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CHAPTER FIVE
THE URBANRENAISSANCE
Michael Barone
Download Chapter Five
Not so long ago, America’s central cities seemed stuck in a terminal decline.
Welfare rolls and crime rates had risen sharply from the mid-sixties on, and
seemed likely to rise even more—as indeed they did well into the eighties.
Central-city public schools suffered falling enrollments, embarrassingly low
test scores, and sky-high dropout rates.
American liberals proposed only one solution to these festering problems: spend
more money on the same programs and in furtherance of the same policies. But
then, they were responsible for those policies in the first place. The liberals
of the 1960s believed that America was an unjust, racist country, and argued
that voters owed recompense to the black and to the poor and to the governments
of the central cities where poor minorities increasingly tended to live. They
successfully pushed for generous welfare payments and gentle police tactics
and schools that instilled self-esteem rather than learning; public payrolls
ballooned.
These liberal nostrums failed to make things better; in fact, they were making
America’s central cities unfit places to live. Most Americans could avoid
daily contact with urban problems. They could move to the suburbs and, as time
went by, could work in the suburbs too. A few very affluent Americans could
maintain gracious high-income urban neighborhoods. But such neighborhoods had
become what Theodore H. White called perfumed stockades—places where peaceful
citizens felt ever more beleaguered by violent criminals and crazed homeless
persons. In truth, the great American cities were dying. Over the preceding
century, Americans had made huge investments in grand urban cultural institutions,
in brilliant works of city architecture, and wondrous metropolitan parks. Now
the value of this investment, this rich historical heritage, faced ruin.
For a long time, conservatives’ recommended approach to urban decay was
simply to spend less on the same old programs. It wasn’t much of a stance.
Liberals cried out that reducing spending would hurt the poor, especially minorities.
And on the political battlefield, the liberals mostly prevailed. In 1978, Democrats
not only controlled the presidency and Congress; they held most of the governorships
and virtually all of the bigcity mayoralties. Conservatives won only when the
voters or the financial markets took direct action, as when Californians passed
Proposition 13, a ballot initiative limiting property-tax hikes, or when the
markets demanded a state takeover of New York City’s out-of-control budget.
The weapon employed in both cases was a bludgeon. It battered down spending
for a while. But the same policies remained in place, and eventually new revenue
sources turned up to finance them.
A New Vision for Saving the Cities
Missing from the political scene were new ideas and proposals for alternative
policies. Enter the Manhattan Institute. Founded in 1978 and
headquartered in Manhattan, the institute has for more than
25 years dedicated itself to restoring the fortunes of the
greatest American city—and of cities generally. The institute’s
strategy has been to expose the bad ideas of the 1960s and
come up with better ones. A key tactic has been to support
the research and writing and promotion of books that challenge
the assumptions behind the failed policies of the sixties
liberals and set forth, by argument and example, policies
that really could help the poor and, in the process, revitalize
cities.
Some say that the influence of three books—Karl Marx’s
Das Kapital, Charles Darwin’s Origin of the
Species, and Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation
of Dreams—can explain much of the twentieth century.
Today, one could say, without too much exaggeration, that
the revival of America’s central cities, visible not
just in New York but across the nation, can be explained by
the influence of the work that the Manhattan Institute has
underwritten, including such books as Charles Murray’s
Losing Ground, Myron Magnet’s The Dream and
the Nightmare, and George Kelling’s Fixing
Broken Windows, among others.
Two common threads run through the institute’s important books. Both challenge
the assumptions of the liberals head-on. The first is that markets work. The
liberalism of the 1960s arose in the academy and the press at a time when the
truth of the central argument of New Deal liberalism was still taken for granted:
that markets mostly don’t work and that enlightened mandarins—social
scientists and planners—could produce better results. The Manhattan Institute’s
authors rejected this view and showed how ignoring market incentives undercut
the mandarins’ policies.
