Too Stupid To Be True?

Pictured Above: Two of Chicago's leading policy makers.

In social and economic policy we can discern two general approaches to improving the welfare of its citizenry. One that seeks to improve welfare by redistributing social & economic capital, whereas the other seeks to achieve the same end by increasing the general level of capital.

The first path is alluring because it offers almost instant benefits to its recipients, whereas the second path is pursued by few politicians, because it is slow, laborious and requires a populace that is committed to self improvement.

Surveying the successes and failures of diverse nations, I am certain that the latter path is the only one that provides a firm foundation for long term wealth, peace and prosperity, as best seen in South Korea, Taiwan and Israel. Conversely, socialist nations that pursued the path of redistribution, condemned the majority of its people to squalor and deprivation.

Unfortunately the political establishment of Chicago shows a greater inclination towards the failed path of redistribution. When faced with the reality that a comparatively low number of
African-Americans and Latinos were passing the police entrance examination, the city declared its intention to toss out the examination entirely.

I can think of no better example of lowering standards in the name of equality and diversity. The end result of engineering equal outcomes at the expense of merit is an increase in the cost of and a reduction in the quality of city services. To do so in a slothful city bureaucracy is foolish, but to do so with civil servants who are vital to the safety and welfare of Chicagoans constitutes criminal neglect. And ironically, the cost of lowering the quality of policemen will be most heavily born by African-Americans and Latinos who disproportionately are the victims of crime.

An administration committed to building human capital would strive to help foster educational & professional development in African-American and Latino communities. Rather than lower standards of excellence, they would help more people achieve those standards. And instead of offering jobs to the less qualified, they would work to address the underlying factors which have led to a lower presence of qualified individuals in certain communities.

First and foremost they would work to improve Chicago Public Schools and increase
opportunities for individuals of marginalized communities to attend quality private schools. Secondly, they would seek to address the underlying cultural factors that have slowed the development of human capital in diverse communities.

Unfortunately this is highly unlikely, because few politicians are willing to take on the administrators and teacher's unions that for the most part defend the status quo.

And even fewer are willing to candidly speak to African-Americans and Latinos as capable adults who, like all human beings, hold the key to their own self improvement. Rather, these politicians
sell cheap narratives of victimology that may earn them votes, but have yet to improve the quality of a single classroom or police officer.

Police may scrap entrance exam

'OPEN UP THE PROCESS' Union chief: It's 'too stupid to be true'

January 6, 2010

BY FRAN SPIELMAN AND FRANK MAIN Staff Reporters

The Chicago Police Department is seriously considering scrapping the police entrance exam to bolster minority hiring, save millions on test preparation and avert costly legal battles that have dogged the exam process for decades, City Hall sources said Tuesday.

If the process is opened to everyone who applies and meets the minimum education and residency requirements, Chicago would be virtually alone among major cities. Most cities have police entrance exams -- and for good reason, experts say.

"A background check and a psych [exam] alone will not eliminate some people who should not be there," said Brad Woods, who ran the Personnel Division under former Chicago Police Superintendents Phil Cline and Terry Hillard.

Calling an application-only process a "step backward" and the "wrong way to go," Woods said, "When you lower your quality, you will get poor police service and more complaints. ... Whenever you make it easier to be the police, you're doing the citizens and the Police Department a disservice."

Charlie Roberts, who ran the training division from 1995 to 1999, noted that there are "eleven tracks" recruits must go through in the police academy, including the law and the municipal code.

"If you don't give someone at least a reading comprehension test, can you just put them in and risk the possibility of having so many of them fail? That could get quite expensive," Roberts said.

"We were getting people with 60 hours of college credit who were reading at a third-grade level. What do you think you'll get if you have no screening process?"

Human Resources Department spokesperson Connie Buscemi acknowledged Tuesday that the Daley administration has been exploring other "options" since last fall, when a "request-for-proposals" for companies interested in preparing an on-line police entrance exam was cancelled.

The last police entrance exam was held on Nov. 5, 2006.

"We wanted to try to develop something on-line to allow the city to accommodate members of the U.S. military who are on active duty. But, we didn't get any responses that met our needs. No one said they could administer an on-line exam" and guarantee its integrity, Buscemi said.

