There’s lots of talk about “affordability” these days, not least because of Zohran Mamdani’s successful campaign to be elected Mayor of New York City.
On affordability, small and large
As we all know from personal experience, there is the “affordability shock” that can hit us linked to single consumer items. Last summer, for example, I stopped at a restaurant on the way back from a day trip, waiting for the train connection. The bottled beer I ordered (3.3 dl) eventually cost me more than 10 Swiss francs (where 6 francs would be a common price). I remember the sort of “what if” question coming up: “what if everything would cost 50% more than the average or customary price?” How could I afford a living in this place?
This is the anxiety that lies beneath the success of Mamdani’s campaign, among a population where many are struggling “to achieve basic stability in the essentials of their lives”. Affordable prices of groceries, of public transport, the possibility to have childcare for children of pre-school age were all tangible elements of such stability. The problem is universal, and by no means something only New Yorkers of average or low income social strata are concerned about. In this case, the electorate was voting for the candidate who promised to use some public money to make these things more affordable (or even free).
From public policy to economy to societal anxiety
However, a state or a city can only do so much with its resources to address the expense side of the equation. It is not in charge of incomes. This is affordability too, capturing the cost of living on the one hand, income on the other, and “the inconvenience, discomfort, and insecurity that come when the two are not in balance”.
Isn’t the fundamental issue facing us this: whether our economies still are or will be designed to provide enough for a living to the working and the middle classes – something that seemed to be granted during large parts of the 20th century in “the West”. But no longer – the labor force has grown, and so has global competition. Add technological advances to it, and you get to the societal anxiety of the present. People are asking, and rightly so, what future they are being offered. There still seems to be a fair amount of faith in the economic system, yet but the issue of social and economic justice – decent work and a life that’s affordable – is looming large in our societies.
I have in my early research confronted the issue of “affordability” often, talking to farmers in Indonesia, and how they were trying to make ends meet. Many were engaged in subsistence farming and could cover their needs for food and other basic necessities. But when it came to school fees for children, medical expenses and so forth, they were struggling. I could observe them adopting strategies of occupational multiplicity, a jargon term for “diversifying”, for example individual household members engaging in parallel jobs that would generate some cash. The difference to the economy where I had grown up, Switzerland, was stark. But affordability is, once again, a universal issue, very much present in Switzerland’s part history of emigration.
[1] The quotations are from Marilynne Robinson, “At What Cost?” New York Review of Books, January 15, 2026, p.15. Worth reading!
