Too Bad to be True

In a recent op-ed in the WSJ, entitled "You Can't Throw the Bums Out if You Voted with your Feet," Allysia Finley derides the out-migration from blue cities with particular emphasis on Chicago and its recently elected hard-left Mayor Brandon Johnson.  She writes:

Chicago is functionally bankrupt. Its high crime and taxes are driving away businesses like Citadel, Boeing and Tyson Foods. Despite some of the highest property taxes in the country, its pension funds are in a death spiral. Scads of people are moving out. A net 175,000 people left Cook County between 2020 and 2022.

Mr. Johnson’s margin of victory was about 20,000 votes. How many of the city’s expats would have voted for moderate reformer Paul Vallas? Therein lies an enormous problem for Chicago and other big cities: Left-wing policies are driving away the types of voters and businesses needed for a course correction.

Between 2020 and 2022, about 71,000 people on net left San Francisco—nearly 10% of its population. During the same period some 503,000 moved out of New York City—about four times the population of Topeka, Kan. High levels of out-migration amount to a political as well as economic brain drain. Cities are losing the voters who keep their leaders from going off the rails.

All of that is true, but any suggestion that there's a way to "throw the bums out" is wishful thinking. In the comments section, I wrote:

In blue cities across the country, the Democrats have ruled for decades. [Chicago hasn't had a GOP mayor in 70 years!] Sure, there might be an occasional GOP mayor in some cities, but the city council, along with public sector unions and (today) NGOs insist on more taxes and greater spending. Ironically, as spending goes up, the quality of public services along with the quality of life, goes down. Hundreds of millions are spent on programs that don't work, except to enrich the parasitic class that acts as middle men in big cities.

"Throwing the bums out" is a reasonable abstraction, but it can no longer work. The political infrastructure in big cities has skewed so far left that a return to moderation is unlikely. Even worse, urban leftists who now run things know that there is no longer moral hazard for poor governance—Washington will bail them out when things get really bad.

Sadly, voting with our feet is the ONLY solution for those us us who see our tax money squandered by incompetent ideologues who do absolutely nothing to make the lives of city dwellers better.

Many commenters asked why even true blue Dems would accept the ruination of their cities? Why would their elected politicians enact policies that make quality of life worse (think: "defund the police"). Why would Democrat politicians invoke policies that don't work (think: spending billions on homelessness only to see the number of homeless increase in locales that spend those sums while in other places, the number of homeless is stable or decreasing)?

To answer those questions, another commenter referenced a paper written by two Harvard researchers, Edward L. Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer, entitled "The Curley Effect: The Economics of Shaping the Electorate." The authors write:

Early in World War I, a wounded British officer arrived in Boston to recruit citizens of the then-neutral United States to fight in the British army. He politely asked the by then legendary Irish mayor of Boston, James Michael Curley, for permission. Curley replied, ‘‘Go ahead Colonel. Take every damn one of them.’’ This statement captures Curley’s lifelong hostility to the Anglo-Saxons of Boston, whom he described as ‘‘a strange and stupid race,’’ and his clear wish that they just leave. Throughout his four terms, using a combination of aggressive redistribution and incendiary rhetoric, Curley tried to transform Boston from an integrated city of poor Irish and rich protestants into a Gaelic city on American shores.

Curley’s motivation is clear. In his six mayoral races between 1913 and 1951, he represented the poorest and most ethnically distinct of Boston’s Irish. The city’s Brahmins despised him because of his policies, his corruption, and his rhetoric, and always worked to block his victory. Curley’s expected share of Boston’s vote was, to a first approximation, strictly increasing in the share of poor Irish among the Bostonians. Unsurprisingly, he tried to turn Boston into a city that would elect him.

My goodness. Is it possible that the Democratic leaders in blue cities today are either consciously or unconsciously using the strategy applied by Boston's Mayor Curley in the first half of the 20th century? Sure, the ethnicity and background of the players has changed, but if you think about it for a second, the strategy is eerily similar.

  

Glaeser and Shleifer conclude:

Our theoretical models, as well as empirical examples, all share a central conceptual theme. Specifically, it is generally thought in economics, following the fundamental research of Tiebout (1956) and Brennan and Buchanan (1980), that elastic response by the voters to tax and other policies disciplines the government. Good policies bring in resources and voters; bad ones keep them out. With the Curley effect, this result is reversed. When politicians seeking to stay in power use distortionary policies to force out their political opponents, the more elastic response renders bad policies more, rather than less, attractive. [emphasis mine] The Curley effect, and more generally the economics of shaping the electorate, might thus shed light on a broad range of government policies that appear too bad to be true from alternative perspective.

Maybe that's why the action of far too many blue city mayors across the past decades only appears to be "too bad to be true," and why they're perfectly okay with the consequences.