Reader "Dichotomy" nails it: magical thinking

Commenting on De Blasio’s claim that, by placing Amazon’s new headquarters adjacent to a sprawling public housing slum, tens of thousands of residents are going to win $150,000 tech jobs, Dichotomy observes,

According to this logic, DeBalsio can relocate a top hospital to the projects and suddenly the denizens will become neurosurgeons and nurses. The left does dream big dreams.

De Blasio’s understanding of the world is exactly the same as that of the most naive Pacific Island cargo cult native, someone who believes that engaging in a ritualistic building ceremony of, say, an airfield, will bring material wealth in the form of airplanes suddenly appearing and dropping mana from heaven. In the Mayor’s defense, this same thinking was why Washington spurred the creation of no-cost home loans to the poor during the past decades: our experts observed that people who owned their own homes tended to be middle-class, steadily employed and living in stable families; caused, the savants concluded, by home ownership. Put an unemployed, high school drop-out single-mother of five into her own house and she’d prosper, just like her fellow home owners. It didn’t occur to our tax dispensers that the material object: the house, was the reflection and result of the living habits of the owner, rather than the other way around.