The city of Boston to research, act on data regarding economic inequality

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The city of Boston is taking steps to do its own research regarding troubling inequality within its borders:

And that’s why it’s so interesting that the city is planning to gather and maintain longitudinal data deep into the future that may help explain what’s going on and what policy levers can change the situation. The new cross-agency project, housed in the Mayor’s Office, is called the Economic Mobility Lab, and it has gotten initial funding from the Rockefeller Foundation…

You can see the germ of this idea in the Resilient Strategy that the city released a couple of months ago. Deep in the report, it says that “The City will build upon ongoing efforts by utilizing new and existing data sources to advance resilience and racial equity across the city.” The existing data simply won’t tell the story, and so the city will need to find those new sources and incorporate them—and study the results. For years.

Jason Ewas, the executive director of the Economic Mobility Lab, tells me, “We’re going to put a stake in the ground and say that we’re going to study in general how people are moving up and down, or staying the same, and see if we can see why.” This is an explicit vision of tracking and improving economic mobility.

It’s not that the city will stop experimenting with programs or improving what it’s doing in the meantime. “We’re going to do [that] while researching,” Ewas tells me.

To me, the most interesting part of this is that the city is doing the research itself. Boston has numerous research institutions that could do such research but the city wants to take this on themselves. Will they find things that academic researchers would not uncover (either because of their perspectives or because of the data and actors they would have access to)? Or, will the city be unable to separate out their research arm from their political concerns?

Of course, perhaps these questions do not matter if Boston is able to successfully combat economic inequality. Many cities face these issues as they both try to keep up with the higher end of the globalized economy and serve residents who are far removed from the global elite.

Quick Review: One Big Home

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A documentary involving McMansions on Martha’s Vineyard I blogged about earlier – One Big Home – has now been released. Here are some thoughts I had after reviewing the film:

  1. This is an engaging story. The promotional material says it was filmed over 12 years yet the time goes quickly as it puts together interviews, public meeting footage, and striking images of both natural and man-made settings from Martha’s Vineyard.
  2. The documentary does a nice job representing multiple points of view. While the filmmaker clearly dislikes these trophy homes – though there is a point where his public activism regarding the issue wavers after the birth of his first child – the film presents local workers, ranging from carpenters to architects to builders, and residents defending property rights and expressing concern about a community imposing regulations on construction.
  3. The filmmaker’s personal story also enriches the film. As he and his soon to be wife learn they are expecting a child, they see a need for more space and a more permanent home. They employ an architect and end up constructing a home around 2,500-3,000 square feet (depending on whether the lofts are used). The film displays some of his own personal quandaries regarding how much space they really need and whether it is worth it to have upgrades in the home. This leads to a basic question: when Americans do feel they need more space, how much space should they be able to acquire?
  4. If there are two parts of the film that could use a little expansion or more explanation, here is what I would vote for.
    1. At the end, the community debates a cap on the square footage for new homes. This is an important part of the entire process yet it goes by pretty quickly in the documentary. It feels like an epilogue when there is a lot of process that might be interesting to show. Ultimately, how exactly did the public conversation develop to lead to an overwhelming majority in the end? What were some of the successful and less successful steps in putting this cap in place?
    2. We see a lot about Chilmark but hear very little about the rest of Martha’s Vineyard. How does this small community interact with the other doings on the island? From the footage, this part of the island is more rural but there are likely some interesting comparisons to be made.

This is a well put together documentary that asks questions facing many American communities: what should be done regarding the construction of large homes? The future of many American communities and the residents affected therein will be affected by these choices.

Another horror film set in suburbia; same old story?

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The new horror film Super Dark Times treads some familiar ground in its story:

Director Kevin Phillips stunning feature debut is true to its title. An unnerving and bleak examination on teen angst, Super Dark Times turns a horrific tragedy into a ticking time bomb of violence. In Brad’s review, he raves, “Super Dark Times is tragedy in its purest of forms, removing the safety blanket from suburbia, tormenting the town with a morbid tale that will leave scars on each and every person who lives there.”…

That Super Dark Times takes place in mid ‘90s set suburbia is fitting; the lack of cell phones and the internet as we know it today meant growing up during this time amounted to boredom. Teen angst and boredom in the quiet suburbs was a recipe for destruction, especially if there’s already an underlying darkness as there is within Josh.

