US Inner Cities: Dark Zones of Impulse and Violence

One of the lasting legacies of the US 1960s era of big-government expansion of social programs, is the hellish environment of US inner cities. De facto "no-go zones" for many police forces, these hopeless neighborhoods create themselves, with the proper mix of ingredients -- including over ample government funding of dependency-inducing community programs. Another destructive legacy of the 60s is massive entitlement programs.

...entitlement programs are the biggest single financial problem we face. They dwarf all the Bush-Obama wars; they make TARP look like small change. They...cost money we don’t have — and are scheduled to cost inexorably more until they literally ruin the nation...

...Since the Great Society era of Lyndon Johnson, the country has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into poor urban neighborhoods. The violence and crime generated in these neighborhoods costs hundreds of billions more. And after all this time, all this money and all this energy, the inner city populations are worse off than before. There is more drug addiction and more social and family breakdown among this population than when the Great Society was launched. Incarceration rates have risen to levels that shock the world (though they make for safer streets);

...The state of the American inner city is an unacceptable human tragedy, and the costs in money spent and prosperity forfeited create an unsustainable drag on the national economy at a time when we need all the help we can get.

There is more. Those neighborhoods — and the prisons in which so many young urban men spend large chunks of their lives — threaten the peace and security of the country as a whole. Extremist cults, some domestically based and others relying on foreign money and enthusiasm, fish in these troubled waters for souls, and sometimes they catch a few. This could turn ugly. _WRMead_theAmericanInterest

What Walter Russel Mead dances around -- and eventually denies entirely -- is the elephant in the room: differences in underlying drive, impulse control, intelligence, and executive function.

Until analysts and decision makers can bring themselves to break with a counter-productive political correctness, and to accept the well established and easily demonstrated facts of hbd (human biodiversity), governments-academics-journalists-pundits etc will continue banging their heads against the wall. And the nation as a whole sinks into a deeper quagmire and a more critical state of risk.