"We're [now] reviewing our options on how to administer the police application process."

Other sources confirmed that the police entrance exam could be scrapped altogether "to open up the process to as many people as possible." A final decision could be made later this week.

Fraternal Order of Police President Mark Donahue said the idea "sounds too stupid to be true."

"You need a testing process. ... You need to be very concerned about the very limited information you would get from just a screening and application process," Donahue said.

Hiring and promotions in the Police and Fire Departments have generated controversy in Chicago for as long as anyone can remember.

The criticism reached a crescendo in 1994 after a sergeants exam produced just five minority promotions out of 114.

The test was the first to be administered by the city after "race-norming" -- the practice of adjusting scores on the basis of race -- was ruled unconstitutional.

In November 2005, City Hall announced plans to offer the police entrance exam a record four times the following year -- and for the first time on the Internet -- after an unprecedented outreach campaign that bolstered the number of minority applicants to 34 percent black, 24 percent Hispanic and 26 percent women.

More than two years later, black ministers told newly-appointed Police Supt. Jody Weis that, if he was serious about re-establishing trust between police and the black community, he should start by hiring and promoting more African Americans.

The Police Department is currently operating at least 2,000 officers-a-day short of authorized strength, counting vacancies, medical leave and limited duty.

Mayor Daley's 2010 budget uses federal stimulus funds to add just 86 officers, 30 of them for the CTA.

That's nowhere near enough hiring to solve a manpower shortage that, Weis fears, will get dramatically worse when as many as 1,000 more officers retire later this year.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/cityhall/1975918,CST-NWS-policeexam06web.article

We Need a New Model...

The United States and other nations recently experienced record cold and snowfall, which (to the best of my knowledge) were not predicted by popular models of global warming. I do not doubt that we are experiencing climate change, however it appears as if we need a new model to better analyze, explain and predict climate patterns. Questions remain about the extent and precise manner in which human activities influence climate change. Until these questions are answered, we cannot blindly invest trillions of dollars to reduce our carbon output, because the benefits would be questionable, while the costs would be crushing.

Arctic freeze and snow wreak havoc across the planet

January 5, 2010

Charles Bremner in Paris and Richard Lloyd Parry Tokyo

Arctic air and record snow falls gripped the northern hemisphere yesterday, inflicting hardship and havoc from China, across Russia to Western Europe and over the US plains.

There were few precedents for the global sweep of extreme cold and ice that killed dozens in India, paralysed life in Beijing and threatened the Florida orange crop. Chicagoans sheltered from a potentially killer freeze, Paris endured sunny Siberian cold, Italy dug itself out of snowdrifts and Poland counted at least 13 deaths in record low temperatures of about minus 25C (-13F).

The heaviest snow yesterday hit northeastern Asia, which is suffering its worst winter weather for 60 years. More than 25 centimetres (10in) of snow covered Seoul, the South Korean capital — the heaviest fall since records began in 1937.

In China, Beijing and the nearby port city of Tianjin had the deepest snow since 1951, with falls of up to 8in and temperatures of minus 10C. In the far north of China, the temperature fell to minus 32C. More than two million Beijing and Tianjin pupils were sent home and 1,200 flights were delayed or cancelled at Beijing’s international airport.

The same far-eastern weather system took its toll of Sakhalin, the Russian island off Siberia, which was hit by blizzards and avalanches. Farther west, in northern and eastern India, more than 60 people, mainly homeless, died of exposure. Thousands of schools were closed. In Uttar Pradesh, the state neighbouring Nepal, the authorities spent £1.3 million on blankets and firewood for needy households.

Western Russia suffered a deep freeze as snow swept across the Baltic and north-central Europe, leaving the worst devastation in Poland, where 13 people died, bringing the toll from the cold this winter to 122.

Up to ten skiers died or were missing in avalanches. The worst incident was in the Diemtig Valley in Switzerland on Sunday, when avalanches hit a group of skiers and then the rescuers who went to their aid. Eight people were pulled from the snow alive, but four died, including an emergency doctor, and three more were missing.

