A “nationwide gentrification effect” is segregating us by education
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
And my reaction is: yes, there is inequality, but what we're seeing here is that college graduates are improving their cities. Awesome!
And I really dislike this 30,000-foot view of humanity:
""" "When you have more college grads, all of these amenities seem to improve in your city," Diamond says. "But that may be at the expense of kicking out lower skilled workers to other cities."
It also comes at the expense of other cities that may lose their college grads. What happens to Toledo and Baton Rouge without them? """
I'm not subservient to helping cities-- I'm going to cities because of my own interests, and I absolutely reject any guilt to bringing down those cities. I dislike this attitude that sees people as pawns that we should move around for political goals rather than as people who are just living their lives.
s/He/She
Instead of: Barack Obama is the current president of the United States. He was born in 1961.
Say: Barack Obama is the current president of the United States. They were born in 1961.
Fight the madness of people getting mad over gender of pronouns with a greater degree of madness. It is the only way.
At some point, we may use "they" for everyone, even if known. But at present, it's not accepted even for cases when gender is unknown.
It's likely better to argue for its usage in unknown cases first before making a case for its usage even when gender is known. The latter is a far more radical proposition.
(I use "they" when gender is unknown".)
I was not intending to mock trans people, I was mocking extremists in that group. It's really fucking annoying when you were for gender-neutral pronouns your whole life, took shit for that because nobody wanted to use "clumsy grammar," then you get shit from some trans people who claim that you're erasing their identity:
<quote>Look, if you take gender neutral pronouns and start using them for people that aren’t gender neutral, you are appropriating my and other non-binary people’s pronouns, whatever way you cut it. You’re also erasing and devaluing both binary and non-binary trans* people, who have to fight every single day to be recognised and treated as their gender. This smacks of that whole ridiculous ’gender is irrelevant’ shit. That sentiment ‘gender is irrelevant’? Yeah, it’s trans* erasure.</quote>
I am not the pedant. These people are the pedants. But these are the people you are going to be dealing with when you talk about what pronouns you should use in writing, so you better be aware of it.
On the other hand, once she informed people about her true gender and pronoun preferences then there ought to be no use of "he" in media to refer to Manning. At most, I'd support using "nee" and a reference to her old name for the sake of continuity.
Make no mistake about it, pronoun issues may seem trivial to those not affected, but it's often a deeply distressing and systemic problem for many trans people.
Overall, I like your post. You might be interested in reading about Spivack pronouns - yes, the same Spivack that wrote the well regarded calculus text.
Yes, I got a little carried away. I was trying to say that there are cases where gender of the person is not important. I was trying to come up with a case where the person's gender was not important. In hindsight, since there have been no female POTUS I guess the gender is still relevant.
A little off topic, I respect Barack Obama (not being sarcastic at all even though I probably disagree with him on more issues than I agree with him) and can imagine where he is coming from.
In post-mortem, I'd imagine I was thinking in terms of something like an Overton window where I suggest something so outlandish hoping that we'd settle somewhere saner in between...
There were times, in my country, when they even dared to instruct women to make more children for the state (Eastern Europe, before 1989). It was their "patriotic duty" to make babies. Not to mention that university graduates were distributed by them to whatever city they wanted, at the end of the studies (married students were sent together though). Moving to another city was prohibited generally - for the same reason - they saw people as pawns to move around as they pleased.
For example if to big group of people met without a good reason - it was illegal assembly and the people could be jailed (depending how strict the militiants were). Owning a printing press (or even a writing machine if you weren't a journalist or a writer) was illegal too.
Each individual may have perfectly rational reasons for their behaviour. It can still be interesting to study side effects of their group behaviour.
The gist of the article can easily be lost if you preoccupy yourself with rationalisations about your own feelings about it.
Each individual may have perfectly rational reasons for their behaviour. It can still be interesting to study side effects of their group behaviour." If only they kept it to just "study[ing] side effects of [..] group behaviour". However, all these meta and orbit-view studies' conclusions are used as justification for all sorts of orbital-level intervention that has real-world consequences on individual's behavior and possibly well-being.
The gist, the implications of the article, and any possible government-level consequences need to be preoccupied over! This isn't just some nifty little article we're reading on the internet. This is your entire environment being slowly manipulated by agendas and "reasoned" responses to correct supposed "problems" such as statistical inequality. Be informed.
