Economist Raj Chetty has found a surprising tool to fight housing segregation
vox.com
vox.com
This logic assumes that none of this benefit is positional. The family moves to a richer area, the kids do well in the fancy local schools, get into top colleges, make lots of money, etc, yes. But a lot of these opportunities look like "each year we take the best N people we can", so there are probably other (less qualified) kids who do slightly worse than they would without the move.
As an analogy, if being in the tallest 5% of society makes you earn $100k more, we would expect a randomized controlled trial on increasing children's heights to have a large positive effect on income. But if we then rolled that out to the whole society those benefits would turn out to be illusory.
This is still valuable from a perspective of reducing segregation and inequality, but I'm skeptical of its presentation as an extremely good deal economically.
As the parent and other sibling comments point out, the real advantage may come from positive-sum effects: reduxed inequality, a more efficient market from a leveled playing field, etc. But that doesn't change the fact that the math being used is too incomplete to be held up as an economic efficiency argument, the way the article does.
On the other hand, it doesn't have to be a requirement to happen. Making some people smarter can actually have a negative effect on the smarter ones.
This can be illustrated with schools, where it benefits the troublemakers to be placed in a group with calm children, but it is on the expense of the calm children who will now be disrupted in their studying. In the scandinavian countries, this is often done to children. Troublemakers, most often boys, are placed together with groups of calm children, often girls. This is such a common practice that there is an expression for such girls - pillow girls, "kuddflickor".
https://translate.google.se/translate?hl=sv&sl=auto&tl=en&u=...
That said, isn't the Chetty proposal (moving from low-opportunity location to higer-opportunity location) basically why there are millions of migrants in Europe right now.
Girls are generally expected to be better behaved. This can be extremely suffocating and unhealthy.
If they are exposed to "troublemaker" boys and learn to have a little back bone and stand up for themselves (to possibly oppressive adults), it's still less socially acceptable for a girl than for a boy. So then she blames the "troublemaker" boy to cover for herself because he will get in less trouble than her and that's what the adults find plausible anyway.
It's entirely possible that even if she tried to accept the blame, the adults would interpret that as her trying to be kind to him and cover for him.
If you remove all the smart people from a school I'm pretty sure the outcomes for everybody left behind will be worse.
The question you ask—are these opportunistic moves zero-sum?—is still an interesting one. But the realities of the sub-population studied here change the intuitive answer to that question. There may be a finite number of seats at Harvard, but there is plenty of capacity for upward mobility from lower classes into the middle class.
[0] p864 here for income statistics https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/lkatz/files/chk_aer_mto_04...
Very much a similar discussion to this article, but they focus a bit more on the macro benefits. I felt like it was a really nice blend of political topics and data science. Raj seems to do a very good job of finding and conveying meaningful insights and statistics.
https://player.fm/series/the-ezra-klein-show/can-raj-chetty-...
- actually wanting the problem to get solved
- finding out, at a very micro-level, how to solve it
- deploying those seemingly unscalable resources towards solving the problem
I suspect it will be more challenging to roll this out in a wider pilot and then city/state/nationwide because of bullet point #1.
There is nothing natural about the current amount of segregation in the US.
Segregation was a deliberate policy and a massive social engineering effort
Yep you got that right for sure.
the problem with doing a nationwide campain is that they tend to be pushed from above with a one size fits all approach: if it worked in seattle, then it must work in miami. but really, each locality needs to approach this on their own and find a locally appropriate way to solve it.
as you say finding out, at a very micro-level, how to solve it
https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/the-su...
That said, there's been some notable kerfuffles when "rich" suburbs didn't want their allocation.
Of course, whether the policy matches the reality... https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-15/canberra-public-housi...
But it worked.
It was a high-touch intervention, but one with amazing results.
Social issues need social solutions. Money may be needed to make it happen, but merely throwing money at the problem typically doesn't work. Tech can do a lot of good things, but tech solutions for social issues often fail.
People problems are generally solved by the right kind of human involvement.
The program doesn’t quite pay for itself by increasing future tax revenue, Hendren says — but it comes pretty close.
I wonder how those figures look if you also include savings on future welfare programs and even incarceration.
They got coaching for how to talk to landlords in better neighborhoods, they were fed information they didn't really know how to find and they were educated about various things. If you come from the right neighborhood, either your parents teach you a lot of that or you just pick it up without trying because you see it everywhere.
If there is no one in your social circle who knows how to navigate certain things, it easily becomes an insurmountable barrier.
No, you need local programs that take into account local economic conditions, social situations, etc.
I'm a libertarian at the federal level, but I'm much more receptive to local government interventions and have voted for local tax increases when I live a place that seems to be well-run.
