Author Archives: legallysociable

Migration after a “millionaire’s tax”

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A number of states are considering raising taxes for wealthy residents and some have argued that such taxes push wealthy people to move to another state. Here is a brief summary of some research on what happened in New Jersey after a millionaire’s tax was implemented in 2004:

A 2004 “millionaire’s tax” in New Jersey had little effect on migration, according to a study by Stanford University sociologist Cristobal Young and Princeton University sociologist Charles Varner published this year in the National Tax Journal. Moving from California to escape taxes is even more difficult.

“Many people in New Jersey could move 30 or 40 miles and find themselves in lower-tax Connecticut or Pennsylvania,” Young said in an email. “If you are in the Bay Area, it is a 500- to 700-mile move to competing urban areas such as Las Vegas or Phoenix. That is a tough move – you will be starting a new life.”

The New Jersey Department of the Treasury issued its own research in October that countered the Young-Varner study. The department is led by an appointee of Republican Gov. Chris Christie, a vocal opponent of a new “millionaire’s tax.”

In a state with 8.7 million residents, the department said that all tax increases – not just those on the wealthy – resulted in 20,000 fewer taxpayers.

So it sounds like both research studies could be right? Though I haven’t read either study, the loss of 20,000 taxpayers from New Jersey doesn’t sound like much. Additionally, there are a lot of reasons people could move and taxes are just one part of the larger business climate and cultural setting. Without clear trends in the data or interviews or surveys with people who leave, it would be hard to know that taxes were what pushed people out of the state.

The argument that it might be more difficult to move out of California because of greater geographic isolation is intriguing. I would think that distance matters less than other characteristics that draw people to California such as the weather and exciting cities. If geographic isolation is a key factor, we would see more movement in metropolitan areas that straddle states, such as New York City or Chicago where residents who want to protest or move because of taxes could live over the border in Indiana or Wisconsin and still be part of the region.

When states consider higher taxes for millionaires, why haven’t more millionaires acted like corporations who then threaten to leave and force tax breaks? Would it be too easy to vilify individual wealthy residents?

In the end, I wonder about the validity of arguments that people move solely in response to tax rates.

States with the highest percentages of homegrown residents

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The Census Bureau recently released statistics about which states have the most residents who were born in that state:

Nationally, on average, 60 percent of people are living in their native state. According to a Governing Magazine analysis, states in the interior South and Midwest tend to have a higher percentage of natives. Louisiana tops the list, with 79 percent of its population born there.

Among large metro areas, Birmingham ranks near the top: 74 percent of the metro population was born in Alabama, the 6th-highest percentage of homegrown residents among the top 50 U.S. metros…

Jim Williams, executive director of the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama, has spent years trying to persuade governments to adopt changes to governmental practices developed in other states. Progress is difficult, he said…

There is a lot of literature in sociology and psychology establishing that a lack of contact with other groups tends to maintain stereotypes, Fording said. Conversely, contact between groups tends to overcome stereotypes.

Here is the list of the top 10 states: Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Mississippi, Iowa, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Alabama.

It is a little difficult to look at this list and see the exact traits these states share. The regions and the cultures are similar in the South and Midwest though this doesn’t apply to Pennsylvania (maybe the western half but not so much the eastern half?) or maybe West Virginia. Other factors that may be influential:

1. Immigration rates.

2. Lack of world/global cities which tend to attract diverse groups of people.

3. Lower levels of education?

4. Density of population/more rural areas.

It would be interesting to ask residents of these states why they stay. It is one thing to stay because one likes the place versus the opportunities to move elsewhere are lacking. While Americans might romanticize small town life and talk about establishing roots, this likely varies from place to place. Certain values, such as interacting with people different from oneself or having access to cultural amenities or always being willing to move to follow job opportunities, could then trump geographic stability.

