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From your perspective, what would the local government need to do to improve life in Baltimore? And why do they not do it, whatever it is?
(I imagine nobody knows re: the pizza. It's not that hard to make a good pizza.)
The problem with Baltimore is the people in Baltimore. I don't think genocide followed by suicide is an option the local government can exercise. But maybe when WWIII happens we'll get lucky, although I doubt our adversaries would do us that favor.
New Orleans is very mildly better than Baltimore because of a lax attitude towards police brutality, while still being a very black city with few economic opportunities.
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My impression is that the situation in Great Migration cities especially deteriorated after deindustrialization. If there were still good livings available for people with relatively low human capital or skills, I imagine the overall chaos would be a lot lower. I've never heard a good answer to the question of: "If we transition to a "knowledge economy," what are the people without useful knowledge supposed to do with themselves?"
Of course I don't dispute that the lever of "actually enforce all of the law, throughout the city" seems to have been abandoned.
I've read a theory by one of the commenters on Steve Sailer's blog that the unprecedented economic prosperity between 1945-73 in the US had the effect of large masses of impulsive, low-IQ people with high time preference from the rural areas of the South and the Midwest moving to Great Migration cities to work in manufacturing (heavy industry in particular). After the oil shocks, stagflation and deindustrialization, it was mostly these people and their descendants who were hit hard, and had no practical means of moving away and getting re-trained to do other things, so they're just stuck there in their misery.
Right - that's a better way of phrasing it.
To me, this appears to be obviously true, and it certainly adds to my cynicism that addressing this situation does not seem to be part of anyone's political platform; I believe the going theory is that those affected are solid clients of the Democratic party, and actually trying to improve their lots (or the lots of the people stuck with them) does not change the political calculus at all, so there's no need to do it.
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Why don’t you try what Longshanks tried in Braveheart? Well, I guess that would require the denizens of Baltimore to believe in marriage….
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