“ST. LOUIS — A white couple who stood outside their St. Louis mansion and pointed guns at protesters who were marching toward the mayor’s home to demand her resignation support the Black Lives Matter movement and don’t want to become heroes to those who oppose the cause, their attorney said Monday. Video posted online showed Mark McCloskey, 63, and his 61-year-old wife, Patricia, standing outside their Renaissance palazzo-style home Sunday night in the city’s well-to-do Central West End neighborhood. He could be heard yelling while holding a long-barreled gun. His wife stood next to him with a handgun.”
Meet Me in St. Louis, Bezos
If Donald Trump were the deal making, industrial-policy president that he once promised to be, he would be on the phone with Jeff Bezos right now, making a case along these very lines — while hinting, broadly and of course nonthreateningly (har, har), at the political benefits of opening Amazon St. Louis or Amazon Detroit, of being seen as a company that renews cities and doesn’t just put brick and mortar out of business.
.. But when you enjoy a monopoly’s powers, one way to avoid being regulated like one is to act with a kind pre-emptive patriotism, and behave as though what’s good for America is good for Amazon as well.
Thoughts on Will Wilkinson’s post on cities
it’s not really cities that are doing well, but certain kinds of cities, suburbs, and towns. It’s really the places with high levels of human capital. To understand the real pattern, read Enrico Moretti’s The New Geography of Jobs. The engineer-heavy suburbs of Fremont or Milpitas are doing great, as are college towns like Ann Arbor and Gainesville. Meanwhile, big cities like Baltimore and St. Louis are still stagnating and crime-ridden, while others such as Detroit and Cleveland have only just now started climbing up out of their Rust Belt doldrums. It’s not city vs. country, it’s innovation hubs vs. old-economy legacy towns.
.. Many American cities remain extremely segregated, especially between black residents and others. Chicago is a thriving, diverse, fun, relatively safe metropolis – unless you go to the poor black areas, in which case you’re in “Chiraq“.
.. the most segregated cities in America include places like Chicago, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Baltimore, and Cleveland. Those are precisely the places that are having the most difficulty adapting to the new, innovation-based economy. And those tend to be the places where crime rates have rebounded to their early 1990s highs, or never really fell in the first place.
.. Either America succeeds as a polyracial nation, or it doesn’t succeed at all.