More broadly, an issue that's "systemic" in that it's observed in a system might not be "systemic" in the sense that something is broken in the system.
Any solution that requires individuals reacting against their own self-interest on a large scale is a complete non-starter, for such a thing would not be Nash Balance. Non-Nash-balanced things can only survive until the first unexpected event, and require ever increasing infusions of energy to save their existence. Even that is only true if you can make it a global intervention. If not, it will simply get out-competed and replaced outright.
Western society is certainly individualist in some senses, especially culturally, and on a micro-level economically as well. I'm not arguing for a fully collectivist society, just to solve systemic problems using systemic approaches. Which we are perfectly capable of doing even in Western culture, using tools like a democratic government.
The notion of acting systemically - rather than merely observing the emergent patterns that the system reflects - seems to be almost a kind of creationist mentality: you need to posit some sort of demiurge that is external to the system, and can therefore treat the system as a singular entity that can be manipulated as an engineer would manipulate the overall parameters of a machine he was working on. But there doesn't appear to exist any such demiurge in real life; human individuals and insitutions are limited to shifting their own particular micro-level behaviors. So how is it even meaningful to speak of acting directly against a complex system's macro-level equilibrium?
The big fallacy of modern political ideologies is to equate the particular insitutions of politics with the emergent equilibrium of society at large. The political state is just another micro-level input into the overall pattern; casting it into the role of a demiurge, and charging it with tweaking the parameters of the macro-level social system generally always leads to failures in the form of unattained goals and unintended consequences.
"But if there is a systemic-level issue, systemic-level intervention is precisely the right response. Individualist attempts to address systemic issues are mostly romanticism."
Systemic level intervention without individuals contributing to the effort will simply be fighting against exponential growth. It'll work really well in the beginning ... and fail.
I am aware that the requirement that any intervention policy must create a Nash balance is an onerous requirement. But you should treat it as a law of nature. It's a requirement that defines reality.
I am simply saying that your claim of government intervention simply fixing things is akin to saying that gravity can be ignored when building bridges. Reality just doesn't work that way. Anything that isn't a Nash balance will crash and burn, just like any bridge that isn't stable under gravity.
What I have in mind as "romanticism" is the more American idea that major societal problems just need some Ingenious Great Men to fix them (maybe together with something vague like "startups" and "innovation"), rather than actual policies.
I would have loved to stick around to here more about the statistical inequality as opposed to other kinds of inequality but I have to go. Best of luck to you.
I have literally heard urban planners cry foul to plans to fund schools with extra money with the idea that you would get a greater return back in taxes as the neighborhood improved because it would 'push out lower income people' and 'ruin otherwise beautifully economically mixed'.
Besides the issue of being theatrically-fulfilling, the nature of something like Starfleet would tend to select against having truly stupid/lazy people there. Even the modern (and for that matter, WWII) U.S. submarine fleets are not cross sections of society, and the technical and training requirements would only seem to have gone up for Starfleet.
I'm presuming the "bred out" thing didn't happen, since the Star Trek canon (and a few episodes, e.g. of DS9) speaks of eugenics as a practice becoming highly disfavored hundreds of years before the events of the various TV shows and movies.
With all that said it is definitely implied that life in the Federation is essential utopian, without lazy/stupid people. Maybe a more knowledgeable Star Trek geek can explain how the show explains it but AFAIK the disparity is never explained by anything more substantial than improved social policies after First Contact.
Honestly the takeaway of this is that questions like "do you want to live in Blade Runner or do you want to live in Star Trek" don't work because Star Trek is more fantasy than science-fiction when it comes to how some of that stuff works.
As others have mentioned, it's just fiction. It's not a roadmap to a destination; it's encouragement to build that destination ourselves.
This alone would pretty much ensure there are no lazy/stupid people. Stupidity is largely a factor of health and education, laziness mostly a factor of social norms (encouragement, expecting success, role models etc.)
What I'm saying is that on average people behave the way you expect them to as long as they know what's expected.
<quote> Various studies have found the heritability of IQ to be between 0.7 and 0.8 in adults and 0.45 in childhood in the United States.[4][7][15] It may seem reasonable to expect that genetic influences on traits like IQ should become less important as one gains experiences with age. However, that the opposite occurs is well documented. </quote>
Most stupidity is a result of poor education, nutrition, pollution, and disease.