In Italy, emergency services struggled with rare cold and ice. Motorways in the northeast were closed and military helicopters were sent to Sicily with medical aid.

In the United States, heavy snow fell again on the northeast

In Burlington, Vermont, a record 33in of snow fell in a weekend storm. The previous record in a three-day period was set in 1969. Residents of the Northern Plains were warned to expect lethally cold temperatures of about minus 30C.

The icy conditions of Western Europe, which broke records in half a dozen countries in December, are expected to last for at least another week.

Guo Hu, the head of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau, linked this week’s conditions to unusual atmospheric patterns caused by global warming.

Meteorologists were also trying to find a pattern in the heavy rains that have hit equatorial regions and the southern hemisphere in the past week.

At least 20 people have been killed in flash floods in Kenya after torrential rains made thousands homeless.

In Australia, the authorities declared a natural disaster along the Castlereagh River as it peaked after torrential rain, forcing 1,200 residents to abandon their homes for high ground.

In Brazil, the death toll from flooding and mudslides over the past four days rose above 80.

Closer to home, forecasters have warned Britons to brace themselves for a freezing cold, bleak new year — this winter is set to be the coldest for more than 30 years.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/weather/article6975867.ece

Great Article on Israel

Pictured Above: David Brooks

Kibbutzim may have helped found Israel, but today creative capitalism has allowed Israel to not only survive, but to thrive.

The Tel Aviv Cluster

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: January 11, 2010

Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates.

Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies, 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees, 37 percent of the Academy Award-winning directors, 38 percent of those on a recent Business Week list of leading philanthropists, 51 percent of the Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction.

In his book, “The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement,” Steven L. Pease lists some of the explanations people have given for this record of achievement. The Jewish faith encourages a belief in progress and personal accountability. It is learning-based, not rite-based.

Most Jews gave up or were forced to give up farming in the Middle Ages; their descendants have been living off of their wits ever since. They have often migrated, with a migrant’s ambition and drive. They have congregated around global crossroads and have benefited from the creative tension endemic in such places.

No single explanation can account for the record of Jewish achievement. The odd thing is that Israel has not traditionally been strongest where the Jews in the Diaspora were strongest. Instead of research and commerce, Israelis were forced to devote their energies to fighting and politics.

Milton Friedman used to joke that Israel disproved every Jewish stereotype. People used to think Jews were good cooks, good economic managers and bad soldiers; Israel proved them wrong.

But that has changed. Benjamin Netanyahu’s economic reforms, the arrival of a million Russian immigrants and the stagnation of the peace process have produced a historic shift. The most resourceful Israelis are going into technology and commerce, not politics. This has had a desultory effect on the nation’s public life, but an invigorating one on its economy.

Tel Aviv has become one of the world’s foremost entrepreneurial hot spots. Israel has more high-tech start-ups per capita than any other nation on earth, by far. It leads the world in civilian research-and-development spending per capita. It ranks second behind the U.S. in the number of companies listed on the Nasdaq. Israel, with seven million people, attracts as much venture capital as France and Germany combined.

As Dan Senor and Saul Singer write in “Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle,” Israel now has a classic innovation cluster, a place where tech obsessives work in close proximity and feed off each other’s ideas.

Because of the strength of the economy, Israel has weathered the global recession reasonably well. The government did not have to bail out its banks or set off an explosion in short-term spending. Instead, it used the crisis to solidify the economy’s long-term future by investing in research and development and infrastructure, raising some consumption taxes, promising to cut other taxes in the medium to long term. Analysts at Barclays write that Israel is “the strongest recovery story” in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Israel’s technological success is the fruition of the Zionist dream. The country was not founded so stray settlers could sit among thousands of angry Palestinians in Hebron. It was founded so Jews would have a safe place to come together and create things for the world.

This shift in the Israeli identity has long-term implications. Netanyahu preaches the optimistic view: that Israel will become the Hong Kong of the Middle East, with economic benefits spilling over into the Arab world. And, in fact, there are strands of evidence to support that view in places like the West Bank and Jordan.

