whichever label that comes into say, okay, we're going to take away the punch bowl. You know, we are going to be the ones we're going to refocus city government on what matters, on delivering efficiency. And I think that that is this oscillation of power that has been part of the American urban story, but it's not unique to dynamics within the city. It also is shaped by dynamics outside of it and larger cultural and political forces. I was in New York this past weekend. At one point in the weekend, I was crawling along Westward inch by inch on a midtown street. And observing one of the reasons this street was moving so slowly is because it was a three-lane street. One lane was being used for driving and two lanes were being used for cheap parking. Who made that decision that the city should give two-thirds of the street away as a subsidized

13:38parking lot to the people using the street? That's not that's a giveaway to somebody or rent more less randomly chosen people, but it's still a giveaway. And I think everyone who drives along the street must have had the same question that I've done and yet obviously it's impossible to do anything about it. Is there it is? Two-thirds of the street is used for subsidized parking. Well, we also know from the great scholar of parking, Donald Shoop, that actually quite a bit of that traffic consists of people who are looking for a parking spot. So in a way, there's many levels to this perversity. But you know, part of it is a point, it's an observation that kind of answers itself. So when you become used to the entitlement, the expectation that you're going to have free parking, moving from one equilibrium, which is a very painful and damaging one that causes all kinds of waste, all kinds of economic damage, to a new one that may well be much more efficient. But you're not necessarily going to be thinking, ah, think about all this time that I've saved. I feel so blessed. I feel so fortunate. What you're going to think about is that I once had an entitlement to free parking on the street. And now I don't. Including if you're not someone who drives

14:42especially often, you know, you just could think in the back of your head, ah-ha, I once have this entitlement. And in New York City and in many other cities besides, you also have these bespoke arrangements. You have what you might think of as these hereditary rights that you kind of you gain over time. So if you're looking at many public employees in New York City, in many cases, they will use placards to identify themselves as public employees. And one reason they do that is to ensure that they will not receive tickets. Because the idea is that if you work in parking enforcement, if you were someone who is, you know, looking to a fellow public employee, you will treat them differently than you treat other people. Now that hereditary privilege alone is something that actually has enormous effects on the flow of traffic. But it's just one of many ways in which when you're thinking about any city, you're not just thinking about a place that is run through cool rationality. You know, how are we thinking about the technocratic management

15:42of this urban landscape? You are thinking about traditions. You are thinking about this deference. You were thinking about this exercise of power. And a lot of other ways that don't actually rise to the level of being covered by the newspaper or even being understood in some, you know, data rich kind of way. These are just the ways that things work that degrade the quality of life, but that people tolerate until they don't. As blue cities and blue jurisdictions swing farther to the left after November of 2026, which is what looks likely to happen, they are insisting that the solution is to capture more revenue, and especially to capture it from the very richest people. And so their projects, you see them in Washington state and other places, who impose an extra heavy level of surtaxes on the very richest people in the jurisdiction, thinking that that's the way out. That seems an ideological commitment. And it seems like a strange commitment for subnational governments to have because it's a country which is very easy to move. It's a world in which people have less and less reason that they have to be in any particular place. But it seems to be a move

16:44that urban governments are determined to make in 2026. I am a great believer in the potential of our great cities. And so I do believe that they are very attractive. They have many, you know, particularly when you're thinking about an aging society, it is not difficult to imagine a world in which younger people in an aging society want to cluster with other younger people. So those are advantages. And I think a lot of people are taking those advantages and saying, gosh, we can tax much more. We can allow the quality of services to degrade further. And that's going to be fine. There will still be the stickiness of economic activity. I believe that's a mistake, even though I do believe in that power of urban concentration, urban agglomeration, urban productivity. Because, you know, as you suggest, I think that there are other forces on the other end. There are other cities that are emerging that are themselves competitive. But the larger point I would make is this, David, we have been living through a period of fiscal expansion and fiscal incontinence.

