Monthly Archives: September 2011

Where do Washington D.C. metro area residents find diversity?

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This could be an interesting research question as put by the Washington Post: “where do you experience diversity?” The question comes amidst recent changes in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area:

We all know how diverse our region is; the latest census shows that Washington is one of the eight major metropolitan areas that have become majority minority in the past decade.

But how do those statistics translate into actual diversity? Where are the places in our region where people of all races, creeds, colors and nationalities mix most freely? Where are the markets, playing fields, dog parks, theaters, shopping malls that attract the most diverse crowds? And what does diversity even mean to each of us?

And there is even a reference to Elijah Anderson’s recent concept of the “cosmopolitan canopy,” places where people of different races and social classes mingle.

Several thoughts come to mind:

1. What exactly do they mean when they ask about people “mix[ing] most freely”? Does this mean different people are simply in the same place, like a baseball stadium or a shopping mall, or they are actually interacting?

2. Several studies from earlier this year looked at segregation within American cities. In one study, Washington D.C. is the 20th most segregated city in the country. The dissimilarity score of 61.0 roughly means that 61% of the population would have to move for there to be an equal distribution of blacks and whites in the region. While there are cities that certainly have worse scores (Chicago, New York City, and Milwaukee are the top three), this isn’t necessarily good. The region may be majority-minority but that doesn’t mean that people live near each other.

2a. Here are some of the other US cities that became majority-minority by 2010: “Along with Washington, the regions surrounding New York, San Diego, Las Vegas and Memphis have become majority-minority since 2000. Non-Hispanic whites are a minority in 22 of the country’s 100-biggest urban areas.”

3. I wonder if this is kind of a silly question because it doesn’t get at the real issue: residential segregation. It is better to have people of different backgrounds mixing in public or private spaces than to not have this happen. But the real issue is that people of different races tend not to live near each other in the United States. When presented with the option of living with other races within the same neighborhood, whites opt out more often than not.

4. What will the newspaper do with this data regarding where people find diversity? Since it won’t be a representative sample (as a voluntary, online poll), I suspect they will profile some of these places to try to understand why they attract different groups of people.

Someone finally says it: the length of the school day doesn’t have a huge impact on student achievement

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There has been much debate about a longer school days in Chicago Public Schools. But a comparison between Chicago and suburban schools made by the Chicago Tribune hints at something: the length of the school day is not the key determinant of student outcomes.

The tongue-lashings Chicago Public Schools has endured in the last several weeks over its short school day — U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan called it a “disgrace” — have overshadowed the fact that that many suburban students aren’t receiving much more instruction time than CPS.

Affluent Glen Ellyn’s two elementary districts both offer five hours, 15 minutes of instruction daily, only seven minutes more than CPS reports…

With state data unreliable, the Tribune used class schedules from a handful of Chicago-area districts to highlight some of the discrepancies. So while seventh-graders in northwest suburban Elgin School District U-46 are getting less than five hours, 30 minutes of instruction on average, their counterparts in southwest suburban Plainfield District 202 are receiving about seven hours, according to state records.

That’s a big difference, but one that doesn’t necessarily translate into student performance, experts say. Indeed, at a time when urban and suburban districts across the U.S. are lengthening their school days in an effort to improve tests scores and student learning, no studies conclusively link more instruction time with higher achievement.

I can think of several reasons why there has been so much attention on the length of the school day in Chicago:

1. This seems like common sense: kids will learn more if they are in school longer. However, studies suggest it is more about how time is used rather than just have larger quantities of time. And if more time was really needed, why not have a serious conversation about shorter summer breaks and possible Saturday programs?

2. It is part of a larger back and forth with teachers. Thus far, the union has not been willing to lengthen the school day and Mayor Emanuel and his team has tried to split teachers on their stance. This is not the only source of disagreement between the District/the mayor and the teacher’s union but it has been very public.

3. The school day is one of the few things that the District can more easily control. Compared to other possible solutions like improving the skills of teachers or hiring better teachers, helping improve life in poorer neighborhoods, or getting parent’s involved, this looks like an easy target.

