The views expressed in this article represent the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce, its staff, or its board of directors.
New York City’s newly inaugurated mayor, Zohran Mamdani, recently declared his intention to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” This rhetorical flourish may sound appealing to some, evoking images of communal solidarity and shared purpose. Yet as an economist who has spent over a decade studying individualism versus collectivism, I can tell you the mayor has it backwards.
My research reveals that individualism, far from being frigid, creates the conditions for genuine human flourishing, including outcomes collectivists like to champion such as gender equality, racial tolerance, and economic opportunity for the marginalized.
What Rugged Individualism Actually Means
The American experiment was founded on rugged individualism. This term, often misunderstood, doesn’t mean isolated atomism or callous indifference. Rather, it recognizes individuals as the primary unit of moral concern and action.
As the Declaration of Independence asserts, all are endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Rugged individualism means you’re free to chart your own course, succeed or fail by your own efforts, and reap the rewards or bear the consequences. Crucially, it means you’re also free to cooperate through voluntary association rather than coercion.
Government exists not to override these rights but to protect them, securing a framework in which free people cooperate voluntarily. The “ruggedness” lies not in rejecting human connection, but in rejecting the idea that some collective authority has the right to subordinate your individual goals to its vision of the collective good.
Collectivism operates on the opposite premise. It subordinates the individual to the group: tribe, class, nation, or state. Individual rights, goals, and identity become secondary to collective purposes as defined by those claiming to speak for the group.
As civilization advanced, collectivism morphed into systems concentrating power in rulers’ hands, from divine-right monarchs to modern totalitarian states. The 20th century’s experiments—Soviet communism, Nazi fascism, Maoist China—all featured vast state apparatuses claiming authority to override individual rights in service of collective goals. The machinery of coercion grew ever more sophisticated: secret police, central planning bureaus, all justified by the premise that collective needs trumped individual liberty.
The human cost is staggering and well-documented. Estimates attribute over 100 million deaths to communist regimes alone, through engineered famines, political purges, and labor camps. Fascist collectivisms added tens of millions more, culminating in the Holocaust and World War II. What unites these tragedies is the premise that the group’s needs justify coercing, expropriating, or eliminating individuals. As one apologist for such policies once quipped, one must break eggs to make an omelet. The result, however, was not a nourishing meal but vast archipelagoes of suffering.
What the Data Show
Let me move beyond history to empirical evidence. If Mayor Mamdani is correct, collectivist societies should outperform individualist ones on human welfare and equality. We observe the opposite.
In multiple studies (here, here, and here) with my co-author Lewis Davis, we examine the link between individualism and gender equality. In individualist societies, women work, earn, learn, and lead at far higher rates. For example, comparing more individualistic societies to more collectivist ones (specifically, a one standard deviation increase in individualism) shows women attaining an additional 2.24 years of education and a 23.5 percent higher probability of employment outside the home. Why? Individualism sees women as autonomous agents and moral equals. Collectivist cultures subordinate women’s personal goals to family or community demands. Collectivism’s “warmth” often means women sacrificing their aspirations for the collective good as defined by patriarchal hierarchies.
The pattern extends to racial tolerance. My research shows that individualism strongly predicts racial tolerance. Individualist values transcend racial identities precisely because they emphasize universal rights and self-determination. Collectivism, by contrast, strengthens in-group/out-group distinctions, which is the very foundation of prejudice.
What This Means for New York—and Chattanooga
New York didn’t become a global capital by accident. It benefited from America’s individualist inheritance—a culture celebrating the striver, the immigrant entrepreneur, the self-made success. Our culture laid the foundation for a political and legal system that turned those values into reality: open markets, enforceable contracts, and economic freedom for millions to build lives and businesses.
What Mayor Mamdani and other New Yorkers see are the visible extremes—the penthouse and the homeless shelter, the hedge fund and the food bank. What they miss are the invisible mechanisms that make New York work: the millions of voluntary transactions, the spontaneous cooperation of markets, the innovation unleashed when people are free to pursue their own goals.
Consider New York’s labor market. Every day, millions of workers and employers find each other. Restaurants hire cooks, law firms recruit associates, startups find engineers. No central authority assigns people to jobs. Instead, wages signal where labor is needed most. When tech booms, salaries rise and workers shift into the sector. When industries decline, people retrain and move on. This dynamic adjustment, driven by individual choices responding to market signals, has made New York resilient through century after century of economic transformation. It’s why the city survived the decline of manufacturing and port activities to reinvent itself repeatedly.
That process created the wealth Mayor Mamdani now promises to redistribute. The tax revenues funding his ambitious programs come from businesses individualism made possible—from bodega owners to tech startups, garment factories to financial firms. Collectivism doesn’t create wealth; it consumes what individualism produces. The mayor proposes killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Here in Chattanooga, a city built on innovation and entrepreneurial spirit, we should pay attention. When politicians promise more equitable outcomes through collective solutions, beware: you’ll get far less than you bargained for. Actually, shift toward collectivism, and you get buried in red tape. My research documents that collectivist countries regulate businesses more heavily, creating barriers that prevent people from starting businesses and climbing the economic ladder. They regulate foreign investment more strictly, reducing job creation from outside capital. In collectivist societies, starting a business means navigating a maze of permits, licenses, and bureaucratic approvals—barriers that keep struggling people down while protecting cronies from competition.
Collectivism promises to address visible problems through centralized control. But it doesn’t deliver. Instead, it stifles the very mechanisms that create prosperity in the first place.
For business leaders, this matters. Cities and states that embrace individualist principles, property rights, contract enforcement, regulatory restraint, attract investment and talent. Those that don’t, lose both.
The Only Path Forward
The past two centuries of lifting billions from poverty, extending lifespans, and fostering technological miracles demonstrate what works. Not collectivist planning, but billions cooperating voluntarily, each pursuing their own ends, creating wealth through exchange. A system where poor immigrants can open businesses, women can pursue any career, and minorities are seen as individuals rather than group representatives.
My research shows individualism produces better outcomes for the very people Mayor Mamdani claims to champion. The 20th century ran the collectivism experiment. The results are in. True progress lies not in reviving failed ideologies under new slogans, but in upholding each person’s right, regardless of gender, race, or background, to live freely and productively.
The mayor claims he seeks equality, opportunity, and human solidarity. Real solidarity comes from mutual respect, not government coercion. Individualism is the only proven route to civilized prosperity and lasting peace.
Claudia Williamson Kramer is the Scott L. Probasco, Jr., Distinguished Chair of Free Enterprise, Professor of Economics, and Executive Director of the Center for Economic Education at UTC.
To hear more from Dr. Kramer, listen to her latest conversation on WUTC here: https://shorturl.at/CyWM0