17:47You know that our deficits are above 6% of GDP right now. This is at a time when unemployment is 4.2%, quite low by historical standards. And yet even then we have this enormous deficit. And that deficit trickles into state and local governments. It trickles in because, you know, you have your city budget funded by city taxes. But then you have your portion of the city budget funded by transfers from state governments. And then you have the proportion of the city and state governments funded by federal dollars as well. And this is really, really important to understand. Now, you know, as well as anyone, David, that a huge driver of employment in any American city, big or small, is, you know, what we affectionately refer to as eds and meds, the education system and the health system. These are two systems that are very heavily subsidized. The health system, in particular, is very heavily subsidized by federal dollars and might I add borrowed federal

18:48dollars. New York City might be a somewhat extreme case, but it's not unique, but in New York City, 52% of residents are on either Medicaid or something called the essential plan, which is a Medicaid-like publicly subsidized health system. Now, we can debate whether or not that's strictly necessary. I would argue that it's not. That in fact, if we had a narrower safety net, we would have more effective safety net programs. And you'd have a lot of other folks who would find private health insurance, let's say, and then you would have a somewhat lower burden. Let's come back to that for a moment. But fundamentally, you're looking at a city that is a very dynamic city with a very dynamic private economy. But if you're actually looking at employment, if you're actually looking at the biggest, fast-discoring private sector job in New York City, but also many other cities besides, it is home health aids. Now, that is a private sector job in a sense that you are not literally a public employment. But it is also a publicly subsidized job,

19:50and it's a job in which you, David Framurai, Raihans-Lam, if I were on a subsidized program, and I have a subsidized home health aid, I'm not paying with my own dollars. And so, in some cases, you might not actually have someone who is offering a service with value, commensurate to what the public sector is paying for that service. That is something you were seeing more and more in American political economy, and particularly in our cities. Now, I invite you to imagine a meeting that you are taking with one of the more leftish crop of new urban officials, local officials in the country after November 26, after, in this past year. And the meeting begins with the person you're talking about saying, Raihans-Lam, you are self-identified conservative, conservatives are very out of style. A lot of the problems that our city faces are driven by the Trump administration, and it's many forms of interference in our and our lives that we're unasked for. Why should anybody listen to you? What can you possibly have to say? It's a value to me as I cope with my problems and my constituents.

20:55Well, I believe that fundamentally, whatever the part is in label, there are some underlying structural forces that are going to come to bite relatively soon. If you look at the urban policy revolution that unfolded in the late 80s, 1990s, 2000s, the big insight was not some grand ideological insight. It was this. It was that when you're looking at a lot of major cities that had for many decades been begging the federal government for money, give us more money to solve this problem. My old colleague Fred Siegel called this the riot ideology. If you do not give us money, they're going to be riots. We're not going to be able to control it. It's going to be really bad. And therefore, you just kept going and rattled the tin cup, begging for more money for the federal government. The problem is when you have a federal government that starts to tighten its belt by necessity, then suddenly you're going to have a more discerning federal government that's going to be thinking about where exactly am I going to be applying these subsidy dollars.

21:57And it's not necessarily going to be in a place that is not really politically contested. During the migrant crisis that unfolded during the Biden presidency, Mayor Eric Adams, Democrat, was begging the Democratic president, Joe Biden, to rescue New York City by infusing more federal dollars in the city. And the Biden administration said, no, the Biden administration said, you have a right to shelter, you have a ton of other policies that actually have exacerbated this crisis in your city. And by the way, we're not really concerned about losing the five boroughs of New York City as voters in our upcoming presidential election. So we're not going to be all that concerned about you. And that's in a case where they were quite happy as President Trump is to run an enormous federal deficit. So basically, what happened is you had an alternative to tin cup politics. You had a group of mayors who said, we have to solve some of these problems ourselves. So you don't have to listen to me. All you have to do is look at your bottom line.

22:58All you have to do is look at the fact that you're going to start experiencing, if you haven't already, very stringent budget constraints and voters to whom you've been making a lot of promises that are going to be very hard to fulfill given this new fiscal landscape. Can we talk about schools for a moment? I mean, you in your own life owe so much to the schools as waste to identify and promote talent. And so much of your rise to your remnants has been was a chief because of the talent scouting that occurred in the New York public school system. New York and other cities seem to be less interested in doing that. In fact, they seem to want to break a lot of the mechanisms for finding talent and helping talent forward. Why does that happen? Is there anything that can be done to change the cities or maybe the cities aren't even wrong? Maybe breaking the time. Maybe the talent scouting mechanism is too exclusionary and unfair. There's so many things going on that are making our cities today really different than they were 30 years ago. So narrowly on the education point, you know, you know this as well as I do, David, in many big urban public school systems, it increasingly feels as though the system is being