It has been estimated that the average person taking an IQ test in 1932 would score 80points using the a 1997 IQ test. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
Ie every society will have 50% of the population that is below the average intelligence. And the lower quartile be considered outright stupid - because the rest of society is not tailored to their needs.
Yeah if you buy what the Minds are selling. (I agree with you and would absolutely live in The Culture, I just felt like playing devil's advocate/discussing the Culture novels).
Except that your decisions about how to live your life are integrally bound up with the infrastructure provided by society as a whole. Individualism isn't exactly what it's cracked up to be.
Being told "no" by society doesn't imply any status of rightness or wrongness, nor is it a reason to get all petulant and start asking "illogically-extending-the-argument" questions.
Go up one or two levels on the scale of life, and we call that cellular freedom "cancer."
Capitalism is the only thing that's really capable of lifting people out of poverty. We need to work with people's selfish desires, not against them.
You left off the part where de facto government granted monopolies helped build the capital base and in many cases directly funded infrastructure investments.
They are also somewhat cherrypicked. If you look at changes over time, you see no relationship between inequality (which has increased) and relative mobility (which has remained flat).
http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/mobility_trends.pdf
You can also get similar correlations if you put single motherhood on the X axis. And if you compare US commuting zones, rather than European countries, you find the correlations are not so strong.
http://www.economics21.org/commentary/great-gastby-curve-rev...
This dogma has penetrated very, very deep amongst techies. The invisible hand seems to be a drop-in replacement for any reflexion about morality for some.
After high school (whether in college or as young adults living on our own), people tend to be more open-minded, plus we are better able to choose our own peer groups. So we tend to find more acceptance.
Sure, some cities may have a more tolerant regard for certain groups (which is actually likely more related to higher concentrations of those groups in the city), however, most of our acceptance comes from the fact that we are no longer in the immense social conformity pressure cooker that is high school in most towns.
But I'm not an ant or a honeybee and I see no reason to think of my fellow humans as worker drones as opposed to a more familial social patterning. Even the elephants, lions and wolves can do that much...
Nowadays, 99% of the time people use his term the exact opposite way. They say it is a hand that gently guides merchants from different nations to trade with one another within a free market, and that such thing. They have twisted his term to mean the exact opposite of how Smith intended it.
I don't see how that's the opposite interpretation from the modern usage. It just seems like the modern usage is a generalization of Smith's usage. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith seems to be saying that an individual favoring domestic industry over foreign industry for purely personal gain tends to be good for domestic industry and society, and perhaps even for foreign industry. The generalized interpretation that people use today is that individuals seeking purely personal gain can result in a market that self-regulates and benefits society. What is the contradiction you're referring to?
Also, in The Wealth of Nations, Smith does describe the more general concept of market self-regulation, though in that section he does not use the phrase "invisible hand." In his earlier book "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," Smith uses the phrase "invisible hand" to refer to the phenomenon that rich people tend to provide livelihoods to the people working for them, not out of altruism, but for personal gain, which is another special case of the general concept of market self-regulation.
Disclaimer: I haven't actually read Smith straight through. I've just read various articles about Smith, and excerpts of his work. I might be missing a lot of context (and please inform me if that's the case), although my general impression of his usage of this phrase is in line with Wikipedia's summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand.
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith says that the actions of the wealthy produce beneficial effects for all of society, as though guided by an invisible hand. This idea is commonly referred to as the "trickle-down effect" today.[2]
In modern economics the term is mostly used to refer to the way in which markets tend to self-regulate,[3] and it's known as THE invisible hand, which is a bit unfortunate since it's such a vague metaphor that it can easily be used to refer to almost any gestalt concept.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations#Book_IV:... "As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it." (Book 4, Chapter 2) [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand#Other_uses_of_t... "The rich … consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species." [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand
Rich people do have nicer stuff but to a surprising extent they just have different stuff. An awful lot of that is zero sum social status signalling, like living in a richer area, or drinking wine, not beer, or gritting your teeth and congratulating your colleague on their kid getting into Princeton, when yours got into Duke.
I'd actually be really surprised if consumption inequality hasn't gone down since the fifties for most physical goods and services.
That's the "for the community" view vs the "for the individual" view. When people start thinking in the second, more selfish, way, households, neighborhoods, cities and countries go downhill quickly.
