Talking Banfield
My conversation with Kevin Kosar
I first heard about Edward Banfield’s The Unheavenly City Revisited while reading Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty in 1988. I soon acquired and read Banfield’s entire book, and was deeply impressed. For Banfield, the main long-run cause of poverty is irresponsible behavior, which strongly suggests that the main long-run solution to poverty is for the poor to behave much more responsibly. In the early 2000s, Banfield’s analysis became one of the main foundations for my “Behavioral Economics and Perverse Effects of the Welfare State,” (Kyklos, 2007) co-authored with Scott Beaulier. Decades later, our article remained controversial enough to get poor Scott cancelled.
During my decades of Banfield fandom, I’ve almost never encountered a fellow fan. Imagine my delight, then, to learn that the American Enterprise Institute had republished The Unheavenly City Revisited, with a new introduction by Kevin Kosar. When I read Kosar’s intro, I was thrilled. Kosar knows not only the thought of Banfield, but the lore. I never knew that Banfield was one of the first targets of recognizably modern cancel culture:
Professor Banfield did not get to deliver a word of his lecture. Shortly after economist Milton Friedman introduced him, protesters stormed the stage, toppled the podium, and began chanting and waving a banner that read, “Racist Banfield Wanted for Genocide.” Faculty pushed back on the radicals, who were members of the Chicago Welfare Rights Organization, the Workers’ Action Movement, and other leftist groups, and demanded they leave the stage and let Banfield speak. They refused and continued their protest. After more than an hour, the event organizers decided to get Banfield out. They hustled him through the auditorium’s side door, because the main entrance was swarmed by around 90 angry protesters. “Wanted Dead or Alive Edward Banfield,” read one of their signs.
To my further delight, Kosar was eager to join me for a critical discussion of Banfield’s analysis of poverty. You can watch the whole conversation below.
Since Kosar and I are both Banfield fans, there is much common ground. But for me, this was also an opportunity to explore what I see as the weaknesses and ambiguities of the great man’s analysis. Banfield focuses heavily on time preference as the central cause of poverty, while I prefer the broader vice of “impulsivity” or just the Five Factor Model’s “low Conscientiousness.” Yet the biggest disagreement is probably over fatalism: Kosar, like Banfield, emphasizes the intractability of poverty, while I remain optimistic that harsher incentives would ultimately make the irresponsible act much more responsibly.
Overall, this is one of the funnest conversations I’ve had in years. I hope you enjoy it at least half as much as I did!
P.S. If you’re puzzled by my odd headdress in the video, the good news is that I’m 99.5% better now… and will sled more carefully in the future.
I'm a big fan of Banfield too. I bet he would have been amazing in conversation. His book on why southern Italy is poor is good too.
He did have a lot of policy advice in The Unheavenly City, so things weren't hopeless, except that the elites would never take his advice. He pointed out how cheap housing was in the tenement era, before regulation require high quality and huge costs, and made cheap housing illegal.
Is Time Preference difference from Impulsivity? I guess so-- that what hyperbolic discounting is getting at in an unduly complex way.
"I soon acquired and read Banfield’s entire book, and was deeply impressed. For Banfield, the main long-run cause of poverty is irresponsible behavior, which strongly suggests that the main long-run solution to poverty is for the poor to behave much more responsibly."
This is misanthropic and anti-libertarian. The main long-run cause of poverty is government: counter-productive regulations, perverse incentives, vast tax-extorted spending, welfare handouts, etc., etc. This causes a phenomenal compound loss over even relatively short time periods, which ensures that poverty continues. The poor make what they regard to be prudent choices given their values and circumstances.