Monthly Archives: October 2011

Contrasting styles: Emanuel vs. Daley in with whom they meet and consult

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The Chicago Reader has an interesting piece looking at who Mayor Rahm Emanuel meets with – and how this differs from Mayor Richard M. Daley’s approach:

In many ways, Emanuel’s schedule strikingly contrasts with his predecessor’s. Richard M. Daley is a Chicago guy, born and raised. Except for his college years in Providence, Rhode Island, he’s stayed here all of his life. And it shows in the people who had his ear: in addition to pols and big-shot business leaders, his meeting schedule was packed with the ministers of small churches, local school leaders, and owners of neighborhood businesses like the local sausage shop (see “Daley’s A-List”).

Emanuel, on the other hand, grew up in the north suburbs, went to college in New York, and spent the better part of the last two decades in Washington, first as an aide in the Clinton White House, then as a congressman, and finally, for almost two years, as Obama’s chief of staff.

Much of his mayoral schedule is taken up by meetings and calls with wealthy out-of-towners, many of whom have donated to his campaign. Indeed, it seems Emanuel has learned from his mentor, President Clinton. Under Clinton, the White House was open to big donors who got to spend the night in the Lincoln bedroom. In Emanuel’s case, he either invites them into his City Hall office or makes time to hang out at one of his favorite haunts…

Some days, Emanuel meets with more multimillionaires within an afternoon than most of us will cross paths with during our entire lives. On June 30, for example, after the mayor spent 30 minutes in his City Hall office with U.S. Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, he took 15 minutes to meet with Marc Lasry, the billionaire CEO of Avenue Capital Group, a hedge fund operation. That was followed by 45 minutes with Stephen Ross, a New York-based real estate mogul and owner of the Miami Dolphins.

There could be two ways to view this:

1. This is good for Chicago. Due to Emanuel’s connections outside of Chicago, the city will benefit. The new mayor may spend a lot of time with out of town millionaires but these people could bring money and jobs into Chicago through this connection.

2. This is bad for Chicago. Emanuel is less involved with the “little people” of Chicago that are important for getting things done and working the patronage machine. Emanuel is more of a corporate mayor (having less time for local leaders) while Daley at least mingled with the commoners and neighborhood leaders knew they could meet with him at certain points.

I wonder how much of this should be chalked up to different styles of leadership, personal history, or simply a shift in what it means to be a politician today where Daley was following the example of his father while Emanuel is operating under the idea that politicians and businesses need to work together (perhaps the Bill Clinton model?).

The lack of seating in cities and the response by New York City

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The New Yorker draws attention to the lack of seating in many urban settings and how New York City has responded:

A dimension that is truly important is the human backside. It is a dimension many architects ignore,” the urban sociologist William H. Whyte once observed. Planners and designers of urban space have often stinted on seating, leaving the rest of us to colonize ledges, lean against planters, perch on fire hydrants, set up camp chairs, and fold coats to dull the pain from pointy iron rails. Lately, though, New York has begun to recognize the needs of the temporarily sedentary. This is quietly becoming an excellent city for sitting…

In the latest initiative, the Department of Transportation has rolled out a new program of sidewalk seating by request. New Yorkers can go to the DOT website and suggest a location for a sleek, sculptural CityBench designed by Ignacio Ciocchini (who also authored the garbage cans and shop kiosks at Bryant Park). Each of the three side-by-side berths is made from a sheet of perforated steel, folded into a back and a seat, and separated from its neighbor by a low armrest. The benches look tough, cool, and modern, but the effect of installing 1,000 of them on sidewalks in all five boroughs will be to make the city a more relaxed, inviting place.

Some will no doubt resent the new proliferation of benches and chairs as yet another encumbrance. New Yorkers would prefer the rest of the world to think that we move at a constant lope, defying cars in intersections, and pushing past slow-moving tourists. The truth is, though, that some of us are also old or infirm or have only just learned to walk. It’s precisely because we spend so much time on our feet that we find ourselves sometimes schlepping groceries, dragging reluctant kids, nursing bum knees, and suffering in high heels. The old solution was to segregate weary shufflers in parks, leaving the asphalt to the hurried. But Whyte noted that in crowded public plazas, people don’t choose to sit out of the way of foot traffic, but rather plop down amid pedestrians who happily weave around them. The reason is that sitting down is a social act. Public seating is a crucial element of a vibrant metropolis, which is why the Department of Transportation is also now functioning as the Department of Staying Right Here.

