Maggie's Farm

From a thoughtful reaction to - not against - Murray's Fishtown and Belmont analysis by Clark Whelton: SugarHouse Rules - On certain aspects of Charles Murray’s new book:

...if feckless men in Fishtown are not unmanly, what are they? Murray invites us to choose our own words; I suggest “remittance men.” In nineteenth-century Britain, sons, brothers, and uncles whose disreputable conduct made them an embarrassment to their families sometimes received an offer they couldn’t refuse: “Move to Capetown, Jamaica, or Tasmania, and—provided you never come back to England—we will send you a monthly remittance. It won’t be a lot, but you’ll be able to live without working.”

Do the residents of Belmont (median household income $95,000) and countless other communities like it have a similar understanding of Fishtown’s feckless men? The Belmonts of America help fund the various government payments that keep neighborhoods like Fishtown afloat. In return for remitting to the tax man, Belmont, Massachusetts (83.5 percent white, 11.1 percent Asian, 3 percent Hispanic, and 1.8 percent black) gets a measure of isolation from the troubles and failures of urban neighborhoods.