Bloomberg Touts Mayoral Achievements
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg addressed staff at Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters this afternoon, speaking on private philanthropy, his achievements as mayor, and his governance philosophy of “citizens as customers”.
After a speech primarily about business and corporate governance, Bloomberg said that one of his primary focuses as mayor was to “treat citizens as customers”, something he said was a philosophy that was being implemented more frequently in New York City but still had a long way to go.
Bloomberg also shared his general outlook on solving complex policy problems: “You can't solve [complex] problems in a revolutionary way - you have to do it in an evolutionary way,” he said.
Although there has been speculation about a 2012 presidential bid, Bloomberg said that he would not be running for president.
Bloomberg has been on tour the last few days, having spoken in Denver Thursday night and helping the Denver Scholarship foundation raise more than $2 million. Later today, he’ll be attending an event with California Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman in San Jose.
During his speech, Bloomberg touted his accomplishments as mayor, claiming that the average New Yorker’s life expectancy has gone up by one year and seven months over the last eight years, more so than anywhere else. In fact, New York City now has the highest life expectancy ever recorded for the city, at 79.4 years.
The mayor also dropped another telling statistic: that New York City has generated 10% of America’s new private sector jobs this year, this with only 3% of the population.
Unprompted, he talked about the state of Washington politics, commenting that “in Washington, there is not the focus on delivering services, as there should be, as compared to getting a political advantage, and staying in office... but I think we're going in the right direction.”
Bloomberg is one of the country’s most generous philanthropists, and when asked about Mark Zuckerberg’s recent $100 million gift to the Newark, New Jersey school system, argued that one of the greatest assets of private philanthropy was the ability to innovate more aggressively than governments could.
“What’s the purpose of private philanthropy? It can try new things. With the public's money,” you have to be accountable, to explain every change to the media, he said. “Private philanthropy allows you do things that aren't accepted as highly likely to be successful... Those lines of attack which turn out to be dead ends are probably as important as those that work out, because you know not to go there in the future.”
Talking about the difference between politics and business, Bloomberg was more light-hearted.” I always say that the difference between business and government is that business is a dog eat dog world, and politics it the reverse,” he joked.
The mayor’s presentation may have been a little tense for those in the audience, as he had slammed Facebook as a waste of time just last week: “The thing that surprises me is why people want to tell others what they're doing day in and day out. ... And you wonder, number one, what on earth? Why does anybody care?" he said.
Perhaps trying to smooth that incident over, Bloomberg finished off his speech today by saying that he was a “loyal customer of Facebook”. Indeed, nearly 28,000 people have ‘liked’ Bloomberg’s page on the popular social networking website.
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