Interesting. Compared to the sedentary suburban lifestyle which consists of a lot of sitting within houses and workplaces as well as numerous short car trips, the city life is much more on one’s feet.

Two thoughts about this:

1. This short piece doesn’t say much about how we got into this position. I suspect one reason is homelessness. Seats are places wheres the homeless can spend a lot of time during the day and sleep on at night. With the increasing criminalization of homelessness in many cities, either seats have been removed or they have been altered to not allow laying down. Cities may want seating but they want it for certain types of people to sit there.

2. I wonder if many cities haven’t provided as much seating to save money or to limit having to deal with problems (like homelessness) by simply leaving seating to private spaces. Of course, the problem with this is that most businesses would have you pay in order to have a seat. If public spaces are only for walking, standing, and milling around, they are less attractive and the wealthier can retreat to private settings to find seats.

“What’s Your Problem?” misses an opportunity to explain survey research

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The “What’s Your Problem?” column in the Chicago Tribune tackles the problems of consumers. Yesterday’s column involved a woman who had been called multiple times by a survey firm even after she asked to not be called again:

Over the following weeks, Scarborough representatives called Riedell repeatedly, asking her to participate in a 15-minute phone survey.

No matter how many times she refused their overtures, the calls kept coming.

Riedell said she asked each time to have her name taken off the call list but was told that representatives were not authorized to do so.

And so it continued through late summer and early fall. By the sixth call, Riedell decided she had heard enough. She emailed What’s Your Problem?

When contacted by the Tribune, the survey firm had this reponse which did not please Riedell:

Dercher said Riedell did not leave her name and phone number when she called Scarborough’s toll-free number, which are critical pieces of information so that the company can remove a respondent from the calling list.

Although her number could be randomly picked for another survey in the future, the odds are against that happening, Dercher said.

After reading Dercher’s email, Riedell said Scarborough’s response was, well, lame.

“The response says that their interviewers are not allowed to remove the name of a respondent from their calling list since the respondent’s name is confidential, but the interviewer already has the respondent’s name and phone number, otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to reach me by phone or address me by my name when I answered the phone,” Riedell said. “Sounds like gibberish to me.”

The column is clearly geared toward Riedell’s point of view and frankly, who likes to be called repeatedly by companies or survey organizations after refusing to participate? At the same time, let’s flip this around to see it from the opposite angle:

-Riedell was selected for the survey by random digit dialing. This is not unusual and telephone surveys are not covered by the Do Not Call registry.

-It doesn’t sound unusual that the survey interviewers didn’t have the power to remove her name from their lists. They were likely handed lists of numbers and told to call until they had an answer.

-Surveys often select their initial batch of respondents and then do whatever they can to get responses from them. The US Census Bureau goes to housing units repeated times in order to collect data because they want accurate data. (Of course, one Census worker who was doing his job last year was arrested for trespassing in Hawaii.) If survey companies simply gave up on people after one attempt, they would spend a lot more time and money and doing so might mess up their calibrated samples which are meant to represent larger populations.

In the end, Riedell may not like the system but in order to collect good data, survey companies may have to contact selected respondents multiple times. Since participation is voluntary, Riedell can opt out and perhaps Scarborough does need to have a more clearly delineated method by which people can opt out. Additionally, there may be some complications because Scarborough is a market survey research firm (tagline: Scarborough Research measures our shopping, media, and lifestyle behaviors) and are not academic researchers or political researchers (though push polls are very problematic). But this column could be much more informative about how survey research works and how consumers can respond to common requests for information rather than just suggesting that this woman should be able to more easily avoid telephone survey questions.

Why many products are always “on sale” – and why buyers fall for it

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My wife and I had a running joke going for a while with the Kohl’s circular that would come in the Sunday newspaper: every week was “the biggest sale of the year!” This is a common strategy for many retailers and consumers continue to fall for it:

“People don’t have a gut sense of absolute value. It’s just that they’re sensitive to contrast. So if you say I’m getting 40 percent off, I’m interested, no matter what the actual cost is.”

“The whole concept of a sale or a discount has become really perverted,” said Shell, a co-director of Boston University’s Center for Science & Medical Journalism and a contributing editor to Atlantic Monthly. “So what is the price? We think of price as a number, something that’s coolly objective, but it’s not. It’s a highly emotional construct. Price is manipulated to attract the consumer.