The article then goes on to list other notable horror films set in the suburbs but does not get to the obvious question (at least obvious to me): how many horror films can cover this same ground? There is no doubt that bad things do indeed happen in suburbia and often they feel worse because residents and outsiders do not expect them to happen in the suburbs. After all, that is why many of them moved there in the first place. Yet, more broadly, how many times can it be original or interesting to rehash the typical suburban critique that peeling back the curtain on perfect looking suburban lives reveals pain and horrors? Perhaps each generation has to tackle this issue but the more times a trope is used, the ante is raised on how it is going to stand out this time.

See earlier posts on this topic here and here.

Inequality starts young: education opportunities for 3-year-olds

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A new book by education scholars highlights the differences in what 3-year-olds are doing with their days:

Only 55 percent of America’s 3 and 4-year-olds attend a formal preschool, a rate far below China, Germany and other power players on the global stage…

Parents who can’t afford preschool typically leave their kids with a grandparent or someone nearby. Some of these informal child-care providers do offer rigorous educational activities, but others just leave kids in front of the television. The quality is more haphazard, and there’s a higher risk the option won’t work out. The book chronicles the awful experience of one low-income family in New York City that had to make 25 different child-care arrangements for their daughter by her fifth birthday.

The inequality that begins before kindergarten lasts a lifetime. Children who don’t get formal schooling until kindergarten start off a year behind in math and verbal skills and they never catch up, according to the authors, who cite a growing body of research that’s been following children since the 1940s. In fact, the gap between rich and poor kids’ math and reading skills has been growing since the 1970s. The “left behind” kids are also more likely to end up in lower-paying jobs…

Many of these initiatives have support across the political spectrum. President Trump’s first budget includes a proposal to start America’s first paid parental leave program. On the campaign trail, Trump also pushed the idea of expanding the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit to help make it more affordable for families to put their kids in quality preschool and childcare programs.

This would be a good example of how the Matthew Effect begins: small differences in younger ages lead to divergent outcomes and larger gaps later in life.

Bipartisan support for something? Better capitalize on this before polarization sets in.

Societal goals: avoiding society through online shopping

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The comic Take It From the Tinkersons recently had a strip hinting at a major consequence of online shopping:

While this might be a bit of hyperbole, there is some truth to this. Is one of the appeals of online shopping the ability to avoid society and social interactions? Even shopping at your local big box store requires rubbing shoulders with other shoppers and a brief interaction with a cashier (even with self-checkout, you still have an overseer).

At the least, online shopping provides evidence of the significant shift that happened in Western societies in the last few hundred years. The earliest sociologists were very interested in the switch from tight-knit village or agrarian life to the less connected and varied urban life. Marx saw tremendous consequences for labor and the individual within an economic system rooted in burgeoning cities. Durkheim compared mechanical and organic solidarity, a shift toward a complex division of labor where individuals now depended on others to do essential tasks for their lives. Tonnies contrasted gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, more direct social interactions versus indirect social interactions.

Online shopping of the sorts we have today may only be possible in a highly complex and individualized society such as our own. The process of moving a product from its production point to a warehouse to your home or business through online clicks is quite complicated and amazing. Yet, it really does limit social interactions on the shopping end. As private individuals, we can now make choices and receive our products away from scrutiny. It would be an error to think that this private purchase is now removed from social influence – with the spread of media and influence of social media, we may be influenced by generalized social pressures more than ever – but the direct social experience is gone.

This could have big implications for social life. Will buying habits significantly change now that immediate social interactions and social pressure is removed? Will we become used to such social transactions not involving people that we will be willing to remove social interactions from other areas? There will certainly be consequences of increasing online shopping and public life – even if it is related to individuals consuming products in a capitalistic system – may just suffer for it.

 

Does talking about the McMansions of yachts make sense?

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Purchase a luxury yacht – a “floating McMansion” – or you can choose one below that level yet still expensive:

The four-bedroom, three-bathroom luxury cruiser offers three floors of light-flooded living space, sundecks galore, two full kitchens and no shortage of closet space. The bedrooms are surprisingly spacious — more-so than most New York City apartments — and a gyro built into the hull keeps the boat so level at sea it hardly feels like a boat at all, even when it tops out at 25 miles per hour, Curry said.

“They are like a house and that’s what they are for these people — vacation homes,” said Chris Broadbent, a salesman for Grande Yachts. “You can buy a vacation home in Montauk for $1.6 million or more and you’re stuck there — which there are worse places to be stuck — but you can pay almost the same price for one of these and go anywhere.”

