Transcription
All right, good afternoon. Welcome to the American Enterprise Institute and thank you for joining us. I'm Kevin Kosar, and I am a senior fellow here at AEI. We're here to discuss AEI Press's republication of Edward C. Banfield's classic book, *The Unheavenly City Revisited*. Now, let me offer you a road map for the program. Uh, first, I'm going to make introductory remarks. Duh. Uh, and after that, I'm going to take a seat, and each of the panelists will talk a little about aspects of the book that they find particularly interesting or relevant. After that, we open the floor to questions, and thereafter, we have a little reception out there.
We do have some copies of the book over there, uh, for those of you who are here in person, feel free to grab one, uh, after the program's done. And for those of you who are watching online out there, uh, you can find it for sale online in many places. Just go to your search engine, type AEI Press, *The Unheavenly City Revisited*, and, uh, you'll get lots of results. Look for the one with the brown cover. That's the new one. Now, let me also say to those of you who are online, uh, if you'd like to submit questions at any point during the program, please email them to my research assistant, Jhun Lee. His email address is j-h-u-n dot aei dot org.
Now, [clears throat] I do want to get to the program, but I first have many thanks to give. Projects like this don't happen all by themselves or through the actions of one person. I alone could not have done this without a lot of help. First, let me thank Elliot Banfield and Laura Hogay Banfield. These are Ed's children who supported the republishing of *The Unheavenly City*. Uh, Elliot Banfield and, uh, and Laura Hogay, they both have been very supportive of my development of the website edwardcbanfield.org, which you can see right there, which compiles lots of Ed's works and many other interesting materials on him. Let me also thank Thomas Lang, a former student of Ed Banfield, who has cheered on my effort to share Ed's wisdom with new generations of Americans. Tom's been really generous, uh, in his support for this whole effort, which has been ongoing for years. And let me heap praise particularly on AEI Press and especially Rosa Lee Blacklock, who did the hard work of turning a PDF, because that's all we had to work with, into this handsome volume. She also edited and re-edited and re-edited my new preface for the book. So, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Last, let me thank the four wonderful individuals over here on stage with me today who took time out of their out of their days. First, Chris Demuth, former head of AEI. Chris, everyone knows Chris. He's had a long and distinguished career in government and think tankery. He was also a student of Ed Banfield's at Harvard and a longtime friend to Ed and his family. Howard Husach, he's also a senior fellow here at AEI, like me, and he's written extensively on housing policy, urban governance, and civil society, topics that were near and dear to Ed's heart. Howard also met Ed for a time at Harvard. Next up, the next generation. John Ketchum, a legal policy fellow and director, director of cities at the Manhattan Institute. He studies urban matters, including elections, housing, infrastructure, and many more. And last, but certainly not least, Raphael Manguel, who is the Nick Olno Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of *City Journal*, and a member of the Council on Criminal Justice.
Now, no doubt most, if not all of you, are, you have some knowledge of who Edward C. Banfield was. He was a great social scientist. He was most widely known for his studies of American cities, but he also published remarkable books on other governance subjects. Not quite a year ago, AEI Press republished Ed's first book, *Government Project*. >> There she blows. >> Uh, which this book was, is a fantastic first book, languishing in obscurity. Uh, had been out of print since the '50s, and AEI Press brought it back. Uh, and it studied a well-intended, well-resourced effort to alleviate rural poverty during the New Deal. And ultimately, this story was a tragedy. A tragedy with lessons for for us today. But here today, we're talk about this book, *The Unheavenly City*.
Now, you might wonder, why is AEI bothering to bring back this book? Well, there are many reasons, but let me limit myself to three of them. First, the book reminds us that hostility to free thinking and expression is a long-standing and perennial peril. After Ed published *The Unheavenly City* in 1970, he was canceled. Radical students invaded his class and disrupted his lectures. He was shunned on campus and even had a stalker, one who drove him from Harvard and then followed him to the University of Pennsylvania and kept harassing him. Various academics criticized Ed in print, often in ad hominem terms. They criticized him at conferences. They were offended, first and foremost, that Ed, by writing this book, had contradicted their intellectual faith. And at the heart of that faith was this belief that more federal spending can fix the problems of America's cities. *The Unheavenly City* was loaded with facts. If you get your copies later and you flip through them, there's an unbelievable amount of data and footnotes and all that. Yet, when I go back and read the conversations in print by these folks with advanced degrees, so seldom was the research itself engaged. Mostly, it was criticisms of the man, calling him a cold-hearted person or something like that. Ed took all that flak. Being the guy he was, he listened, and then he turned around and revised the book a little bit. More footnotes, more data. And in 1974, out came *The Unheavenly City Revisited*. He tried with this book to engage his critics with high-minded dialogue, facts, evidence, and all that. He worked hard to polish the text a bit to further clarify what seemed to me to be already bell-clear findings. Again, sadly, sane discussions of the book and its findings were rare. Most of society's leading lights simply didn't want to hear what it had to say.
The second reason AEI's republished this book is because it really holds timeless wisdom about an array of urban policy topics. Crime, housing, unemployment, you name it. And we humans have an unfortunate habit of forgetting what previous generations have learned. In the past 10 years, I've watched with dismay as various politicians, smarties, and online influencers have announced bold new ideas for making cities better that reformers, in fact, have already tried in the '50s, the '60s, and the '70s. It's painful to watch, and it's such a waste of resources. The old quote, "Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it," by George Santayana. Well, it rings all too true. Yet, here we are again. And my hope is that bringing this book back into print and getting it discussed is maybe, just maybe, we can help policymakers avoid repeating the same mistakes they made in the past.
Finally, uh, I wanted to bring this book back because it feels particularly timely. Odd to say, considering it's from 1974, but no, it's timely. This moment in history, Banfield's analysis really hits home because at the heart of it, he places politics. He places class. Yes, here in America, we believe that all men are created equal, but that doesn't mean we're homogeneous. And Banfield was acutely aware of difference. He realized that societies, no matter whether we're talking about America or any other society, there's going to be different classes within it. And with that comes different perspectives, ways of life, behaviors. And this has huge ramifications for policymakers. For Ed, a very big ramification was that putting class at the center of thinking about politics and policy reminds we Americans that elites tend to dominate both policymaking and the conversations around it. And like any other class, elites have their own biases. They tend to be affluent relative to the rest of the country and have very high expectations for how life ought to be. Being thus, they tend to see problems everywhere and tend to want to conjure solutions about how to fix them. Elites also tend to have, uh, very optimistic take on what government can achieve, and they often feel that even if something can't be made better, there's nobility in the trying.
