IN THE INCREASINGLY DULL, narrow, methodologically obscure world of the social sciences, it is hard to find a mind that speaks not only to its students but to its nation. Most scholars can’t write, many can’t think. Ed Banfield could write and think.
When he died a few days ago, his life gave new meaning to the old saw about being a prophet without honor in your own country. Almost everything he wrote was criticized at the time it appeared for being wrong-headed. In 1955 he and Martin Meyerson published an account of how Chicago built public housing projects in which they explained how mischievous these projects were likely to be: tall, institutional buildings filled with tiny apartments built in areas that guaranteed racial segregation. All this was to be done on the basis of the federal Housing Act of 1949, which said little about what goals housing was to achieve or why other ways of financing it — housing vouchers, for example — should not be available. This was heresy to the authors of the law and to most right-thinking planners.
Within two decades, high-rise public housing was widely viewed as a huge mistake and efforts were made to create vouchers so that poor families could afford to rent housing in the existing market. Local authorities in St. Louis had dynamited a big housing project there after describing it as a hopeless failure. It is not likely that Ed and Martin’s book received much credit for having pointed the way.
In 1958, Ed, with the assistance of his wife, Laura, explained why a backward area in southern Italy was poor. The reason was not government neglect or poor education but culture. In this area of Italy, the Banfields said in The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, people would not cooperate outside the boundaries of their immediate families. These “amoral familists” were the product of a high death rate, a defective system for owning land, and the absence of any extended families. By contrast, in a town of about the same size located in an equally forbidding part of southern Utah, the residents published a local newspaper and had a remarkable variety of associations, each busily involved in improving the life of the community. In southern Italy, people would not cooperate; in southern Utah, they scarcely did anything else.
Foreign aid programs ignored this finding and went about persuading other nations to accept large grants to build new projects. Few of these projects created sustained economic growth. Where growth did occur, as in Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea, there was little foreign aid and what existed made little difference.
Today, David S. Landes, in his magisterial book that explains why some nations become wealthy while others remain poor, offers a one-word explanation: culture. He is right, but the Banfield book written forty years earlier is not mentioned.
In 1970, Ed published his best-known and most controversial work, The Unheavenly City. In it he argued that the “urban crisis” was misunderstood. Many aspects of the so-called crisis, such as congestion or the business flight to the suburbs, are not really problems at all; some that are modest problems, such as transportation, could be managed rather well by putting high peak-hour tolls on key roads and staggering working hours; and many of the greatest problems, such as crime, poverty, and racial injustice, are things that we shall find it exceptionally difficult to manage.
Consider racial injustice. Racism is quite real, though much diminished in recent years, and it has a powerful effect. But the central problem for black Americans is not racism but poverty. And poverty is in part the result of where blacks live and what opportunities confront them. When they live in areas with many unskilled workers and few jobs for unskilled people, they will suffer. When they grow up in families that do not own small businesses, they will find it harder to move into jobs available to them or to meet people who can tell them about jobs elsewhere. That whites treat blacks differently than they treat other whites is obviously true, but “much of what appears . . . as race prejudice is really class prejudice.”
In 1987 William Julius Wilson, a black scholar, published his widely acclaimed book, The Truly Disadvantaged. In it he says that, while racism remains a powerful force, it cannot explain the plight of inner-city blacks. The problem is poverty — social class — and that poverty flows from the material conditions of black neighborhoods. Banfield’s book is mentioned in Wilson’s bibliography, but his argument is mentioned only in passing.
Both Wilson and Banfield explain the core urban problems as ones that flow from social class. To Wilson, an “underclass” has emerged, made up of people who lack skills, experience long-term unemployment, engage in street crime, and are part of families with prolonged welfare dependency. Banfield would have agreed. But to Wilson, the underclass suffers from a shortage of jobs and available fathers, while for Banfield it suffers from a defective culture.
Wilson argued that changing the economic condition of underclass blacks would change their underclass culture; Banfield argued that unless the underclass culture was first changed (and he doubted much could be done in that regard), the economic condition of poor blacks would not improve. The central urban problem of modern America is to discover which theory is correct.
Banfield had some ideas to help address the culture (though he thought no government would adopt them): Keep the unemployment rate low, repeal minimum-wage laws, lower the school-leaving age, provide a negative income tax (that is, a cash benefit) to the “competent poor,” supply intensive birth-control guidance to the “incompetent poor,” and pay problem families to send their children to decent day-care programs.
The Unheavenly City sold well but was bitterly attacked by academics and book reviewers; Wilson’s book was widely praised by the same critics. But on the central facts, both books say the same thing, and on the unknown facts — What will work? — neither book can (of necessity) offer much evidence.
Ed Banfield’s work would probably have benefited from a quality he was incapable of supplying. If it had been written in the dreary style of modern sociology or, worse, if he had produced articles filled with game-theoretic models and endless regression equations, he might have been taken more seriously. But Ed was a journalist before he was a scholar, and his commitment to clear, forceful writing was unshakable.
He was more than a clear writer with a Ph.D.; everything he wrote was embedded in a powerful theoretical overview of the subject. “Theory,” to him, meant clarifying how people can think about a difficulty, and the theories he produced — on social planning, political influence, economic backwardness, and urban problems — are short masterpieces of incisive prose.
His remarkable mind was deeply rooted in Western philosophy as well as social science. To read his books is to be carried along by extraordinary prose in which you learn about David Hume and John Stuart Mill as well as about pressing human issues. To him, the central human problem was cooperation: How can society induce people to work together in informal groups — Edmund Burke’s “little platoons” — to manage their common problems? No one has ever thought through this issue more lucidly, and hence no one I can think of has done more to illuminate the human condition of the modern world.
A few months ago, a group of Ed’s former students and colleagues met for two days to discuss his work. Our fondness for this amusing and gregarious man was manifest, as were our memories of the tortures through which he put us as he taught us to think and write. Rereading his work as a whole reminded us that we had been privileged to know one of the best minds we had ever encountered, a person whose rigorous intellect and extraordinary knowledge created a standard to which all of us aspired but which none of us attained.