24:02run for the benefit of the system's employees then for its no-shinnell beneficiary students. That's not because anyone is sinister. It's because you're seeing declining enrollment. That's kind of one thing that is going on across jurisdictions. But also you have the system that employs an enormous number of people who are themselves people who might feel economically fragile. These are people where some of them absolutely could find more remodeled employment outside of these public systems. But some of them are people who might not be able to find more remodeled employment outside of these systems. What we've been doing in the United States as a whole since the 1970s is we've been increasing the amount of staff in our school systems. We're hiring more teachers, but we're hiring more para professionals as well. So if you're looking at the staffing ratios, how many students do you have relative to the number of adult employees of the school system, you've seen a really dramatic change over this time. So if you're looking to people who are employed in public education, they will often say that, well, look, education is part of our mission,

25:07but we also are providing meals. We are providing counseling. You know, we have students in some cases who are homeless, who are suffering from various other maladies. And so we are essentially social service bureaucracies in miniature that are serving this troubled population. Now, you know, we can get into that specifically whether or not that's a sound argument, but also think about a middle class parent who, as you were suggesting before, has options. They don't necessarily have to enroll their children in that school system. They can move elsewhere and what have you. You know, that system that is leading with the idea that, well, look, education is from education. You know, yes, this sort of that might be true, but how dare you not appreciate this incredibly profound social mission that we have. And by the way, oh gosh, you're right. You know, maybe we're not doing as well as we might on the educational front, but that's because of segregation and inequality and various other problems of cosmic injustice that we, of course, in our small little school system. I can't possibly solve it on our own. So it becomes this incredible buckpassing to help cement

26:09the political coalition that allows for these failures to unfold. And again, there are some great people in these systems. There are some excellent schools within these systems, but the underlying logic is one that leads you to more excuse making and away from accountability. Tell me what is wrong with the argument I'm about to present. A historic idea in the New York system long ago, a generation ago and more was students in the school system are going to be disproportionately poor. Some of them are going to be very talented people who might not have on their own from their own family resources, the opportunities that their talent could use, could benefit from and could benefit all of us. So we're going to do talent sifting. We're going to look for those talented 30% and we're going to promote them and give them fast track them and help them to get to college and to discover things in themselves that the people in their lives who they grow up with may not recognize for them. That's been a view in the past. It's increasingly challenged. We've all been reading with fascination, the recent eruption between a famous New York Times writer and her daughter,

27:09the New York Times writer said to the daughter, you're going to go to the same school as everybody else and the daughter said, you have the ability to get me into a better school. Why won't you help me? And the mother said it's a point of principle. What is wrong with what the mother is saying? What is potentially right about the old way of doing it or vice versa? Well, I believe the mother in that case was right to say that my daughter has been failed by these schools and there is something broken where she goes wrong is with her view as to what the right structural solution would be. So this is my answer to any number of dilemmas facing American cities and it's this. When you are an American city that has people who want to solve problems for you at very low fiscal cost to you, you should let them do it. What do I mean by that? So one thing we hear again and again, you hear this in Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, San Francisco, of course, any number of cities. We have an acute housing crisis and that's true. We

28:12have an acute housing crisis in many American communities. But what you also have is a crisis that could present its own solution. In New York City, asking rents are so high for the tiny number of units that are available that there are people crazy enough that they will come along and say, I will build a private rental housing if you let me do it. And if you allow me to charge what the market will bear, you might think they're mad. I might think they're mad because there's so many other barriers that you have to overcome, so many political obstacles. But if you let them do it, they would do that. In a similar vein, there are people who run school systems in New York City, in the fibers of New York City, but also in many other urban jurisdictions besides who will say, hey, I'm running a charter network. Give me a fraction. And by the way, they'd rather have more money. But they'll say, hey, give me 80% of what you're giving to your public district schools for my

29:13public charter school, where I don't have the same collective bargaining rules and I have greater flexibility. And I can educate those students much more effectively. There are people who will solve that problem for you if you just let them solve it for you. So to my friends on the left, what I would say is that you have bigger fish to fry. Maybe you want to address the Middle East. You want to address various other problems. Why don't you allow these other people to educate young people and do it competitively and at reasonable cost? Why don't you let these other people address this acute housing crisis? And you can focus much like the Queen of England, and now the King of England, is able to service defender of the faith and do other things. The magic and mysticism of any form of government. Why don't you focus on those things and then allow these other people to solve the problem? I'm smiling at your joke. The mayor of New York should focus