Next year, the Chicago Public Schools will have a longer school day in 2012-2013. While leaders may take credit for this, it will be interesting to see if there is any positive outcome (and then it is another question about whether this is due to the longer school day). Additionally, if they just stop at longer school days, not much will have changed.

This reminds me of the Coleman Report which had a few findings: “student background and socioeconomic status are much more important in determining educational outcomes than are measured differences in school resources (i.e. per pupil spending)” and “socially disadvantaged black students profited from schooling in racially-mixed classrooms.” But getting school districts and the general public to get ahead these ideas (think of the debate over busing in the late 1960s and early 1970s) is a very difficult task.

David Simon, The Wire co-creator, to receive William Julius Wilson award

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The Wire has been used in a number of college courses (one example here) and now David Simon, co-creator of the HBO series, will be awarded the William Julius Wilson award from Washington State University:

David Simon, co-creator of the HBO television series “The Wire,” has been named recipient of the Washington State University William Julius Wilson Award for the Advancement of Social Justice…

Wilson received his doctoral degree in sociology from WSU and is one of the nation’s leading scholars in the fields of African American studies, race, civil rights, poverty and social and public policy issues. He was the first person to receive the award named in his honor in 2009. He is scheduled to attend this symposium…

“We are honoring David Simon with this award because of his significant and innovative contributions to promote social policy, in particular by raising the public’s awareness of systemic social inequality, poverty and the complex way that social surroundings affect individual-level decisions,” said Julie Kmec, associate professor of sociology and chair of the committee organizing the event…

Three Harvard scholars, including Wilson, recently pointed out that the series has “done more to enhance both the popular and the scholarly understanding of the challenges of urban life and the problems of urban inequality than any other program in the media or academic publication.”

Several questions:

1. I wonder if this award for Simon, also a former journalist, is part of a larger trend (the ASA has been doing this for a few years now – David Brooks was the latest to be recognized) of sociologists recognizing journalists as key people/gatekeepers for spreading sociological ideas.

2. What other television shows accomplish similar things to The Wire?

3. I had forgotten that William Julius Wilson received his PhD from Washington State since he is more commonly associated with the University of Chicago or Harvard. Of prominent sociologists, how many have received degrees from places like Washington State versus the typical top-ranked programs (Harvard, Chicago, Berkeley, Wisconsin-Madison, etc.)?

Lombard mosque approved by DuPage County Board

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I’ve been tracking this story in recent months (earlier stories here, here, and here) and it looks like we have a resolution: the DuPage County Board approved plans for a mosque in unincorporated Lombard.

By a 12-4 vote, board members supported revised plans from the Muslim Community Association of Western Suburbs for the Pin Oak Community Center. It will be built just east of Interstate Highway 355, at the southwest corner of Roosevelt Road and Lawler Avenue…

The plan had been controversial because of residents’ objections about traffic down Lawler Avenue into their neighborhood.

But the plan was modified to include an exit onto Roosevelt Road and restrictions on two access drives on Lawler. Also, the association will widen Lawler to three lanes and extend the eastbound lane on Roosevelt Road…

In July, board members deferred their vote on the Pin Oak proposal, but they did deny the group’s plan for a roughly 50-foot-tall dome on the property. The building will not be permitted to exceed 36 feet in height.

It would be interesting to hear the rationale of the 4 board members who voted against this.

The article suggests the controversy about this mosque was due to traffic concerns and the height of the building, typical NIMBY concerns that might be brought up with proposals for any religious structure or any non-religious, non-residential structure. I hope there is a sociologist (or other social scientist) working on testing whether proposals for mosques draw special “NIMBY” attention.

