The New Yorker:

As some Wall Street billionaires melt down over Zohran Mamdani’s policy platform, a prominent progressive economist argues that it meets the moment.

By John Cassidy

Panics about the supposed threat of socialism or communism are hardly new to American history, so the reaction in some quarters to the presumed victory of Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, in last week’s New York mayoral primary wasn’t surprising.“It’s officially hot commie summer,” the hedge-fund billionaire Dan Loeb wrote on X. A bit more shocking, perhaps, was the response of the Harvard economist Larry Summers, a former Treasury Secretary during the Clinton Administration, who accused Mamdani of advocating “Trotskyite economic policies,” which was presumably a reference to his calls for a rent freeze, free bus rides, government-run grocery stores, and higher taxes on millionaires and corporations. (Summers also said Mamdani had shown a great ability to learn during the campaign and expressed the hope that he would “provide much needed reassurance” to believers in the market economy.)

To be sure, these reactions to what might be called “Zohranomics” didn’t exactly stun Mamdani’s supporters, many of whom take criticisms from financiers and centrist Democrats as confirmation they are on the right track. Summers “never disappoints, does he?” Isabella M. Weber, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who signed a public letter endorsing Mamdani’s campaign proposals, told me during a lengthy conversation last week. Weber rose to prominence during the covid-19 pandemic, when she called for government price controls and published detailed research about how big companies were taking advantage of the global emergency to raise their prices and profit margins. Responding to Summers’s comments, she said that describing Mamdani’s program as Trotskyite was “absurd” and didn’t tell us anything “about what Mamdani’s agenda is trying to get at.”

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