“If people see a sweater on a table for $50, they don’t buy it. If they see the same sweater was once $100, they will. We’re highly swayed by reference price. … There are some things that are almost perennially on sale, like mattresses and jewelry. We buy almost all our clothing on sale.”

“Retailers are now outfoxing consumers,” said Kit Yarrow, chair of the psychology department at Golden Gate University, where she is a jointly appointed professor of both psychology and marketing. “They’ve figured out how to offer a bargain in a way that the consumer doesn’t even know what they’re buying anymore.”

So how could consumers fight back? Some common strategies:

1. In certain areas, like credit card offers and statements or the calories in restaurant meals, having sellers display more information so that the consumer can theoretically make more rational decisions based on more information. Do all consumers use this information? Does the extra information “wear off” over time, particularly in light of enticing promotions or marketing? You can hear the same argument about health care from some people – if everyone knew, doctors and patients, how much every test or treatment was going to cost, different choices would be made.

2. Use an envelope system (or a debit card) for spending money so that one has a better idea of the total spending limit. This may help overspending but does it help eliminate all “impulse buys” or the deals one purchases?

3. Aren’t consumer education classes in high schools supposed to help talk about finances and such? And do they help much? Do such classes typically talk about how marketing works and different ways to think about deals?

4. There are companies that claim to not offer deals and have “no-haggle prices” or something like that. Think of CarMax or Saturn. Since most other retailers do offer deals, some companies can take an opposite tack.

The conclusion: prices are a social construction and taps into basic human impulses to avoid losses (paying the higher price)

Is the American Sun Belt boom over?

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One of the biggest changes in the American population in the last sixty years has been the migration to the Sun Belt. But new data suggests that this boom may have come to an end:

Between 2007 and 2010, Florida lost more people to internal migration than it gained, for the first time since the 1940s. Nevada, too, which had been growing for decades, had a net migration loss of 30,000 in 2009. And Arizona had a net gain of just 5000, way down from 90,000 five years before.

Meanwhile, New York and California both saw their net losses shrink in 2009 by more than half since 2005.

The analysis, based on Census Bureau and IRS data, was conducted by the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire.

What explains the shift? The Sun Belt states, of course, were hit hard by the housing bust that helped trigger the recession and its aftermath. The early aughts housing boom was responsible for much of the growth in places like Clark County, Nev., and Maricopa County, Ariz. in the first place.

But just as important, migration as a whole, which has been on the wane for three decades, has really tailed off since the downturn began.

The economic crisis has limited mobility across the United States, particularly for the less wealthy who are then more tied to existing jobs and homes.

It will be interesting to see whether this trend continues or (1) the Sun Belt will grow again in the future or, in a longer shot, (2) older cities in the Midwest and Northeast (“Rust Belt”) regain some of the population that shifted south and west. In other words, once people have some more freedom to move, what will they choose to do and what social forces will push or pull them in certain directions?

Is feminism over?

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A short piece in USA Today suggests many young women today don’t want to be labeled as feminists:

The feminist has been portrayed as a woman who was “unhappy, angry, humorless and didn’t shave any part of her body,” says Terry O’Neill, national president of the National Organization for Women, which this weekend marks its founding 45 years ago with an event at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla.

The stereotype, she adds, “became very powerful.” And it’s hard to get past for many young women today…

Sociologist Michael Kimmel of Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, N.Y., finds that reaction widespread. “Most of my women students have said ‘Feminism was your generation’s issue and we won. We can now do anything we want,'” he says…

Wendy Brandon, an associate professor of education and women’s studies at Rollins, says the women’s movement has evolved to focus more on what’s termed the “intersectionality” of gender, race, class and sexual orientation.

Quick thoughts:

1. We need more data on this. This article has completely anecdotal evidence.At the same time, I’ve heard similar responses from my students.

1a. I easily found a 2002 report from Gallup on the issue. As of 2001, 25% of women considered themselves feminists. This was down from 31% in 1991. This suggests that the term has been on a decline for a while. Or perhaps many women were never willing to call themselves feminists?

1b. However, the data also suggests that when asked about specific issues (pay, etc.), more people say work still needs to be done. So the label is more of the issue, not the issues raised.

2. If the label itself is a problem (similar to the connotations with the descriptor “liberal”?), why not look for a new term? Or run advertising campaigns to change the image of the term?

