David Rubenstein: belief

Transcript context

…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. Where do you think your marginal dollar does the most social good? Being paid to government in the form of tax, being invested through private equity at a reasonably high return, or in philanthropy?…

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