The Manhattan Institute enters The Bob Zadek Show chiefly as a publisher and as an affiliation claimed by guests. In the excerpts it is never described as an organization with a founding date, a stated mission, a budget or a program of its own; it is named in connection with a book and with the writers who contribute to it.
The Beholden State and California governance
In the 2013 episode on California government, the Manhattan Institute is identified as the publisher of The Beholden State, the book that Bob Zadek says started the discussion California Dreamin’ – About Sane Government (2013). Guest Steve Greenhut refers to it the same way, calling it the Manhattan Institute’s book, and places the writer Joel Kotkin inside it. According to Greenhut, Kotkin is an old-school Pat Brown progressive who argues that the new progressives are at war with the working-class economy; Greenhut says he sees that himself, describing environmental elites in the Bay Area and the LA basin who, in the excerpt’s words, have no clue about—and there the passage breaks off.
The book frames a conversation about California’s business climate and its pension obligations. Zadek cites an annual objective ranking of states as places to do business, saying California ranks 47th overall and 50th in the cost of doing business, and he cites the Mercatus Center, part of George Mason University, as ranking California 49th in overall economic freedom. He quotes Mercatus observing that California not only taxes and regulates its economy more than most other states, but also aggressively interferes in the personal lives of its citizens. Greenhut adds that business owners he talks to have made peace with high taxes but are driven out by the attitude of bureaucrats and state officials, and he recalls Richard Alarcón, when he was Senate Majority Leader, saying he does not care if businesses go rip off some other state. Greenhut also describes unannounced visits by the Air Quality Management District, press releases from the California Air Resources Board celebrating fines on businesses, and the cap-and-trade system created under AB 32, which he calls an essentially added tax that forces Fresno-area farm producers competing with Mexico and China to buy air pollution credits.
Pensions and municipal distress
The same episode returns to the Manhattan Institute’s book in its treatment of pensions. Zadek says he wrote a couple of pages in The Beholden State, the Manhattan Institute’s book, and turns to Stockton, which he describes as a city in the Central Valley about an hour and a half southeast of San Francisco that is struggling with bankruptcy; he says that if it becomes subject to bankruptcy it will hold the record for the largest municipal bankruptcy until some other city bumps it California Dreamin’ – About Sane Government (2013). Greenhut responds that the city is dealing with a crime wave and cannot fix its problems because pay levels for public employees are so high, and he calls it a good example of the progressive case for pension reform. He names Jeff Adachi, public defender in San Francisco, who led a pension reform initiative, and Chuck Reed, a progressive Democrat in San Jose who led pension reform there, as progressives making that case; he says other services are suffering as cities pay outlandish amounts to public employees.
Zadek supplies the magnitude: Jerry Brown recently announced a budget surplus which, Zadek says, was not true and rested on accounting gimmicks, while California by most measures owes one trillion dollars in unfunded pension costs. He calls this the classic sticking of future generations with today’s costs and says the surplus does not exist. As one segment of the problem, he says CalPERS, which administers the state pension, needs $4.5 billion a year for the next 30 years just to pay for the teachers, money that must come out of the state budget and is not budgeted for—more than consuming the entire surplus. He also mentions Vallejo, which came out of bankruptcy and, from what he hears, is headed back into fiscal trouble because it never reformed its pensions.
Policing and The War on Cops
The Manhattan Institute appears in the 2017 episode on policing only in the episode’s topic list, which names it alongside Law Enforcement, Black Lives Matter, the Ferguson Effect, Crime Statistics and Media Narratives Is There a War on Cops? (2017). The introduction presents Heather Mac Donald as the author of The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, and Zadek says she has followed the issue since long before it hit the media on August 9th, 2014, when the events in Ferguson, Missouri occurred, and that she wrote about the subject for four years before Ferguson, her book Are Cops Racist? having been written in 2010. Zadek frames the episode’s question as whether there is a war on cops and whether there is a war conducted by cops on the inner-city black community, calling the debate heavy on emotion and light on substance and facts; Mac Donald thanks him for having her on. The excerpts do not state what connection, if any, Mac Donald has to the Manhattan Institute beyond the topic list’s inclusion of the name.
Theodore Dalrymple
In the 2019 episode, Zadek introduces Theodore Dalrymple as the author of over two dozen books, a retired practicing physician, and a writer for the Manhattan Institute Theodore Dalrymple on Negligence and Unaccountability (2019). His most recent book, False Positive, examines 52 issues, one year of issues of the New England Journal of Medicine, in the first instance for errors in their reporting; Zadek says errors in a publication are assumed, but that Dalrymple’s important thesis is that the errors occur in areas where the journal ought not to be offering an opinion at all, such as criminal justice, opioid addiction, drug addiction, euthanasia and air pollution.
The discussion then turns to personal responsibility. Zadek asks how much criminal behavior is simply criminal behavior—someone greedy who wants another’s property or wants to harm somebody—and how much spills over into questions of causation, environment, early parenting and bad home life, saying he has great difficulty enunciating a principle he is totally happy with. Dalrymple answers that the principle that everyone has to deal with the hand he is dealt is very important, because trying to equalize that would argue for a society that would make North Korea seem like a haven of freedom; you cannot equalize the hand people are dealt, but it is still necessary to demand that people keep within certain limits. He gives the example of a burglar he dealt with in the prison where he worked for years, who asked whether his burgling had anything to do with his childhood; Dalrymple said absolutely nothing whatsoever, telling him he wants things he does not want to work for, is lazy and is not very clever. The man laughed rather than being annoyed, and Dalrymple says such men were quite relieved because they did not have to pretend anymore. He allows that such people often have terrible childhoods and that you can talk about the childhood openly, but without implying you are making an excuse or finding buried psychological treasure that will stop the behavior without effort; what they need, he says, is a Socratic dialogue rather than therapy.
Across episodes
The Manhattan Institute is touched on in three episodes across six years—the 2013 California episode, the 2017 policing episode and the 2019 Dalrymple episode—and the excerpts show no development: it is named once as the publisher of The Beholden State, once in a topic list, and once as the outlet where a guest writes, with no argument about the Institute itself advanced or answered between them.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state when the Manhattan Institute was founded, where it is located, who leads it, how it is funded, or what positions it takes. They do not say what relationship Heather Mac Donald has to it beyond the topic list’s mention of its name. They do not describe any publication of the Institute other than The Beholden State, and they do not say what became of the California pension or policing debates discussed in these episodes.