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Saving Our Cities
Over the last few decades we’ve all been watching as many of the major cities in the US have been going downhill. Violent crime, poverty, filth, decay, unemployment, homelessness, riots, addiction. It’s terrible.
And it’s not getting better. Nobody is even talking about it getting better.
San Francisco is crawling with homelessness, addiction, and poop.
Detroit is apocalypse porn for French photographers. (Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, click image for their site.)
Drugs turn people into zombies in Philadelphia. (Click image for “Streets of Philadelphia, Kensington Ave. Documentary.”)
And so forth.
And it’s making our country look really bad. Looking like a cross between a third-world nation, a Soviet state, and a dystopian, post-apocalyptic movie.
So what exactly is going on? And who is at fault? And what can we do about it?
People will blame it on racism, the police, capitalism, inequality, or whatever excuse might be politically advantageous at the moment. It would seem better to blame the city governments, as running a city is their job. (As in, “You had one job.”) But those governments are elected by the people who live in those cities. Are the citizens of the city, then, to blame?
Running a city isn’t difficult. I mean, people have been running cities successfully for a very long time, usually with far less to work with. There are lots of working examples out there. It shouldn’t take enormous amounts of money or resources.
It seems you would have to try to have things turn out this badly.
Now, I don’t claim to have any firsthand knowledge in this area. I’ve always lived near major cities, not in them, and I’ve never been involved in municipal politics. But I think we can all see a pattern here.
One more example… This set of tweets from lifelong Democrat Michelle Tandler summarizes the frustration many are feeling:
Here is what confuses me about San Francisco.
We have the most liberal, left-wing government & population in the country.
We have a $13B budget.
And we have 8,000 people sleeping in the rain this week.
Can someone please explain this to me?
— Michelle Tandler (@michelletandler) December 26, 2021
First, I want to talk about The Curley Effect. It has nothing to do with our favorite stooge, but rather it is a political strategy named after James Curley, the four-time mayor of Boston. Read all about it here:
The Curley Effect: The Economics of Shaping the Electorate
The Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization
Edward L. Glaeser, Andrei Shleifer (Both with Harvard and the National Bureau of Economic Research)
Abstract:
James Michael Curley, a four-time mayor of Boston, used wasteful redistribution to his poor Irish constituents and incendiary rhetoric to encourage richer citizens to emigrate from Boston, thereby shaping the electorate in his favor. As a consequence, Boston stagnated, but Curley kept winning elections. We present a model of using redistributive politics to shape the electorate, and show that this model yields a number of predictions opposite from the more standard frameworks of political competition, yet consistent with empirical evidence.
Basically, the Curley Effect states that there are two ways for the mayor of a city, once elected, to be successfully reelected. The traditional approach is to do an excellent job running the city, letting businesses thrive, managing the revenue, growing resources, pleasing the electorate, and then bringing in the most votes on election day. Basically, like you’d play “Sim City.”
So traditional.
But there is another approach pioneered by James Curley, to “shape the electorate.” That is, to drive the people who are likely to vote against you out of the city, and recruit new residents who are more likely to vote for you.
This is called The Curley Effect, and the article goes into some detail about it.
Note that the authors are economists, not politicians or historians, and this is an analysis from an economic incentive point of view. It has nothing to do with left or right political ideologies, and has everything to do with working the system.
There are lots of ways to drive voters out of a city. You can do it by taxing one group and providing services to another. Crappy schools will drive people out. Or crime; the district attorney could adopt a policy of not prosecuting crimes in specific neighborhoods. Or NIMBY (“Not In My Back Yard”) projects; strategically create the worst NIMBY projects and place them… precisely… in their backyards. And then shame them when they complain.
It’s easier to do in cities where the people who would vote against you can move just outside the border, into the suburbs, while still retaining social, recreational, business ties, and many of the other advantages of the city.
Now…
Unfortunately, the Glaeser/Shleifer paper doesn’t go into the consequences of the Curley Effect. I don’t think anybody has. Our most revered economists (Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman) have always reminded us to ask, “What happens next?”
