# The Unheavenly City By Edward C. Banfield **URL:** **By** Murray Rothbard **Published:** March 1, 1974 --- “Published only a few years ago, Professor Banfield’s The Unheavenly City has already taken on the stature of a classic.” Published only a few years ago, Professor Banfield’s _The Unheavenly City_ has already taken on the stature of a classic. And with good reason: for this is one of the most exciting books of the past decade. Exciting not only for the clarity and logic with which Banfield presents his case, and not only for a firm command of economics, history and sociology unusual in a political scientist, but mainly for the admirable tough-mindedness that shines through on every page. Not for Banfield the fuzzy sentimentality of woolly-headed liberal “humanism” so fash-ionable nowadays; instead, and in refreshing contrast, Banfield follows the implications of his knowledge and his logic with iron and unsparing integrity. There is no better work available on America’s urban crisis and, indeed, the crisis of the entire society. Banfield demonstrates concisely but unsparingly, and point by point, the evil consequences of program after program of government intervention into the cities: in labor, housing, public works, job training, whatever. But not only that: he also demonstrates convincingly that the only hope for the city and for the urban poor is for the government to do nothing and to allow the gradual but benefi-cent processes of the free market and of the free society to work them-selves out. If this policy (well labeled “benign neglect” by others) were carried out, Banfield shows that urban poverty would effectively disap-pear within a generation. Being familiar with economics, Banfield uses the Friedman-Brozen figures to show how minimum wage laws are par-tially responsible for the alarming rise in teen-age Negro unemployment. It is indeed on the vexed and troublesome racial question that Banfield is at his toughest and most brilliant. For Banfield differs from most other social scientists in having the courage to acknowledge what every American knows but is afraid to say out loud: that crimes of violence by Negroes in American cities are far greater than those committed by whites. It is typical but ironic, however, that the Left has bitterly accused Banfield of being a “racist”; for Banfield’s _Unheavenly City_ provides by far the best argument against the high rate of Negro crime being genetic in origin. Banfield pins the responsibility on cultural values, which he shows to be endemic among lower classes and immigrant groups throughout American history, so that the turn-of-the-century Irish immigrant groups had much the same unfortunate value systems that ghetto Negroes have today. In short, what Banfield has done is the remarkable achievement of turn-ing Marx (and Oscar Lewis and other Left-wing sociologists) on his head: the problem, he says, is not race but values and culture. But while Lewis and other Leftists claim that the “culture of poverty” is the result of being poor, Banfield shows that the “hard-hearted” nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberals were right: that it is their bad and dysfunctional value systems that cause these people to be poor and to remain poor in the first place. Banfield also stands on their head the Leftists who deplore the "middle-class values" of thrift, hard work, foresight and self-discipline, and who laud the "lower-class values" of improvidence, hedonism, violence and whim-worship (what economists would call "low time-preference" for the present versus "high time-preference"). For what Banfield shows is that it is precisely these values of "spontaneity" and hedonism that have kept the Negroes poor, just as they were responsible for the poverty of other immigrant groups in the past. It is his hope that benign neglect and the workings of freedom will gently lead the current urban Negro groups to gradually alter their value-systems and become middle-class oriented. Only there lies their salvation. Banfield, for example, demonstrates the causal importance of value systems over income by citing studies of Jewish and Irish immigrant slum-dwellers in turn-of-the-century New York; while the Jews were probably poorer, their infant mortality rates were spectacularly low. The reason is that the Jews had adopted the middle-class values which were soon to result in their spectacular rise up the American ladder. There are few books in the last decade that have caused as much fury and apoplexy on the Left as _The Unheavenly City_. It is not too far-fetched to liken the book, in style as well as content, to the implacable and principled John Wayne facing down the villains in a John Wayne-type movie. The fury of the Left against both Wayne and Banfield, in their very different arenas of struggle, is not an accident. Read this book and see why. _Reviewed by Murray N. Rothbard / Economics (308 Pages) / BFL Price $4.25_