That's an interesting take, but would you agree that it's often the places that aren't particularly well-run that also have the most need for interventions? What if federal programs were conceived as high-touch assistance programs for local government?
No, that would just eleminate the idea of a local government. The only thing they can really do is throw money around, or some glorified variation thereof.
Centralizing power is risky (a lot of things can go wrong), ineffective, and promotes division.
Imagine Congress deciding on one kind of car for everyone in the country -- people in manhattan don't want any car, people in the suburbs want a sedan, outdoor people want a truck, etc. It would be a huge argument dividing everyone in the country into factions and nobody would be happy. It sounds ridiculous, but that's what happens to a small extent with each new federal law that gives more power to the central government. And look what's happening.
Maybe busing should become a thing again... get everyone motivated to fund _all_ schools properly and not just have dumb magnet schools
> Living in certain neighborhoods seems to expand opportunity, and living in other neighborhoods seems to diminish it.
What I don't get about these policies is that they do zero to actually address the problem and instead just shift things around.
If you have good neighborhood A and bad neighborhood B, taking a handful of people from B and relocating them to A does nothing to actually address the problems in B for those that remain in B. B continues to B bad.
The solution that should be pursued is how to make B as good as A. Once B is as good as A, people from B will naturally migrate to A and people from A will migrate to B. This is essentially what gentrification accomplishes. The problem with gentrification is that is pushes people in B out to some other bad neighborhood C.
It seems to me that this being the case, the ideal scenario is to figure out how to gentrify B without displacing those in B to C. What you want is good influences found in A to dilute the bad influences in B until the bad influences are extinguished.
In fact, the neighborhoods mentioned as 'high opportunity' already have quite a lot of low-income, public, and section 8 housing. Yes, demand exceeds availability, but that's true anywhere in Seattle.
Wouldn't this mean the divide runs east to west?
What's the problem supposed to be? And why is "North Seattle" being used to refer to the northern half of downtown, rather than the northern part of Seattle?
I don't know anything about Seattle. If you look at the area of the clear divide, what differentiates the houses on one side from the houses on the other side? In Minneapolis-St Paul, there are pretty clear differences in amenities between many racially separated areas: more trees and walking paths in some areas; fewer trees, worse streets, and highway noise in others.
What are you asking when you ask, "What's the problem supposed to be?" I don't quite get it.
That's the racial divide. Not just downtown.
Across from Seattle, across Lake Washington, you can also see the majority-blue suburb of Bellevue.
[0] https://northwesturbanist.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/seattl...
The divide is east-west, but the division is north/south.
Throw in how most New Deal recovery efforts were only aimed at states the Democratic party needed votes in and this lead to the exclusion for any funds to help poor blacks in the South.
The FHA created this mess and on purpose. It simply comes down to politicians constantly trying to focus the ire of the people on those who did not cause it so as to keep people divided and the situation perpetuated.
Want to fix housing segregation and outcomes, get politicians out
I'm one of the undeserving poor, that's what I am. Now think what that means to a man. It means that he's up against middle-class morality for all of time. If there's anything going, and I puts in for a bit of it, it's always the same story: "you're undeserving, so you can't have it." But my needs is as great as the most deserving widows that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same 'usband. I don't need less than a deserving man, I need more! I don't eat less 'earty than 'e does, and I drink, oh, a lot more. - From My Fair Lady / Pygmalion.
So, the key to getting people to move, is to get the landlords to allow it. Surprising tool they call it?
It's also fairly obvious - rich people think they're better humans than poor people and don't want to live near them. Not worthy of much hand-wringing or fretting in my opinion.
This seems... unlikely.
I.e. even after the white people get replaced, it would still be a good neighborhood.
Naturally, I don't agree with the "race realist" view on this, and think the term is a bit of a strawman. Humans are intensely social, people's actions are deeply shaped by their social environments, and the liberal view being mocked isn't that your location transforms you but that your social milieu does.
But your comment seems to actually be this strawman come to life, which I find fascinating. To be clear, do you really think it's likely that good neighborhoods are shaped _primarily_ by factors independent of who lives in them? I know this is possible in the abstract, eg a downtown neighborhood is closer to jobs, a neighborhood with a freeway running through it is rarely cohesive, etc. But this seems dwarfed by the mountains and mountains of data points of neighborhoods transforming dramatically due to shifts in resident demographics, and pretty much every housing-related phenomenon is in line with this: white flight, gentrification, the recent impoverishing of the suburbs etc.
I do not - I was pointing out the contradiction. Although to be fair, the way schools are funded in the US complicates this. If a neighborhood becomes low-income, then the schools will get less funding as well, as I understand it, because schools are funded from neighborhood-level property taxes.
Seems like the really wealthy will still end up with enclaves one way or another.
