Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…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? Baltimore renamed itself Charm City under Mayor Schaefer. Mayor Schaefer was a very dynamic mayor, but he couldn’t control white flight. And therefore, the city’s wealthiest people moved out, and the biggest companies in Baltimore moved out. In the end, I think crime just took over, and the poverty rate just accelerated, and just so many endemic problems. Baltimore did not have entrepreneurs coming there, starting new companies, and it didn’t have the revitalization of the entrepreneurial spirit that you saw in some cities which had gone through difficult times. Take Pittsburgh as an example. Pittsburgh used to be a steel center. Now people see it as an artificial intelligence center or as a computer center, or as a city that’s remade itself in many ways. Now, it didn’t have quite the minority population that Baltimore did, but it, in many ways, has revitalized itself. Some other cities have not been able to revitalize themselves. Take Detroit. Detroit is also like Baltimore — enormous social-economic problems, and despite the best efforts of some pretty talented businesspeople there — like Mr. Gilbert — they just haven’t really been able to revitalize themselves to the point where they were in the 1950s, let’s say, as a leader.…

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