Which Came First, The Chicken or the Egg?

Thomas Sowell warns in his book Economic Facts and Fallacies that another urban fallacy is getting sequences wrong. After the 1960s, jobs formerly located in the inner cities moved to the suburbs. Did that cause social pathologies like high crime and violence and welfare dependency? No, Sowell shows how a scrutinization of facts reveals that those pathologies were already well developed in the 60s. Deficiencies in education, in attitudes, plus the riots of the 60s sealed the fate of inner city workers.

Then, when jobs moved to the suburbs, wage rates were set higher than the productivity employers could find in inner city workers. Sowell points out that "in an earlier era that was by no means free of racial discrimination, inner city ghettoes had lower rates of crime and violence, lower unemployment rates, and most children grew up in two parent households."