But it’s more likely that Israel’s economic leap forward will widen the gap between it and its neighbors. All the countries in the region talk about encouraging innovation. Some oil-rich states spend billions trying to build science centers. But places like Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv are created by a confluence of cultural forces, not money. The surrounding nations do not have the tradition of free intellectual exchange and technical
creativity.

For example, between 1980 and 2000, Egyptians registered 77 patents in the U.S. Saudis registered 171. Israelis registered 7,652.

The tech boom also creates a new vulnerability. As Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic has argued, these innovators are the most mobile people on earth. To destroy Israel’s economy, Iran doesn’t actually have to lob a nuclear weapon into the country. It just has to foment enough instability so the entrepreneurs decide they had better move to Palo Alto, where many of them already have contacts and homes. American Jews used to keep a foothold in Israel in case things got bad here. Now Israelis keep a foothold in the U.S.

During a decade of grim foreboding, Israel has become an astonishing success story, but also a highly mobile one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/opinion/12brooks.html?em

Watch the A-Team Instead!

When I listen to Obama and his cohorts discussing the merits of their stimulus plan I feel as if I am watching a terrible re-run. A similar recovery plan was tried in Japan, which not only failed to end their economic malaise, but resulted in the quadrupling of their national debt. So, if you are in the mood for a re-run, watch the A-Team instead; the action and dialogue are far more intelligent than anything coming out of the White House. And as Mr. T would say "I pity the full who don't learn from history!" To view the full article scroll down and click on the link.

Japan's 'Lost Decade' Argues Against Obama's Policies

By Sean Rushton

February 14, 2009

During this period, the Japanese government engaged in numerous, mammoth infrastructure spending projects, meant to increase “aggregate demand.” The result was a nation of bridges to nowhere and empty superhighways, as The New York Times reported recently. A telling quote: “Economists tend to divide into two camps on the question of Japan’s infrastructure spending: those, many of them Americans like [Treasury Secretary Tim] Geithner, who think it did not go far enough; and those, many of them Japanese, who think it was a colossal waste.” That is, citizens who actually lived through it think the spending was ineffective, but outside theorists like Geithner know better. Meanwhile, the ‘90s stimuli quadrupled Japan’s national debt, driving it to more than 180 percent of GDP.

http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2009/02/japans_lost_decade_argues_agai.html

Debt Ceiling Raised By $1.9 Trillion!

I can think of no issue that threatens the welfare of our republic than our rapidly spiralling national debt. The cost of servicing this debt will grow like a cancer, consuming a larger and larger share of our budget. In other words, capital that should be invested in educational, environmental and economic development will go towards paying interest. Far too many people on the right and left alike are distracted by meaningless cultural battles, while the debt bomb keeps on ticking away.

JANUARY 22, 2010,

$1.9T US Debt Ceiling Hike Likely To Last Into 2011

By Meena Thiruvengadam Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--The $1.9 trillion U.S. debt ceiling increase proposed in the U.S. Senate likely would cover the country's spending into early 2011, an Obama administration source said Friday.

The increase would bring the U.S. debt ceiling tp $14.3 trillion. The U.S. statutory debt limit currently stands at $12.394 trillion while the public debt subject to that limit is at $12.271 trillion.

The source said the U.S. likely won't reach its current debt limit until March.

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100122-709119.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines

Ahhh, Sweet Reason...

Ahhh...more sweet reason from Thomas Sowell. To those who believe that the federal government can lower the cost of health care without inducing grave unintended consequences, I urge you to read up on the history of price controls. And I ask you to delve even deeper and explore the fundamental question of what are prices. The source of many progressive fallacies is their tendency to treat prices are arbitrary, rather than as market signals that are essential in any productive economy. The great paradox is that in a free market prices convey supply, demand & scarcity and offer vital incentives to producers and consumers, far greater than the most brilliant economic planners could ever hope to do so. In virtually every instance when prices were arbitrarily assigned by the state, scarcity, poverty and a misallocation of resources emerged.

The ‘Costs’ of Medical Care, Part III

By Thomas Sowell

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/ One of the strongest talking points of those who want a government-run medical care system is that we simply cannot afford the high and rising costs of medical care under the current system.