30:13on solving the problems in the Middle East, volunteers deliver schools and build housing for them. Because they will do it. They will come along and do it if you actually just create a system. Because he's got a lot to say about the Middle East, of course, and everyone who wants to hear from him. And that's supposed to be a burning passion for him and for many other people. And again, I might disagree with where he lands on the Middle East, but we'll leave that aside. But he's probably pretty harmlessly occupied talking about it. He might actually do less damage if he simply said, I'm going to actually serve as an ambassador for, you know, I'm going to serve as a mascot for this or that political cause. But why don't you create the systems that allow other actors, including in some cases, public actors to do good work? Well, you mentioned housing, and that was where I wanted to go next. You and I come from a tradition where we believe, if you let private builders build tens of thousands of new units per year, even if all of those units are aimed at the top of the market, simply the presence of those tens of thousands a year of new units all aimed at the top of the market is going to push down prices all the way through the market. But that seems to be, at least in the city of New York, a discarded, rejected idea. And they say

31:18that if you build lots of units at the top of the market, they will only serve the top of the market and everything else will remain unchanged by the arrival of all of these new units. Can you speak up on behalf of what we used to think of as the basic economics of housing against the new idea that no matter how many units you build at the top, it won't change anything else for anybody else? It's very simple. Right now, you know, the way that we are approaching housing in many of our cities is you're saying that the desire to build private rental housing is suspect. It is something that is very questionable. We will allow you to do it if you do 15 other things to prove to us that you're not actually doing something sinister or dubious or questionable or whatever else. So one thing we'll say is that we'll allow you to build private rental housing if you set aside some number of those new units to represent permanently affordable housing stock.

32:19That is to say, you know, if you set it aside so that people with incomes below a certain threshold can afford these units and then, you know, can if you'll do that on a kind of ongoing basis, then we'll allow you to build some other private housing. But the funny thing there is that what you're effectively doing is that these people who want to build more housing supply, you're taxing them. You're saying that we're actually going to limit the number of new market rate units you can build so that you can set aside this this number of units that are, you know, mandatory below market affordable. So actually, you make it even harder to solve the bigger problem, which is that demand is outstripping supply. Then you could say, well, we'll allow you to build it, but you need to offer very high wages to the people building it, you know, because actually, you know, somehow this work, relative to all forms of work otherwise, need to be and need to put in some separate bucket. And we don't trust those workers to be able to come to some arrangement

33:19with you because you exert power, but, you know, any number, they're all of these other side deals that are imposed so that you actually see to it that the amount of new housing is a trickle. Now, actually, how it really works when it works is this. You allow a bunch of speculators to build and indeed to overbuild so that actually they eventually come to a point where they lose their shirts and they as investors lose their shirts. It's not the city government that loses its shirt through a subsidy. It's the investors build and build and build until you satiate at the demand and then, okay, low and behold, we built a little bit too much. That's what happened in Austin, Texas. Austin, Texas built an enormous amount of housing, rents wet down, and then developers stopped building new housing because then they're waiting for that amount of new supply to be absorbed by the marketplace. So I'm not of the view that if you allow private developers to build a lot of new housing, they're going to build so much that New York City is going to become,

34:19you know, as inexpensive to rent an apartment and it is to Buke. That's not going to happen. But you will mitigate this acute problem we have right now, number one, and number two, you'll have a bigger tax base. You know, you will actually have a more prosperous thriving city, which is a good thing unto itself. And I think that there are some folks on the left who recognize that you need to build more, but I call this a maculad conception progressivism. They say that, well, you can build more, provided you do it in exactly the right way in exquisitely moral ways by my exquisite moral standards. I'm not going to let you do it in some laissez faire fashion where the ideas that you build to the point where you lose your shirt. I'm going to do it with you as a partner side by side, we will do this together. And I will essentially dictate to you exactly what it ought to look like. And I understand that there's there's some subtleties here. There's some complexities. There's a question of getting from here to there. I get all of that. But I think that fundamentally, if there are people