The second common thread is that morality matters. The sixties liberals saw
most Americans as immoral colluders in an immoral society. In the liberals’
view, conventional morality propped up an unjust world and needed overcoming.
The institute’s books, by contrast, insist that the moral behavior of law-abiding
citizens deserves encouragement, not rebuke or dishonor; conventional morality
does have lessons to teach us.
Old Truths for a New Generation
Markets work, morality matters: the Manhattan Institute has spent a quarter-century
restating these truths, wrongly cast aside as irrelevant in the 1960s and 1970s.
No one has done so with greater impact than Charles Murray in his 1984 book
Losing Ground.
Murray brought to his work a statistical rigor and a moral
intensity rare in the social sciences. By careful use of statistics,
he pointed out how poverty had been decreasing from 1950 to
the mid-1960s but had become stubbornly entrenched and had
even increased after the policy changes of the 1960s and early
1970s. “The most compelling explanation for the marked
shift in the fortunes of the poor,” Murray concluded,
“is that they continued to respond, as they always had,
to the world as they found it, but that we—meaning the
un-poor and un-disadvantaged—had changed the rules of
their world. Not of our world, just of theirs. The first effect
of the new rules was to make it profitable for the poor to
behave in the short term in ways that were destructive in
the long term.” The rules of the “market” had
changed. “Their second effect was to mask these longterm
losses—to subsidize irretrievable mistakes.” That
led, Murray underscored, to widespread social dysfunction:
“We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more
poor. We tried to remove the barriers to escape from poverty,
and inadvertently built a trap.”
Murray recognized that economic incentives operate only in
a social matrix. Decreasing punishment for crime and reducing
penalties for misbehavior in schools, Murray explained, result
in the transfer of the costs of misbehaviors from those who
disobey the rules to those who obey them. To address the problems
he had described, Murray proposed radical, bracing policies:
an end to racial preferences, an education system with vouchers
and rigorous testing, and “scrapping the entire federal
welfare and income-support structure for working-aged persons,”
except unemployment insurance.
To the readers of 1984, when his book first appeared, and even to Murray himself
at the time, such policies seemed politically unthinkable. Yet in the years
since, public policy has inexorably moved Murray’s way. Voters have rejected
racial quotas and preferences, and courts have drawn tighter limits around such
policies. Various states and localities have instituted school voucher experiments
and systematic testing (and President Bush’s No Child Left Behind education
act of January 2002 has fortified the testing cause). States and localities
began refashioning welfare laws in the late 1980s and early 1990s, establishing
work requirements and shifting the goal of welfare from providing subsidies
to encouraging work—a trend solidified and extended by the federal welfare
reform act of August 1996. Murray’s focus on the harm that 1960s liberal
policies had visited on the poor made it impossible to caricature opposition
to those policies as hard-hearted.
Seldom has a single book had, in less than a generation’s time, such an
effect on public thinking and public policy.
Fixing the Culture
Those effects weren’t fully apparent yet in 1993, when Myron Magnet’s
The Dream and the Nightmare first appeared. Magnet’s subject was
the malignant culture of the late 1960s that metastasized in the 1970s and had
affected almost all segments of American society by the 1980s. This new culture,
Magnet wrote, downplayed “personal responsibility, self-control, and deferral
of gratification” and “celebrated an ‘if it feels good, do it’
self-indulgence.” Radiating out from the academy and from elite media like
the New York Times, the new culture assured us that criminals were victims
of the system, that taking illegal drugs was a legitimate expression of individual
autonomy, and that the mentally ill should have the freedom of the streets.
As Magnet powerfully argued, these ideas proved disastrous for the poor, their
lives ravaged by overindulgence or threatened by those who overindulged. And
in the process of proving disastrous for the poor, they proved equally so for
our great cities too. Magnet was writing from the Manhattan of the early 1990s—from
a city that boasted the greatest accumulation of cultural capital of any in
human history but that was at the same time a place in which criminals prowled
the streets and the deranged fouled the sidewalks.