More bad economic figures: median household income down, poverty up

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The effects of the economic crisis are reflected in two key updated figures just released by the US Census Bureau:

Data released by the Census Bureau today showed the proportion of people living in poverty climbed to 15.1 percent last year from 14.3 percent in 2009, and median household income declined 2.3 percent. The number of Americans living in poverty was the highest in the 52 years since the Census Bureau began gathering that statistic. Those figures may have worsened in recent months as the economy weakened…

The ranks of people in poverty increased to 46.2 million from 43.6 million. The last time the poverty rate reached 15.1 percent was in 1993. It climbed to 15.2 percent in 1983. Median household income in 2010 was $49,445, down from $50,599 the year before…

The income figures declined even as the U.S. economy expanded 3 percent in 2010. Growth has slowed this year to an annual rate of less than 1 percent, raising concern that the financial struggles of families will continue to worsen and hamper the recovery…

It was the third consecutive annual increase in the poverty rate, a trend that won’t reverse itself without “concerted action” on the part of policy makers, said Melissa Boteach, who leads a campaign to reduce poverty at the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based research group with ties to the Obama administration.

I would love to hear politicians talk about this ahead of the 2012 elections and to do so in ways that go beyond typical “political speak.” Talking about taxes and jobs might make some sense: they have an effect on incomes and poverty rates and every politicians loves to promise more jobs. However, there are other factors involved as well and talking about taxes and jobs means that the conversation never really turns to these indicators but only stays on “safe” ground.

UPDATE 9/13/11 3:20 PM: Here is some more data on the topic, including time-series charts that give some perspective on poverty rates and median incomes by race.

The Freakonomics of fair use

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The NYTimes’ Freakonomics blog uses the subject of poetry criticism to tackle fair use:

In a recent article, the poetry critic of the New York Times complained that to do poetry criticism right, it’s often necessary to quote extensively from a poem. Indeed, in the case of a short poem, it might be helpful to readers to copy the whole thing. But, the critic said, this can’t be done because it might run afoul of copyright law.

It is true that copyright law prohibits the unauthorized copying of any substantial part of someone’s poem, song, or other work.…Is this a good policy?  From an economic perspective, no.

The reason this is bad policy, however widely discussed, bears repeating:

Use of a small bit of someone else’s creative work to build a new creative work rarely harms the economic interests of the first copyright owner, because most “derivative” works do not directly compete with the original.

Every creator builds on what came before, and such building usually doesn’t “compete” with that earlier work in any economic sense.  Creating legal fear and uncertainty about building on the past, however, is quite effective in limiting the creation of new works in the present.

Accessing the public domain through JSTOR

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Academic journal archiver JSTOR has just made public domain articles a lot more accessible:

[W]e are making journal content on JSTOR published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere, freely available to the public for reading and downloading. This includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals, representing approximately 6% of the total content on JSTOR.

We are taking this step as part of our continuous effort to provide the widest possible access to the content on JSTOR while ensuring the long-term preservation of this important material.

Mike Masnick over at Techdirt recounts some history that provides context for JSTOR’s decision:

You may recall that following the indictment of Aaron Swartz for downloading some JSTOR papers, a guy named Greg Maxwell decided to upload 33GBs of public domain papers from JSTOR and make them available via The Pirate Bay. He had the papers for a while, but was afraid that he’d get legally harassed for distributing them.

JSTOR explicitly acknowledge this history in its announcement (emphasis added):

I realize that some people may speculate that making the Early Journal Content free to the public today is a direct response to widely-publicized events over the summer involving an individual [Aaron Swartz] who was indicted for downloading a substantial portion of content from JSTOR, allegedly for the purpose of posting it to file sharing sites. While we had been working on releasing the pre-1923/pre-1870 content before the incident took place, it would be inaccurate to say that these events have had no impact on our planning. We considered whether to delay or accelerate this action, largely out of concern that people might draw incorrect conclusions about our motivations. In the end, we decided to press ahead with our plans to make the Early Journal Content available, which we believe is in the best interest of our library and publisher partners, and students, scholars, and researchers everywhere.

Regardless of how this happened, I applaud JSTOR for greatly furthering access to public domain academic journal articles.

H/T Techdirt/Copycense.

