Volume 15, Number 3 · August 13, 1970
Survival of the Fattest
By Richard Sennett
The Unheavenly City
by Edward Banfield
Little, Brown, 308 pp., $6.95
In every pessimist, it has been said, there lies an unshakable if unspoken idealism. As the erosion of national domestic policy in Washington proceeds according to plan, I wonder whether in the heart of every conservative 'realist' or 'pragmatist' lies an unshakable and unspeakable naïveté. Daniel P. Moynihan once remarked to me that, in urban affairs, it costs more money to do nothing than to experiment. The more housing deteriorates through neglect, the more it costs to fix; the longer schools are allowed to decay and the children they house deprived of decent education, the harder and more expensive it becomes to repair the damage done; the longer civil rights are denied, the more complicated and painful does their restitution become.
Review, 3366 words
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