The Future Once Happened Here.

• Author: Yarmolinsky, Adam

It is always salutary to be reminded of our mistakes. And the architects of American urban fiscal and welfare policy over the last quarter century made some whoppers. Intransigent naivete, blindness to inevitable consequences, cowardice in the face of bullying and corruption -- all of these sins are laid out in convincing detail in Fred Siegel's new book.

Siegel's thesis is that our big cities, and specifically New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, have been going to hell in a handbasket because their leaders have squandered their resources on welfare bureaucracies, neglected public order, splintered civic unity over issues of race and ethnicity, and ignored the market economy. The argument seems not so much wrong as irrelevant to our present troubles:

* The recent welfare reforms have completely changed the fiscal picture.

* Community policing and the exhaustion of citizens' patience with public disorder have altered the debate over public order.

* Issues of race and ethnicity continue to roil the civic body politic, but demagoguing these issues has begun to backfire as a political technique. New York's Al Sharpton is now seen more as a pathetic figure than as a monster, a distraction rather than a threat.

* Reviving the economy of the big cities is recognized as the major problem of governance. The question is no longer whether but how to do it.

Siegel's view of all these problems is essentially a backward-looking one. He seems more concerned with what he considers the excessive social services available in New York City for a child with emotional problems than with the inadequacy of these resources (as documented by investigative journalism). And he complains about the deinstitutionalization of mental patients (has he forgotten the exposes of Willowbrook?) rather than about the collapse of the community mental health centers that should be providing a better answer.

Siegel is at his sharpest in describing the limitations of individual leaders -- the righteousness of John Lindsay, the cynicism of Ed Koch, the timorousness of David Dinkins, the laissez faire demagogy of Sam Yorty, and the complete abdication of responsibility by Marion Barry. Nor is Siegel blind to the failings of the new generation of reformers, who he wishes would lead us back into ancient paths of virtue. Although he takes a more positive view of the incumbent mayors in New York and Los Angeles, he notes Giuliani's "expert[isel in the art of turning would-be allies...