One of William Easterly’s more striking findings about Third World Aid, Erik Falkenstein notes, is how little is learned. There’s just a continual call to double down. With Detroit imploding, the parallels are clear:
A friend of mine drove me by his childhood home in Flint Michigan and every corner strip mall highlighted two products: lottery tickets and alcohol. His old home now had security bars around its first floor windows.
There are two obvious features about American inner cities and neither are talked about very much (see the NYT discussion, no mention). First, most have long and deep Democratic political rule. That is, not only the mayor, but the police chief, school superindendent, and every other head bureaucrat is a Democrat. Five of the 10 cities with the highest poverty rates (Detroit, Buffalo, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Newark) have had a Democratic stranglehold since at least 1961, and most dangerous big US cities are strongly Democratic. Why isn’t this relevant?
The other feature is these cities are predominantly black or Hispanic. Few can even mention this without being called a racist, and most important writers have legitimate reason to avoid even being accused of racism, which can cost you your career (meanwhile, Spencer Ackerman, who was caught red-handed advocating the racist libel as a progressive strategy, has been unaffected, highlighting its potency). So, as a non-professional, I’ll ask: Why are these minorities performing so poorly when concentrated?
Honest Italian-Americans ended up greatly benefiting from the collapse of the briefly-lived Italian American Civil Rights League in 1971. These were the people who would say with a straight face they didn’t know what the word ‘mafia’ meant. With the danger of being accused of racism removed, the federal government during the Reagan Administration hammered the Mafia and left it a shell of what it once was. Since the Mafia preyed most of all on their co-ethnics, that was a huge win for Italian-Americans. This issue is not whether or not one group is more prone to nefariousness than any other. The issue is that if any group is exempted from criticism, the temptation for members of the group to do bad things increases. We all have urges that are worthy of criticism, but if we can arrange matters so nobody is allowed to criticize us, then the temptation to give in to those urges can be overpowering.
American minorities don’t need money, pity, or special rights, they need temperance, diligence, thrift and other bourgeois virtues, exactly what their community leaders are telling them are orthogonal to their position. The last thing you should tell someone in really bad [straits] is that his problem is the indifference, if not cruelty, of others, because it doesn’t help him.
Democrats and black leaders bear most of the blame for the Detroit, and this should be a teaching moment. Yet, I see no such re-evaluation, and so I have little hope for American Cities, which I assume in a generation will be like the favelas of Brazil, places the police won’t even go.
So between two options, a given effect is observed about equally with both? He hasn’t told us anything, until he tells us a lot more about those other five cities.
He’s on much firmer ground when he talks about the causes in detail. Even so, the rot is much too deep for local politics to be the answer, and probably too deep for national politics either.
Also, s/straights/straits/.
When Falkenstein says that 5 of the 10 cities with the highest poverty rates have had a Democratic stranglehold since at least 1961, he’s not saying that they simply sway left rather than right; the degree matters.
(And, yeah, he makes spelling errors.)
Naturally, the degree matters. As I said, we need to know more. I’d also like to hear more about the politics of non-dangerous cities.
He’s more convincing when he writes,
Well, now he’s talking about a correlation.
I happen to think he’s right, and you’re right. I think the more we dig up the numbers, the more detail we get into, the more that will become apparent. I don’t like people saying stuff that isn’t reasonably robust.
But when he starts talking about the Democrats, I start thinking “Oh, is that supposed to mean the GOP’s going to fix it? Who, Huckabee? Romney?”
But I guess it may no longer matter what you say, or who you say it to. Our political class will deny there are any problems as long as they can draw breath. The people will demand ever more handouts as things get worse, because the creation of handouts is simple enough for them to understand, while the creation of goods and services and jobs is utterly mysterious to them.
I don’t believe all of our cities have been in strict, monotonic decline though. So some cities were able to undo at least some of the damage of the 1960s and ’70s. Escape from New York no longer seems prophetic.
True. Boston has bounced back amazingly, too.
But not Philly… those poor bastards.
Or like Paris and its banlieues.