This week's book is by one of the few really sharp and honest reporters of whom I know, someone who does not toot the courage horn by sitting in a studio defended by the resources of a network, but demonstrates it by going out in the world to find things called facts and write stories based on them. I mean City Journal's own Heather Mac Donald, and her book, The Burden of Bad Ideas: How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society.
I feel you can make a distinction between two types of reporters who look at societal problems: the first, your average J-school grad, says Look at this problem! Do something! The other, much more rare, says Why is this a problem, one that has proved so hard to solve? Mac Donald is squarely in the second camp, and this book is a great collection of her pieces on these problems.
"The reality I have observed again and again in welfare offices and urban classrooms across New York and elsewhere is so dissimilar from that presented in the mainstream media that I sometimes wonder whether their reporters and I occupy the same universe," she writes in the introduction. "Maybe this is a matter of my background. I came to writing about urban problems and social policy as an innocent, without a preconceived theory about the neighborhoods that have dominated domestic policy debate for almost half a century now."
This book was published in 2000, but hardly anything has changed in the last twenty years, and where things had changed for the better, as in New York, they are rapidly changing back for the worse.
What Mac Donald learned in her work is shown in this book, with chapters like "The Billions of Dollars That Made Things Worse," "Why Johnny's Teachers Can't Teach," "Public Health Quackery," and "Revisionist Lust: The Smithsonian Today."
One of the most powerful chapters to me was "Homeless Advocates in Outer Space," which described a 1990s program by the Business Improvement District of Times Square to do exactly what advocates for the homeless seem to think has never been tried -- provide a no-strings-attached outreach to feed and clean and house the homeless, then offer every kind of help to get them on their feet provided they refrain from drug and alcohol use for a period of time. "One year and $700,000 later, only two people had accepted housing," Mac Donald reports. And this is only one of the programs described, a hint of the millions spent that helped hardly anyone. She concludes, "A sane homeless policy would acknowledge two basic realities. First, many people on the streets need treatment, not housing. For the sickest, legislators need to change rules against involuntary confinement, and states need to recommission mental hospitals emptied by deinstitutionalization. Second, for the rest of the homeless the best medicine is the expectation of responsible behavior -- the expectation of work and civil and lawful conduct in public spaces."
When The Burden of Bad Ideas was published, the New York Times Book Review said "this book has the freshness of a stiff, changing breeze." With the rush among governors and mayors to empty prisons and allow tremendous homeless encampments, and ding-dongs like Mike Bloomberg disowning all the policies that made his political leadership successful, I think it's safe to say that Mac Donald's essays, backed by interviews, observation, and deep research, have been completely ignored by those empowered to make better public policy. In fact, just last year she had a look at San Francisco's intractable homeless situation and found a situation even uglier than described in Burden. I doubt her work finds a welcome in the New York Times Book Review today.
I would advise anyone interested in the problems of urban decay to read The Burden of Bad Ideas. Urban problems have been given the breath of new life since the book was published. The causes have not changed, but now the idiocy that led to bad public policy has seeped into an urban population incapable of seeing how its participation in bad ideas leads to its own misery. This book ought to be required reading for every political science major in the country.
Instead, of course, Mac Donald gets silenced on campuses by the usual idiots who can't bear to hear anything resembling the truth.
No comments:
Post a Comment