First of all, what we can afford has absolutely nothing to do with the cost of producing anything. We will either pay those costs or not get the benefits. Moreover, if we cannot afford the quantity and quality of medical care that we want now, the government has no miraculous way of enabling us to afford it in the future.

If you think the government can lower medical costs by eliminating "waste, fraud and abuse," as some Washington politicians claim, the logical question is: Why haven't they done that already?

Over the years, scandal after scandal has shown waste, fraud and abuse to be rampant in Medicare and Medicaid. Why would anyone imagine that a new government medical program will do what existing government medical programs have clearly failed to do?

If we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical drugs now, how can we afford to pay for doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical drugs, in addition to a new federal bureaucracy to administer a government-run medical system?

Nothing is easier for politicians than to rail against the profits of pharmaceutical companies, the pay of doctors and other things that have very little to do with the total cost of medical care, but which can arouse emotions to the point where facts don't matter. As former Congressman Dick Armey put it, "Demagoguery beats data" in politics.

Economics and politics confront the same fundamental problem: What everyone wants adds up to more than there is. Market economies deal with this problem by confronting individuals with the costs of producing what they want, and letting those individuals make their own trade-offs when presented with prices that convey those costs. That leads to self-rationing, in the light of each individual's own circumstances and preferences.

Politics deals with the same problem by making promises that cannot be kept, or which can be kept only by creating other problems that cannot be acknowledged when the promises are made.

Price controls are a classic example. At various times and places, in countries around the world, price controls have been put on any number of goods and services — going all the way back to the days of the Roman Empire and ancient Babylon.

Price controls create lower prices for open and legal transactions — but also black markets where the prices are higher than they were before, because the risks of punishment for illegal activity has to be compensated. Price controls also lead to shortages and quality deterioration.

But politicians who take credit for lower prices blame all these bad consequences on others. Diocletian did this in the days of the Roman Empire, leaders of the French Revolution did this when their price controls on food led to hungry and angry people, and American politicians denounced the oil companies when price controls on gasoline led to long lines at filling stations in the 1970s. It is the same story, whatever the country, the times or the product or service.

The self-rationing that people do when prices are free to convey the inherent impossibility of any economy to supply as much as everybody wants is replaced, under price controls, with rationing imposed by government, which cannot possibly have the same knowledge of each individual's circumstances and preferences — least of all when it comes to medical care, where patients differ in innumerable ways.

Here, as elsewhere, there is no free lunch — even though politicians get elected by promising free lunches. A free lunch in medical care is one of the most dangerous illusions of all.

Waiting in long gasoline lines at filling stations was exasperating back in the 1970s, but waiting weeks to get an MRI to find out why you are sick, and then waiting months for an operation, as happens in countries with government-run medical systems, can be not only painful but dangerous.

You can be dead by the time they find out what is wrong with you and do something about it. But that will "bring down the cost of medical care" because you won't be around to require any.

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell110509.php3

Demolishing Another Edifice

Recent reductions in crime have occurred in the face of rising poverty and unemployment, which largely demolishes another liberal edifice. This theory grows even weaker when you look around the world and see that nations such as Venezuela and Brazil have a much higher living standard than India, yet their crime rates are far higher. In the face of these puzzling statistics, I am unable to come up with a cogent explanation, but I know a flawed one when I see it.

A Crime Theory Demolished

If poverty is the root cause of lawlessness, why did crime rates fall when joblessness increased?

By HEATHER MAC DONALD

The recession of 2008-09 has undercut one of the most destructive social theories that came out of the 1960s: the idea that the root cause of crime lies in income inequality and social injustice. As the economy started shedding jobs in 2008, criminologists and pundits predicted that crime would shoot up, since poverty, as the "root causes" theory holds, begets criminals. Instead, the opposite happened. Over seven million lost jobs later, crime has plummeted to its lowest level since the early 1960s. The consequences of this drop for how we think about social order are significant.

The notion that crime is an understandable reaction to poverty and racism took hold in the early 1960s. Sociologists Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin argued that juvenile delinquency was essentially a form of social criticism. Poor minority youth come to understand that the American promise of upward mobility is a sham, after a bigoted society denies them the opportunity to advance. These disillusioned teens then turn to crime out of thwarted expectations.

