Thomas Sowell has a short essay in the Fall 2020 issue of the Claremont Review of Books titled “The Unheavenly City at 50.” Sowell, who turned 90 years old this past June, is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution.

He writes:

“Somewhere Winston Churchill said that all wisdom is not new wisdom. That is certainly true of Edward C. Banfield’s landmark book, The Unheavenly City, published 50 years ago. Many, if not most, of the people discussing urban problems today have not yet caught up to what Banfield said half a century ago.”

Riffing off Banfield’s observations on dropouts, Dr. Sowell also add this personal note:

“While many people today may simply dismiss what Banfield said, it is impossible for me to dismiss it. As a personal note, I happen to have dropped out of high school at age 16, and took a full-time job as a messenger delivering telegrams for the Western Union telegraph company. But the law required me to also spend some time in what was called a ‘continuation school.’

“It was a time-wasting farce. I informed the teacher that the law could force me to be there, but it could not force me to participate, and I had no intention of participating. I was indeed angry ‘at the stupidity and hypocrisy of a system’ that used me like this. Fortunately, Western Union had its own continuation school for its messengers, and I transferred there, where I learned to type, a skill that would be of some value to me in later years—instead of being used to justify some teacher’s job in a public school.’

You may read the essay at https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-unheavenly-city-at-fifty/.