12 ms·

A “nationwide gentrification effect” is segregating us by education

169 points by dctoedt 12y ago

civilian 12y ago
Okay. I'm reading this: "Diamond also found that as cities increased their share of college graduates between 1980 and 2000, they also increased their bars, restaurants, dry cleaners, museums and art galleries per capita. And they experienced larger decreases in pollution and property crime, suggesting that cities that attract college grads benefit from both the kind of amenities that consumers pay for and those that are more intangible." 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.
- _delirium 12y ago
  I don't think Diamond is asking you to make choices that improve society. He's attempting to analyze systemic changes in society accurately. And from that perspective, it is not only appropriate but absolutely required that you look at overall shifts, not just one city in isolation. The extent to which a particular city's improvement is "internal" vs. just zero-sum shifting at the expense of other cities, is pretty relevant to that. If college graduates vs. non-graduates are self-segregating and this explains a large part of the wealth changes in both directions (the places that get more graduates get richer, the places with fewer get poorer), then I think it is not really accurate to say that "college graduates are improving their cities", or at least it is not the whole story. It would be more accurate to analyze it as a migration, something like: college graduates are concentrating in some areas and not others, and wealth flows accordingly. Assuming, again, that systemic flows of educated people are the main causal factor in wealth changes, as Diamond claims.
  - probablycorey 12y ago
    > He's attempting to analyze systemic changes in society accurately. s/He/She
    - pooper 12y ago
      We can probably replace many instances of (s)he or he/she with a singular they. As the Wikipedia article says[1], this is not a recent phenomenon. If using he in a gender-neutral way or in gender ambiguous situations is somehow not politically correct, we should use the word they to replace all instances of he/she or (s)he or he or she where the gender is not important. This is probably the case in over half of our usage of he/she or (s)he or he or 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
      - graeme 12y ago
        I feel like you're making a good argument but have chosen a singularly poor example. Use of "they" is most justified when the gender is unknown. Barack Obama is a very known male. 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".)
        A_COMPUTER 12y ago
        Consider that like Chelsea Manning, at some point in the future Barack Obama may announce she has always been a woman. Also like Chelsea Manning, at that point you would be obligated to alter all past and present references to Barack Obama as "she," or else be guilty of a hateful and cruel misgendering slur. So as a matter of practicality it's probably easier just to use the singular-they in every case so you are being respectful. On the other hand, it still wouldn't be considerate to leave it at "they" if Barack Obama had clearly stated her preferred pronouns, so you might have to change it anyway so now I am not actually sure what advice to give.
- rayiner 12y ago
  I really dislike this idea that we should always elevate individual wants over the overall societal benefit of having integrated societies with low levels of inequality.
  - oldmanjay 12y ago
    I similarly dislike the idea that someone else could, in any capacity, have the power to decide for me how I am going to live my life, even if their decisions are "morally correct" for some values of moral and correct.
    - dctoedt 12y ago
      > I similarly dislike the idea that someone else could, in any capacity, have the power to decide for me how I am going to live my life .... 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.
      - vinceguidry 12y ago
        I don't understand this position. Individualism has given us everything we have as a modern society. Someone had to build the roads, someone had to build the manufacturing pipelines, someone had to build the distribution networks, someone had to build X, and that X was built by someone hoping to get rich doing so, and that someone did, deservedly. 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.
        steveax 12y ago
        Rubbish. Individualism did not build the interstate highway system, or sewer systems or even the internet. Please put down Atlas Shrugged long enough to take a look around you.
        12y ago
- RodericDay 12y ago
  "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." 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.
  - firstOrder 12y ago
    Dogma has penetrated very deep. If you read Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations", the invisible hand is something that intervenes in markets to prevent free trade among merchants from different nations. 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.
    - zo1 12y ago
      Perhaps the definition changed because the invisible hand he described isn't so invisible. It's usually government intervention / foreign trade policy, and it's anything but invisible!
    - baddox 12y ago
      > If you read Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations", the invisible hand is something that intervenes in markets to prevent free trade among merchants from different nations. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand.
- xorcist 12y ago
  Why did you bring guilt into question? 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.
  - zo1 12y ago
    "Why did you bring guilt into question? 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.
    - xorcist 12y ago
      So you do not wish to understand the issues involved because they might lead to "government-level consequences", including "orbital-level intervention". Yeah, good to know that college degree of yours wasn't wasted. 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.
      - autokad 12y ago
        no, but unless you push back the moment they start preaching the right and wrongness, then they will use it to implement government policy to push their ideals, probably at 'your' expense. you may not be able to see what the article is doing, but many of us know too well. 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'.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- noonespecial 12y ago
  So is it a zero-sum deal? If there is a certain "type" of person that makes cities better when they are present can we make more of this type? Or must we simply choose between moving them all to a few special extra-nice cities and scattering them out so that all cities are equally mediocre?
- visarga 12y ago
  > 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. 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.
  - erichocean 12y ago
    Out of curiosity, did that "community first" attitude create stronger and more empowered individuals?
    - ajuc 12y ago
      It wasn't community first. It was state first. Communities as people in "the west" understand them would often be illegal behind Iron Curtain. 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.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
- benatkin 12y ago
  The author is arguing that "improving their cities" is like "improving their school districts". Not entirely a positive thing to progressives.
- rtpg 12y ago
  >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. 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.
- kenjackson 12y ago
  A lot of people do care about helping other people. It is fantastic that you are not one of them but I find it an odd, yet more common theme now, that they like to celebrate this characteristic of themselves..
- coldtea 12y ago
  >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. 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".
asdkl234890 12y ago
I am not sure how that could be prevented without reducing inequality. And I don't see how to raise the income of lower educated people in a world which is ever more automated.
- pistle 12y ago
  Progressive taxation on wealth (not income). Then, mess with the curve of progressiveness. 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.
  - aianus 12y ago
    > 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. 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.
    - 12y ago
mattdeboard 12y ago
There's another article on the front page right now, http://www.venturedlife.com/episode-three http://www.venturedlife.com/episode-three that suggests Detroit could be the next Silicon Valley. I'd like to see an analysis of THAT article in the context of the findings reported on in THIS article.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  Oakland and Washtenaw counties (adjacent to the county Detroit is in) have college graduates at rates far higher than the national average. 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.
7Figures2Commas 12y ago
> They're gaining access to high-cost cities like New York or San Francisco that offer so much more than good jobs: more restaurants, better schools, less crime, even cleaner air. 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. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5505622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5505622
- autokad 12y ago
  i dont think that is fair. just because they are not taking advantage of their improved situation doesnt mean they dont have a situational advantage. 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.
- Chronic28 12y ago
  It is foolish to look solely at savings rates. What about all the intangibles the rich, college grads implicitly pay to build their network and make them smarter?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
placeybordeaux 12y ago
What degree of this is just how many college students is a city able to attract? 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.
- dkural 12y ago
  This is a very good point. There are cities like Atlanta and Chicago that offer good jobs, good amenities and don't suffer in the same way - a large reason is ease of developing housing in areas there are demand. Boston, SF, NYC come with many unnecessary restrictions so supply is not able to shoot up with demand. Ed Glaser's book "Triumph of the City" discussed many of these issues.
vinceguidry 12y ago
This just in: Rich people have better lives and are happier than poor people! Film at 11. 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.
- cauterized 12y ago
  What if what the journalists are trying to accomplish is to make information available to people and prompt dialogue about the issues -- whatever the outcome of that dialogue?
gautambay 12y ago
Interesting to note that (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?
- tdeitch 12y ago
  The Economist published a chart in April showing some of the (American) colleges with the highest and lowest rates of return on investment over twenty years. The article admits that the study "surely overstates the financial value of a college education" because it compares college graduates to non-attendees without trying to adjust for differences in intelligence, etc., so take it for what it's worth. http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21600131-too-many-degrees-are-waste-money-return-higher-education-would-be-much-better http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21600131-too-man...
- cko 12y ago
  Perhaps it's not the "going to college" that puts one at an advantage, but the "being able to go to college." In other words, the people who are able to make the choice to go and afford it were already at an advantageous position.
  - seanflyon 12y ago
    That makes sense, but I don't think it is as big of a factor as the actual value of education. Our economy is increasingly shifting to skilled labor. If you have the right skill set, opportunities abound.
    - dllthomas 12y ago
ars 12y ago
Pittsburgh is quite an outlier on those charts. Anyone know why?
- trackofalljades 12y ago
  Pittsburgh is a pretty amazing place right now, because it's a recovering rust belt city that's managed to transition from manufacturing (steel) to services (health care, banking, higher education, technology firms) pretty well but because their initial crash was SO hard they still have very affordable cost-of-living comparitively. So you have all the public transit and nice museums and great libraries and all that but a bartender and a waitress can buy a house and raise kids together too. It's someplace where "hipsters" are not secretly living off their parents' money to front as making it.
- akgerber 12y ago
  Pittsburgh has really weird demographics, with an uneducated older population, an educated younger population, a big gap in middle-aged population, and a massive housing surplus. 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_of_steel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Pittsburgh#Collapse_... [1]http://nullspace2.blogspot.com/2013/06/education-examined.html http://nullspace2.blogspot.com/2013/06/education-examined.ht...
dmritard96 12y ago
"Census data suggests that in 1980 a college graduate could expect to earn about 38 percent more than a worker with only a high-school diploma. Since then, the difference in their wages has only widened as our economy has shifted to bestow greater and greater rewards on the well-educated. By 2000, that number was about 57 percent. By 2011: 73 percent." 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.
- withdavidli 12y ago
  Didn't think of this, very good point. I also have a feeling this is by gross income. When we factor in college debt I think it will level off a lot more.
- autokad 12y ago
  This article doesnt state what census figure explicitly it was pulling from; however, its the norm to use median household income (or some other median value) as to not be skewed by outliers. In that case, removing the top 1% wouldnt make a difference.
  - vannevar 12y ago
    Yes, if it was from here: https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/earnings/call1usboth.html https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/earnings/call1us... then the median figure was used.
- VLM 12y ago
  "has shifted to bestow greater and greater rewards on the well-educated." 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.
forrestthewoods 12y ago
"They're gaining access to high-cost cities like New York or San Francisco that offer so much more than good jobs: more restaurants, better schools, less crime, even cleaner air." 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.
keithpeter 12y ago
"A higher share of college graduates also yielded higher wages for workers without college degrees, likely because employers have to pay them more to keep them in higher-cost cities:" 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?
micro_cam 12y ago
This being hacker news I would ask if this is an inefficiency ready to be taken advantage of or a system ready to be disrupted? 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?
- bsder 12y ago
  Choice is good, until the food truck explodes ... http://articles.philly.com/2014-07-03/news/51033519_1_lunch-truck-3rd-street-14-year-old-boy 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.
  - micro_cam 12y ago
    Interesting point but I think the recent gas main explosion in new york and the fervor over our aging, difficult to inspect and dangerous gas mains (the one in question was 127 years old) needs to weighed if your going to argue safety. [1] Reputable propane fillers will only fill gas tanks that have been recently inspected and even the largest mobil tank only holds a limited amount of gas compared to what can be released when something connected to a main leaks. 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/ http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/15/us/aging-gas-infrastructure/
webmaven 12y ago
Interesting article and data, it is basically a deep and narrow dive into one of the issues tacked by the 2008 book 'The Big Sort': http://www.thebigsort.com/ http://www.thebigsort.com/

169 points by dctoedt 12y ago

Okay. I'm reading this: "Diamond also found that as cities increased their share of college graduates between 1980 and 2000, they also increased their bars, restaurants, dry cleaners, museums and art galleries per capita. And they experienced larger decreases in pollution and property crime, suggesting that cities that attract college grads benefit from both the kind of amenities that consumers pay for and those that are more intangible." 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.

_delirium 12y ago
I don't think Diamond is asking you to make choices that improve society. He's attempting to analyze systemic changes in society accurately. And from that perspective, it is not only appropriate but absolutely required that you look at overall shifts, not just one city in isolation. The extent to which a particular city's improvement is "internal" vs. just zero-sum shifting at the expense of other cities, is pretty relevant to that. If college graduates vs. non-graduates are self-segregating and this explains a large part of the wealth changes in both directions (the places that get more graduates get richer, the places with fewer get poorer), then I think it is not really accurate to say that "college graduates are improving their cities", or at least it is not the whole story. It would be more accurate to analyze it as a migration, something like: college graduates are concentrating in some areas and not others, and wealth flows accordingly. Assuming, again, that systemic flows of educated people are the main causal factor in wealth changes, as Diamond claims.
- probablycorey 12y ago
  > He's attempting to analyze systemic changes in society accurately. s/He/She
  - pooper 12y ago
    We can probably replace many instances of (s)he or he/she with a singular they. As the Wikipedia article says[1], this is not a recent phenomenon. If using he in a gender-neutral way or in gender ambiguous situations is somehow not politically correct, we should use the word they to replace all instances of he/she or (s)he or he or she where the gender is not important. This is probably the case in over half of our usage of he/she or (s)he or he or 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
    - graeme 12y ago
      I feel like you're making a good argument but have chosen a singularly poor example. Use of "they" is most justified when the gender is unknown. Barack Obama is a very known male. 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".)
      - A_COMPUTER 12y ago
        Consider that like Chelsea Manning, at some point in the future Barack Obama may announce she has always been a woman. Also like Chelsea Manning, at that point you would be obligated to alter all past and present references to Barack Obama as "she," or else be guilty of a hateful and cruel misgendering slur. So as a matter of practicality it's probably easier just to use the singular-they in every case so you are being respectful. On the other hand, it still wouldn't be considerate to leave it at "they" if Barack Obama had clearly stated her preferred pronouns, so you might have to change it anyway so now I am not actually sure what advice to give.
rayiner 12y ago
I really dislike this idea that we should always elevate individual wants over the overall societal benefit of having integrated societies with low levels of inequality.
- oldmanjay 12y ago
  I similarly dislike the idea that someone else could, in any capacity, have the power to decide for me how I am going to live my life, even if their decisions are "morally correct" for some values of moral and correct.
  - dctoedt 12y ago
    > I similarly dislike the idea that someone else could, in any capacity, have the power to decide for me how I am going to live my life .... 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.
    - vinceguidry 12y ago
      I don't understand this position. Individualism has given us everything we have as a modern society. Someone had to build the roads, someone had to build the manufacturing pipelines, someone had to build the distribution networks, someone had to build X, and that X was built by someone hoping to get rich doing so, and that someone did, deservedly. 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.
      - steveax 12y ago
        Rubbish. Individualism did not build the interstate highway system, or sewer systems or even the internet. Please put down Atlas Shrugged long enough to take a look around you.
        12y ago
RodericDay 12y ago
"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." 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.
- firstOrder 12y ago
  Dogma has penetrated very deep. If you read Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations", the invisible hand is something that intervenes in markets to prevent free trade among merchants from different nations. 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.
  - zo1 12y ago
    Perhaps the definition changed because the invisible hand he described isn't so invisible. It's usually government intervention / foreign trade policy, and it's anything but invisible!
  - baddox 12y ago
    > If you read Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations", the invisible hand is something that intervenes in markets to prevent free trade among merchants from different nations. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand.
xorcist 12y ago
Why did you bring guilt into question? 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.
- zo1 12y ago
  "Why did you bring guilt into question? 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.
  - xorcist 12y ago
    So you do not wish to understand the issues involved because they might lead to "government-level consequences", including "orbital-level intervention". Yeah, good to know that college degree of yours wasn't wasted. 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.
    - autokad 12y ago
      no, but unless you push back the moment they start preaching the right and wrongness, then they will use it to implement government policy to push their ideals, probably at 'your' expense. you may not be able to see what the article is doing, but many of us know too well. 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'.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
noonespecial 12y ago
So is it a zero-sum deal? If there is a certain "type" of person that makes cities better when they are present can we make more of this type? Or must we simply choose between moving them all to a few special extra-nice cities and scattering them out so that all cities are equally mediocre?
visarga 12y ago
> 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. 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.
- erichocean 12y ago
  Out of curiosity, did that "community first" attitude create stronger and more empowered individuals?
  - ajuc 12y ago
    It wasn't community first. It was state first. Communities as people in "the west" understand them would often be illegal behind Iron Curtain. 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.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
benatkin 12y ago
The author is arguing that "improving their cities" is like "improving their school districts". Not entirely a positive thing to progressives.
rtpg 12y ago
>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. 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.
kenjackson 12y ago
A lot of people do care about helping other people. It is fantastic that you are not one of them but I find it an odd, yet more common theme now, that they like to celebrate this characteristic of themselves..
coldtea 12y ago
>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. 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".

asdkl234890 12y ago

I am not sure how that could be prevented without reducing inequality. And I don't see how to raise the income of lower educated people in a world which is ever more automated.

pistle 12y ago
Progressive taxation on wealth (not income). Then, mess with the curve of progressiveness. 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.
- aianus 12y ago
  > 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. 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.
  - 12y ago

mattdeboard 12y ago

There's another article on the front page right now, http://www.venturedlife.com/episode-three http://www.venturedlife.com/episode-three that suggests Detroit could be the next Silicon Valley. I'd like to see an analysis of THAT article in the context of the findings reported on in THIS article.

maxerickson 12y ago
Oakland and Washtenaw counties (adjacent to the county Detroit is in) have college graduates at rates far higher than the national average. 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.

7Figures2Commas 12y ago

> They're gaining access to high-cost cities like New York or San Francisco that offer so much more than good jobs: more restaurants, better schools, less crime, even cleaner air. 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. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5505622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5505622

autokad 12y ago
i dont think that is fair. just because they are not taking advantage of their improved situation doesnt mean they dont have a situational advantage. 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.
Chronic28 12y ago
It is foolish to look solely at savings rates. What about all the intangibles the rich, college grads implicitly pay to build their network and make them smarter?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

placeybordeaux 12y ago

What degree of this is just how many college students is a city able to attract? 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.

dkural 12y ago
This is a very good point. There are cities like Atlanta and Chicago that offer good jobs, good amenities and don't suffer in the same way - a large reason is ease of developing housing in areas there are demand. Boston, SF, NYC come with many unnecessary restrictions so supply is not able to shoot up with demand. Ed Glaser's book "Triumph of the City" discussed many of these issues.

vinceguidry 12y ago

This just in: Rich people have better lives and are happier than poor people! Film at 11. 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.

cauterized 12y ago
What if what the journalists are trying to accomplish is to make information available to people and prompt dialogue about the issues -- whatever the outcome of that dialogue?

gautambay 12y ago

Interesting to note that (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?

tdeitch 12y ago
The Economist published a chart in April showing some of the (American) colleges with the highest and lowest rates of return on investment over twenty years. The article admits that the study "surely overstates the financial value of a college education" because it compares college graduates to non-attendees without trying to adjust for differences in intelligence, etc., so take it for what it's worth. http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21600131-too-many-degrees-are-waste-money-return-higher-education-would-be-much-better http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21600131-too-man...
cko 12y ago
Perhaps it's not the "going to college" that puts one at an advantage, but the "being able to go to college." In other words, the people who are able to make the choice to go and afford it were already at an advantageous position.
- seanflyon 12y ago
  That makes sense, but I don't think it is as big of a factor as the actual value of education. Our economy is increasingly shifting to skilled labor. If you have the right skill set, opportunities abound.
  - dllthomas 12y ago

ars 12y ago

Pittsburgh is quite an outlier on those charts. Anyone know why?

trackofalljades 12y ago
Pittsburgh is a pretty amazing place right now, because it's a recovering rust belt city that's managed to transition from manufacturing (steel) to services (health care, banking, higher education, technology firms) pretty well but because their initial crash was SO hard they still have very affordable cost-of-living comparitively. So you have all the public transit and nice museums and great libraries and all that but a bartender and a waitress can buy a house and raise kids together too. It's someplace where "hipsters" are not secretly living off their parents' money to front as making it.
akgerber 12y ago
Pittsburgh has really weird demographics, with an uneducated older population, an educated younger population, a big gap in middle-aged population, and a massive housing surplus. 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_of_steel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Pittsburgh#Collapse_... [1]http://nullspace2.blogspot.com/2013/06/education-examined.html http://nullspace2.blogspot.com/2013/06/education-examined.ht...

dmritard96 12y ago

"Census data suggests that in 1980 a college graduate could expect to earn about 38 percent more than a worker with only a high-school diploma. Since then, the difference in their wages has only widened as our economy has shifted to bestow greater and greater rewards on the well-educated. By 2000, that number was about 57 percent. By 2011: 73 percent." 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.

withdavidli 12y ago
Didn't think of this, very good point. I also have a feeling this is by gross income. When we factor in college debt I think it will level off a lot more.
autokad 12y ago
This article doesnt state what census figure explicitly it was pulling from; however, its the norm to use median household income (or some other median value) as to not be skewed by outliers. In that case, removing the top 1% wouldnt make a difference.
- vannevar 12y ago
  Yes, if it was from here: https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/earnings/call1usboth.html https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/earnings/call1us... then the median figure was used.
VLM 12y ago
"has shifted to bestow greater and greater rewards on the well-educated." 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.

forrestthewoods 12y ago

"They're gaining access to high-cost cities like New York or San Francisco that offer so much more than good jobs: more restaurants, better schools, less crime, even cleaner air." 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.

keithpeter 12y ago

"A higher share of college graduates also yielded higher wages for workers without college degrees, likely because employers have to pay them more to keep them in higher-cost cities:" 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?

micro_cam 12y ago

This being hacker news I would ask if this is an inefficiency ready to be taken advantage of or a system ready to be disrupted? 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?

bsder 12y ago
Choice is good, until the food truck explodes ... http://articles.philly.com/2014-07-03/news/51033519_1_lunch-truck-3rd-street-14-year-old-boy 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.
- micro_cam 12y ago
  Interesting point but I think the recent gas main explosion in new york and the fervor over our aging, difficult to inspect and dangerous gas mains (the one in question was 127 years old) needs to weighed if your going to argue safety. [1] Reputable propane fillers will only fill gas tanks that have been recently inspected and even the largest mobil tank only holds a limited amount of gas compared to what can be released when something connected to a main leaks. 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/ http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/15/us/aging-gas-infrastructure/

webmaven 12y ago

Interesting article and data, it is basically a deep and narrow dive into one of the issues tacked by the 2008 book 'The Big Sort': http://www.thebigsort.com/ http://www.thebigsort.com/