Municipal Grocery Stores In New York City (economist expert panel)

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Municipal Grocery Stores in NYC — Economist Expert Panel

Panel: Kent A. Clark Center US Economic Experts Panel (the IGM-style survey of top academic economists) | Published: 2026-08-05

Summary

The wiki’s first academic-survey source: the Clark Center polled its US experts panel (Acemoglu, Autor, Glaeser, Thaler, Hoxby, Maskin, Hart, and ~35 others) on zohran-mamdani’s municipal grocery program. Question A — that grocery margins are so small that the vast majority of the promised 30% discount would have to come from tax-funded subsidies — drew near-consensus agreement (heavily Agree/Strongly Agree; only Bergemann and Hurst disagreed). Question B — (per the survey framing) that a SNAP-style targeted subsidy would be a more effective way to help low-income families — also drew broad agreement, with more hedging. The comment threads are the value: economists across the panel converge on “grocery net margins are 1–3%, so a 30% discount ≈ a ~30%+ taxpayer subsidy,” while several push back on the framing — Autor calls the program “novel and relatively innocuous… worth a try,” Hoynes notes SNAP’s eligibility burdens and current cutbacks make it an awkward alternative, Chevalier flags the travel-cost/food-access goal that vouchers alone don’t solve, and Edlin raises the dignity argument for low prices over means-tested benefits.

Key Claims

  • Question A (subsidy arithmetic): overwhelming agreement. Werning: “Reported margins are much smaller than 30%”; Shimer: “Net margins are currently 1–3%… city-run stores are likely to have higher costs due to higher wages, higher wholesale prices, and more spoilage”; Kaplan: if stores lose money on top, the subsidy exceeds 30%.
  • Question B (SNAP-style transfers better): majority agree, with substantive dissents-in-comment: Hoynes (SNAP burdens + cuts), Chevalier (needs zoning/location policy for food-access goals), Edlin (dignity qualification), Autor (worth a try, wants built-in evaluation).
  • Kashyap (Strongly Agree, confidence 10): hopes prediction markets open a contract “so that economists can get rich off of the obvious point that this is going to be really costly for the taxpayers — unless it gets shutdown fast.”
  • Udry: “Government capacity is limited. Focus it on priorities that are best supplied by government. Grocery supply doesn’t make the cut.”
  • Nobel-adjacent breadth: the agree column includes left-of-center economists (Acemoglu, Thaler, Goldberg) — this is not an ideological panel result.

Direct quotes worth preserving

“Net margins are currently 1-3%. More importantly, city-run grocery stores are likely to have higher costs due to higher wages, higher wholesale prices, and more spoilage. This will also have to be tax financed.” — Robert Shimer (Chicago), Strongly Agree, confidence 8

Why citable: the complete economic mechanism in three sentences — margins, cost structure, and fiscal incidence.

“This seems like a novel and relatively innocuous idea that is worth a try. It would be nice however if there were a built in way to measure its efficacy.” — David Autor (MIT)

Why citable: the steelman from inside the consensus — distinguishes “won’t pencil out” from “shouldn’t be tried,” and names the evaluation gap.

Connections

Entities mentioned: zohran-mamdani Concepts referenced: decommodification, central-planning Events: 2026-mamdani-municipal-grocery-stores

Contradictions / Tensions

  • Counterweight to city-journal-2026-problem-with-city-owned-grocery-stores’s intent argument: the panel treats the program as an inefficiency question, not a plot; Autor’s “innocuous” directly contradicts Barron’s “war against neighborhood enterprises.”
  • Cross-links to does-socialism-work-economically: this is the calculation/incentive critique applied to a live, small-scale, falsifiable case — the corpus’s first testable-in-real-time socialism experiment.

Notes

Raw file is HTML-table heavy; per-economist votes and comments preserved. CSV of full results linked at the source URL. Exact question wording for B is truncated in the clipping — fetch the survey page before quoting B’s text verbatim.