3. How much have arguments within the feminist itself hampered their efforts?

New Census data on income inequality by state, metro areas

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Based on American Community Survey data from 2005 and 2009 and working on the assumption that “Spatial income inequality is neither intrinsically bad nor good,” the Census has a new report on income inequality. Here are some of the findings:

The report, by Daniel H. Weinberg, analyzed income data at various geographical levels and found that the region encompassing New York, northern New Jersey, Long Island and parts of Pennsylvania had the highest income inequality of any large metro area.

New York State also has the highest income inequality of all 50 states (although Washington, D.C., was worse).

Below is a map showing three measures of income inequality for each state: the Gini index (which ranges from 0.0, when all households have equal shares of income, to 1.0, when one household has all the income and the rest has none); a ratio of household income at the 90th percentile to that at the 10th percentile; and a ratio of household income at the 95th percentile to that at the 20th…

After New York, Connecticut, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas have among the most unequal income distributions. At the low end are New Hampshire, Alaska and Utah, which is the most economically homogenous state in the nation.

The states that are above the US averages are an interesting group: Texas, New York, and California (tied to larger populations?) but also Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Washington D.C. Table 8 and 9 of the report have correlations and regression coefficients to look at the relationship of inequality measures to demographic characteristics. (Intriguingly, the regression is a stepwise regression analysis.)

Of more local interest: Illinois is lower than the US averages on two of the three measures and Chicago has a very similar Gini Index to the US average. And of places with more than 100,000 people, Elgin, Illinois has the lowest Gini Index value.

Here is part of the conclusion of the report:

This paper has shown that low income inequality at the neighborhood level is most likely a result of income sorting. In other words, it may be that higher-income households, when they can, choose to live away from lower-income ones, sometimes forming “enclaves” with little income variation. Alternatively, it may be that developers concentrate higher-end houses in certain tracts and those can be afforded only by households of higher incomes.

This uses more neutral language of sorting but we could probably tie this to larger processes of residential segregation: those with money (with wealth related to race) have the opportunity to live in their own communities and leave everyone else behind.

It will be interesting to see how this report gets spun by Occupy Wall Street supporters and those opposed and in the ongoing presidential race.

Argument: Chomsky wrong to suggest Twitter is “superficial, shallow, evanescent”

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Nathan Jurgenson argues that Noam Chomsky’s thoughts about Twitter are misguided:

Noam Chomsky has been one of the most important critics of the way big media crowd out “everyday” voices in order to control knowledge and “manufacture consent.” So it is surprising that the MIT linguist dismisses much of our new digital communications produced from the bottom-up as “superficial, shallow, evanescent.” We have heard this critique of texting and tweeting from many others, such as Andrew Keen and Nicholas Carr. And these claims are important because they put Twitter and texting in a hierarchy of thought. Among other things, Chomsky and Co. are making assertions that one way of communicating, thinking and knowing is better than another…

Claiming that certain styles of communicating and knowing are not serious and not worthy of extended attention is nothing new. It’s akin to those claims that graffiti isn’t art and rap isn’t music. The study of knowledge (aka epistemology) is filled with revealing works by people like Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard or Patricia Hill Collins who show how ways of knowing get disqualified or subjugated as less true, deep or important…

In fact, in the debate about whether rapid and social media really are inherently less deep than other media, there are compelling arguments for and against. Yes, any individual tweet might be superficial, but a stream of tweets from a political confrontation like Tahrir Square, a war zone like Gaza or a list of carefully-selected thinkers makes for a collection of expression that is anything but shallow. Social media is like radio: It all depends on how you tune it…

Chomsky, a politically progressive linguist, should know better than to dismiss new forms of language-production that he does not understand as “shallow.” This argument, whether voiced by him or others, risks reducing those who primarily communicate in this way as an “other,” one who is less fully human and capable. This was Foucault’s point: Any claim to knowledge is always a claim to power. We might ask Chomsky today, when digital communications are disqualified as less deep, who benefits?

Back to a classic question: is it the medium or the message? Is there something inherent about 140 character statements and how they must be put together that makes them different than other forms of human communication? I like that Jurgenson notes historical precedent: these arguments have also accompanied the introduction of radio, television, and the Internet.

