In the first study referenced I’m quite certain that a huge lurking variable is the concienciousness and executive function of the parents on a big 5 personality test. If youre poor and you move from a poor neighborhood to a rich neighborhood you’re probably doing it with some intent to better the life of you and your family, you’re likely leaving a community with connections and it’s a very intentional choice to take a short term cost for longer term gain. You’re selecting against the types of people who would be the classic low SES nuisances/anti social actors that people want to spend money to avoid. It’s not a study but I’m quite aware of a few sets of issues in public housing in SF where a bottom 1% in concienciousness person ruins the experience for everyone else in the building by smoking meth, blasting music all day, screaming a ton and having shady associates come and go, or in another story a person in the affordable part of a nice building opened some kind of a giant water faucet for fire fighting on the 20th floor and and everyone on floors 15-20 had to be moved out to hotels for a few months while everything was repaired. I’d take a proceed with caution approach to any policy here, and I’d be more open to expansion if it was more broadly acceptable to deal with anti social/nusiance behavior vs accepting it.
It's not that I don't believe you, but it's tricky that the logic starts with "it is bad for kids to grow up around a lot of poor people" and goes to "so we would like to move some poor people into your wealthier neighborhood." Y'know? It's like every point of evidence for why the kids should get out of the bad neighborhood ALSO works as a point against bringing those people into YOUR neighborhood.
In the opener there's a line about "the benefits of integration — for the rich in addition to the poor" but when I read it, I did not really find those benefits for the rich. Without a tradeoff, this becomes just charity work and I worry it will not really happen.
BTW in terms of solutions - I love magnet schools and other specialized schools that bring people from different backgrounds together based on exceptional ability. As someone who grew up poor but tested into a fancy school, this was a great way to get contact with upper class people on terms that started by acknowledging that I was an equal re performance.
I would guess that there is a big difference between a neighborhood with demographics roughly matching the national proportion of rich/middle/poor people and a neighborhood that's entirely poor people, such that changing a school from 0% poor to 30% poor doesn't significantly harm the remaining 70%.
This doesn't seem that strange to me. In both bodily health and social health, many good things are effective in low doses and bad symptoms only occur when they are entirely absent. Likewise, a healthy system can often absorb stresses that would completely destroy a bad system. We often see this pattern in immigration in the United States. Undocumented immigrants and refugees typically come from vastly poorer and more violent countries, but their presence doesn't usually worsen the communities they live in. This isn't to say that integration never comes with growing pains, but they are usually milder than feared.
Well... But your own words are "doesn't significantly harm the remaining 70%" - you are already stipulating that the impact is negative, or at least definitely not positive!
I'm also not sure choosing the example of undocumented immigration makes the point that you might hope. Undocumented immigration has turned into a major ugly political issue! The people do NOT like it, it seems.
Overall you're structuring an argument like "You well off people are fine - you can take this" and I really do not think that is the mood of the voters.
It's true that Milan mostly finds concrete economic gains for the poor kids and the rich kids' gains are more intangible and this will make integration a harder sell. A policy that significantly benefits one half of the population while not affecting the other half or causing a brief inconvenience to the other half is still positive sum.
> Undocumented immigration has turned into a major ugly political issue! The people do NOT like it, it seems.
But easy immigration into a country has been proven to be positive sum by the general weight of economic literature. The narrative that they spread large amounts of crime and steal jobs is empirically false. People dislike it mostly because of prejudice and negative media coverage that convinces them these things are true, not their actual experiences. That's a thing to consider when deciding political goals, but that doesn't mean high immigration rates are truly bad for a country.
As another example, the case of post-Brown education integration is worth returning to. White and black kids going to school is normal now and we haven't seen white academic performance drop for white kids. White kids didn't see an immediate statistical boost in their own lives, but the economy is undeniably richer now that talented black people aren't consigned to menial labor.
If “it’s just propaganda and bigotry“ worked as a persuasive tactic, then the last decade of US history would look very different. That is assuming that it is *true* that their opinions aren’t driven by experience. Annecdotally, I know at least one person who had difficulty finding a job because she did not speak Spanish, and her area had seen enough immigration lately that it hurt her in the job hunt.
And frankly, “it’s positive sum overall” is still a hard sell. You are asking for altruism, which can work…if the beneficiaries are sympathetic. But that doesn’t work if you frame your argument in terms of benefits for all parties, and then apparently forget to mention the benefits to one party at all
I don't necessarily disagree with the arguments laid forth in this article, but I do think some of the framing (mostly from Chetty's study) is a little misleading. Like, this article talks about "integration" but it seems like the bulk of it is a lot less about actually bringing rich and poor people together, and more just about busing a few poor kids into rich neighborhoods. Apart from one line about HOPE IV, there's no talk about busing rich kids into poor neighborhoods, or even generally just having a distribution that is more uniform. As another commenter mentioned, the discussed benefits are entirely incurred by the poor kids from being exposed to rich kids, and none in the opposite direction.
