MixedThe Wall Street JournalUnfortunately, cities are particularly vulnerable to pandemic, and mayors alone cannot stop a plague. The energetic pragmatism that Mr. Emanuel champions does, however, provide a model for the state and national leaders who must grapple with this global crisis ... Mr. Emanuel proves an entertaining guide to running a great city ... Mayors do have enormous power, but that power is never guaranteed. During a crisis, governors can mobilize the statewide resources and give statewide shelter-in-place orders. Covid-19 has pushed Andrew Cuomo, not Bill de Blasio, onto center stage in New York ... But even national leaders can learn from Mr. Emanuel’s book. The strength of mayors is that they solve hard problems in a nonpartisan fashion. Pandemic disease is one of the hardest of all problems. There is no Democratic or Republican way to fight a pandemic.
Alan Greenspan
MixedThe Wall Street JournalA sweeping tome that takes us from the Founders to the election of Donald Trump. Their work is an accessible overview of American business history, but also presents a case for capitalism ... Readers who already believe our future depends on a dynamic, free market will have their beliefs bolstered by Capitalism in America. Yet I suspect few millennial supporters of Sen. Sanders will read these pages, feel the scales drop from their eyes and suddenly believe that the answer is less government.
Annie Lowrey
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalDistinguished intellectuals on the right, including Milton Friedman and Charles Murray, have advocated for simple cash transfers instead of various welfare programs, a move that would stop the government from micromanaging the lives of the poor. The problem with Friedman’s perspective, which Ms. Lowrey well recognizes, is that taxpayers are typically not interested in funding jaunts by food-stamp recipients to Las Vegas even if those trips really do bring more satisfaction than health care and fresh vegetables. In any case, Ms. Lowrey has little interest in \'eliminating the country’s existing antipoverty programs and converting them to a U.B.I.,\' because she believes such a change \'would likely result in an increase in poverty.\' Instead, she wants to add cash transfers to the existing safety net, in order to reduce American poverty. This is a tenable position ... We need policies that encourage job creation and working, not policies that pay people not to work.
Andrew Yang
MixedThe Wall Street JournalI share Mr. Yang’s worries about the future of work, but I remain convinced, even after reading...that UBI is the wrong answer to this challenge. We need policies that encourage job creation and working, not policies that pay people not to work ... despite Mr. Yang’s hopes that UBI will somehow \'enable people to more effectively transition from shrinking industries and environments to new ones\' and will be \'perhaps the greatest catalyst to human creativity we have ever seen,\' 50 years of evidence about labor supply in the U.S. suggests that giving people money will lead them to work less.
Richard Florida
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalThe New Urban Crisis bracingly confronts this tension between big-city elites and the urban underclass ... The strongest part of The New Urban Crisis is the author’s discussion of how to combat such segregation, particularly by building more middle-class housing. His excoriation of NIMBYs—the exponents of a 'Not In My Back Yard' anticonstruction ideology—is delightful ... Mr. Florida is right that there are really twin crises: inequality and segregation. But only segregation truly qualifies as a particular urban crisis. Rising inequality is a nationwide phenomenon, driven by globalization and technological change.
