As a podcast on iTunes, listenable/downloadable onscreen at Taki’s Magazine, or as a transcript here.

In this week’s broadcast I ponder the long-term implications of the Detroit bankruptcy.  I take it for granted, race-shy blather about “progressivism” and “sprawl” notwithstanding, that the fundamental problem is demographic.

There is a speculative, but I think quite persuasive statistical theory called Smart Fraction Theory. It says that for a society to function well, to be stable and prosperous, you need a certain threshold proportion of smart people, which the author of the theory says means IQ 108 or above. If your population's smart fraction is below that threshold, the society won't work. Detroit, it seems to me, illustrates the truth of the theory.

What does the future hold?

If blacks running a black city can't work, and whites don't want to move back there to live among them, we end up with what is essentially a reservation. Detroit may be the first, but there'll be plenty of others. Low-class blacks are being cleansed from New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and other big cities. They have to go somewhere. They'll go to reservation cities like Detroit, or to small towns from which whites and middle-class blacks will promptly flee.

We'll end up with a lot of poor, black, unproductive, dysfunctional communities managed from outside: the custodial state envisaged by Richard Herrnstein forty years ago.

Forty years ago, when Coleman Young took over Detroit. It's been a long forty years.