Over time, others came to agree with this argument. The liberal elite did not
lead the move for change, however. Instead, it came from leaders like Rudolph
Giuliani, elected New York mayor the year that The Dream and the Nightmare
was published, and from other public officials around the country who began
to fight crime and reform welfare. Then, in the late 1990s, The Dream and
the Nightmare found its biggest fan: George W. Bush. In his presidential
campaign, in his acceptance speech, and in his presidency, Bush echoed the book’s
themes and often its language.
Bush noted that The Dream and the Nightmare “crystallized for me
the impact the failed culture of the sixties had on our values and society.
[That culture] helped create dependency on government, undermine family and
erode values which had stood the test of time and which are critical if we want
a decent and hopeful tomorrow for every single American.”
A Revolution in Crime Fighting
Threatening those values more than anything else is crime, which increased
exponentially in America during the 1960s and 1970s and continued at devastatingly
high rates until the mid-1990s. Future generations may well consider it puzzling
that an affluent and increasingly fair nation like the United States put up
with such horrifying rates of crime for so long. In his 1996 Manhattan Institute
book Fixing Broken Windows, co-authored with Catherine Coles, criminologist
George Kelling tells the story of how this state of affairs came about—and
how American police departments finally, and suddenly, achieved a vast reduction
in crime.
The sixties liberals preached that crime was an inevitable and perhaps justified
response to an unfair society, and that there was not much police forces could,
or perhaps should, do about it. For liberals, the police appeared as occupying
forces of poor minority neighborhoods, acting on behalf of oppressors against
the oppressed; police actions should therefore meet with hostile scrutiny and
face strict limitation. It was legitimate to ask police to solve violent crimes,
after the fact, though in the nature of things that often was a futile task.
But they should not attempt to police what Kelling called “disorderly behavior,”
by which he meant “aggressive panhandling, street prostitution, drunkenness
and public drinking, menacing behavior, harassment, obstruction of streets and
public spaces, vandalism and graffiti, public urination and defecation, unlicensed
vending and peddling, unsolicited window washing of cars (‘squeegeeing’)
and other such acts.”
After years of observing police work, Kelling had come to think that the liberal
approach was utterly wrong. In the early 1980s, he and James Q. Wilson wrote
an article for The Atlantic Monthly entitled “Broken Windows,”
arguing that the existence of broken windows in a neighborhood signaled disorder,
which in turn told criminals and non-criminals alike that no one cared and that
crimes would be tolerated and criminals would go unpunished. Effective police
action against disorderly behavior, the authors argued, would reduce the number
of more serious crimes.
As a consultant to the New York Transit Authority police after Giuliani’s
election, Kelling helped to put these order-maintenance policies into effect.
The results were spectacular: within five years, the number of major crimes
fell by half and the number of murders by two-thirds. New York’s streets
became much safer, and the city profited from an influx of tourists. Seldom
has a public policy so quickly and so spectacularly proved its worth.
The Battle for the Public Schools
New York’s public schools were once one of its great glories. In the first
half of the twentieth century, they educated hundreds of thousands of children—most
of them the sons and daughters of immigrants. The schools taught these newcomers
to speak, read, and write the English language, to master arithmetic and mathematics,
to understand history and the principles of this nation, and to comprehend the
great advances of science. The school system’s leaders believed that all
children could learn and so held students to rigorous standards. New York’s
schools consistently produced some of the best graduates in the nation. But
by the late 1960s, bureaucracy, civil service rules, and bad pedagogy had smothered
the public school system. Most city schools became sinks of mediocrity—or
worse. For New York’s poor, for the children of the ghettos and the immigrant
neighborhoods, the schools were a bleak failure, in vivid contrast to the public
schools of 50 years before.