Well, in this book, [clears throat] to the annoyance of many of those individuals, uh, Ed called them out on this. Uh, he called them out on their biases. He pointed out that, no, the average American does not see the same problems that elites flag as problems. They have different ideas, frequently. No, the average American is not so confident that government action will succeed. Often, their lived experience with government is one of chagrin, things getting screwed up, [snorts] things being corrupted. And no, the average American does not feel pride seeing money spent on government programs that fail. This is not a source for, uh, cleansing of their collective guilt. They just don't tend to feel that way. And a larger lament of the book, again based on class, is that it appeared to Ed that America's politics were headed in an unhealthy, uh, and somewhat destructive direction. As society was growing wealthier, ever more college-educated individuals were taking an interest in politics and lending their voices to and resources to go to the government to tackle ever more problems, to do something, uh, with little consideration as to whether the problem actually is solvable and whether the government, with its peculiar construction, with power fractured between the feds and the states and localities and different branches, really could deliver. Ed worried that many problems, promises would be made by the political class, by the influencers, yet few problems would be solved. And this would sow cynicism in the public and ferment angry politics. The average American would rage at the elites, while the political elites, for the most part, would talk amongst themselves, often with a sort of righteous indignation. So yes, despite this book's age, I think there are, uh, resonances in our own time for it. And I certainly could say more about why I wanted to bring this book back, but I won't, because I want to turn over the stage to my guests. It's [clears throat] time for you to hear them. So let me sit down and first turn to Chris Demuth. [clears throat]
Should we applaud you here [applause] or there?
>> [cough and clears throat]
I first encountered *The Unheavenly City* in September 1966, four years before it was published. Browsing around for courses as a Harvard junior, I noticed a photograph in the *Harvard Crimson*, the student newspaper, of the first session of Edward C. Banfield's course, Gov 146, Urban Policy Problems. It showed a standing-room-only lecture hall with students filling the aisles and jamming the back of the room. Professor Banfield, the caption joked, was teaching that congestion and overcrowding were intrinsic to urban life and not the serious problems they were often claimed to be. That sounded like fun, and I signed up. Gov 146 was the second biggest course on campus. Relocated to the largest lecture hall, it was the proving ground for *The Unheavenly City*, with sessions on class, race, poverty, schooling, crime, and the rest of the book's table of contents. Its wide-ranging reading list—demography, ethnography, sociology, politics, history, economics—would find its way into the book's hundreds of expository endnotes.
Kevin Kosar, uh, notes, uh, that the reception to *The Unheavenly City* in the early 1970s was marked, uh, by the inauguration of campus cancel culture. But in 1966, the old campus culture, that of adamant open inquiry, was still alive. Change was in the air, to be sure. Student protests against the Vietnam War were growing violent, but they were not yet conventional. That October, after Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara gave a luncheon talk at Harvard, his car was blocked from leaving by several hundred students, leading several thousand students to sign a letter of apology. Within the university faculty, professors were still respected and deferred to, and that included many of Banfield's colleagues with at least somewhat conservative leanings: Harvey Mansfield, Henry Kissinger, James Q. Wilson, Samuel Huntington, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Thomas Schelling. Many Gov 146 students, probably most, found Professor Banfield's views on race and class and the causes of poverty and crime to be offensive and disturbing. It was the charming practice of Harvard students in those days to express disagreement with speakers by hissing, and there was a good deal of that at the beginning of the course, but as the course proceeded, the hall quieted down. We were impressed by Ed's depth, hard-nosed humanity, by his ability to synthesize disparate academic disciplines, by his careful attention to opposing views, and by his impatience with cant and performance moralizing from whatever source. Professor Banfield invited students to submit written questions at the end of each lecture and then opened the next session with thoughtful answers to the best of the questions. When a group of students set up a weekly gathering to air dissenting views on course topics, Ed applauded the initiative in the *Crimson*.
By dint of personal example, Ed Banfield taught us that politics and policy debate were full of nonsense. That the task of the educated man and woman was to see through the nonsense, and that there was an abundant literature of excellent research and thinking to help us find our way. All of this made me, for the first time, a serious student. I completed the reading list halfway into the semester, then hazarded a telephone call to the gruff professor seeking an office visit. To my astonishment, he spent more than an hour with this naive undergraduate and gave me several things to read before another meeting. Could he recommend any journals or periodicals that I should follow? Yes: *Commentary* and *The Public Interest*. Soon I found myself in a small secret society of Banfield devotees. Most of us were undergraduates, which was highly unusual for a senior professor. Only one of us stayed on to pursue graduate studies, contemplating an academic career. That was Bruce Crain, future chairman of the board of the American Enterprise Institute. The rest of us went off to pursue our fortunes in the big, wide world.
Gov 146 featured occasional guest lectures by specialists, including Milton Friedman on the then subject of school vouchers. Ed and Milton were close friends and strong skeptics of government planning and provision, but their perspectives were orthogonal. For Milton, freedom was primary. For Banfield, culture was primary. After reading the manuscript of *The Unheavenly City*, Milton dictated to Ed what became the famous opening passage of the preface: "This book will probably strike many readers as the work of an ill-tempered and mean-spirited fellow. I should like, therefore, to assure the reader that I am as well-meaning, probably even as soft-hearted as he, but facts are facts, however unpleasant, and they have to be faced unblinkingly by anyone who really wants to improve matters in the city." If Milton thought those words would soften the book's reception, he was mistaken.
