David Rubenstein: preference

Transcript context

…Let’s consider your role as donor and philanthropist. Let’s say — and maybe you’ve even done this — you had $200 million to allocate to Baltimore to make it a better city. It’s not enough money to be transformative, but it’s not a tiny sum. How would you spend it? Baltimore has serious problems. When I was growing up, it was the eighth-largest city in the United States with a population of 939,000. Now it’s about half that size, so you’ve had a white flight. The business headquarters have largely moved out of Baltimore. There aren’t that many headquarters there compared to what it used to be. What would I do with $200 million? Well, $200 million, as you suggest, is not $2 billion or $20 billion. With $200 million, I guess I would put some of it into education because Baltimore has a very high dropout rate in high school and also has a very high, I would say, illiteracy rate. It has a high syphilis rate. It has a high STD rate. It has a high murder rate. I don’t know that $200 million would solve all those problems, but if I could do anything to help Baltimore, it would probably be to use some of that money to incent businesses to come back into Baltimore, give them some incentives to come back in because if you get businesses to come back in, they’ll hire people, and ultimately that will help out. But you’ve got to deal with the education system. If you have a large percentage of your population that’s functionally illiterate, that’s going to produce a lot of crime, and it’s also going to produce a lot of poverty. There was a time, I think in the 1990s, when the word was, well, Baltimore has come back — there’s the aquarium, the waterfront has been refurbished — and somehow that all didn’t materialize. The moment looked good for at least five years. What actually do you think went wrong?…

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