Two issues with Most Admired poll: a large gap between #1 and others, low numbers for #1

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While it is interesting to note that sitting presidents tend to lead in Gallup’s “Most Admired Lists,” two other things immediately struck me when looking at the tables:

1. There is a relatively big gap between #1 for most admired man and woman and everyone else. This year, President Obama is at 17% and his next closest competitor is at 3% while Hillary Clinton is also at 17% and her next competitor is at 7%. Since Gallup asks this as an open-ended question (exact phrasing: “What man that you have heard or read about, living today in any part of the world, do you admire most? And who is your second choice?”), it suggests that people name famous people, particularly types who are likely to be in the news a lot and whose positions are notable. If this is the case, is this really a survey about who is most admired or more about who is most well-known?

2. The leaders in each category are only at 17% and their competitors are quite a ways back. This could lead to several suggestions. Perhaps Americans don’t think in these terms much. For men, 32% said none or had no opinion and for women, 29% said none or had no opinion. Additionally, when asked about men 9% said a friend or relative and 12% said the same when asked about women. Even the current President is only most admired by 17%, suggesting that Americans are not necessarily looking to admire their political leaders. Another possible explanation might be that there is a wide range of admirable famous people in the United States. For men, the top 10 only account for 31% of responses though the top 10 females account for 47% of responses. This might reflect the lesser number of women in positions of power or leadership so more attention is focused on a select few.

This leads me to think that this poll may not really not tell us much about anything. Those selected as admired have relatively low figures, certain positions in society lead to being selected, and there are clear leaders but then also a mass of closely-admired figures.

UPDATE 12/28/11 10:11 PM – There seems to be similar variability in a recent poll that asked Americans which celebrity they most wanted to live next door. Also:

The majority of surveyed adults (42 percent) said they did not want to live next to any celebrities. “As a voyeuristic culture that breathlessly tracks every celebrity movement, it’s extremely surprising to see so many Americans saying they wouldn’t like to live next to any celebrity at all,” said Zillow Chief Marketing Officer Amy Bohutinsky. “In fact, more people opted out of a celebrity neighbor in 2012 than in any of the past years we’ve run this poll.”

Perhaps Americans are more tired of famous people this year?

Part of the appeal of “It’s a Wonderful Life”: geographic stability

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In a number of ways, It’s a Wonderful Life is a classic American holiday tale: George Bailey fights the big banker, the importance of family is stressed, and people pursue single-family homes in new subdivisions. But one scholar suggests another dimension is appealing to people today: the geographic stability of characters in the movie.

Part of the appeal today of the “It’s A Wonderful Life” story may be the geographic stability that the film depicts.

Sparks pointed to research reported in 1943 in the Journal of Sociology that 75 percent of the couples to be married in New Haven, Conn., and Philadelphia lived within 20 blocks of each other while growing up.

He said that’s essentially the lifestyle reflected in the movie’s setting, Bedford Falls — a fictionalized town where people were born, grew up, raised families and lived out their lives.

“The relationships you formed in Bedford Falls were for life,” Sparks said. “This is in stark contrast to the way we live today, and I think that most of us sense that as we have become more mobile, we’ve lost something.”

There is an intimacy among the characters of the film that is appealing to some viewers, and George Bailey is even brought back from the pit of despair after seeing how his absence would negatively affect both his family and his friends. The interesting suggestion here is that these relationships are embedded in a particular geographic context that matters. George is known around the town and he fights for a better community, not just for the people he knows. This is most tangibly demonstrated by the conflict George has with Mr. Potter, the banker. George simply wants to offer residents of Bedford Falls a taste of the American Dream (which looks much like the post-war suburbs) with cheap rent. To state it in a slightly different way, it’s not just the relationships that are important but the space they help make and are shaped by.

Another way to think about this would be to imagine trying to make a movie with these themes today. Movies about relationships are not unusual. However, is it plausible to put George Bailey within a 2011 community that has such tight relationships? Without focusing on some small group or subculture, how many movies present truly interconnected relationships within communities? Most movies about the suburbs or small towns tend to focus on dysfunction. I have little doubt that academics have contributed to this image by decrying the blandness, striving, and hidden lives of suburbanites.