The book was a surprise bestseller, widely reviewed, cited, celebrated, and criticized. But in this manner, it moved from the academic world to the political world, where standards of evaluation were different, and people often took sides based upon buzz rather than substance. A friend of mine who was a fierce conservative activist noticed that the preface listed me as among those who had offered "criticism of the manuscript." He assumed this meant that I was opposed to its arguments, confirming his suspicion that I was a milktoast RINO. On the other side, articles in prestigious venues such as *The New York Times* angrily misrepresented the book's arguments. By then, however, the academic world was itself becoming a political world. In 1969, Harvard students had occupied University Hall, ejecting deans by force and ransacking their offices. The next year, when Ed suddenly became a prominent national figure and was recruited as an urban affairs advisor by the Nixon administration, a small group of radicals hounded him and pronounced him a racist. As Kevin has mentioned, [clears throat] Ed soon decamped for the University of Pennsylvania, whose president at the time was his friend and one-time co-author Martin Meyerson. But the hounds followed him there.
At the time, the director of security at Penn was my wife's father. A cherished piece of family lore is the evening when Ed was delivering a lecture and a young man came barreling down the aisle toward the podium. Susan's father confronted the fellow. More precisely, he decked him, and the lecture continued. *The Unheavenly City* was a bestseller and generated many serious, admiring reviews and symposia. Ed received numerous thoughtful fan letters from scholars and housewives, which he answered with his customary diligence. Still, the protests and egregious vilifications stung. He once told me that he thought Harvard should require its professors to deposit their unpublished book manuscripts in the university library for 100 years, at which point each manuscript would be read by a faculty committee, which would decide whether it was worthy of publication. More than a half-century after its publication, we can already see that *The Unheavenly City* would have passed the test of time and be grateful that it didn't have to. Many of its most controversial propositions have been vindicated by events and have been absorbed into the world, into the views and research of leading students of urban policy, such as those we're about to hear from. Thank you. [applause] There, or there, whichever you like.
>> Thank you so much. It's really an honor to be on this stage with, uh, Kevin, Chris Demuth, and Ralph and John, colleagues from, uh, my former home at the Manhattan Institute, which continues to do such great work. There's so much to say about this book, and I'm going to, I've been asked to talk about housing policy, particularly, which I will do. But I have to reflect on Chris's comments about academia at that time, and the many disciplines from which *Unheavenly City* drew. You could say political science, economics, psychology, urban planning, sociology. And one wonders not only would Ed Banfield be canceled today at a university, but whether he'd be hired. Because he was clear that he wanted to write for a popular audience and was not going to be overspecialized. And those are not traits that are welcome today in many, um, tenure decisions. I think so.
So, I've been asked to reflect on *Unheavenly City*'s insights as they relate to housing, especially, and especially public housing, the history of which and condition of which is the subject of a recent book I published, *The Projects*. Which I could not have written without drawing on the fantastic book, maybe it'll be the next one that you republished, *Politics, Planning, and the Public Interest*, co-authored by Ed Banfield and Martin Meyerson. Martin's son is here somewhere today. Adam, are you here? >> It's over here. >> Okay. Which revealed the complexity and the politics of Chicago public housing. Still important. I promise I'll get around to all that, but I'm to do so in a roundabout way, starting with a call I got from Ed Banfield himself, inviting me to dinner at his home. It was, to say the least, a stunning invitation for me. I was a decidedly junior person at the Harvard School of Government, not fortunate enough to be his student. Uh, why had he invited me? That was my real question, and the key turned out to be an essay I had just published in, not surprisingly, *The Public Interest*, which he had recommended to you. I called it "Bringing Back the Settlement House." In it, I recalled the success of early 20th-century middle-class reformers, I guess you'd have to say, in introducing the values of delayed gratification, healthy diet, upward mobility, work ethic, to often unlettered immigrants. Well, this, it turned out, mapped directly onto *Unheavenly City* to a great extent. In the book, Banfield writes less about cities per se and narrowly, and more about their social classes, with a specific emphasis on the problems most concentrated in the cities of what he unabashedly calls the lower class. That portion of the population in which, per Banfield, antisocial behavior and crime is concentrated as a result of what he called the present-oriented worldview. The present-oriented individual, he writes, lives from moment to moment. He is radically improvident. Whatever he cannot consume immediately, he considers valueless. His bodily needs and his taste for action take precedence over everything. The stretch on action, risk-taking, conquest, fighting, smartness makes lower-class life extraordinarily violent. This is a long way from the assertion that poverty and racism lead to crime, and is no less at odds with the progressive conventional wisdom today than when it was written. In my essay, I was adding, somewhat unwittingly, a chapter to what Banfield viewed as keeping with his own work, with its emphasis on the need to acknowledge and mitigate lower-class behavior. Not necessarily to send the lower class to Harvard, but to push it to ascend to the working class, as did Jane Addams at Hull House, who he referenced in *Unheavenly City*. She chastised neighbors for such habits as throwing garbage on the street. I'm grateful that he chose to encourage me, which he most decidedly did.
And to that point, the failure of American public housing has much to do with how it came to counter what it was counter to what was planned: a concentration of that lower class that so concerned Banfield. As he wrote, "Strange as it may seem, the mammoth government programs to aid the cities are directed mainly toward the problems of comfort, convenience, amenity. In so far as they have had any effect on the serious problems, it is on the whole to aggravate them." How did that happen to the ambitious program known as public housing? And what might Banfield think should be done today? It's important to understand that at its outset in the 1930s, public housing was conceived as apartments for the working class. In New York City, the site of the largest concentration, priority was given, believe it or not, to two-parent families. In theory, their rents, and this is important, were going to pay for the maintenance over time. That changed dramatically as working families chose suburban home ownership, left the projects behind. Public, and later other types of subsidized housing, housing vouchers became the readout of low-income, one-parent households who could not maintain through their rent the maintenance of the projects. A key turning point came in St. Louis in 1969 when tenants staged a rent strike that led to the demolition of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing projects, and in a policy akin to the rent freeze now promoted by New York Mayor Eric Adams, the federal government limited to 25% of income the rent for low-income public housing residents. Three years later, lacking any money essentially, the St. Louis Housing Authority imploded this fantastic [clears throat] ambitious save-the-cities project. Rather than challenging the behaviors of the lower class, government had decided to accommodate them. Most notably, the female-headed single-parent households that Ed Banfield described as a core characteristic of the lower class that so concerned him. Today, more than 5 million households live either in the remaining 872,000 public housing units or 2.8 million apartments whose rent is paid by the government. 3% of those households are two adults with children. In my view, Banfield, judging by *Unheavenly City*, would find this unacceptable: a concentration of the lower class enabled by government in the name of reducing poverty. Indeed, in *Unheavenly City*, he proposed that what he called "the incompetent poor" – we know why he got in trouble, don't we? [laughter] – be encouraged to reside in an institution or semi-institution, for example, a closely supervised public housing project. I would speculate he might agree with my own recent prescription: a time limit on how long one can stay in a public housing project and a rent fixed in dollar amount rather than as a percentage of income, so as not to discourage self-improvement and work. In other words, public policy that seeks to force a future orientation on the present-oriented, encouraging them to work and inhabit an attitude to ascend to the working class. That's just what the settlement house movement was trying to do more than a century ago. And that's what got Banfield's attention to my humble essay.