While the Norwalk Boat Show offers impressive examples of a luxury life at sea, not every boat needs to feel like a floating McMansion and run upwards of $2 million to be realistically livable for an extended period of time.

Mike Bassett, co-owner of Louis Marine in Westbrook, said the essentials for comfortable on-board living include heat and air conditioning, hot water and a microwave. Typically these boats are 35 to 40 feet, and can run anywhere from $130,000 to nearly $500,000 depending on the level of luxury, detailing and features that are added. The larger the boat, the more maintenance required, so really, it’s all about the lifestyle one is willing to live.

I am always intrigued to see what other consumer or luxury goods are compared to McMansions. Using the term implies more than just an expensive item: it is a mass-produced, gaudy or garish item of questionable quality intended to flash the status of their owner. Does a luxury yacht fit this bill? I would say no based on three factors:

  1. The price of the yachts said to be “floating McMansion[s]” costs more than the average American McMansion. (The average price would include a rough estimate based on housing markets across the United States.) This puts what is truly a more unusual consumer good already (how many Americans can purchase boats after their other expenses) out of reach of many people.
  2. These expensive boats are not mass-produced on the same scale as McMansions. There are plenty of boats in the United States – nearly 12 million registered boats according to Statista – but how many of them are these more expensive boats?
  3. The architecture or design of an expensive boat receives less attention than houses. Are new expensive yachts garish or poorly designed compared to older big yachts? It is hard to know what people’s perceptions are of this if the conversation is not as public or the conversation does not exist.

I’m open to hearing arguments for why this comparison – expensive boats are like McMansions – makes sense.

The suburban expansion strategy of Sears in the 1920s

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In an intriguing article comparing the rise of Sears and Amazon, Derek Thompson explains how Sears expanded from a mail-order business to physical stores:

In the early 1920s, Sears found itself in an economy that was coming off a harsh post-World War recession, according to Daniel M. G. Graff and Peter Temin’s essay “Sears, Roebuck in the Twentieth Century.” The company was also dealing with a more lasting challenge: the rise of chain stores. To guide their corporate makeover, the company tapped a retired World War I general named Robert Wood, who turned to the U.S. Census and Statistical Abstract of the United States as a fount of marketing wisdom. In federally tabulated figures, he saw the country moving from farm to city, and then from city to suburb. His plan: Follow them with stores.

The first Sears stores opened in the company’s existing mail-order warehouses, for convenience’s sake. But soon they were popping up in new locations. Not satisfied with merely competing with urban department stores like Macy’s, Wood distinguished new Sears locations by plopping them into suburbs where land was cheap and parking space was plentiful….

The company’s brick-and-mortar transformation was astonishing. At the start of 1925, there were no Sears stores in the United States. By 1929, there were 300. While Montgomery Ward built 90 percent of its stores in rural areas or small cities, and Woolworth focused on rich urban areas, Sears bet on everything—rural and urban, rich and poor, farmers and manufacturers. Geographically, it disproportionately built where the Statistical Abstract showed growth: in southern, southwestern, and western cities.

So what is the equivalent today of the burgeoning suburbs of the 1920s in terms of locations? The end of the article hints at one option:

Amazon, too, will thrive as long as it uses American demographics as a roadmap and takes advantage of new personal technology, like mobile phones for shopping and AI assistants for the home. In the last six months, Amazon has spent $13 billion to buy Whole Foods and its upscale urban locations. At the same time, it has offered discounts for low-income shoppers to become Prime subscribers.

Locating in wealthy communities is an interesting strategy. Other major popular retailers today are following such a model: think of Apple stores (perhaps another reason they cannot truly be town squares if they are primarily in wealthy areas) and Starbucks locations (less exclusive than Apple but still located within reach of wealthier customers or along well-trafficked roadways – see all 11 locations in the wealthy suburb of Naperville). Could we end up with a bifurcated retailing model where the wealthy (and those who can travel to these locations) can shop at a bricks and mortar store while the majority of Americans primarily shop online? This might be an overlooked edge for Walmart at this point: Amazon may rule online but Walmart stores, like Sears, are where many more typical Americans are and it may take some time to switch loyalty.