What exactly does happen as a result of shaping the electorate?
I’ll suggest:
- Future elections will be heavily biased toward the party of the mayor and city council. And the party will continue to win every election. That’s one-party rule.
- A changed electorate is a long-term affair. Once started, the shaping process and the effects of that process can continue decades after the election. The people who left are unlikely to return, there are a backlog of people in the planning stages of a move, the policies in place will continue to drive targeted people away, and bring other targeted people in.
- Competent, capable people from the opposing party will be discouraged from running as their statistical chance of winning steadily falls. Any that do try will likely be nonserious candidates. Financial backing becomes more difficult.
- Political offices will effectively no longer be determined by a vote of the people, but are rather selected by the party.
- You no longer have the core essence of a Democracy. No checks and balances. No way to “vote the scoundrels out.” In short, you no longer have a Functioning Democracy.
- And no incentive to do a good job. Graft, corruption, bribery, fraud, waste, mismanagement can all thrive unchecked, and without limit. Federal financial assistance will be requested and squandered.
- Doomed. It’s basically stuck. Over decades you’ll see rising poverty rates, crime rates rising to 10 times the national average, unemployable people holding official positions. And you’ll see the population dropping as people move out, and the city is unable to attract new residents or businesses.
And this leads us back to the source, James Curley was also extremely corrupt. (“How corrupt was he?”) He was elected to Boston’s board of aldermen in 1904 while serving time in prison on a fraud conviction. And he spent part of his last term as mayor in prison.
So corruption can run rampant when the democratic process is crippled.
And this is completely consistent with what we’ve been seeing over the past 50 years.
An upcoming article will propose a solution.
Also, check out my previous article, Well, This Is Fascinating, which was basically a warm-up for this.
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I highly recommend that everybody listen to the Joe Rogan interview of David Mamet at least twice.
The other thing I was thinking about is, in Austrian economics you have this thing called subjective value. Any system that starts screwing with subjective value and individual subjective value is going to have problems and marxism is the worst.
I keep trying to think of a theory of everything that would unite the most people are across libertarianism and most conservatism. You could do a lot worse than David Mamet, Deirdre McCloskey, and Isaiah Berlin.
Austrian, too, but about everyone but the Marxian economists has known this since 1871.
Right. You know more about this than me.
Subjective value. Say’s Law. The people in power, and I suppose the voters, violate this all the time and just look around.
Also a good book.
Stealing from each other.
The whole system is a joke.
The article is dead on as are most of the comments. Is there an out? Is what’s going on unique? Hardly, it’s the history of the world which our founders tried to change and I suspect the fix is the same; leave and form a new Republic designed to avoid bureaucratic development and centralization.
It’s very depressing because we have a beautiful country with plentiful resources and basically good people (as Trump reminded us). We have the ability to be self-sufficient and help others across the world. I don’t ever recall so many deliberate disasters, so I think most of it is very selfish and evil. The liberals do not look after their fellow man – they do everything to make them more dependent and despondent. Giving people “things” doesn’t make them better, i.e. give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day – teach a man to fish and he can feed himself.
I will say if you take everything together – it is Biblical. In that case, politics won’t save us. The spirit of this world is running things:
2 Timothy 3:1-5 New International Version (NIV)
But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.
I’ll quibble. Rather, because democracies require free markets. Free markets create the economic incentives that prevent famines. Managed markets can never plan well enough to prevent famine.
The EU could be a catastrophe for energy in this sense. Printing all of this money into all of the stupidity already. Ugh. The German economy is falling apart because they can’t export as much. They are going to have to print money to save Italy.
Any GOP that are hesitant to criticize globalism are out of their minds.
@James Lileks Of course it’s still a scheme for personal enrichment–and personal safety (you don’t want to go against The Machine)–but where does Kim Foxx fit into this? Because Lori Lightfoot is not running Chicago. She can’t run it because her ideology keeps her from making any half-way good decisions. This destruction goes way beyond what we have seen city machines do in the past. They didn’t destroy their bread and butter. It’s part of a larger left-wing package that includes border destruction and fentanyl destruction and institutionalized corruption of our children, etc., etc., etc. No longer politics as usual.
wrong image
Yes.
