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Comment by shasta | Hacker News Reader

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_profile_of_Detroit

Here's this information in graphical form: https://spreadsheets.google.com/oimg?key=0AmvRYjkKmN-udGpOZk...

Note that this includes only the white/black/asian numbers, and the total is adjusted accordingly.

Very interesting to view the chart of the percentages for different ethnicities: https://spreadsheets.google.com/oimg?key=0AqDMNINEecZvdEZWOT...

Note: this chart includes "Others or Mixed", but not "Foreign Born" which to subset of the other categories (i.e. some from each category are foreign born).

Also made a chart like yours with "Others or Mixed" included to match the percentage chart above: https://spreadsheets.google.com/oimg?key=0AqDMNINEecZvdEZWOT...

A much more interesting chart is here:

http://www.freep.com/article/20110323/NEWS01/103230444/Detro...

Notice the blue areas of 20% growth. These are areas where young people are moving in. Around downtown and the midtown area near Wayne State.

Tricky color scheme. What bizarre thinking leads to using dark red to represent less loss than light red? It doesn't even line up with using dark blue to represent more gain than light blue.

The data the chart is representing is interesting though; I don't mean to imply that you were wrong about that.

I'm not sure what this is supposed to say. Can you put a comment with your link?

The original article says that Detroit has gone through economic changes and he is just pointing out that it has gone through demographic changes as well. I don't think he needs to add any comments to it, the link speaks for itself

Changes in age and education levels might be interesting, but that article only covers race. What value does it add to the conversation?

Reading this thread, the historical demographic trends were very interesting. Do you think they are irrelevant? If so, please explain why.

Very interesting that from at least the 1850s right up until the 1930s more than a third of the population were immigrants. I would say most of these were from Canada, based on my own study of immigration patterns and knowing it was extremely easy to immigrate from Canada to the US during that period.

Also very interesting that population peaked in the 1950s even though the American auto industry did not go into decline until the 1960s.

> Reading this thread, the historical demographic trends were very interesting. Do you think they are irrelevant? If so, please explain why.

I'll bite. I don't find skin color particularly interesting, nor am I interested in it as a demographic distinction. I think skin color is used as a proxy indicator for things like culture, class, and income. I believe this is generally for expediency's sake (i.e. it is easy to measure and observe).

Ignoring the expediency benefits, I think the focus on skin color and comments such as yours perpetuate the distinction's hold on our global psyche, to our global detriment.

I'm torn on this issue. Socioeconomic class is of towering importance, and has been neglected in favor of pure race for far too long; but racism is very real, and remains a potent force worldwide. It is counter-productive, I think, to look through either lens exclusively.

What specifically is it about my comment that you found to "perpetuate the distinction's hold on our global psyche, to our global detriment"?

At least with education, There is a strong correlation between race and education, namely blacks are less likely to be well-educated than whites. Connect that with income and you are not only seeing a drop in population, but very likely a steep drop in overall tax revenue necessary for Detroit to rebuild itself.

The people leaving Detroit are mostly white, so not only is population going down but the city is becoming "blacker".

No, mostly black people are leaving Detroit. Most of the "white flight" occurred in the 1970's and 1980's.

Actually, if you take a look at the chart, you'll see that the population of black people is stable from the 80s to the 00s, and has only been reducing in the past 10 years. Versus the white population that has been halving every 10 years since the 70s.

For comparison, the 2010 numbers that correspond with (some of) this list — from the US Census American Fact Finder: http://bit.ly/dIfLJN

You can probably dig up other useful figures if you poke around enough: http://factfinder2.census.gov/ (it’s listed under "Detroit city, Michigan")

Striking how quickly the population has dwindled over the past twenty years.

that's... interesting. Are there other examples of this kind reciprocal pattern in US (or maybe Canada)?

he's implying that black people are killing detroit. Look at the population of whites to blacks from 1820 to 2000.

That was my assumption, but also why I asked for clarification. I try not to take the worst possible interpretation as truth. But if that's the case, I would just point out Atlanta. It's half-black and doing fine. So it'd be silly to claim.

"Blackness" seems like a poor metric for economic vibrancy.

When I moved from Europe to America, my neighborhood went black. White flight seemed to kill all the businesses around my neighborhood. The "Blackness" of an area can't be ignored but it doesn't account for Detroit's problems.

America has "black" problems that Europe may not have.

look Europe has a problem in accepting non western cultures, lets not enter into that useless debate here on HN..

Europe does. But I realize the way that I put it was not constructive.

There is no debate. In Europe, they have a problem of communication between classes. In America, we have a problem of communication between communities. One society is not better than the other. That is same tired old "debate" that we should avoid here.

No he's not. Correlation is not causation.

ie. just because Detroit is going through economic changes and the proportion of black people in Detroit has increased across the same period, that does not necessarily mean those black people are responsible for said economic changes.

When I looked at the link I thought he was trying to show that Detroit's been in decline for a long time. I guess it's like a Rorschach ink blot.

I wasn't implying anything. I was linking to data that I found interesting. Black populations have been increasing (though have recently plateaued). It's the whites that have been decreasing since ~1950.

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