Anyone still puzzled by the fact that New York’s mayor is a democratic socialist doesn’t know New York.
Yesterday, New York City Comptroller Mark Levine released a survey of New Yorkers’ incomes, based on their tax returns from 2019 to 2024. The survey revealed levels of wealth concentration and income disparity so profound that it called to mind Metropolis—the fictional city in Fritz Lang’s 1927 film of the same name, where a handful of economic oligarchs rule over the literally subterranean workers.
The survey’s findings include these particulars:
The top 0.1 percent of New Yorkers—that’s 1 in 1,000—received 22 percent of New Yorkers’ total income in 2024.
Between 2019 and 2024, that top 0.1 percent received more than half of all New Yorkers’ income growth. The top 1 percent received nearly two-thirds.
Factoring in all the city’s other residents, New Yorkers’ real median income actually fell by 3.2 percent from 2019 to 2024.
Among the richest 1 percent, fully 64 percent of their income came from investments, rents, and proprietorship in 2019, which had risen to 69 percent by 2024.
It’s not that New Yorkers could roll off these statistics, of course, but their lived realities nonetheless fleshed them out. New York is a place where concentrated wealth is ostentatiously visible, as are the daily struggles just to make ends meet. Simply to live in and see the city over a period of time, and yet believe that its economy works for all therein, requires a ferocious denial of reality, the kind you can see among Wall Street Journal editorialists.
Zohran Mamdani clearly understood that running against the systemic inequality hardwired into New York life required no theoretical treatises. Freezing the rent and taxing the rich to create affordable child care were real solutions to real problems that millions of his fellow New Yorkers experienced. Due partly to its density, New York is surely the American city where economic inequality is most visible and palpable, but it’s hard to miss in other major cities as well—as is not the case in rural America. That’s one reason why our new burst of socialism is chiefly an urban phenomenon; it’s cities where the sweeping upward redistribution of wealth and income is impossible to miss.
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In a sense, the astonishment at the rise of American socialism is rather astonishing in itself. The economic, social, and political consequences of the deregulation of capital and the suppression of labor (with unions, battered by the increasing power of investors, declining from representing more than a third of private-sector workers to a bare 6 percent today) should lead to a rise in socialist and social democratic movements in any normal country (and, alas, to far-right tribal sensibilities as well). For most of its history, the United States has not, in this sense, been normal; its racial and ethnic divisions blocked the emergence of the socialist movements and parties common to more ethnically homogeneous nations. Today, the kind of inequality that is spiraling upward, and whose growth AI will only accelerate, is inching our country closer to being a more normal nation.
About time.