This tragedy did not have to happen: so argued Seymour Fliegel, when he was
head of Community School District Four in East Harlem and, later, in the pages
of his 1993 book, Miracle in East Harlem. When Fliegel came to District
Four in the 1970s, it had the lowest test scores in the city and there seemed
no obvious way to improve them. But three teachers asked permission to start
their own schools, each based on a different theory. The schools turned out
to be successful, and other teachers came forward with their own proposals for
new schools. The central bureaucracy, uninterested in a failing district, let
the experiments go forward; costs remained low because the schools typically
were small, occupying just one floor of a large building.
Then came what Fliegel calls “the most crucial development”: letting
parents choose what schools their children would attend. Popular schools could
grow; those no one wanted would close. Fliegel and his fellow administrators
discovered that, even within the public school system, markets work—if
principals and teachers have the freedom to innovate and parents are given the
chance to be involved. District Four’s success showed that the public schools,
which so many had given up on, can still produce miracles in the poorest parts
of New York City.
The Efficient City
Those who constructed the big-city bureaucracies of the twentieth century believed
that centralized, monopolistic bureaucracies could deliver services better and
more efficiently than the highly politicized city governments of the nineteenth
century. But they failed to understand that monopoly control is far less efficient
than competition and that the workers can often manage things better than the
managers.
These are the lessons of Stephen Goldsmith’s The Twenty-First Century
City, based on his experience as Indianapolis mayor during most of the 1990s.
Indianapolis faced no big crisis when he came to office. But costs were rising
and services were far from optimal. Goldsmith subjected government services
to competition, allowing private firms to contract to provide services but also
letting existing city employees make competitive bids. He wasn’t surprised
to find that private firms often provided better services at lower costs. What
did surprise him was discovering that existing city employees often bid
successfully for contracts. Individual workers, freed from arbitrary rules and
sluggish layers of middle management, often had excellent ideas about how to
improve services. And public employee union leaders, even more to his surprise,
often actively cooperated with these efforts. City spending fell and services
improved. Markets work.
The Bourgeois Ideal
America’s cities still have major problems, of course.
But they’re no longer in terminal decline. Some may backslide,
but others present shining examples that lead voters in cities
with less enlightened leadership and policies to ask why things
can’t be better. Learning is cumulative: the lessons
taught by the books and other initiatives supported by the
Manhattan Institute and the successes that they inspired will
not be easy to erase from memory. Markets work and morality
matters, because people work and live more successfully when
they understand that there is a connection between effort
and reward and when they appreciate the dignity of work and
virtuous behavior. The Manhattan Institute has fostered what
one could call the Bourgeois Ideal—an ideal cherished
a century ago but debunked and spurned by many in the twentieth
century, and especially by the 1960s liberals. Bourgeois means
“of the city,” and the Bourgeois Ideal is of an
ordered and comfortable life in the city, benefiting from
the economic vitality and cultural riches that the city, at
its best, can offer. An aristocracy that sought deference from others and saw
itself as the only repository of culture disparaged the Bourgeois
Ideal in the nineteenth century. Marxists and 1960s liberals
disparaged the ideal in the twentieth century, believing that
only an overturning of the existing order and a repudiation
of its central ideals—markets work and morality matters—could
create a decent society.
Neither the aristocracy nor the Marxists ever had much purchase in America,
and in the early twentieth century, the Bourgeois Ideal, with characteristic
American accents, seemed to be on the rise in this country. As the economy surged
ahead, more and more Americans could live comfortably in great cities with all
their economic opportunities and cultural glories at hand. But as we’ve
seen, the sixties liberals, tearing down the Bourgeois Ideal, inflicted great
harm on the cities whose interests they professed to champion. In this atmosphere,
the Manhattan Institute came forward to champion again the Bourgeois Ideal.
In the books that it has sponsored—and those discussed here are only some
of the important titles to appear over the last quarter-century—in its
influential quarterly magazine City Journal, and in papers and conferences,
the institute has proved that the ills of the central cities were not inevitable,
their decline not a fate. It showed the way toward better public policies and
toward a respect for markets and morality.
The Manhattan Institute’s success is apparent in a thousand statistics.
It is clear as well to those of us fortunate enough to live or work in or visit
great American cities today.
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