Keep in mind, uh, yeah, in 1992, Ed Banfield's colleague, the political scientist James Q. Wilson, reviewing for *The Public Interest* a collection of Ed Banfield's essays, wrote that "it is rare for a man's unorthodox opinions to become conventional wisdom in his lifetime. But something close to that has happened to Ed Banfield." I don't want to disagree with James Q. Wilson, but I wish his statement were more literally true. Banfield's view on racial politics. He writes that "black leaders cannot be expected to explain that prejudice is no longer the obstacle. Even some of those who understand that it is must pretend otherwise." Not exactly conventional wisdom today. In law enforcement, I believe *Unheavenly City* is the first reference I ever saw to the idea of assertive policing, stop-and-frisk. Not exactly uncontroversial today. And the, as is well known, the distinction between riots and political protests, about which he wrote in *Unheavenly City*, remain as fresh and challenging as when *Unheavenly City* was first published. All of those remain just as challenging and just as important. Thank you very much. [applause]
Thank you.
>> Thank you to AEI and to Kevin for the invitation to present today. Uh, sometimes the significance of a major thinker lies in a personal legacy that endures long after his death. Uh, type of fame. Other times, though, a thinker's ideas become so thoroughly absorbed into the prevailing intellectual framework that their original source fades from view. Professor Ed Banfield may not be a household name, but his legacy lives in how deeply his insights have shaped the conservative mindset and how often they're now taken for granted, as we've heard already. I commend to you also today my colleague Judge Glock's insightful book review in *Law and Liberty* for yet another exposition of the life and legacy of Ed Banfield.
In *The Unheavenly City Revisited*, Banfield presents urban challenges with a characteristically hard look, confronting inconvenient or uncomfortable facts, including that many things urban leaders and reformers describe as crises are not, in fact, life-and-death matters, but issues of convenience, comfort, and marginal improvement. As Howard just mentioned, gridlock may be genuinely unpleasant, and shaving 15 minutes off the average commute time would undoubtedly improve health and welfare, but whether a city has such improvements will not determine whether it is a good society or not. These are often preferences of middle or upper-class people asserting themselves as problems rather than as essential matters of well-being. Were he alive to observe last year's mayor race in New York City, Professor Banfield would undoubtedly have felt vindicated. Uh, Eric Adams's supposedly transformative campaign promised to save tenants in rent-stabilized apartments—that are not means-tested, mind you—uh, roughly an average of $50 per month, and eliminate a $3 bus fare. You can judge for yourselves whether those are transformative.
For Banfield, there isn't really much public policy can do to radically transform an urban society, at least not quickly. The way cities develop is largely the product of three imperatives, he writes: population growth, transportation technology, and some differential economic success among city residents. A growing population requires more space, usually outwards, sometimes upwards. Cheaper and faster transportation allows people to move farther from the dense city center where land is used most intensively. And those who prosper economically will, if given the option, move from a more disorderly city center to a less disorderly, uh, exurban and suburban area, as will firms that will eventually locate to find that labor pool. And for the first half of the 20th century, New York grew precisely because its regulatory structure was flexible enough for this process to unfold. The city made room for newcomers physically, economically, and socially. Infrastructure and housing expanded alongside population growth. In the 1920s alone, New York City averaged some 7,000 new housing units per year, uh, predominantly constructed by the private sector, sometimes approaching 100,000 units. I mean, these figures would be inconceivable today.
But Banfield recognized that density can magnify disorder, especially when what he termed the lower class is concentrated in the same place, producing slums and creating the conditions for crime, unrest, and social breakdown. To escape these costs, Banfield argued, those who could afford to move out of the dense urban core will do so whenever transportation, technology, and their personal finances permit. Uh, and this thesis has influenced later thinkers who justify suburbanization both on factors similar to Banfield's, but also on the revealed preference of the majority of the American people who seem to prefer suburbs rather than the city center. Banfield treated this outward movement from center to exurb to suburb as something close to a law of gravity, rather than as a preference contingent on specific conditions.
The urban renaissance from roughly 1990 to 2020, however, demonstrated that under improved local conditions and strong growth in information-based firms, a sizable plurality of Americans do want to live in dense urban cores, and that urban living is often an undersupplied commodity. To his credit, the assumption of suburbs as the way of the future was a widely shared assumption in Professor Banfield's era. What no one could foresee was the rise of finance and professional services as a powerful recentralizing force, beginning in the 1980s, when long working hours and the premium on proximity made suburban commutes increasingly impractical for a growing professional class. Just as dockworkers once needed to live near the waterfront, investment bankers and lawyers needed to live near the central business districts of Lower Manhattan and Midtown, which created the robust tax base of high earners that sustains New York and other major cities today. The idea that the rich don't pay taxes is just a complete fallacy. As, uh, all of you know in this room, the rich are the ones who are supporting the tax base in New York and elsewhere. The result was not a new wave of poor residents displacing incumbents, as in previous waves of immigration, but the reverse of wealthier individuals moving into formerly disinvested neighborhoods, a process often pejoratively called gentrification.