I think that, paradoxically, as most things in life, it's the "community first" attitude that creates stronger and more empowered individuals. The "self first" attitude, despite the widespread mistrust, fear, hate and selfishness, also results to loneliness, depression, less power (because when you're just by youself you can be crushed more easily by others, etc).
>I dislike this attitude that sees people as pawns that we should move around for political goals rather than as people who are just living their lives.
It's not "political goals". It's solidarity, duty, love, connection, ties, roots, caring for where you live, caring for the neighbor, all those things. It's easy to dismiss them as "chains".
While in this case I do agree with your conclusion, the argument that people should just be able to live their lives is what gave the suburban sprawl, which makes it costlier to offer good services, etc.
Yes, and a lot of these folks are spending the vast majority of their disposable income on housing and discretionary income on the so-called "amenities" mentioned in the article.
Don't get me wrong: it's great to be able to live in a desirable area with high employment, but at the end of the day, it's not what you make, it's what you keep. There are a lot of folks like this guy[1] who confuse cashflow from employment with financial security.
The paltry savings rates in this country aren't just a product of the less educated, lower-wage workers. If you look at national averages, it's pretty obvious that most college graduates aren't doing a great job of converting their higher wages into savings and assets.
What im trying to say is, they do have a huge net benefit, but they may not be financially behaved to actually save it. My former roomate quite a bit of money and spent a great deal of it on alcohol. you could increase his wage, he'd just find a way to spend more. you could decrease his wage, and his spending on those non-accounted things would drop.
Regardless of how I feel about this, I wonder a bit what these numbers would look like if you took the one percent out of the equation. The distribution of wealth right now is totally nuts and concentrated at the very very top. If we were to remove them my suspicion is that it still would be trending up but maybe somewhat less severely.
https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/earnings/call1us...
then the median figure was used.
I'm old enough to have seen that the lifestyle and quality of living for the average college grad has decreased quite a bit over than interval, its just decreased MUCH further for non college grads, who are generally now found only in the trades, unemployed, manual labor, or are special and unusual anecdotal snowflakes. The numbers are of course better because we reward numbers. I'm writing about actual lifestyle and quality of life.
Inherently there's no reason why credentials result in better bartenders, waiters, baristas, receptionists, file clerks, but it does make it somewhat more likely that a given individual will have any job at all.
This gives the article a different tinge. Much as the future is already here, just unevenly distributed, some cities for arbitrary reasons may simply be more or less decayed than others. There may be some survivorship bias such that peculiar theories can be manufactured out of fundamentally random data. That city was in the FIRE business and is now rich, that city was in the automotive business, and isn't rich.
Nursing is now a graduate entry job as are may of the roles I entered the job market from high school.
Thus the remaing jobs avaible to hs diploma kids are lower paid ones.
It's not that hard to make a hamburger-making machine and then make thousands or millions of copies.
Georgia has worked very hard to make Georgia a good state for choosing to go to a local college, and I find it extremely unlikely that a large number of people are being pushed out of Atlanta due to cost of living, its extremely affordable to live in Atlanta, even more so if you consider the greater metro area.
I would argue that payment companies/services like Square are successful in part because they are doing just that. They lower the bar to someone with or without a collage degree starting a small business like a food cart or truck that can thrive in a collage grad heavy city.
Similarly sites that offer reviews make it easier for a business to prosper on merit and reduce the tendency of people to just go to a chain because they know what they will get.
I don't think this is an uphill battle. Surly a neighborhood feels more vibrant alive and inspiring when all the workers (tech and otherwise) are out on the street choosing from many unique options then when they all line up the mcdonald's drive through, starbuck's or the company cafeteria to get the same thing they got yesterday.
So what is the next great start up that helps make this happen?
http://articles.philly.com/2014-07-03/news/51033519_1_lunch-...
The consequence of the food truck growth is that there are now many more mobile, explosive installations of gas in existence as opposed to restaurants which have a contained, inspected, fixed installations of gas.
At what point did we have the conversation as to whether this is a good thing? We didn't.
Disruption isn't automatically a benefit.
However, my point more then being pro food truck or any one business model is that major socio-economic trends like groups of people needing to move away from some cities is indicative of something that might be target by a startup. Who knows, maybe the next big trend is custom manufacturing with same day delivery via 3d printers, skilled laborers and bike messengers leveraging both the concentrated capitol of the educated workers and creating jobs for people who would otherwise have to leave.