Crime down but today’s parents less likely to let first graders go places alone

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I stumbled upon this 1979 checklist for parents who want their children to attend first grade. Perhaps the most interesting point on the list: “Can he travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to store, school, playground, or to a friend’s home?” As you might expect, this drew some commentary:

It’s amazing what a difference 30 years have made. Academically, that 1979 first grader (who also needed to be “six years, six months” old and “have two to five permanent or second teeth”) would have been considered right on target to start preschool. In terms of life skills, she’s heading for middle school, riding her two-wheeled bike and finding her own way home. It’s not surprising that I came to this link via Lenore Skenazy’s Free-Range Kids blog. What is surprising is just how shocking a jolt it is to realize how stark the difference is between then and now.

I’d probably be considered a free-range parent by today’s standards; I’ve allowed a 7-year-old to walk to a friend’s house unaccompanied and left a 9-year-old in charge of siblings. But the idea of a kindergartener walking “four to eight blocks” alone? Crossing streets? Turning corners? Even though I suspect I did it myself, I can’t get my head around it. I have two kindergarteners this year (and one will be 6 in just a few weeks), and I check on them if I let them walk solo to the bookstore’s bathroom. Yesterday, I watched one of them get lost in the grocery store, trying to go two aisles over to the freezer section, where she’d been not 30 seconds before. Two to four blocks?

But there it is, in the middle of the list, as though the ability to find your way around your world at 6 years old was quite ordinary. The country isn’t different (Skenazy points out that crime rates are actually lower overall than they were in 1979). We’re different, and not just as parents. A commenter to the post points out that her children’s school doesn’t allow students to walk home alone (even with an older sibling) until fifth grade. And it’s a difference most parents are aware of already. But to see it laid out so clearly is to remember that it wasn’t just my own mother who expected more from me than I expect from my own kids, but all the mothers. I’m not suggesting we loose our kindergarteners on our neighborhoods, and I don’t plan to send mine romping any further than the yard. But I will try to broaden my ideas of what else they’re capable of—besides math and reading—this year.

It reminds me of the story of the New York City mom who let her 9-year old kid ride the subway alone (after proper training and guidance) a few years ago and the controversy that generated.

Somewhat hidden in the explanation of this shift in parenting is an important set of statistics: crime rates are down. Not just down; rates in some big cities, like Chicago, have hit lows not seen for several decades. But, as I have noted, this is not the public perception. Instead, we live in a world where crime always seems to just lurk around the corner (perhaps even in the suburbs!), we hear about all sorts of gruesome outcomes (real outcomes and on shows like CSI), and we hear more and more about child abductions (think Amber Alerts). In these cases, the perceptions about crime are more important than the actual data.

An analogy might also help explain this shift. In books like Scorecasting and elsewhere, some argue that football teams should never punt because they could then score more points. What can hold back teams from going against the norm is that coaches don’t want to be held responsible if their team does go for it on fourth down and doesn’t make it. It is “safer” to punt in most circumstances because one then can’t be blamed for following conventional wisdom. Could parents operate in the same way – which parent wants to play the odds, that their child will be safe when going places alone, and risk being wrong? How would other parents and other members of the community view such parents whose children then do fall into trouble?

h/t Instapundit

Americans don’t know about the level of wealth concentration in the United States

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Sociologists have been talking about the growing levels of inequality in the United States for some time now. But a recent survey suggests that Americans are unaware just how much wealth is concentrated at the top (and there is a lot more information on the topic at this link):

A remarkable study (Norton & Ariely, 2010) reveals that Americans have no idea that the wealth distribution (defined for them in terms of “net worth”) is as concentrated as it is. When shown three pie charts representing possible wealth distributions, 90% or more of the 5,522 respondents — whatever their gender, age, income level, or party affiliation — thought that the American wealth distribution most resembled one in which the top 20% has about 60% of the wealth. In fact, of course, the top 20% control about 85% of the wealth (refer back to Table 1 and Figure 1 in this document for a more detailed breakdown of the numbers).