But Professor Banfield never denied that affluent people could and did live in dense urban cores, and that it might be possible in the future to bring professionals back into the city center. But what he doubted was public policy's ability to address the problems of inner cities with any real finality. Uh, at the time of *The Unheavenly City* and its revision in '74, um, in 1970, New York City's budget, in today's dollars, was roughly about $40 billion. Today, New York City spends about $116 billion, and we're going to get to $120 billion probably imminently, as Eric Adams prepares his budget. So, if you went to leading social scientists and economists in 1970 and asked them whether tripling the budget immediately would solve most, or maybe even almost all, of the problems that New York City was facing at the time, and I gather many, maybe most, would say yes, that that kind of dramatic expansion would indeed solve most of the problems. And yet, fast forward to today, and we've tripled the budget, not to mention dramatically increased our incomes and developed immensely superior technologies, uh, that are at our fingertips and in our pockets. And yet, the problems remain, which would have come as no surprise to Professor Banfield.
But while, at least in the short run, we can't change the preferences or dispositions of large swaths of the urban population, we can take heart in some lessons and progress of the last four decades. Uh, Banfield's influence over the preceding decades about the futility of government programs, an influence particularly on academics like his friend and student James Q. Wilson, spurred the '90s era rejection of using social programs to address issues like crime by addressing poverty. In the '90s, we started fighting crime by fighting crime. We used precision policing and higher arrests to, uh, deter those who can be deterred and incarceration to incapacitate those who cannot be deterred. We started fighting poverty by requiring those on welfare to find jobs, which inculcated in them the middle-class habits of diligence, personal responsibility, and future orientation that they used to help themselves into a better future. We've made less progress, however, in making city government more adaptable, flexible, and amenable to growth, particularly private sector growth, um, in things like housing.
History has, on balance, vindicated Banfield's famous observation that "a great many so-called urban problems are really conditions that we either cannot change or do not want to incur the disadvantages of changing." And, uh, New York City's housing model and state of affairs today is the clearest example. At its core, the big problem of affordability is that the private sector is prohibited from having the flexibility to supply what the city needs. Today, we produce about 25,000 units per year, so just a quarter or so of the 1920s level at its peak, and about half of where we were, uh, in the early part of the 1960s. Our labor regulations, building codes, tenant protections, and inclusionary housing requirements have raised development costs enough to make the price of a new housing unit in New York City prohibitively expensive. We depend on the housing of the past, just as we do the infrastructure of the past, because we've decided we won't build more of it today. And as Professor Banfield noted, "the disadvantages of change are immediate and concentrated, while the benefits of growth are diffuse and long-term." The rise of public sector unions has severely crimped urban executives' managerial discretion, while establishing an enduring and powerful voting block constantly agitating for higher pay, benefits, and importantly, lax work rules. So these factors make many challenges intractable and solutions infeasible, at least in the short or medium run. And the rise of Eric Adams can be partly understood as a shift in the city's prevailing sensibility away from the middle-class and upper-class sensibility of delayed gratification, a strong work ethic, and a future orientation, and instead towards one that seeks to have government provide greater stability and security in place of individual responsibility. New York has always been a very tough place to succeed. It's the place where the best and brightest from around the world have sought to make their mark. Um, it has traditionally rewarded those who have worked hard and sacrificed in the hopes of a better future. Adams and the DSA are normalizing a greater present orientation, giving residents less reason to change their occupation or behaviors in response to market pressures and allowing them to enjoy more of the city's amenities today. What we risk losing in all of this is this, the culture of ambitious striving that has made New York what it is today. But despite our present follies, we know better, uh, because we have counterexamples. We know that cities like Austin, Texas, have built a lot of housing, and guess what? Rents have gone down. Uh, we can do better if we want. But while reading Professor Banfield, I found myself time and again impressed by how relevant and fresh his work is, um, especially for a book, uh, written over five decades ago. Um, and I'm also struck by how little recognized he remains today. We're trying to undo some of that here this afternoon. If today he finds himself, uh, [snorts] a resident of that true heavenly city, perhaps he can see that our unheavenly ones still suffer from the problems he predicted they would. Thank you. [applause]
That was great. So I want to start, uh, with a thank you not just to all of you for coming, but also to Kevin and AEI for giving me the opportunity to correct a grievous error I realized that I had made, which is that up until a couple of weeks ago, I had not ever read this book. Um, and, you know, if you work at a think tank long enough, and you have, uh, several versions of the following conversation, which is, you meet someone new, and you tell them what you do, and they inevitably ask you, "What is it that people who work at think tanks do?" And you tell them, "Well, we think, in large part by reading books." And, you know, some of those books are okay and perfectly informative, and they serve their purpose. Some of those books are terrible. And sometimes those books are incredibly good, and this is one of those books. And so, finally having the opportunity to engage with it has actually just been, uh, an incredible pleasure, because you get to have that experience for the first time when you're mature enough to enjoy it, uh, the way that it should be enjoyed. So, I really do, uh, appreciate this opportunity.