But could we tweak Chomsky’s thoughts to make them more palatable? What if Chomsky had said that the average Twitter experience was superficial, would he be incorrect? Perhaps the right comparison is necessary – Twitter is more superficial compared to face-to-face contact? But is it more superficial than no contact since face-to-face time is limited? Jurgenson emphasizes the big picture of Twitter, its ability to bring people together and give people the opportunity to follow others and “tune in.” In particular, Twitter and other social media forms allow the average person in the world to potentially have a voice in a way that was never possible before. But for the average user, how much are they benefiting – are they tuned in to major social movements or celebrity feeds? What their friends are saying right now or progress updates from non-profit organizations? Is this a beneficial public space for the average user?

Additionally, does it matter here if Twitter had advertisements and made a big push to make money off of this versus providing a more democratic space? Is Twitter more democratic and deep than Facebook? How would one decide?

In the end, is this simply a generational split?

(See earlier posts on a similar topic: Malcolm Gladwell on the power of Twitter, how Twitter contributed (or didn’t) to movements in the Middle East, and whether using Twitter in the classroom improves student learning outcomes.)

Cities ranked by the “Trick or Treat Index”

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Richard Florida has put some of his data to use to answer an important question: what are the best cities in the united States for trick or treating on Halloween?

According to National Retail Federation projections, Americans will spend $6.86 billion on Halloween this year, up from $3.3 billion in 2005 when a lot fewer of us were out of work. But even as Halloween edges up on Christmas as a shopping opportunity, the trick-or-treating experience is a lot less universal than it was. In some towns, you see hardly any unsupervised trick-or-treaters after dark; in other places—Brooklyn Heights or my neighborhood in Toronto leap to mind—there are more kids than you can imagine.

Herewith the 2011 edition of the Trick-or-Treater Index developed with the ever-able number-crunching of my Martin Prosperity Institute colleague, Charlotta Mellander. The 2011 Index is based on the following five metrics: the share of children aged 5 to 14; median household income (figuring the haul will be better in more affluent metros), population density, walkability (measured as the percentage of people who walk or bike to work) and creative spirit (which we measured as the percentage of artists, designers, and other cultural creatives). The data are from the American Community Survey and cover all U.S. metro areas, both their cores and suburbs…

As for the top ranking metros, Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, Connecticut, comes in first again this year. Greater New York has moved up to second place, followed by Chicago, greater Washington, D.C., and the twin cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Los Angeles, last year’s runner-up, has dropped to 7th place. Big metros dominate the top spots, but Lancaster, Pennsylvania, has moved all the way up from 16th last year to 6th on our 2011 rankings. And college towns like Ann Arbor, Michigan, Boulder, Colorado, and New Haven, Connecticut, also rank among the top 25.

This reminds me of another recent odd use of data that ranked the luckiest cities. So people with more money, who are more creative, and live in more walkable areas necessarily give more or better candy? Might they also be the people who are more likely to give substitutes to candy? Could this also be related to health measures, like obesity or life expectancy? This seems like opportunistic, atheoretical data mining meant to get a few page clicks (like me).

And since there are probably few people who would go to a whole new metropolitan area just to get candy, wouldn’t this be a better analysis if it was at a zip code, community, or census block level?

Linking sports fandom and faith: “A New Cubs Theo-logy”

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In the past, I’ve likened the faith many fans in Chicago have that the Chicago Cubs will one day win the World Series to religious faith where you have to believe in things unseen. The Chicago Tribune reinforced this idea with their header on Wednesday’s front page that read “A New Cubs Theo-logy” to introduce coverage of the naming of Theo Epstein as director of baseball operations. Additionally, coverage of Epstein has occasionally hailed him as the “savior” of the Cubs.

This is another great example of how sports can be the functional equivalent of religion. Does it have rituals? Check – games and important moments that fans participate in or watch and then an ongoing lore of these moments. Does it provide meaning? Baseball, in particular, gives one something to do for 162 days of the year (and more with spring training, the playoffs, fan’s conventions). Does it have totems? Check – perhaps the Cubs “W” flag, perhaps the anti-totem of the silly Billy Goat curse or Steve Bartman. Does it have religious leaders? Check – people like Ron Santo and even stranger fans like Ronnie Woo-Woo. Does it require faith? One hundred and three years without a World Series win and counting. Does it have a sanctuary/religious space? The “Friendly Confines” of Wrigley Field and perhaps the neighborhood bars where fans go for post-service activities.

In the end, sports get discussed in all sorts of religious and moral language.