While It’s a Wonderful Life may seem like it is from a very different era, Americans have expressed a desire to live in small towns. A 2009 Pew survey found that while suburban Americans were most satisfied with their communities, 30% said they would prefer to live in small towns versus 25% in suburbs, 21% in cities, and 21% in rural areas. Of course, the boundaries between these different types may be very different in the minds of Americans, and within the Census boundaries, one might be able to find all four types within a metropolitan region.

The social factors that influence your tip for the doorman

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Tipping the doorman is influenced by a number of social factors:

What this means is that even after you’ve rifled through the data and researched the gratuities administered by your neighbors and friends, you don’t know what you don’t know. Your superintendent could tell you what Mrs. Parsons in 5F gave him, but presumably he won’t. And Mrs. Parsons, if you ask her, is likely to abstain from the truth.

This habit of dishonesty is confirmed in “Doormen,” a generalized but thoroughly convincing book about the relationships between Manhattan doormen and tenants, by Peter Bearman, a Columbia University sociologist. In a chapter devoted to Christmas tipping, Mr. Bearman determines that people frequently understate the amount they are giving for the purpose of driving down the contributions of others, and thus distinguishing themselves as among a building’s more generous residents…

If Mr. Bearman were to arrive at Christmas dinner and listen to you fret about whether you tipped your doorman or your super sufficiently this year, he would not quell your anxieties but, instead, tell you that they were utterly justified. Tipping, in this view, is a complicated affair in which it is virtually impossible to establish uniformity. Tipping too little is embarrassing, but so is tipping too much, which can come with distasteful implications of hierarchy and servitude…

Tipping is affected by an infinite number of variables, not the least of them personal affinity. Most doormen will tell you that everyone tips something at Christmas, but that’s not quite true.

This small act is complicated by the relationship one has with the doorman, the setting of the building and the general socioeconomic status of the residents (as the article suggests, comparing the East and West sides), and wanting to appear somewhat but not too generous. It strikes me as well as the issues of tipping could be very unique to American culture where we talk about being egalitarian and therefore don’t like to talk about or even bring up differential positions of power (doormen vs. wealthier residents) but still want to appear nice (supplementing their salary with tips).

Another thought: couldn’t tipping be eliminated if the unionized salary for doormen in New York City was raised so that tips were not necessary to supplement incomes?

I wonder if anyone has solved this problem in a way that the doorman still receives a similar take and residents still tip something. Imagine if there was a website devoted to tipping that included real-time figures for different buildings in New York City. If residents had real data on what other people were tipping, not just suggestions from advice columnists, would this help them make tipping decisions? I suppose this would all depend on residents reporting their true tip, not the socially acceptable value.

When a devastating wildfire leads to the construction of McMansions

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Here is brief mention of a situation when McMansions were built after a devastating wildfire:

Although dwarfed by other natural disasters, and probably forgotten by people without Bay Area connections, the Oakland Hills Fire 20 years ago killed 25 (many of them trapped in their cars, trying to escape), injured 150 and burned down more than 3,000 homes and 450 apartments and condos. The property damage has been estimated at $1.7 billion—the same (in today’s dollars) as the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Overnight, a hillside brush fire was transformed into a major conflagration by a sudden “Diablo wind” that rose within minutes to 70 miles per hour and 100 feet high. Defying more than a thousand firefighters from all over the state, the winds (including flame-generated whirlwinds) hurled fire, flint and embers in a dozen different directions. At their peak, the flames were exploding 10 houses a minute—600 in the first hour alone. Sparks leapt over an eight-lane freeway. In two days, two square miles of wood-framed houses among the trees, built on steep slopes and narrow, winding roads (to capture the great views of San Francisco), had been reduced to a no-man’s-land of white ash and crumbled debris, pierced by dark spikes of leafless tree trunks among surviving stone steps and totemic chimney towers.

It is this ghostly, lifeless afterworld that Mr. Misrach captured by setting up his view camera along the empty streets of this miniature version of Dresden or Hiroshima a week or so after the fire. There are no people in his pictures; no cars except burned-out hulks with melted windows.