Now, if there were two words that I was limited to to describe this book and my impression of it upon reading it, it's wisdom and humility. Um, and I want to just read a quick line from one of the chapters on crime, which is the topic that I've spent the last 10 and a half years, uh, thinking and writing about. Banfield writes, "We cannot solve our serious problems by rational management." Now, if you spend a lot of time around academic elites, um, it becomes very clear that one of the things that motivates them is their own sense of grandeur, right? Their confidence in their own abilities, and the fact that they have answers to all of society's most complex problems. And I'm reminded of this relatively regularly doing what I do, but I'm reminded of a recent, uh, uh, exchange. It was at UC Berkeley, the law school there, was invited by John Yoo and Chasa Bodin, of all people, to engage in a debate symposium alongside my Manhattan Institute colleague Heather MacDonald. And we were there to exchange ideas with police abolitionists. And so, uh, when it was my turn to speak, I, I gave a presentation about the necessity of urban policing, uh, about the necessity of incarceration, about why these things helped keep communities safe. And I was met with a two-part critique from the police abolitionists. And what they said was the problem with my remarks was that they were uncreative and unhopeful. So, it's just, it's too simple to put a bad person who's going to hurt people into a cage to stop them from hurting people. That's just uncreative thinking. We should be, uh, more intelligent about how we approach society's problems. And it was unhopeful in so far that it represented a pessimistic view. I wish I had Banfield's book at my side then, because there is a really rare but very important humility embedded in his claim that the lower-class pathologies that are driving problems like unemployment and crime are unamenable to change through policy. And that was really the main lesson of this book for me, which is that we have to really understand our limits and what our capacity is. I mean, take the conversation about crime, for example. We are told from the American left today that crime is a function of socioeconomic root causes. It's a function of deprivation. Right? You think about Eric Adams's campaign. His name's [clears throat] come up a couple of times today. You know, this is a man who rose to fame arguing in favor of defunding the police in 2020. And what was at the core of the defund idea? It wasn't just that police are bad and that we should get rid of them. It was that police are a resource-sucking institution, that they take resources that if we diverted them elsewhere, we could solve the underlying causes of crime, those being poverty and socioeconomic deprivation. People like me, when we hear that argument, we're tempted to just point to reality, which is that we don't actually have to solve society's problems to bring something like crime under control. I mean, take New York City, for example. In 1989, which is the year before New York City homicides peaked in 1990 with 2,262 murders that year, the city's poverty rate was just under 19%. You fast forward to 2016, which is the year before New York City hit its modern-day valley for homicides of 292 killings that year, and the poverty rate went up to about 21%. So, poverty moves slightly in the wrong direction. It remains mostly steady, and yet we see almost a 90% decline in homicides. Well, that kind of goes against the modern-day left story. Well, what's what's the deal if it's not that? I mean, just to give you another example, I mean, consider the Great Recession. Nationally, the unemployment rate doubled between 2006 and 2010. The homicide rate declined 15%. That's not supposed to happen if, in fact, our moral betterers are correct, which is that, you know, if in fact it is the case that you can just ameliorate the problem of crime through more social spending.
So what does cause crime? People like, uh, James Q. Wilson, George Kelling, psychologists like Terry Moffitt, argued that crime was basically a psychological phenomenon. It was representative of entitlement thinking and antisocial disposition. A lot of the characteristics that it sort of, uh, were illustrated by what Banfield called the lower classes. And I think that's exactly right. The problem with that is, is there aren't any real psychological interventions that we can reliably deploy to cure those things, which is where the requirement for humility comes into place. And Banfield tells us that crime is a function really of two things, and that is inducements and propensity. And when he talks about propensity, he's referring to a few things. He says propensity is constituted by an individual's morality, meaning, uh, you know, whether they are conventional, post-conventional, or preconventional, meaning that, you know, they're either underdeveloped [clears throat] or they subscribe to conventional social mores, or that they think they're above them. Uh, so it's morality, the strength of their ego, their ability to control themselves, their time horizon, how they think about time, their ability to delay gratification, which is incredibly important, their taste for risk, and then their willingness to inflict violence and injury. That's actually really interesting to me, because one of the myths that has always frustrated me is this false dichotomy between violent and nonviolent crime. Um, we're often told that these categories are static, and that something like retail theft should be reliably thought of as unserious. And yet, you know, the real test of whether or not a crime is actually violent is to see what happens if and when you intervene to stop it from taking place. And what you find is that a lot of these low-level crimes quickly rise to very violent ones as soon as you interfere. But when you think about those factors that constitute an individual's propensity for crime, when someone like me looks at it, what I see is, well, geez, this is a real challenge. How am I supposed to change somebody's morality through public policy? How am I supposed to, uh, uh, affect the direction of their ego? How am I supposed to get somebody who's in their early 20s to start discounting, to stop discounting time the way that they do and to think about their futures? How am I supposed to adjust their taste for risk, or explain to them that their willingness to engage in serious violence, um, is a bad choice.
Banfield tells us that the better avenue for us from a public policy standpoint is to focus on inducements. And by inducements, what he means are the conditions that allow crime to take place. And this is actually very prescient, because one of the dominant criminological theories today is something called routine activities theory. The routine activities theory of crime posits that three things need to be present for a crime to occur: You need to have a motivated offender, you need to have a vulnerable target, and you need to have an absence of capable guardians. Now, what the modern academic left has done is tried to create a policy program that they believe will get at the motivations of the offender and change them for the better. And that is incredibly hubristic. The better avenue, the one that actually works, the one that has actually produced the most amount of safety, not just for the well-to-do, but also for the least fortunate among us, is the focus on inducements. The focus on capable guardians, institutions like policing, the most obvious form of a capable guardian, institutions like prisons that incapacitate individuals who cannot be trusted to operate in polite society. This is another just incredible insight from Banfield that I didn't even know was there. He talks about deterrence. He's a skeptic of deterrence before it was cool. To me, now, when, when conservative criminologists and people in our space talk about deterrence, it's often in the context of harsher penalties. And the idea is, you know, on the right is that, you know, if you raise the penalties, you increase the cost of crime. And when you increase the cost of crime, you'll get less of it. That's true to some extent in some cases, mostly at the margins. But if you actually look at a lot of the research on deterrence, what it tells you is that most criminals aren't particularly responsive to changes in the severity of the sanctions that they face for committing the criminal acts that they're considering. Um, you see this in, in some of the research that shows, for example, subjecting someone to an additional year in prison doesn't actually affect their post-release recidivism rate. And one of the reasons for that is that criminals don't really think about their futures. They're not future-oriented. They are discounting their time. And so if, in fact, deterrence is not a sort of reliable mechanism that supports the primacy of incapacitation, which is kind of at the core of the work that I've been doing, um, and I, I feel that I need to give Ed Banfield some, uh, credit going backward, and I'm going to start to do that, uh, from this point forward. But, you know, there are a couple of other points I, I want to make here, which is that these ideas that were expressed in this book were vindicated at a rate that I don't think is easily reproducible. If you were to go back and look at some of the social science work that's been done and that's been popular over the years. Ed Banfield not only talked about the primacy
of incapacitation over deterrence, sewed the seeds of what became routine activities theory, but also in the realm of psychology. You know, Ed Banfield writes that it is just a reality that adolescence is going to come with young males taking risks that will sometimes lead them down a path into juvenile delinquency. Now he recognizes that a good chunk, in fact most, of the males who engage in this kind of behavior in adolescence will eventually age out by their early 20s.
