The institute supports
free-market ideas, focusing on urban policy, education, public finance and pensions, energy and the environment, health policy, legal reform, and economics.
State and local policy The institute focuses on both national and local issues, including
municipal finance,
public pensions,
infrastructure,
welfare,
policing, and
housing. The institute pushed for
welfare reform in the mid-1990s. On the 20th anniversary of the
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, the institute published a report by former senior fellow Scott Winship defending the act. The institute has published multiple books focused on America's cities; in 1997 it published
Twenty-First Century City: Resurrecting Urban America, authored by then-Indianapolis Mayor
Stephen Goldsmith. In 2015 it published
The Next Urban Renaissance. In 2016, it published
Retooling Metropolis.
Howard Husock joined the Manhattan Institute in 2006 as vice president of policy research and director of the institute's Social Entrepreneurship Initiative. Since 2019, Brandon Fuller has served as the institute's vice president of research and policy. Steve Malanga has criticized public-sector unions and said that states like California and New Jersey suffer from political leadership. Cities Malanga has profiled include Stockton, California; Atlantic City, New Jersey; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Houston, Texas; and Dallas, Texas.
Josh McGee, vice president at the
Laura and John Arnold Foundation, joined the Manhattan Institute as a senior fellow in 2015. In 2020, McGee left the institute to become chief data officer of the state of Arkansas.
Broken windows theory The institute supports the
broken windows theory, named after a 1982
Atlantic Monthly article "Broken Windows" by
James Q. Wilson and
George L. Kelling. Senior fellow
Heather Mac Donald argues that
crime prevention statistics from the
2008–2009 recession improved as a result of efficient policing, high incarceration rates, more police officers working, data-driven approaches such as
CompStat which helps commanders target high-crime areas, and a policy of holding precinct commanders accountable for results. This research opposes the commonly held notion that crime inevitably spikes when economic conditions worsen. She contends the decline of American cities, beginning during the 1960s, was a result of crime "spiraling out of control". Most recently, Mac Donald has argued that crime rates (or, in some instances, murder rates) have spiked in many urban areas as a result of the "Ferguson Effect": the tendency, in the aftermath of 2014's riots in Ferguson, Missouri, for police officers to engage in less proactive policing for fear of generating backlash from local populations or the media. Mac Donald has controversially argued that the consequences of this trend adversely affect African-American communities, stating that "there is no government agency more dedicated to the idea that black lives matter than the police". In the 2010s, according to
Fox News, institute employees were embedded in the
Detroit Police Department, assisting in the implementation of Broken Windows theories. The institute funded an outreach team that shared its perspective on criminology and policy implementation with the Detroit Police Department, focusing on the "broken windows" approach. The institute is associated with
CompStat, a police management approach focused on crime analysis, information sharing, and accountability. George Kelling, the institute's loaned executive to the City of Detroit, and Michael Allegretti, the institute's director of state and local programs, implemented two pilot programs in the Northwest neighborhood of
Grandmont-Rosedale and the Northeast neighborhood of
East English Village. One source reported that in the first year following implementation, "home invasions dropped 26 percent".
Education, charter schools and vouchers Institute senior fellow
Beth Akers wrote
Game of Loans: The Rhetoric and Reality of Student Debt (2016), which says that the student loan system is simply far too complex for the average student or parent borrower to navigate well. She argues that the department of education should simplify federal financial aid, adopt a single, income-driven repayment plan for federal student loans, and bring market-based approaches into student lending. Former senior fellow Jay P. Greene's research on
school choice was cited four times in the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in
Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, which affirmed the constitutionality of
school vouchers. In March 1989, the institute employed Seymour "Sy" Fliegel as a senior fellow and launched the
Center for Educational Innovation (CEI). Fliegel and Institute senior fellow James Macguire wrote a book,
The Miracle of East Harlem: The Fight for Choice in Public Education, to demonstrate how education reform can be achieved one school at a time.
Energy and environment In 2005,
Basic Books published
The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, The Virtue of Waste and Why We Will Never Run Out Of Energy, by Manhattan Institute senior fellow Peter Huber and physicist and engineer Mark Mills. In 2018,
The New York Times reported that EPA director
Scott Pruitt had solicited a meeting with Manhattan Institute senior fellow
Oren Cass, who told the newspaper that he "encourage[s] conservatives to accept mainstream climate science and focus on economic analysis and good public policy." The
Times noted that "experts at the institute have expressed skepticism about the projected costs of climate change," but that "the organization does not take a formal position on climate change science."
