Ryan Avent has a long and thoughtful post responding to a wrong-headed Prospect article on urban decline and its causes. Avent:
[S]o long as declining cities are still there, there will be cries to try and rejuvenate them with various public programs — tax incentives to lure new companies, public funding for stadiums or convention centers, bail-outs for failing firms. These kinds of things are simply not helpful. The issue is this: it’s never clear what transition is going to look like and what the right distribution of people and capital is going to be. In providing aid to struggling cities, then, we want to facilitate that transition, not impede it. We want to make people more mobile, even as we work to generate a high quality of life in growing cities and declining cities. We don’t want to lock up resources in declining cities, either by propping up failing companies or by trapping people in hopeless situations.
The Dish 