Well, that concept was very clearly thought out and and laid out in an incredibly, uh, influential paper by the psychologist Terry Moffett in his developmental taxonomy, where he actually lays out the the core of the theory between and the distinction between people who are adolescent-limited in their criminal offending and life course persistent. And the thing about the life course persistent people is that again, there are no psychological interventions that are shown to actually stop that, which means that we have to be realistic about what our capacity is to create safety. And that is, I think, at the core of of Banfield's message. And it's it's just so cool to see a book that is at the core of so many of the modern theories that have been vindicated and borne out. And I I really truly think John is right. It does not get nearly the credit that it should.
Um, finally, I I just want to say, you know, there is there is an idea in American criminology that there needs to be equity in the way that we enforce the law, in the way that we hand out any kind of of of um, a social byproduct. But what Banfield seems to recognize is that crime is actually very concentrated, and that is kind of one of the things that I think gets overlooked the most. We we see it now, actually. You know, the the year just changed, and so as we do every year, uh, we hear a lot of conversations about, you know, national crime numbers in 2025. You know, the homicide rate was the lowest it's been in in, you know, however long, or this was the largest one-year decline. And we fall into this trap of talking about crime in national terms and in the aggregate. And my my beef with that has always been is that we shouldn't talk about something in the aggregate when it's not experienced in the aggregate. Right? The national crime uh uh rate, or the national violent crime rate, or the national homicide rate means nothing to most of us in the room because it doesn't reflect what our daily life is like. Right? For example, the homicide rate in the neighborhood that I call home has been essentially zero for the last, you know, 40 years. It hasn't changed at all, despite massive variation even at just at the state level in New York, which is where I hail from. The reality of crime is very, very different for different people depending on where they live and where they spend the bulk of their time.
If we are going to be responsive to that, that is going to produce inequities, or it's going to produce disparities. The question is whether we should be comfortable with that. Now, the the critics of Banfield, the types of people that I was debating at UC Berkeley, they would say that well, if you look at the costs of enforcing the law, they are unevenly distributed on these communities that we should, you know, spend our resources differently to help through some other avenue. And the thing that I I I am so glad that this work exists for, because it it kind of laid the groundwork for it, is the knowledge that actually producing those disparities in the distribution of the costs associated with enforcement also produces disparities with respect to the distribution of the benefits associated with enforcement. And that is, I think, a lesson that needs to be relearned.
There is another side to the equation, which is kind of a theme that runs through Banfield's book, and he, you know, it's it's sort of uh elucidated in his discussion on deterrence, right? Because at at the core of the left's argument about resources is an idea that like, well, if you give people additional resources, you raise the cost of committing new crimes by by making crime more costly to commit, by you can do that by giving them more to lose. But there's an admission embedded in that argument, which is that crime is basically a function of a cost-benefit analysis, which means that you can affect the cost-benefit analysis by attacking either side of the equal sign, right? Either side of the equation, which means that the less argument, taken to its logical extension, also is just an argument in favor of harsher penalties, because you can raise the cost of committing a crime just by focusing on that side of the equation. And yet, that's not something that you would see a lot of support for.
What I do think we can do is get people to understand that the unequal distribution of the benefits associated with the kind of enforcement program that Banfield talked about, including early evidence of police surges. He talked about Operation 25, which was kind of like the predate of uh Operation Impact done in the uh mid to late 1990s in New York City, which proved incredible, incredibly successful, and you know, a precursor to some of the surges that we're seeing now, like the Memphis Safe Task Force deployed, you know, just over the last few months, like the task force here in Washington DC. These things work, but they work particularly well for the people who are facing the highest risks. And that, I think, is the key to defending this line of work, and I I look forward to doing that in the years to come. Thank you. [applause]
>> Well, thank you all. Um, we have managed to eat just about all of our time, but I do want to take a couple questions from the floor, and then uh, we'll end the program. But nonetheless, anyone wants to hang around and keep asking questions, we'll be here. Any questions, comments for Laura? Go ahead, sir.
>> Thank you, first of all, for a wonderful session. Thank you for publishing the book. U I'm one of the very few people uh who are grateful for the cancel culture at Harvard in the 1970s. Uh, that's because I was a graduate student at Penn when he came to Penn [laughter] and very timidly asked him if I could possibly just uh audit his undergraduate course, and instead, he said, why don't you uh take a one-on-one with me for the year? Uh, you read a book once a a week, write a reported on report on it, and then we'll talk about it. Right?
Um, my question is uh, there's been only a few references to the present-oriented focus of his book, which I thought was one of the really brilliant, inspiring concepts. And I tried, but I didn't have the wit at the time to ask him, but I did try to think about it later. How would a culture try to instill more future orientation among people with a proclivity to be present-oriented? In other words, for for Banfield, present orientation was one of the serious difficulties. And in the book, as I recall, he brilliantly compared for someone who's very present-oriented, has little concept of the future, compare being in a classroom to being in a prison, and how much more wonderful it is to be in prison. Because in a classroom, you can't talk, you can't even chew gum, you can't shoot hoops, you can't smoke. In prison, if you're present-oriented, it's much better. You can do all those things. So in a way, um, one way of asking the question, am I too enamored with that concept? And a second way of asking the questions, do we know of any research from that that would try to move the culture, the people involved in our culture growing up to be more future-oriented? Because as I read Banfield in the unheavenly city, the true aristocrats are not the rich people, the smart people, but they're the people who and think about and care about their culture, their [clears throat] society beyond their own lifetime.
>> Right?
>> How do we try to encourage that?
>> Well, I I'll take a stab at that if I might.
>> Sure.
