New York City in brief

After Wall Street investors sent Salesforce, CrowdStrike, and others on a roller-coaster ride over fears that artificial intelligence will spark mass white-collar layoffs and a recession by 2028, economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and David Autor—fresh from Nobel fame—countered with a Brookings report urging policies to steer A.I. toward empowering workers; apparently, algorithms aren’t the only ones who could use a firm hand.

New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and World Economic Forum puts America’s wage winners in health and tech, where some salaries now top $200,000, while artificial intelligence threatens one in four jobs, mostly those with repetitive tasks. We note that roles demanding advanced skills—especially in finance and medicine—will see rising demand, though the rest of us may need to swap our comfort zone for a coding bootcamp.

Alister Martin, newly installed as New York City’s health chief, pledges to rebrand the agency beyond letter grades in restaurant windows by focusing on affordability amid rising insurance costs and shrinking federal Medicaid support. With a $2.5 billion budget, he plans to plug gaps left by Washington cuts and connect residents with billions in unclaimed aid—an ambitious prescription, but perhaps not a cure-all for city living’s sticker shock.

With Gov. Kathy Hochul’s overhaul consolidating New York’s $11bn Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program under Public Partnerships, 1199SEIU sees an opening to unionise up to 258,000 home health aides—friends and family managing care at home, now herded under one administrative tent. The union, poised to swell by 55%, may find corralling disparate caregivers rather less straightforward than corralling Medicaid dollars.

New York City paid $117 million in 2025 to settle NYPD misconduct claims, according to the Legal Aid Society, bringing the five-year taxpayer tab to $796 million—even as Mayor Zohran Mamdani navigates a $5.4 billion budget deficit and eyes a modest $22 million police funding trim. The NYPD insists it's merely clearing old cases under Commissioner Jessica Tisch; progress, albeit at historic expense.