35:20who are willing through their animal spirits to address the problem, let them do it. How much new housing does New York need in your opinion? How many units per year would be would put the city on the path to escaping from the crisis of affordability at the end? I would say something like 50,000 plus new units a year so that we would get something like half a million over the course of a decade. If you were to do that, then I believe housing would be much more abundant and more affordable than it is today. There are many other things that I would do to David, but I think that that would go a long way. And how many of you are building now? Do you happen to remember? It's more like in the in the 20,000s, maybe the high 20,000s, but that is a little bit of an artifact of the fact that we just had a big rezoning. And also, there are some units that are being built because of a tax credit that is about to expire. So people were rushing to collect that tax credit. So those numbers

36:21I would expect to go down somewhat. But we'll see. I think that our current mayor recognizes that this is an acute challenge. And he does want to build more. He, however, is not always mindful of the various other regulations that he's imposing that makes this a less attractive place to invest. So we'll see, but we're not anywhere near where we need to be. Urban politics, as you said, is inherently very complicated. There are a lot of people are just as people are close together. There are a lot of interest. There are lots of points of view. But one of the things that used to guide good decision making was it was a few basic rules and say, you know, I'm not going to master every complex detail. I just know if you build more housing, the prices go down. If you arrest more criminals, the streets are safer. If you, if you sweep the streets, you'll have less disease. And that those basic notions, which are not 100% true, but good enough, we seem to have a harder and harder time holding onto them. And maybe that's because of something, you know, that I talk about a lot. I think, I know you think about a lot, which is the implosion of conservatism as a workable philosophy. It used to be the conservative's job to say, build more

37:25housing, the prices will go down. And as conservatos give up their ancient views and chase after new ideas, new and often quite sinister ideas. Who's speaking for these old truths? Build more housing, put the criminals in jail, sweep the streets, locate kids with less economic opportunity and more talent and find a way forward for them. Who's to speak for that? Well, first I'll note that there have always been many conservatives who are small, see conservative in the sense they want to protect their neighborhood. They want to protect its character. So some of that resistance to new building has always come from people who are small, see conservatives who do not want the composition of their neighborhood to change and what have you. But the larger point is well taken. And you wrote an essay many years ago, David, that left a very deep impression on me about how what you and I call conservatism reflected arguably an historical moment. When you think about the progressivism of the early 20th century, this was a moment, this was a sensibility that was a response to the challenge of urbanization,

38:29an enormous immigrant influx, and a pattern of industrialism that demanded new forms of state capacity. And then you had a progressive movement that was actually a part of both major political parties. In a similar vein, you've observed there was, you know, what you could call a supply sign movement, a conservative movement that actually did shape both major parties as well. And now that movement appears to be an abance. And what you have now instead is a new forms of populist politics. You have a left wing flavor of it, you have a right wing flavor of it. And instead, you know, the partisans of what you might call pluralism or classical liberalism or something that resembles the conservatism of that earlier era, they still exist. These ideas are still there. These ideas are still very compelling and relevant. But you could argue that they represent a minority faction in both of the major party coalitions. And so what I would argue, David, is that I think that you need political innovation as well. You know, you have a ton of new

39:33challenges right now that are markedly different from the challenges of even 15 years ago when you were and I were having that conversation about what had happened to the conservatism of that era, of the 70s, 80s and 90s. And I think that those challenges demand new forms of left and right politics. And I think that's a big part of what we focus on at Manhattan Institute. Well, let me ask you since you're kind enough to allude to my work, I'm basically the end of my career. But you're in the middle and peak of your career. You are going to have to ride your way through whatever's happening next in American politics, which probably is a kind of collapse and discrediting of the ideas associated with President Trump. How do you find your personal way forward through this new landscape in which it's that 2029, it's 2030. The Trump era is left behind. Maybe the Republican party is chased off under vice president advanced toward ever more protectionism, ever more showvinism, ever more xenophobia. How do you and you have always stood for the opposite of those things? How do you find your way forward as a thinker and as an institution in a landscape