Part of this is that it relies on Chetty's study, which I find similarly misleading. He denotes his metric as "economic connectedness", and describes it as a sort of symmetric quantity: "The degree to which low-income and high-income people are friends with each other." As a gut check, I wanted to compare my socioeconomically diverse high school to the neighboring homogeneous, wealthy high schools in southwestern CT. To my surprise, extremely white and wealthy high schools like Darien HS, New Canaan HS, and Staples HS scored above 90% on this "economic connectedness" metric while my high school (Brien McMahon HS in Norwalk) scored in the 60s. I promise you that no one would describe any of those schools as places where "low income and high income people are friends with each other".
But that's because the _real_ definition as listed elsewhere on the website is "the share of high (above-median) income friends among people with low (below-median) incomes", which is an incredibly asymmetric measure, and, as with the schools above, greatly benefits schools that are almost entirely rich and have a handful of low-income students (Darien, for one, has a program similar to the MTO one you mention).
So in my mind the case is a lot less "integration and increased economic connectedness is good for everyone", and more "busing a few poor kids into rich neighborhoods increases their economic outcomes down the line".
To echo other commenters, you frame things in terms of the common good but the benefits seem one-sided. This feels like a request for charity wrapped up in civil-rights language that is at best an imperfect fit.
you have not addressed any of the reasons why rich people do not currently choose to live near poor people (it’s not like they can’t afford it). Some of those reasons are surely stupid and bigoted, but unless you want the rich to simply move away after the affordable housing goes up then those arguments cannot be ignored.
This was a superb piece with data and arguments everyone should be exposed to. Nonetheless, Milan, here is my question: how do you square this with Jerusalem’s most recent piece arguing that the government shouldn’t legislate the common good?
Of course, some class-based housing segregation is due to the lingering effects of redlining, or more recently, LIHTC and zoning regulation. But I’m sure we can agree that SOME separation of low and high income communities is simply due to the human desire to associate with similar people.
Most rich Americans really do not want to live near poor Americans, and even most poor don’t want to live with the rich, not because it wouldn’t help them, but because they share little culture in common: they have different professions, media tastes, educational backgrounds, politics, mannerisms, and of course, financial means. Again, to some degree, this is merely the product of free association, a well protected right in this country.
By arguing that the government should foment cross-class interaction, we are supporting the “violation” of free association in favor of the common good. So, which is it? Is this an unacceptable claim, as it gives the government power to legislate morality? Or should we admit that it truly is OK, at times, for the government to declare and encourage what the good life is? Personally, I’d say the latter.
In the first study referenced I’m quite certain that a huge lurking variable is the concienciousness and executive function of the parents on a big 5 personality test. If youre poor and you move from a poor neighborhood to a rich neighborhood you’re probably doing it with some intent to better the life of you and your family, you’re likely leaving a community with connections and it’s a very intentional choice to take a short term cost for longer term gain. You’re selecting against the types of people who would be the classic low SES nuisances/anti social actors that people want to spend money to avoid. It’s not a study but I’m quite aware of a few sets of issues in public housing in SF where a bottom 1% in concienciousness person ruins the experience for everyone else in the building by smoking meth, blasting music all day, screaming a ton and having shady associates come and go, or in another story a person in the affordable part of a nice building opened some kind of a giant water faucet for fire fighting on the 20th floor and and everyone on floors 15-20 had to be moved out to hotels for a few months while everything was repaired. I’d take a proceed with caution approach to any policy here, and I’d be more open to expansion if it was more broadly acceptable to deal with anti social/nusiance behavior vs accepting it.
It's not that I don't believe you, but it's tricky that the logic starts with "it is bad for kids to grow up around a lot of poor people" and goes to "so we would like to move some poor people into your wealthier neighborhood." Y'know? It's like every point of evidence for why the kids should get out of the bad neighborhood ALSO works as a point against bringing those people into YOUR neighborhood.
In the opener there's a line about "the benefits of integration — for the rich in addition to the poor" but when I read it, I did not really find those benefits for the rich. Without a tradeoff, this becomes just charity work and I worry it will not really happen.
BTW in terms of solutions - I love magnet schools and other specialized schools that bring people from different backgrounds together based on exceptional ability. As someone who grew up poor but tested into a fancy school, this was a great way to get contact with upper class people on terms that started by acknowledging that I was an equal re performance.
I would guess that there is a big difference between a neighborhood with demographics roughly matching the national proportion of rich/middle/poor people and a neighborhood that's entirely poor people, such that changing a school from 0% poor to 30% poor doesn't significantly harm the remaining 70%.
This doesn't seem that strange to me. In both bodily health and social health, many good things are effective in low doses and bad symptoms only occur when they are entirely absent. Likewise, a healthy system can often absorb stresses that would completely destroy a bad system. We often see this pattern in immigration in the United States. Undocumented immigrants and refugees typically come from vastly poorer and more violent countries, but their presence doesn't usually worsen the communities they live in. This isn't to say that integration never comes with growing pains, but they are usually milder than feared.
Well... But your own words are "doesn't significantly harm the remaining 70%" - you are already stipulating that the impact is negative, or at least definitely not positive!