American marriage increasingly related to social class

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Continuing a trend of recent years, recent studies show that those getting married in the United States are more likely to be middle or upper class:

Currently, 26 percent of poor adults, 39 percent of working-class adults and 56 percent of middle- and upper-class adults are married, according to a research brief published today from two think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute and Opportunity America. In 1970, about 82 percent of adults were married, and in 1990, about two-thirds were, with little difference based on class and education.

A big reason for the decline: Unemployed men are less likely to be seen as marriage material…

In reality, economics and culture both play a role, and influence each other, social scientists say. When well-paying jobs became scarce for less educated men, they became less likely to marry. As a result, the culture changed: Marriage was no longer the norm, and out-of-wedlock childbirth was accepted. Even if jobs returned, an increase in marriage wouldn’t necessarily immediately follow…

People with college degrees seem to operate with more of a long-term perspective, social scientists say. They are more likely to take on family responsibilities slowly, and they often benefit from parental resources to do so — like help paying for education, birth control or rent to live on their own. In turn, the young adults prioritize waiting to have children until they are more able to give their children similar opportunities.

I have had this thought when seeing middle and upper class couples that have dated or lived together for years: what is their purpose in getting married? Do they need the government (and occasionally religious) backing to their union or is this primarily about social status?

As I’ve written before, perhaps more and more Americans see living alone as the preferred way to live out their adults lives rather than marriage.

I drove past the same scenery for almost eight years

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I realized a few days ago that I drove almost the same route every day to and from work for almost eight years. It was not a bad drive: it usually took about 15-20 minutes to go roughly 7 miles, I saw a lot of greenery due to Forest Preserves and a private park, I drove past some important local institutions, and there were not too many traffic lights.

But, as I was recently driving part of this route for another destination, I noticed that I had not seen this part of the world for a few months – and I live just a few miles away. With no daily commute along this route, I do not need to bother with this territory.

Does it matter that I do not keep up with this area any longer? It did not appear that much had changed. Yet, I felt like I missed something that had been part of my life for years. Now, I see different things on my daily route: new houses and buildings, new cars, and new obstacles to avoid in order to reach work faster.

It was easier when I was younger to simply explore my own suburbs and those around it. Although slower, this could be accomplished best by bicycle and with no set destination. This could even be accomplished when driving was still exciting in the early years (and gas was very cheap and what else was there to do in high school and college). Today, my goal is usually to get to a place quickly.

In the end, it is easy to see one set of sites for years and years. At the least, we can try to pay attention to those sites and be a part of the place (even if that means passing through at 30+ MPH). On the flip side, we can blindly go along that same route for a long time and also miss out on numerous other nearby places that are just off our daily route.

The same LA bridges in many car commercials

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One interesting set of locations is fairly common in car commercials: bridges in Los Angeles. This is not what you might expect: how many people know that bridges are even necessary in Los Angeles? (The Los Angeles River does exist.) This has a long history: a 2004 New York Times story suggests the presence of production companies in southern California plus good weather leads to many shoots in Los Angeles.

One of the past bridge locations was the Sixth Street Viaduct which closed in 2016:

According to Film L.A., the organization that helps the film industry book municipal locations, over 80 movies, television shows, music videos, and commercials are shot on or underneath the Sixth Street Viaduct each year. That’s partially because of the bridge’s swooping metal arches, perched on an art-deco concrete platform; and partially because of the river underneath and that access tunnel: if you want to film something set in Los Angeles that makes reference to the city’s automotive culture, or if you’re just looking for a place to shoot a car chase that’s cheaper and more available than a clogged freeway, the channelized, concretized bed of the Los Angeles River is your best choice.

Except that the bridge officially no longer functions that way, as of last week. It’s going away completely. And the river? It’s on its way to becoming a river again.

Here is a short montage of the bridge being taken down alongside iconic images from films.

The Fourth Street Bridge is also home to a number of shoots and features Art Deco columns as well as views of the downtown skyline. Here is a Google Street View image:

FourthStreetLosAngeles

Are viewers of car commercials more likely to purchase a vehicle if it is shown in Los Angeles compared to other settings? Los Angeles has its own aesthetic which may or may not match with many other places. (In urban sociology, Los Angeles is often held up as the prime example of decentralization. Yet, it also does have a downtown as well as numerous other scenic sites such as the hills behind the city.) In the Chicago television market, we see some car commercials shot in Chicago. Might this help viewers envision themselves driving a new car when they see it in a familiar location? It would be more difficult to do this for all of the metropolitan markets in the United States.

Here are some other common car commercial locations with several more in the Los Angeles area.