Matt Walsh

Unless you're about 100 years old or so, or you've spent a lot of time in the state of Massachusetts, there's a good chance you've never heard of something called the Curley Effect.

It's named after James Michael Curley, who served four terms as mayor of Boston from 1914 to 1950.

He also served in the House of Representatives, and he was governor of Massachusetts for one term as well.

So for a half century, he was a very well-known figure in Boston.

They called him the Rascal King, and he was quite popular with Boston's poor, particularly the Irish population.

The funny thing about James Michael Curley, though, is that despite the fact that he kept getting elected to high office, he wasn't actually a good politician.

Wasn't even close.

He committed numerous crimes, including mail fraud.

He served part of his term as a mayor in a prison cell.

And under his watch, by every objective metric, the city of Boston declined dramatically.

The population stagnated, even as other major cities grew exponentially.

Manufacturing jobs left the city.

Boston's finances collapsed to the point of near bankruptcy.

So how did James Michael Curley hold on to power for so long, despite doing such a horrible job?

It doesn't seem logical.

So a couple of economists at Harvard decided to look into it.

And what they found was that by dramatically raising taxes and using taxpayer funds to hire poor Irishmen for fake government jobs, James Michael Curley had driven wealthy people out of the city.

The rich people decided to get out of town before the city of Boston would steal any more of their money.

And as a result of this mass exodus, the share of low-income residents living in Boston, the core demographic supporting James Michael Curley, grew substantially.

The economists called this tactic the Curley effect.