The Unheavenly City at Fifty. Edward Banfield's book was ahead of its time––and ours.

Claremont Review of Books ^ | Fall 2020 | Thomas Sowell

[alternatives?]

I started a lifetime of enjoyment from my wood shop class in high school. You go to a wood tool show and it is mostly older guys like me.

[alternatives?]

“That was about twenty years ago, give or take.

Needless to say, any IRS auditor could try the same tactic today—probably with all the same events happening.”

I wonder if today the auditors do the same thing, but only target donors to conservative causes or some other conservative trigger. If not today, probably in the near future.

[cgbg]

Good point—those building permits are brutal smoking guns in the hands of someone in the IRS who knows what to do with them.

(The vast majority of IRS agents have no clue, of course...)

[Intolerant in NJ]

Remember reading the book way back then - don’t remember what it said - glad it stood the test of time, whatever it was......

[Fiddlstix]

Bookmark

[Elsie]

They disappeared when mass production, assembly lines and then robots came on the scene.

[Elsie]

Those things are SHARP!

Can’t have a little child injured in any way!

[Reeses]

We live in a kleptocracy

It's like that everywhere. Having a king is cheaper because there's only one thief to worry about. If you like your king, you're set for life. If you don't, you just have to move once.

[GOPJ]

“The boy who knows that he has learned nothing since the eighth grade but that he must nevertheless sit in boredom, frustration, and embarrassment” until he reaches the legal school-leaving age “must be profoundly disaffected by the experience.” Banfield cited an empirical study which suggested that “much juvenile delinquency originates in the adolescent’s anger at the stupidity and hypocrisy of a system that uses him in this way.”

That's what's known as a hard truth...