40:35where so much will have changed? Well, David, I actually don't believe that it is Donald Trump, who is the only political figure who will have been discredited by this moment. When you're looking at the Democratic coalition right now, I see a lot of anger and frustration with how people see their leadership class as well. So I think that this is going to be this big generational turnover that is going to be, could go very badly. It could also go pretty well. When you're thinking about the fact that we've had, I believe it's three American presidents who are all born in 1946, who've presided over a period that many see as discredited. If you think about neosocialism, this new movement, why is it termed that had been so anatomatized in American political life? Why hasn't re-emerged? One reason is because of that larger discrediting. And I think that in the case of Trump and Trumpism, what was fascinating about Donald Trump, and I'm talking about him in the past tense, but when he first emerged in 2015, 2016, is that he served as a new coordinating

41:39device. There were many people on the right who felt as though they were burdened by backward compatibility. Ronald Reagan was still the figure that people could rally around. George W. Bush was the figure that many people felt they couldn't rally around. And Donald Trump said some things not entirely true about how he had always opposed the Iraq War. It was a stupid war. And so he allowed himself to emerge as a new coordinating device. However, I think that that Trump era right now, in 2024, that campaign, I think showed the outlines of what could be a new coalition. The problem is that the Trump presidency and how it's unfolded did not represent the cementing of that coalition, that multi-ethnic coalition, a coalition that was called a back-to-basics coalition. If in 2025, you had a right of center presidency that said, we're going to focus on inflation. We're going to focus on getting the basics right. We're going to focus on having state capacity when it comes to managing immigrant inflows, managing law and order, this kind of thing. And we're otherwise

42:43going to let the private economy roar. I think we'd be in a very different place right now. But President Trump, like many of his opponents, he's someone who is very fixed on past rivalries. He is someone who is very fixed. He has deep self-interest. He's very self-motivated. That's certainly true. And I think that basically you're going to have a very different politics in a few years' time. It's very unpredictable what it's going to look like. But I do think that some of these core ideas you were talking about, these kind of core pragmatic ideas you were talking about, I think that they're going to have a place in the other side. And I think that that's something that everyone is going to have to be thinking about. It's a reckoning that it's not going to apply just to the right, but also to the left. If we are turning the page, what writing will you put on that page? You've written two books about the way forward for conservatism at an individual of a decade. If you were to return to this at another 10-year interval, what would you say? What would you advise? Well, I'm fortunate in running a nonpartisan organization. We

43:46pride ourselves in our independence. We certainly have a point of view. But a lot of what I'm thinking about is identifying talent, thinking about people who have a thoughtful, smart perspective on where things are heading, and advancing a certain vision of American life. My view is that we have a multi-ethnic society. That's just a reality that will be true one way or another, regardless of whose in power. And how will we go about making that multi-ethnic society a success? And how will we ensure that that multi-ethnic society is in tune with core American values and with core virtues that I see as good and valuable? When I came to identify with a political right, a lot of it was out of an appreciation for what Margaret Thatcher called the vigorous virtues, the virtues of independence, self-reliance, loyalty. These are just things that matter. They're not the only virtues,

44:47but they're virtues that matter and they're virtues that a system, a kind of government, a society, a culture can either cultivate and celebrate or diminish and demean. And I just really believe that in our multi-ethnic society, there isn't potential majority that embraces those ideals, that embraces the best aspects of our American, of our Western inheritance. And that's what I'm really focused on, just the idea of ensuring that these values survive into the future. So some of that is looking at policy issues through this lens, trying to find what are novel issues that we ought to be paying more attention to that we haven't. If you believe as I do, that building new housing is a good and valuable thing to do and that will address some of these acute challenges, how do you make that argument? And also, how do you structure the bargain to make it work? So it's not to bang my head against the wall and say that all is lost, all is doomed. It is to recognize what do we have, what is the population that we have, what is the electorate that we have,

45:52what are the challenges we're facing and how can we make the best of it and how can we draw people into our way of thinking? That is what I'm really passionate about and want to do more of. Well, let's finish by talking about this challenge of the multi-ethnic society. You and I have been talking about this for a long time, but how we make an immigration a source of renewal and strength for American society and not a source of trouble. How do you think the United States of 2026 and free future is doing? I'm building itself as a multi-ethnic society, and what advice would you have? How would you recommend that it do better than it is doing now? The one of the biggest challenges we face is a challenge that we can't avoid, we can't work our way around, is the fact that birth rates are shrinking, the population is aging markedly. And by the way, healthy lifespan is increasing as well. I mean, there are many things to look forward to, things that are good and positive that they will have very unpredictable effects in our political culture. If you are in your 50s for 30 years, which sounds ridiculous, but I think that that