[1]: http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/15/us/aging-gas-infrastructure/
Washtenaw is about on par with San Francisco (but also only ~1/3 the population).
I think it's relevant because you don't need all those services to exist in the core of Detroit or a huge migration to get access to lots of educated people.
Generating income becomes the unbridled thing. Sitting on mountains of wealth becomes futile. No dynasties. What have you done for me lately? You can live a king's life by generating obscene earned income, but your kids will only be assured easy street. Their kids only assured middle class. This gives grandpa and grandma a reason to improve the lot of the middle and lower classes.
If you let the lower groups fall too far into despondence, they will eventually come for your heads. You can build prisons to a point. You can create mental prisons to an extent. You can pacify the masses for a long while. Eventually, there's nothing left in the tank. Nothing to lose. Then, you lose stability and your choices are few.
The more your society reflects fiefdoms of the middle ages, the more you'll start seeing royalty thrown from windows and put on stakes.
We have the very wealthy (royalty). We have their military class ready to step in: Gun-coveting believers in the system that amazingly keeps increasing inequality. Then we have a growing base of servants who can't own land or tools of production (education). This looks increasingly familiar.
Or maybe I just have some Dystopia Myopia.
I don't think that's true. People will resort to violence and risk their lives when they're hungry and cold, not because the elite are driving Lamborghinis and they have to make do with Fords. As long as the lower classes have some minimum standard of living, greater and greater wealth inequality is sustainable.
The problem is in the potential for corruption, since your official income number will mean so much more than now.
[1] Krugman on the "zoned zone": http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/20/the-two-americas... (his point about the bubble actually turned out to be probably not completely accurate, but the split in urbanization policy is very real).
(1) The cost of attending college has grown faster than inflation over the past few decades.
(2) Yet, it seems that the ROI on college is high (for those you graduate), as evidenced in this article.
(3) There's another statistic that gets bandied in education reform circles: 43% of college grads in 2013 were underemployed (working jobs that don't need a college degree).
I wonder how #3 reconciles with #1 and #2. Perhaps this is a case of averages lying, and the ROI data for top colleges might look very different from bottom colleges (to the point where there may even be no income disparity between attending a bad college vs. not attending college).
Has anyone seen a better / deeper analysis of this?
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21600131-too-man...
The employers probably "need" employees with at least average intelligence and conscientiousness, for which a college degree (in anything) is a decent proxy.
The ROI of a college degree earned 30 years ago is high. Recent college graduates aren't faring so well. Those who do have jobs are frequently underemployed, living with their parents, and buried under school loans.
Why? Pittsburgh's steel industry, which had tons of well-paid blue-collar union jobs, collapsed in the early 1980s: 'Following the 1981–1982 recession, for example, the mills laid off 153,000 workers.'[0] A lot of the working-age population left in the following years. The main thing remaining were a lot of world-class institutions in healthcare & education (much better than a lot of the Rust Belt, e.g. Detroit/Toledo/Milwaukee), so the people that come to & stay in Pittsburgh today are very well-educated[1]. The older population that had pensions or savings to fall back on when the steel collapse came, and didn't need to relocate for work, is a lot less educated.
[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Pittsburgh#Collapse_... [1]http://nullspace2.blogspot.com/2013/06/education-examined.ht...
I'm wondering if the increase in average wage of non-college degree holders outweighed the higher cost of living in the cities with high concentrations of college degree holders.
If so, not so bad, all boats lifted higher by the tide &c. I suspect that the rise does not outweigh the increased cost of living, especially rents/housing costs. The result is a long commute added onto the day for the people who do not hold college degrees and who work in the chi-chi economy. That process has limits.
Perhaps it needs a generation or two to reach steady-state?
lol what? The whole article reads like someone who has a giant boner for SF. Lots of assumptions that it's an objectively better place to live and obviously everyone wishes they could live there.
Tech job hubs are few and far between. There are only a handful of cities you have to choose from. Toledo and Baton Rouge aren't on the table for tech workers just like SF and NYC aren't on the table for a high school drop out.
If they want people to start taking inequality seriously, the first thing journalists might want to do is to figure out what the hell they're trying to accomplish.