>> I tried to talk about it a bit, and uh, I think it's fair to say that Banfield was pessimistic about that, and some of the other speakers have said that maybe policy is that condition is not amendable to policy intervention, and that it needs present orientation needs to be effectively suppressed. Banfield even broached some questions like, will present-oriented people perpetuate themselves, reproduce? I mean, he he talked about some real hot button stuff there. Uh, but I I don't think we should be utterly pessimistic about it. That's why I suggested that and there's references to welfare reform that could create a framework that encourages future orientation, so that people rise from the the the lower class to the to the working class because they're in effect have little other choice. That may be the best we could do with public policy, but you know, but but Ralph said maybe there's not much we can do, and that in effect law enforcement has to suppress the the present-oriented. I I don't think we should be that pessimistic, frankly. I I [clears throat] think we should think that public policy can frame a set of incentives. That was certainly Charles Murray's view. AEI's Charles Murray, that policies can take steps toward encouraging uh less present-oriented uh [clears throat] but there is terrific, another obscure book which I referred to is called Hard Living on Clay Street. It's about um white quote on hillbilly families in Alexandria, Virginia, and how they lurch from one personal crisis to another because they are present-oriented. And that was an NIH study. So answer to your question about has there been research about this? Yes, there has been. And the other question is, is it amendable to change? That's a tougher nut.
>> Outside of policy, the one thought I had
>> is teaching five, six, and seven year olds about going to heaven.
>> How [laughter] do you get a fivey old to think about after I die?
>> I I know that ter that terrified me. I mean, I I will say I think [laughter]
>> book confession
>> that's true. Yeah.
>> I I went to Catholic school. This my entire childhood experience was terrifying at many stages.
>> Um
>> that's why he turned out so well.
>> Yeah. Maybe uh look, I will say that there is research that I think suggests pretty confidently that there are kind of two mechanisms through which uh present orientation is sort of transmitted, and that's intergenerational transmission and cultural diffusion. I think those are kind of the the the sort of two main mechanisms there. What I mean by intergenerational transmission is that children who are raised in households by parents or where you know, with people or in communities where present orientation is sort of the predominant way of going about daily life, are more likely to develop that kind of approach. Um, now from a policy perspective, that doesn't put a lot of interventions on the table. One of the things that I've always been skeptical of though, is our decision to sort of collect the poor in public housing projects in this sort of very small, dense place where we are surrounding them with other people who have the same social pathologies and problems that they do, and they kind of reinforce one another. Um, so maybe a housing voucher system that sort of requires, you know, some geographical distance be between people who are using the vouchers, um, might be best to keep people in closer, you know, [clears throat] proximity [laughter]
>> in closer proximity to those who have more sort of pro-social and future-oriented um uh approaches to life, to sort of create the conditions so that they can see the effects of that orientation on those individuals and then choose to assimilate to those kinds of cultural attributes. But that is a long process. I do think that the intergenerational transmission is the kind of more hopeful route for us to think about and target. And the reason for that is is because the research I think pretty again confidently suggests that growing up in a two-parent married household will reliably predict a lot of the life outcomes that we know are also associated with future orientation. Um, and it's, you know, you are being raised in an institution that is future-oriented. Right? I am choosing to tie myself for the rest of my life to this one person. Not necessarily because I love them so much in every single moment, right? I mean, you know, you fight, [clears throat] you have you get [snorts] frustrated, whatever. But because we have come to the conclusion that that is the best path for our future and the future of the children that we produce, and providing that stability creates that example, and it I think it makes those children more likely to live that out in their own lives, so long as that isn't overcome by that with by their own surroundings.
Many items on Banfield's list of policies that are uh feasible and could improve things at the margin, uh, even though they're not acceptable to experts and public opinion, uh, include matters that would incrementally, at least possibility, possibly incrementally, um, improve on the problem of radical present orientation. For example, um, uh, uh, take uh, moving away from the school, current school ages, so that young people, if they chose, could leave and go to a vocational school. That would put young men, we're mostly talking about young men, uh, into a situation with people that are a little bit closer to their outlook. And you could actually see that if you did something that you you could actually learn something, you know, about plumbing, or you you could learn some some things, construction, using your back. Uh, and you could see people that had actually progressed that way, uh, rather than living in an environment where you have no exposure, uh, to to people that have made even a little investment in their future. Uh, that that could be helpful. I [clears throat] think that he would also say, uh, that part of the problem is of the upper class puritanical uh uh reformers, uh, uh, that [clears throat] in fact were highly um, future-oriented. You know, they saved uh for the future. They deferred gratification. They educated themselves. Uh, but when it came to their policy views, offered an endless uh list of excuses for the opposite behavior in others. And in those, I in those matters, I think Ed would agree emphatically with Charles Murray's uh prescription for upper class successful people, preach what you practice.
>> to to take a more economics
>> Actually, I want to get I want to get to Don and then we we can take it up after the program if that's all right.
>> y I hate to interrupt. It's an interesting discussion. My name is Don Graham, and I wanted to just uh do three do two or three things. First, this is uh Chris and I were present at the first of these sessions about republished books of Ed Banfields when Kevin uh republished Government Project a year ago. This group is bigger and younger than that group. And I want to wave my arms and tell you that in addition to The Unheavenly City, uh, the book Kevin brought out a year ago, Government Project, is stunning. It is a description of an opportunity for the government to create a positive result defeated. I won't I won't uh I won't tell you the punchline, but it is an extraordinary piece of work by Ed Banfield, and it's a great, great introduction to his work, and it just underscores the importance of what Kevin Kosar and AEI are doing here by republishing the works of this man. I was lucky enough to enter [clears throat] his circle, and in Chris, I was listening to you talking about things Ed would recommend that might make some incremental improvement in present-mindedness. But you and I quite often heard Ed say, almost every government program I've seen adopted will not improve the the problem it's addressing, and most of them will make the problem worse. Uh, and that was a a recurrent uh uh theme. But you [clears throat] know, he uh, he wrote many other wonderful books, and if any of AEI leadership is here, uh, there is no one who wouldn't enjoy reading the book he co-authored with his wife Laura, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society.
>> Right?
>> And if you go on to the books he co-authored with James Q. Wilson, City Politics and Politics Planning in the Public Interest.
>> This was an extraordinary man, and those of us who knew him were so, so lucky that he was part of our lives.
>> Well said.
>> Thank you, D.
>> Thank you.
>> We've reached 513. Everybody's been so well-mannered uh and not fleeing because I've kept you over time. So despite the interest in more good conversation, I'm going to end the formal session here and thank you all for being here. And as I said, uh, some of us are going to hang around, and if you'd like to chat a bit more about Banfield or the book, we're here. Thank you all.
>> Thank you. [applause] And we have books over here.