I'm also not sure choosing the example of undocumented immigration makes the point that you might hope. Undocumented immigration has turned into a major ugly political issue! The people do NOT like it, it seems.
Overall you're structuring an argument like "You well off people are fine - you can take this" and I really do not think that is the mood of the voters.
It's true that Milan mostly finds concrete economic gains for the poor kids and the rich kids' gains are more intangible and this will make integration a harder sell. A policy that significantly benefits one half of the population while not affecting the other half or causing a brief inconvenience to the other half is still positive sum.
> Undocumented immigration has turned into a major ugly political issue! The people do NOT like it, it seems.
But easy immigration into a country has been proven to be positive sum by the general weight of economic literature. The narrative that they spread large amounts of crime and steal jobs is empirically false. People dislike it mostly because of prejudice and negative media coverage that convinces them these things are true, not their actual experiences. That's a thing to consider when deciding political goals, but that doesn't mean high immigration rates are truly bad for a country.
As another example, the case of post-Brown education integration is worth returning to. White and black kids going to school is normal now and we haven't seen white academic performance drop for white kids. White kids didn't see an immediate statistical boost in their own lives, but the economy is undeniably richer now that talented black people aren't consigned to menial labor.
If “it’s just propaganda and bigotry“ worked as a persuasive tactic, then the last decade of US history would look very different. That is assuming that it is *true* that their opinions aren’t driven by experience. Annecdotally, I know at least one person who had difficulty finding a job because she did not speak Spanish, and her area had seen enough immigration lately that it hurt her in the job hunt.
And frankly, “it’s positive sum overall” is still a hard sell. You are asking for altruism, which can work…if the beneficiaries are sympathetic. But that doesn’t work if you frame your argument in terms of benefits for all parties, and then apparently forget to mention the benefits to one party at all
I don't necessarily disagree with the arguments laid forth in this article, but I do think some of the framing (mostly from Chetty's study) is a little misleading. Like, this article talks about "integration" but it seems like the bulk of it is a lot less about actually bringing rich and poor people together, and more just about busing a few poor kids into rich neighborhoods. Apart from one line about HOPE IV, there's no talk about busing rich kids into poor neighborhoods, or even generally just having a distribution that is more uniform. As another commenter mentioned, the discussed benefits are entirely incurred by the poor kids from being exposed to rich kids, and none in the opposite direction.
Part of this is that it relies on Chetty's study, which I find similarly misleading. He denotes his metric as "economic connectedness", and describes it as a sort of symmetric quantity: "The degree to which low-income and high-income people are friends with each other." As a gut check, I wanted to compare my socioeconomically diverse high school to the neighboring homogeneous, wealthy high schools in southwestern CT. To my surprise, extremely white and wealthy high schools like Darien HS, New Canaan HS, and Staples HS scored above 90% on this "economic connectedness" metric while my high school (Brien McMahon HS in Norwalk) scored in the 60s. I promise you that no one would describe any of those schools as places where "low income and high income people are friends with each other".
But that's because the _real_ definition as listed elsewhere on the website is "the share of high (above-median) income friends among people with low (below-median) incomes", which is an incredibly asymmetric measure, and, as with the schools above, greatly benefits schools that are almost entirely rich and have a handful of low-income students (Darien, for one, has a program similar to the MTO one you mention).
So in my mind the case is a lot less "integration and increased economic connectedness is good for everyone", and more "busing a few poor kids into rich neighborhoods increases their economic outcomes down the line".
LIHTC always seemed like a huge waste of money relative to YIMBYtopia.
To echo other commenters, you frame things in terms of the common good but the benefits seem one-sided. This feels like a request for charity wrapped up in civil-rights language that is at best an imperfect fit.
you have not addressed any of the reasons why rich people do not currently choose to live near poor people (it’s not like they can’t afford it). Some of those reasons are surely stupid and bigoted, but unless you want the rich to simply move away after the affordable housing goes up then those arguments cannot be ignored.
This was a superb piece with data and arguments everyone should be exposed to. Nonetheless, Milan, here is my question: how do you square this with Jerusalem’s most recent piece arguing that the government shouldn’t legislate the common good?
Of course, some class-based housing segregation is due to the lingering effects of redlining, or more recently, LIHTC and zoning regulation. But I’m sure we can agree that SOME separation of low and high income communities is simply due to the human desire to associate with similar people.
Most rich Americans really do not want to live near poor Americans, and even most poor don’t want to live with the rich, not because it wouldn’t help them, but because they share little culture in common: they have different professions, media tastes, educational backgrounds, politics, mannerisms, and of course, financial means. Again, to some degree, this is merely the product of free association, a well protected right in this country.
By arguing that the government should foment cross-class interaction, we are supporting the “violation” of free association in favor of the common good. So, which is it? Is this an unacceptable claim, as it gives the government power to legislate morality? Or should we admit that it truly is OK, at times, for the government to declare and encourage what the good life is? Personally, I’d say the latter.
People shouldn’t commit crimes