46:56could be something we're looking at when you're looking at the pace of biomedical innovation, what effect does that have on people in their teens and 20s? When you're looking at how our information environment is changing at a time when you have increasingly intelligent machines, these are very deep questions about what it means to work and be a purposeful individual. It could be that we could have challenges of affluence that are even greater and graver than the challenges of the affluence we already face. So we're going through these incredible ruckians at the same time that we're going through these multiple reverberating identity crises. When I think about the manias of our politics right now, I think often of the 1920s and 1930s, when you had the popular front, when you had a group of people who were themselves, second generation Americans, who were both included in a sense, but very alienated in another sense. I look at the fact that the populations right now that feel very alienated and out of sorts

47:58are not just minorities, it's also majorities. I see this incredible psychic breakdown that's happening in our society that goes above and beyond discrete policy questions. And so, part of me thinks stick to your knitting, focus on the basics, how do we make public systems work, how do we address questions of integrity and corruption and competence, that's something we can wrap our arms around. But then I do think that these spiritual questions, which are not my Bayley Wic as someone who is in the business of policy research, but I do think that those questions matter an enormous amount and they stem from an abdication of responsibility. You have a generation of people who are taking over as leaders of different institutions who don't think of themselves as the establishment. They think of themselves as fighting an establishment, but that establishment is hollow. And actually what we need is to have a group of people from different ethnic backgrounds, different educational backgrounds, what have you, who take responsibility, who say that rather

49:04than complain about the ways in which they've been victimized or aggrieved, and you see this very much on the right as well as on the left. How do you instead have a group of people who say that I am going to take responsibility and therefore inspire other people by virtue of having taken that responsibility? That's something I think about a lot, David. And part of that is about an ethic, a cultural ethic of inhabiting that role of adult, but instead what's incredibly attractive to everyone is to imagine themselves as victims of this or that catastrophe, as people who are damaged and therefore can take responsibility. Well, give some affirmative advice on how to achieve this and you care about. One of the things I think we've seen in the 2020s is that the ethnic groups of America are voting less differently one from another, while the sexes of America vote more differently one from another. And that's true within ethnic groups and across ethnic groups. There seems to be part of the alienation is an alienation between young men and young women, which expresses itself and family formation among other things.

50:06Meanwhile, you're getting these strange kinds of cross-cultural coalitions, which can be kind of reactionary sometimes. How do we make it better? What is your advice? This is something you think about a lot. Give us just something we can hold on to as a solution, as something to carry forward into the new era you're talking. In everyone's life as an individual, as a citizen, as a neighbor, to think about in a more purposeful way about what it is that you can do, it'll be because I think that there's a tendency to think about these problems and I certainly am guilty of this myself in purely abstract broad terms. But when I see the people I admire the most, I see people who are raised in families where there wasn't a ton of religious observance and who are becoming more observant themselves, or people who are finding institutions in their own lives that they can breathe life into in a more deliberate way. We were talking about political parties in our major cities that are just more abundant when you have these incredible

51:08political monocultures. Well, you can complain about the problem or you can actually get involved in a local political party that is more abundant. It can actually be very distasteful because what you'll find is that they're not necessarily a lot of other people who are very thoughtful or maybe that's what you'll find. But actually doing that patient work, one thing that I find very striking is that, and again, I don't run a political organization, but when I talk to people in politics, one thing that is very powerful for them is when you actually talk to or interact with people outside of your own narrow world and you're trying to persuade them and you recognize they don't agree with you on everything, but you want to bring them along in your direction. That is a very powerful civic habit that we've lost. So I think that you and I are both very fortunate to live among neighbors, to have many friends who don't agree with us on a great many things. And I think that's a really valuable discipline. And that's something that all of us can find in small ways. How do you have different kinds of conversation? How do you engage with people where you're trying

52:12to solve a problem together with them as opposed to retreating? I think that that's something that we can all do more of. Hi, I'm Salam. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you very much, David. Bye bye. If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms rage-baiting day eye noise. Thanks, social media. That's where in press comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with in press. Download it today for iOS or Android at in press.app. That's I and as in news nerd press. From rethink the creative marketing studio at the Atlantic and Walmart on solid ground is a new podcast exploring the increasing threat of natural disasters. I'm journalist Caroline Modoresi-Torani and I spoke with those on the front lines