The first images I focused on were the remains of the burned trees. In most cases, only the hard, black, sharp centers of their trunks remained. Mr. Misrach found many ways of making these spiky shapes eloquent and expressive…

In the years since the fire, most of the empty lots have been filled with new houses, even if most of the residents from 1991 have left. Many of the rebuilders used their settlements to build new McMansions two or three times the size of the houses that were lost. The trees around them will take another 50 years to grow back. The handsome old houses of the Oakland hills are not what they were. But Mr. Misrach has captured the precise moment when one world ended and another began.

This is a unique situation compared to the typical complaints about McMansions that are built within an established neighborhood. In this case, a fire wiped out the existing neighborhood, wiping the slate clean. I would guess that the homes that were built after the fire would have been difficult, perhaps even impossible, to build before the fire. Additionally, this wasn’t just valuable land but also land on the sides of hills that had commanding views but could also probably be seen from a distance as well.

I imagine there could be a very interesting story to tell about these new homes and how the new neighborhood came to be.

IKEA neighborhood to be built in London

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IKEA is planning to build a sizeable east London neighborhood in the next few years:

The new district, Strand East, will include 1,200 homes, of which about 40 percent will have three or more bedrooms. Strand East will also have a 350-room Courtyard by Marriott hotel, 480,000 square feet of offices, shops, cafes, restaurants, a school, a nursery, and a health-care facility, allowing residents to accomplish daily errands and needs without having to drive.

The 26-acre neighborhood-in-progress is being designed to include car-free pedestrian zones, courtyards and landscaped grounds, while the planned underground parking means vehicles will be stowed tidily out of sight. The parcel is bordered on two of three sides by waterways, so the community might take on a Venice-like feel, with a water taxi service, a floating cocktail bar, and moorings that will be available for residents’ use…

Although some planning approvals are pending, construction is planned to begin in 2013 — after the Olympics — and is expected to take about five years. However, one section, Dane’s Yard (pictured at top) has been approved. It will feature a 40-meter-high (131-foot) illuminated sculpture in its public square, and a Grayson’s restaurant that will focus on ethically and locally sourced foods. It will also retain renovated versions of some of the historic buildings.

“We will turn it around for sure,” says Müller. “Not being arrogant, but for sure it will be a new hotspot in London.”

This isn’t IKEA’s first time pursuing something like this: the article suggests they have had “similar developments in Poland, the Baltics and Romania.” It is too bad the article doesn’t tell us more about those projects.

The redevelopment project itself doesn’t sound too startling; it sounds like they want to create a new vibrant neighborhood that will take advantage of some of the settings for the site which includes water access. What I assume will catch people’s attention is that the development company is part of IKEA. Does this immediately change the perceptions about the project? Compare this to Celebration, Florida – is it better or worse to have IKEA versus Disney build a neighborhood/town? How involved will IKEA be with the neighborhood after the neighborhood is constructed? What would happen if other retail companies, say Target or Walmart or Costco, decided to build neighborhoods?

I wonder how many jokes could be made about this. Do residents have to assemble their own homes out of a box? Will the design all be Scandinavian minimalism…?

“Arrival cities” see immigrants moving to cities and suburbs

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Immigrants to Sydney, Australia, an “arrival city” as termed by a Canadian journalist, are moving to the city and its suburbs:

London, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Toronto, Mumbai, Istanbul, Jakarta, Shenzhen and Sao Paulo led the list, but Saunders writes that Sydney is on the cusp of this transition, a place where “the people renting the apartments and buying the houses and running the shops are mainly former villagers”.

The ”arrival city” is not so much the city as a whole but a ring of post-war suburbs, old enough to be a bit run-down but not old enough to be historic and charming, and usually far from the CBD…

Saunders studied rural-to-urban immigration in 20 cities on five continents and found that, despite the rhetoric of anti-immigrant populists, the clustering of migrants into particular suburbs brings more benefits than problems because the neighbourhoods often become centres of economic activity. In short, ethnic ”ghettos” are good…

Professor Phillip O’Neill, of the urban research centre at the University of Western Sydney, says Campsie, Lakemba and Punchbowl are also classic “arrival city” suburbs, where the gritty facades belie thriving neighbourhoods.