I think the value of the location of a house for me would be tied to the relative safety, convenience, and nearby opportunities compared to other neighborhoods. None of those things require that people less affluent than me don't live in the same neighborhood. That being said, it might be tough for some of them to afford it, but that's what the housing vouchers are designed to help with in the first place.
Too many Section 8 residents will hurt school scores, which hurts home values, which hurts school scores, ...
I have no idea how many it would take to impact values in such a way. But, the school board meetings I’ve attended show that if nothing else, wealthy parents are fiercely protective of their school districts.
Test scores have a lot to do with parental income, but as you say, that's strongly correlated with money and the things money buys.
It's the chance of a genetically fortunate person (with a great nature-given voice, or intelligence, or strength and perseverance) to become rich through it, and maybe pass it to children. This chance is not very high, of course.
It's funny how even the most restrained statements with any eugenic implications are outright rejected, but people don't bat an eye at Lysenkoism.
If you don't believe that intelligence is at all heritable, then I'm not sure how you would explain why it is that people with genetic defects like Down's syndrome have below average IQs.
In regards to arguing that genetic defects cause lower intelligence, you have to define intelligence. The rate at which certain, particular categories of knowledge are learned? The speed at which knowledge is utilized? Are autistic savants the most intelligent people to have ever lived? People with down syndrome seem adept at reading and responding to body language, in my experience. Precise empathy is certainly a form of intelligence. I think our intelligences are diffuse. In the abscence of how biological data relates to these, we are just pattern matching.
After that, you have to ascertain what is even a factor in those intelligences: the total pool of genes we can draw from, the ways the genes express themselves on or off, or the delicate mosh-pit of biochemistry weaving our personality together. There are too many variables to control for, variables that aren't understood. It seems clear to me that environment dictates more than heritability of genetics. How much more is up for debate, but I'm not confident genes will be adequately contextualized in my lifetime.
"People with Down's syndrome are not less intelligent than average" is the sort of thing that you can only say in an ultra-progressive environment. It would not be taken seriously by most people. Under any reasonable definition of intelligence, those with Down's syndrome have less of it on average.
Your observation about multiple intelligences isn't novel or profound. The interesting thing about intelligence is that different kinds of intelligence are positively correlated (SAT math scores correlate with SAT verbal scores. Musical ability is correlated with mathematical ability. Etc. etc.)
At this point you've just recited the standard college freshman talking points, which tells me that this isn't a subject that you're curious about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
I don't even think a statement like "It seems clear to me that environment dictates more than heritability of genetics" is intelligible. The idea of dividing it into X% genetics versus (100 - X)% environment betrays an incredibly naive understanding of the question.
It's a bit more than that. If you look at all the different measure of intelligence that people have come up with like vocabulary, finding patterns in shapes, SAT scores, etc, and do a factor analysis there seems to be more or less a single factor behind the correlation. Some of these, like vocabulary, have an additional large effect from training. Some, like vocabulary and SAT verbal scores, have a strong correlation independent of the the rest of these varied scores. But in general there seems to be one factor, the hypothetical g, that explains why everything is correlated together. And it seems to explain part of other test results too that don't seem to be what we would normally consider intelligence, like the classic reflex test that measures how long it takes you to press a button after a light turns on.
IQ tests try to measure this 'g' by using a number of different subtests chosen to not respond strongly to practice. But these, like all tests, have a certain amount of noise and shouldn't be taken as absolute truth.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/your-genes-wont-make-yo...
I mean that in a somewhat literal sense: it was once true that "gentleman" meant a man possessing property, a member of the gentry. The section titled Sir George Sitwell in the Wikipedia article on the word "gentleman" is amusing and to the point.
There are rich crooks, yes, but that's beside the point here.
Unless such families make the effort to change their circumstance and save enough to move to the preferable area, programs like this one rob them of their free will.
I don't understand why advocates of progressive programs like this seem to always miss this crucial point. Real, lasting change only comes when people make conscious decisions to improve their lives with no external input whatsoever handed to them. Anything else is anti-competitive and subject to regulatory capture.
>Unless such families make the effort to change their circumstance and save enough to move to the preferable area, programs like this one rob them of their free will.
This is a bizarre claim. Participants were given advice, not forcibly relocated:
>They would also be given information on which neighborhoods promise the most opportunity for their kids, based on the research data. They’d also be assigned “navigators” whose job it was to walk them through the apartment application process, and receive additional financial assistance with down payments if necessary.
that doesn't sound right. most people want to improve their life. it's not about making the decision, but about knowing what steps to take to achieve it. and why wouldn't someone take help for that?
you seem to think that making a conscious decision is all it takes. far from it. in particular, when the steps to achieve it involve time and effort that you don't seem to have time for.
i made a conscious decision to increase my income years ago. it wasn't effective until i found partners who helped me get clients (iaw i found a sales person who would work by sharing profit instead of taking a salary), so that i could focus delivering the service.