53:17of disaster response to understand how communities build resilience before, during and after a storm. Listen to on solid ground wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much to Rihon Salam for joining me today on the David From Show. This week's book is a classic of American strategic thinking. Every war must end by Fred Charles E. Clay originally published in 1971. The book gained great fame when Colin Powell urchered on all of his officers during the planning for the Gulf War of 1990 and 1991. But it remains burningly relevant today as the United States contemplates an exit from the war with Iran. The author Freddie Clay was born in 1924 in Switzerland. He emigrated to the United States after World War II and became one of the leading thinkers in the new area of nuclear strategy and nuclear deterrence. He directed the arms control and disarmament agency under President Stixon and Ford and he promoted to Undersecretary of Defense by Ronald Reagan. I got to know him

54:18toward the end of his life and he was as insisive and original at the end as he was all the way through. Let me start my discussion of his book every war must end by quoting the opening paragraph. Fighting a war can cost more in blood and money than any other undertaking in which nations engage. And to wage war, governments develop more detailed plans, establish a more rigid organization, and institute tighter discipline than for any other national effort. Yet, despite all this elaborate and intense dedication, the grand design is often woefully incomplete. Usually in fact, it is not grand enough. Most of the exertion is devoted to the means, perfecting the military instruments and deciding on their use in fit battles and campaigns. And far too little is left for relating these means to their ends. As we discuss at the opening of the program, this advice applies so pointedly to the troubles in which the United States finds itself today. Military planning focuses on the work that soldiers do. It focuses on developing plans to actually

55:19wage the war. How fighting will shape the political outcome, however, falls between the work of soldiers and the work of civilians. And because it's in that in-between zone, it can often be neglected, neglected until it becomes too late, until the choices have narrowed. That's where the United States is today in Iran. What exactly are we trying to achieve? That was a question that was not asked hard enough back in February when the war began, and now the options don't look so good as the United States tries to find a way out. Leaders enter wars, expecting battlefield success to produce its own reward. Win on the battlefield and you'll get something good without having to think very much about what it is you want. And they also don't think very hard, but if they don't achieve total victory, Japanese surrender on the deck of the US's Missouri leaves surrendering a sword to grant. If they don't get total victory, how do they arrive at terms that the defeated, but not hopeless, enemy will accept? Through the war, both sides overrate their own process, and assume the enemy is near breaking when the enemy may not be near breaking. And some cost,

56:24the money that has been spent, the lives that have been lost make compromise feel like a betrayal of earlier sacrifices. In the discussions of how to end the war, the advocates of peace, risk charges of defeatism, and the hawks too often promise too easily that just one more big push and deliver the results that everybody wants. In Iran, as in Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan before that, the United States has had terrible trouble defining an achievable end state that is worth the effort of the military undertaking in the first place. So here we are. In the throes of this war, trying to make sense of what, uh, what has been done, why was it done, where is it going, what are we trying to do? And Freddie Clay in 1971 predicted it all. If you don't think at the beginning about how the war will end, you're unlikely to have a successful arrival at that destination point. That's the question to start with. What are you trying to do? How likely is it that you can do it? And if you don't achieve total victory, what is the means you're going to use to ensure that the defeated but not hopeless enemy complies with the victors, but not total victors requirements?

57:29That's what the United States is today. The book that repays rereading, I've been thinking about it a lot these past days. Thank you for thinking about it with me. See you next week on The David From Show. Remember, as always, if your mind had just wore the work of this program, the best way to do it is by subscribing to the Atlantic and please share the work of this program on whatever social media platform you use. Thanks for watching or listening. See you next week. Bye bye. This episode of The David From Show was produced by Nathaniel From and edited by Andrea Baldes. It was engineered by Dave Grine. Our theme is by Andrew Edwards. Claudine Abad is the executive

58:32producer of Atlantic Audio and Andrea Baldes is our managing editor. If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, ragebait, and AI noise. Thanks, social media. That's where InPress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with InPress. Download it today for iOS or Android at InPress.app. That's I, Ennis & News Nerd. Press.