The theories put forward by Cloward, who spent his career at Columbia University, and Ohlin, who served presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Carter, provided an intellectual foundation for many Great Society-era programs. From the Mobilization for Youth on Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1963 through the federal Office of Economic Opportunity and a host of welfare, counseling and job initiatives, their ideas were turned into policy.

If crime was a rational response to income inequality, the thinking went, government can best fight it through social services and wealth redistribution, not through arrests and incarceration. Even law enforcement officials came to embrace the root causes theory, which let them off the hook for rising lawlessness. Through the late 1980s, the FBI's annual national crime report included the disclaimer that "criminal homicide is largely a societal problem which is beyond the control of the police." Policing, it was understood, can only respond to crime after the fact; preventing it is the domain of government welfare programs.

The 1960s themselves offered a challenge to the poverty-causes-crime thesis. Homicides rose 43%, despite an expanding economy and a surge in government jobs for inner-city residents. The Great Depression also contradicted the idea that need breeds predation, since crime rates dropped during that prolonged crisis. The academy's commitment to root causes apologetics nevertheless persisted. Andrew Karmen of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice echoed Cloward and Ohlin in 2000 in his book "New York Murder Mystery." Crime, he wrote, is "a distorted form of social protest." And as the current recession deepened, liberal media outlets called for more government social programs to fight the coming crime wave. In late 2008, the New York Times urged President Barack Obama to crank up federal spending on after-school programs, social workers, and summer jobs. "The economic crisis," the paper's editorialists wrote, "has clearly created the conditions for more crime and more gangs—among hopeless, jobless young men in the inner cities."

Even then crime patterns were defying expectations. And by the end of 2009, the purported association between economic hardship and crime was in shambles. According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, homicide dropped 10% nationwide in the first six months of 2009; violent crime dropped 4.4% and property crime dropped 6.1%. Car thefts are down nearly 19%. The crime plunge is sharpest in many areas that have been hit the hardest by the housing collapse. Unemployment in California is 12.3%, but homicides in Los Angeles County, the Los Angeles Times reported recently, dropped 25% over the course of 2009. Car thefts there are down nearly 20%.

The recession crime free fall continues a trend of declining national crime rates that began in the 1990s, during a very different economy. The causes of that long-term drop are hotly disputed, but an increase in the number of people incarcerated had a large effect on crime in the last decade and continues to affect crime rates today, however much anti-incarceration activists deny it. The number of state and federal prisoners grew fivefold between 1977 and 2008, from 300,000 to 1.6 million.

The spread of data-driven policing has also contributed to the 2000s' crime drop. At the start of the recession, the two police chiefs who confidently announced that their cities' crime rates would remain recession-proof were Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. As New York Police Commissioner in the mid-1990s, Mr. Bratton pioneered the intensive use of crime data to determine policing strategies and to hold precinct commanders accountable—a process known as Compstat. Commissioner Kelly has continued Mr. Bratton's revolutionary policies, leading to New York's stunning 16-year 77% crime drop. The two police leaders were true to their word. In 2009, the city of L.A. saw a 17% drop in homicides, an 8% drop in property crimes, and a 10% drop in violent crimes. In New York, homicides fell 19%, to their lowest level since reliable records were first kept in 1963.

The Compstat mentality is the opposite of root causes excuse-making; it holds that policing can and must control crime for the sake of urban economic viability. More and more police chiefs have adopted the Compstat philosophy of crime-fighting and the information-based policing techniques that it spawned. Their success in lowering crime shows that the government can control antisocial behavior and provide public safety through enforcing the rule of law. Moreover, the state has the moral right and obligation to do so, regardless of economic conditions or income inequality.

The recession could still affect crime rates if cities cut their police forces and states start releasing prisoners early. Both forms of cost-saving would be self-defeating. Public safety is the precondition for thriving urban life. In 1990s New York, crime did not drop because the economy improved; rather, the city's economy revived because crime was cut in half. Keeping crime rates low now is the best guarantee that cities across the country will be able to exploit the inevitable economic recovery when it comes.

Ms. Mac Donald is a contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute's City Journal.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703580904574638024055735590.html