From what I can gather from this article, the new book Arrival City hints at a major trend in the United States and perhaps Canada and Australia: immigrants are commonly moving to suburbs, not just to ethnic neighborhoods within the big city. Attracted to wealthy metropolitan regions because of jobs and opportunities, more and more immigrants are going straight to the suburbs. This commonly occurs in inner-ring suburbs but can also occur in suburbs far out from the central business district.

This trend of immigration to the suburbs has been noted in the United States within the last decade. This can lead to a couple of concerns. One, it is a reminder that not all suburbs are wealthy and white; rather, some suburbs are “a bit run-down” which means they are generally cheaper and are good starting points for new immigrants. It is easy for commentators to generalize about all of suburbia but this new trend suggests this is not terribly accurate. Second, suburbs have to adjust to new populations. This might include changing school curriculum, thinking about the character of the suburb, and figuring out who can provide certain social services.

One thing that this article does not address: the movement of wealthy immigrants, such as those who might live in “ethnoburbs,” and how this immigration pattern looks different from that of more unskilled immigrants.

The “Trolley Problem” in virtual 3-D

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A psychologist has taken a classic experiment, the “Trolley Problem,” to the virtual realm:

Virtual reality, however, is emerging as intriguing new tool because it enables researchers, to some degree, test a subject’s claim by simulating just about any given situation. Recently, Carlos David Navarrete, a evolutionary psychologist at Michigan State University, applied the technology to shed light on how people might respond when faced with an ethical conundrum.The Catch-22 bind he chose to put his subjects in is a popular philosophical thought experiment known as the “Trolley Problem.” The classical version of it goes a little something like this: You’re a train worker who observes a runaway train moving down a track where five people are about to get run over. You can pull a switch that diverts the train onto another track but you would end up killing one person who happens to be walking on the alternative track unaware. What would you do? Think about the situation in a pragmatic sense (saving more lives) and pull the switch? Or do nothing, which can be viewed as a wash-your-hands-of-any-responsibility decision.

The virtual simulation version was devised by wiring up test subjects with eyewear that generated a 3-D re-enactment of such a scenario. Attached to their fingertips were electrodes that measured their heartbeat and other indicators of their emotional state as they were forced to make a difficult decision. Using a joystick, users can either re-route the runaway boxcar, killing a lone hiker, or do nothing and let the it kill the group of five hikers…

While the findings corroborated with the results of a previous study that relied on self-reported methods, the experiment also showed that participants who did not pull the switch were more emotionally aroused. This means that their inaction might not be so much a conscious choice but a result of freezing up during highly anxious moments, which is akin to a solider failing to fire his weapon in battle, Navarrete said. Perhaps if they had remained calm enough to process what was happening, the percentage of people who would have pulled the switch to save five and let one die might have actually been greater.

Several thoughts:

1. The finding about emotional arousal reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell’s summarizing in Blink: humans make different decisions in emotionally charged situations.

2. The article is set up by suggesting that this kind of virtual research helps get around the issue facing the social sciences that people say one thing and then do another. While I don’t disagree that this is a problem, people’s stated beliefs and attitudes are still consequential. Take a story I blogged about a few days ago: people may be getting married at lower rates but majorities still aspire to get married, reinforcing a social norm. We need data on both actions and beliefs.

3. I’m tempted to ask whether people’s responses in this virtual world are different than if they were in the real situation. Is there a larger body of research that suggests these virtual experiments are truly better than typical research experiments?

4. Whenever I have presented this experiment to students, they tend to find to find it interesting. Also, since this one is fairly straightforward (one life for five), introducing variants to it such as having to push a large man onto the tracks to stop the train, thus giving the bystander more culpability, can change people’s responses.