A “functioning democracy” might not technically be an actual democracy. But the point is that the government is answerable to the people in some effective way.
One thing I forgot to include…
The Curley Effect of “shaping the electorate” is the equivalent of gerrymandering, but on a municipal level. Both are biasing the election results by altering the voting population.
With gerrymandering, the people stay put and the congressional district borderline is moved around them.
With the Curley Effect, the city border is unchanged, but the people are encouraged to move across it.
So the effect, and the effectiveness, are very similar.
Doesn’t this then allow those city dwellers to get what they vote for, good and hard?
Did you look at the French photograph apocalypse porn of Detroit? That qualifies as “good and hard”.
But that brings up another good point. Gerrymandering has an effect on the peoples’ representation in the federal government, so that’s non-local, while The Curley Effect is completely local.
A lot of the countries in South America have had democratic governments most of the time. Without a real free market it simply doesn’t do it. Similarly, free markets have to have some kind of representative government , or they won’t last long. There have to be ways to assure markets remain free. Our founders put power in the hands of ordinary folks, all of them, and that worked. Very successful folks gradually accumulated power which is the way power and economies always worked until we put power in the hands of ordinary folks and designed politics to keep it there. It’s over, and the folks who run matters don’t know that prosperity and growth require freedom. We will see decline, beginning with the poor, the middle class, then the top struggle among themselves. That, my friend is the history of the world we thought we had changed. Our founders knew how vulnerable it was. We forgot.
This is what I’ve been harping on relative to the cheating opportunities available for those offices determined by statewide popular vote. State legislatures could alter that by pulling back the selection of Presidential Electors but not much to be done about Senate elections.
To fight climate change or to fight those opposed to the climate change movement?
The EU could be the vortx that drags down the whole West. Total idiots.
Thank you.
I think there is an out, and I’ll be writing that post soon.
But before that can happen, it’s important to understand the *mechanism* that’s currently killing so many of our cities. I mean, if you address one problem without addressing the mechanism, it’s just gonna be a game of Whac-A-Mole.
I’ve presented what I think the mechanism is, and I’m eager to incorporate ideas from the discussion here.
The so-called Amazon Tax is an excise tax on companies with a certain amount of revenue, who pay their employees high salaries. The law was designed to ensnare tech companies whose employees earn $150,000 or more. They pay a tax on those salaries. Just a couple of weeks ago, the Seattle Chamber of Commerce dropped its lawsuit challenging the tax, since they figured they could not win in court. The State of Washington has a constitutional prohibition on income taxes, but they enacted a capital-gains tax last year, on high-earners (for now). That law was immediately challenged, and is now before the Seattle Supreme Court (as it is called, since Seattle has the most influence). They have been trying to get an income tax passed for decades, but have always failed. There is a good chance that the capital-gains tax will pass this time-they just cannot tolerate citizens keeping their earnings.
The state has two big sources of revenue. One is the sales tax, which is levied at all levels of government, local, county, and state. The state also has a gross-receipts tax on all businesses (“business and occupation tax”), with rates varying by type of business. This is extremely unfair, as all businesses pay, profitable or not. Even with no state personal income tax, Washingtonians pay high taxes. Our gas tax is the third-highest in the nation, and going higher.
We seem to be competing with them for that role, but I agree.
Then what?
I don’t think that this is a solution, Bryan. There has to be government in a city. If you revoke a city charter, does the county take over? The state?
Either.
I mean, you have to plan it out, but, cities exist at the leave of the State. States giveth and taketh away.
I just don’t think you’d get many courts allowing that, except maybe in Florida. To borrow from Animal House, cities have “a long-standing tradition of existence.”
The State has the absolute power. The courts have no say at all. City charters are controlled by the state.
The Executive and Legislative branches can just do it. Replace the City with something else. In fact, maybe FL should do it to Orlando.