Health policy Since 2006, the institute's Project FDA has asserted that with modern medicine "on the cusp of a radical transformation" due to breakthroughs in precision medicine, the FDA "has struggled to adapt its regulations to new scientific advances". Senior fellows Paul Howard, Peter Huber, and Tom Coburn have all argued that the FDA could speed up approvals without sacrificing safety. In October 2015, the institute ran a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, reading, "Everyone will be a patient someday". The institute has taken a critical view of the
Affordable Care Act (ACA) since its inception. In 2013, it released its Obamacare Impact Map, a joint project of health policy fellows Paul Howard,
Avik Roy, and Yevgeniy Feyman. In 2014, the institute published then senior fellow Avik Roy's proposal for its replacement, titled "Transcending Obamacare". According to Roy, while the ACA delivers on the goal of reducing the number of uninsured Americans, it does so by increasing the cost of U.S. health coverage. More recently, in 2017, the institute released a report by Yevgeniy Feyman advocating the use of 1332 "state innovation" waivers giving states the flexibility to increase choice, competition, and affordability under the ACA. The institute's health care scholars oppose allowing the federal government to negotiate prices in the
Medicare Part D prescription drug program and believe that drug price negotiating has adverse effects in the
Veterans Administration. Institute Senior Fellow Oren Cass has argued that the American social safety net's overwhelming emphasis on health care is the unintentional result of skewed incentives. States should therefore be allowed to reroute Medicaid funding to other programs that would more effectively meet the needs of the poor at no extra cost. In a 2017 article for
National Review, Cass responded to accusations that repealing the Affordable Care Act would lead to otherwise preventable deaths by writing "In reality, the best statistical estimate of the number of lives saved each year by the ACA is zero".
Legal reform The institute's legal scholars author policy papers on various aspects of legal reform. The Center for Legal Policy regularly writes on
overcriminalization,
corporate governance, and
civil litigation reform. Corporate governance reports usually focus on proxy voting records. Issue briefs on overcriminalization typically study the growth of the criminal law in state penal codes. Proposed reforms to America's lawsuit practice are published under the center's ongoing publication of Trial Lawyers, Inc.
Overcriminalization In 2014, the institute began to study the issue of
overcriminalization, the idea that state and federal criminal codes are overly expansive and growing too quickly. At the federal level alone, Institute fellows have identified over 300,000 laws and regulations whose violation can lead to prison time. The institute asserts that this puts even well-meaning citizens in danger of prosecution for seemingly innocuous conduct. From 2014 to 2016, the institute produced reports on the status of overcriminalization in five states (
North Carolina,
Michigan,
South Carolina,
Minnesota, and
Oklahoma) and is continually adding more state-specific research.
Prisoner reentry in Newark In
Newark, New Jersey, the institute partnered with Mayor
Cory Booker to implement a new approach to prisoner reentry, based on the principle of connecting ex-offenders with paid work immediately upon release. As the mayor of Newark, Booker sought to remedy a problem familiar to those in the community: prisoner reentry. A study by William Eimicke, Maggie Gallagher, Stephen Goldsmith for the institute,
Moving Men into the Mainstream: Best Practices in Prisoner Reentry, found that the most successful prisoner-reentry programs were those that employed the work-first model. Booker's staff, and Richard Greenwald, a specialist in the development of workforce, implemented Newark's Prisoner Reentry Initiative (NPRI). As of November 2011, the agencies that contracted with the city through NPRI had enrolled 1,436 program participants, exceeding the benchmark set by the Department of Labor. Provider organizations have placed more than 1,000 people in unsubsidized jobs, with an average hourly wage of $9.32. Governor
Chris Christie thereafter announced his plan to reform the state's prison system, and sought the institute's analysis of the current system. The final report included a set of recommendations on addressing drug offenses and recidivism, and better aligning New Jersey agencies around a successful reentry strategy.
Economics Given the concern about
economic inequality among mainstream academics and commentators, especially since the
Great Recession and the release of
Thomas Piketty's bestselling
Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the institute has produced several pieces of research on this and the related issue of
economic mobility in the U.S. In 2014, former senior fellow
Scott Winship produced a report, "Inequality Does Not Reduce Prosperity", which examined evidence from across the globe. This report contended that larger increases in inequality correspond with sharper rises in living standards for the middle class and poor alike, while greater inequality in developed nations tends to accompany stronger economic growth. In a 2015 report, Winship examined the state of economic and residential mobility in the U.S., finding that people who move from their birth states fare better economically than those who stay put. He argues that the U.S. should focus on policies to improve mobility in order to expand opportunities among disadvantaged groups.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, formerly a senior fellow, has argued for a reduction in the corporate tax rate and a move to a territorial tax system, in order to make the U.S. more economically competitive on the world stage. In 2015, Roth, together with former fellow
Jared Meyer, published the book, ''Disinherited: How America Is Betraying America's Young'', arguing that millennials' plight is the result of government policies that are systematically stacked against young Americans to the benefit of older generations. The institute has criticized plans to expand the federal
minimum wage. In 2015, it published a report by American Action Forum's Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Ben Gitis, which made the case that an increase of the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2020 would cost 6.6 million jobs. A 2016 report by
Oren Cass argued that these deleterious effects are mainly due to the fact that increases in the federal minimum fail to account for differences in local conditions: not all labor markets are the same. Cass has also argued for the introduction of a federal wage subsidy—additional dollars per hour worked delivered via one's paycheck—as a better third way to help low-income workers. In 2015, he wrote that a wage subsidy is superior to both the minimum wage and
Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) because it incentivizes workforce participation and delivers benefits directly to workers, without distorting the labor market.
Technology A 2024 study by David Rozado of the
Manhattan Institute said that Wikipedia had a liberal bias and expressed concern that "some of the politically biased sentiment associations embedded in Wikipedia articles also pop up in
OpenAI’s language models". ==Notable people==