A prediction

Over the last few decades, our society has made impressive progress on solving one of the two main hurdles -- crime and schools -- to raising a middle class family in dense urban neighborhood. We reduced the crime rate through a variety of means, the most obvious of which has been by throwing a huge number of guys in jail, most of them minorities. 

In 1974, Harvard political scientist James Q. Wilson published a little book called Thinking About Crime in which he said that the best way to fight crime is lock more criminals up for longer periods. You see, he explained, when they're in prison, they can't victimize people who aren't in prison. This concept was very controversial at the time. Wilson's plan to fight crime by locking up criminals would obviously inflict disparate impact discrimination upon minorities, and that was just inconceivable to most advanced thinkers in 1974. 

Eventually, however, that's exactly what we started doing. And, in the long run, it worked. 

Today, you aren't supposed to remember this or think about it, but very few people are much bothered by it. Between 1981 and the early 1990s, I had my car windows smashed four or five times by criminals. I bought a new car in 1988 without a radio so that the bastards wouldn't smash my windows to steal it. So my wife bought a $10 transistor radio so she could listen to tinny-sounding music while she was driving. And they smashed my window and stole her radio and fenced it for about a buck. 

But I haven't had that happen to me since the mid-1990s. Why not? Well, for one reason is that a lot of these bastards got caught and locked up. Some of the criminals who did this to me may well be still in prison for other stuff they did.

Guess what? I sure don't miss that aspect of The Old Days: walking to my car and finding its windows smashed. Most people don't.

What about schools? How will today's well-educated young white urbanites figure out a way to educate their kids in public schools in urban neighborhoods? 

I don't know, but I suspect the SWPLs will eventually solve this problem. There is simply too much talent that wants to live downtown and, eventually, raise their kids there for this problem to go unsolved forever. I suspect the solutions will turn out to be about as racially insensitive as the solutions for crime turned out to be. 

My guess is that smart white urbanites will figure out ways to keep most non-Asian minority children out of their own kids' urban public schools. Sure, it sounds inconceivable today, but the real estate is so valuable that tomorrow's SWPLs will figure out ways to do it. 

And, at some point, they'll just do it. 

After it's done, it will be considered in as bad taste for any uncouth person to point out that the reason Ansel Jr.'s public high school school in the city in 2031 is almost all white or Asian is because white people pushed through reforms that had massive disparate impact on blacks and Hispanics as it is considered uncouth today to point out that Park Slope or Silver Lake or wherever is now full of white people because white people a few decades ago pushed through reforms that locked up lots of black and Hispanic people. 

But, it will happen.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer