Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Stone: Diversity didn’t cause the baby bust
A new paper proposes that increasing diversity explains 90% of the recent decline in birthrates. Lyman Stone says it's nonsense.
Liberalizing Cities
From The Ground Up
Tag diversity
Confounding Diversity with Segregation Again
In July, I showed that an otherwise careful group of researchers at the Othering and Belonging Institute were using a measure of statistical racial segregation that confounds diversity with segregation. Briefly, regions with more variety in the racial makeup of their neighborhoods will show up as statistically “segregated.” Regions where all neighborhoods are pretty similar will show up as statistically “integrated.” To their credit, the study authors corresponded with me at length and adjusted their Technical Appendix to emphasize limitations that I had pointed out. Today, Mark Zandi, Dante DeAntonio, Kwame Donaldson, and Matt Colyar of Moody’s Analytics released a much less careful study purporting to show the “macroeconomic benefits of racial integration.” But if one were to make the mistake of taking their study at all seriously it would lead one to the opposite conclusion: mostly-white counties do better economically. They discovered white privilege and mislabeled it “integration.” (When economists talk about “segregation” statistically, they mean differences in racial proportions across neighborhoods. This is not the same as the de jure segregation regime imposed in the American South. It’s not even the de facto segregation that persists in some neighborhoods today.) The easiest way to see Zandi et al’s mistake is to work backwards from the table of county results they (helpfully) published. The most integrated county in America, in their analysis, is Kennebec County, Maine. It’s 94.6% white. The rest of the most-integrated counties are similarly pallid – with the exception of Webb County, Texas, which is 95% Hispanic. In each of these counties, integration is a mathematical product of the lack of diversity. With hardly any minorities, hardly any neighborhood can diverge from the dominant group. These extreme counties aren’t an accident. Whereas most researchers treat metropolitan areas together, Zandi’s team worked with counties. Several of their […]
Is Diversity “Segregation”?
Headlines last month proclaimed that “Cities Have Grown More Diverse, And More Segregated, Since the 90s.” The headlines originate in the key findings of a new, detailed study from the Othering and Belonging Institute (OBI) at UC Berkeley. The study leans heavily on a relatively new metric – the Divergence Index – which has impressed many researchers (myself included) with its versatility. But now that we have seen the Divergence Index in action, its versatility clearly comes at a cost: the Divergence Index conflates what we would intuitively call diversity with “segregation.” As a result, more-diverse metro areas are usually ranked as more segregated by the Divergence Index. And as America became far more diverse over the past 30 years, it is logical that the Divergence Index would rise in most metro areas. Why is it so hard to measure segregation? Racial segregation is easy to see. You walk down the street and almost everybody in one neighborhood looks different than you and almost everybody in another neighborhood looks the same as you. The human eye and ear can also distinguish categories that are meaningful in some contexts but not others. Everybody but me in the café where I watched European soccer last week appeared to be not only Black but specifically Ethiopian. Was that café integrated or segregated? I certainly felt welcome as I bantered at the bar with an Ethiopian-American tennis instructor. But statistically, the café was far more Black and vastly more Ethiopian than the D.C. region as a whole. In this context, “segregation” refers to places where one group is overrepresented – like the café – not to the legal regime that imposed second-class citizenship and pervaded every aspect of life for black Americans. Given the word’s loaded history, it would have been wiser for social […]
Rothbard the Urbanist Part 5: Diversity and Discrimination
This 5th installment of the Rothbard Series dovetails well with the most recent post on segregation by guest blogger, Stephen Smith, as well as a post back in July over at Austin Contrarian. If you haven’t kept up with our discussion, Murray Rothbard’s classic For A New Liberty can be downloaded free from Mises.org as pdf, web page, and audio book, and you can read the first four parts: Rothbard the Urbanist Part 1: Public Education’s Role in Sprawl and Exclusion Rothbard the Urbanist Part 2: Safe Streets Rothbard the Urbanist Part 3: Prevention of Blockades Rothbard the Urbanist Part 4: Policing In the comments of the first post of this series on public education’s roll in segregation, the discussion delved into the topic of discrimination. Bill Nelson and I shared our thoughts on discrimination by co-op boards, while another guest inquired about my statement, “elitist institutions often exclude others to their own detriment” (Rothbard’s words further below make a similar case) I also referred the guest to a great article on the economics of discrimination and a snippet from an article discussing how private streetcar companies fought discrimination: The Market Resists Discrimination The resistance of southern streetcar companies to ordinances requiring them to segregate black passengers vividly illustrates how the market motivates businesses to avoid unfair discrimination. Before the segregation laws were enacted, most streetcar companies voluntarily segregated tobacco users, not black people. Nonsmokers of either race were free to ride where they wished, but smokers were relegated to the rear of the car or to the outside platform. The revenue gains from pleased nonsmokers apparently outweighed any losses from disgruntled smokers. Streetcar companies refused, however, to discriminate against black people because separate cars would have reduced their profits. They resisted even after the passage of turn-of-the-century laws requiring […]