There isn't. You didn't buy the house from the government and they don't owe you any right to not meet any poor people. Segregating out the poor from access to quality education just reinforces generational class stagnation- no one can be anything better than their parents were. This is a bad thing for everyone in the long run.
> I’m going to sound like an asshole, but...
Life-tip: if you need to start a sentence with that, chance are it's because what you sound like is reflecting reality.
Ignoring the snark, arguments like these stop making sense when the government is actively tipping the scales by manipulating the housing market in that area. You can make arguments for the morality of it, but arguments along the lines of the government not owing one group something are pretty weak when you're literally supporting the government owing another group something. The government can owe whoever and whatever we want them to owe.
I used to live in a highly integrated neighborhood. The neighbors across the street were section 8. I had no problem with that. What I did have a problem with is when my daughter was playing in the front yard and their son ran outside screaming shooting his rifle as a car peeled out down the street. This was of course on mother’s day while my mother-in-law was on the phone.
We moved to the most expensive neighborhood we could afford after that. And you know what? The worse thing I’ve had to deal with was some neighbors having a slightly heated conversation at 11pm on their front porch.
If that hadn’t been an option, if everywhere had this “affordable housing”, we’d have just moved three hours away and bought 100 acres and lived in a trailer instead. I’m not going to risk my daughters safety to fulfill some equity agenda.
My concern is that class stagnation, where one cannot be anything more than the class they were born to, is a bad thing that we must work hard to prevent from happening. Keeping poor people out of nice schools? That is a thing that causes class stagnation.
> We moved to the most expensive neighborhood we could afford after that.
Right, and what if that neighbourhood had raised prices, locking you out of that option? What if that neighbourhood re-zoned it's school district to ensure no one with less than $K/year income could possibly afford to go there? That's what class stagnation is all about, locking you and your daughter into where you are so that you cannot become anything more than you were born.
Affordable housing means poverty is not isolated in a single, dense community. It gives those born into families with lower incomes the option to go to better schools- as you have with your daughter.
You made it- wouldn't it be good if more people could? Or are you the type to say "Got mine, fuck the rest of you"?
I think the main driver is maybe less living in this area, and more that your kids can go to a great school.
I think if the US ever figures out a way to make the schools for poor people decent or even good, much of the reason for segregation would disappear.
But broadly, the long-term benefits of social programs are to create a richer, more stable society. If one's goal is strictly positional, then other people being less poor is negative, because the whole point is having someone to look down upon. However, you can take some comfort from the "more stable" part, as it means your kids are less likely to get guillotined at some point.
Instead of trying to fix the problem by allowing non-monetary ways to segregate, which would be available to everyone, people are busy trying to universalize the problem.
To answer your question: you're not an asshole, but you're the only one without a broken leg... and we'll break it to make things fair to everyone.
That's exactly what this study ISN'T saying. The entire point of this research is to determine if the reason very poor people stay in very poor neighborhoods is personal preference or other factors. This study found that many poor people would in fact prefer to move from very poor neighborhoods.
Because unfamiliarity breeds contempt.
One of the successes of london is that unlike paris they didn't eject all the poor people to the outskirts in the 1930-70s. this means that even opposite the houses of parliament, there is social housing.
Yes there are sink estates, but they are not whole boroughs (well, kinda, there are stressed areas.)
yes, we still have problems. The police still stop black people because they are "suspicious" (alas we've recently gone backwards)
But they are not stopped because they are in the "wrong area" the whole "Trayvon Martin" effect just doesn't really apply.
TL;DR:
Segregation increases problems, regardless of it being by choice, or by an act of government (ala rhodesia/south africa) unless you socialise with the "other" you are going to continually live in fear/contempt
Doesn't seem terribly surprising. The cultural atmosphere pervading low-income areas is not conducive to academic and financial achievement. Children who see strangers walking down the street at night are not going to have the same attitude towards school and behavior in general as children who see neighbors walking dogs in the morning. Garbage in, garbage out. ANY kid is capable of doing great when they're not surrounded by shit-heads.
> Children who see strangers walking down the street at night[...]
really stands out. I live in a busy neighbourhood, and there are lots of people on foot at all times of day. Yet I somehow doubt it's doing anything to my attitude to education.
Just two nights ago, I actually started to talk to a group when they asked for directions, and two of them had physics PhDs. What a hellhole.
I'm fascinated by this view, and it's the first time I've ever heard it. Can you elaborate as to what you think the connection between seeing strangers outside and educational drive is?