Even more striking, they did not come close on the amount of wealth held by the bottom 40% of the population. It’s a number I haven’t even mentioned so far, and it’s shocking: the lowest two quintiles hold just 0.3% of the wealth in the United States. Most people in the survey guessed the figure to be between 8% and 10%, and two dozen academic economists got it wrong too, by guessing about 2% — seven times too high. Those surveyed did have it about right for what the 20% in the middle have; it’s at the top and the bottom that they don’t have any idea of what’s going on.

Americans from all walks of life were also united in their vision of what the “ideal” wealth distribution would be, which may come as an even bigger surprise than their shared misinformation on the actual wealth distribution. They said that the ideal wealth distribution would be one in which the top 20% owned between 30 and 40 percent of the privately held wealth, which is a far cry from the 85 percent that the top 20% actually own. They also said that the bottom 40% — that’s 120 million Americans — should have between 25% and 30%, not the mere 8% to 10% they thought this group had, and far above the 0.3% they actually had. In fact, there’s no country in the world that has a wealth distribution close to what Americans think is ideal when it comes to fairness. So maybe Americans are much more egalitarian than most of them realize about each other, at least in principle and before the rat race begins.

So Americans have some ideas about what the wealth distribution should look like but not much of an idea of what it actually looks like. What exactly might they do if they knew the exact figures since it doesn’t seem to line up with what they think it should be?

Read about the possible effects of this heavy concentration of wealth, including helping to bring about our recent economic crisis, here.

Righthaven “nearing bankruptcy”

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I was suspicious several days ago when I heard that Righthaven might be going under, but apparently it’s true:

The Las Vegas copyright-trolling firm Righthaven told a Nevada federal judge Friday it might file for bankruptcy protection, or cease operations altogether.

To prevent that, Righthaven is asking U.S. District Judge Philip Pro to stay his decision requiring Righthaven pay $34,000 in legal fees to an online commenter it wrongly sued for infringement.

Wired has posted Righthaven’s Motion to Stay here (pdf).  They are exceptionally candid about the economics of copyright troll litigation:

In Colorado, 35 Righthaven copyright infringement cases have been stayed since May 19, 2011 pending a ruling on whether the company has standing to maintain these actions. Likewise, ten infringement actions, most of which involve an amended version of the SAA that addresses the concerns expressed by this Court in its subject matter decision, have been stayed in this District until a standing determination is made. Thus, Righthaven has been precluded from actively litigating and resolving the stayed cases. Moreover, Righthaven has delayed filing new copyright enforcement actions until a standing determination is made based upon the terms of the currently operative version of the SAA. Throughout this period, and despite a lack of incoming revenue given that numerous pending action are stayed, Righthaven has continued to incur operating expenses.

Clearly, Righthaven is a cash-poor outlet these days.  And here’s where things get really interesting:  based on its motion, Righthaven seems deathly afraid that they might have to sell some of their assets to satisfy a $34,000 judgment.  As they explain to the court:

Righthaven also has significant proprietary rights in its copyright infringement search engine software (the “Software”), which plays an integral role in the company’s operations. If a stay is not granted pending appeal, this valuable Software may be seized and liquidated in an attempt to satisfy the Judgment. Liquidation may result in the Software being sold to a competing organization or entity.

Talk about woeful undercapitalization.  A $34,000 judgment is going to force them into selling off their core business assets?  Really?

Righthaven always presented defendants in its copyright litigation with an unfair dilemma:

(1) pay out a few thousand in “go away” money now, or
(2) mount an actual legal defense (at an initial, minimum cost of a few thousand, with no guarantees that things would work out well).

It seems that Righthaven now faces a dilemma of its own:

(1) raise enough capital to pay off this $34,000 pending appeal, or
(2) go bankrupt.

The difference, of course, is that the dilemma Righthaven faces is fair.  They put defendants to the expense of hiring lawyers.  Some of those defendants won.  The law says that those winning defendants should have their legal expenses paid by Righthaven.  Sounds about right to me.  If Righthaven can’t afford to pay without selling assets, perhaps they never should have been filing lawsuits in the first place.