Macro Roundup

"... In 2014 the Obama administration sent school districts “guidance” letters that essentially threatened federal action if black suspension rates weren’t reduced. The letter stated that even if a school’s suspension policy “is neutral on its face—meaning that the policy itself does not mention race—and is administrated in an evenhanded manner,” the district could still face a federal civil-rights investigation if the policy “has a disparate impact, i.e., a disproportionate and unjustified effect on students of a particular race.”..."

Jason Riley, "Obama’s Racial Preferences Made Schools Dangerous," Wall Street Journal, December 25, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/obamas-racial-preferences-made-schools-dangerous-11545767080

Obama’s Racial Preferences Made Schools Dangerous

There are some interviews a journalist never forgets. I remember the time a father in Harlem explained to me why he had pulled his son out of the neighborhood public school and enrolled him in a nearby charter school.

The father was tall and thin. He kept both hands in his pockets as we stood talking, but he had a very expressive face. I thought he was going to tell me that the charter school had smaller classes or better graduation rates. Instead, he wanted to talk about something most parents take for granted when they send Johnny and Susie off to school each morning: physical safety.

He didn’t take it for granted. He told me the atmosphere at the old school had been chaotic, that bullying was rampant, and that his son, a sixth-grader at the time, had become terrified of the place. One day the boy was attacked by other students in the school lavatory, and the father got a call to pick him up from the hospital. It was the final straw. “I didn’t know anything about charters,” said the father. “I was just looking for an escape.” After the new school assured him his child would not have to worry each day about being assaulted by his classmates, he was sold.

I thought about that family last week when news broke that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was revoking an Obama-era policy on school discipline. In 2014 the Obama administration sent school districts “guidance” letters that essentially threatened federal action if black suspension rates weren’t reduced. The letter stated that even if a school’s suspension policy “is neutral on its face—meaning that the policy itself does not mention race—and is administrated in an evenhanded manner,” the district could still face a federal civil-rights investigation if the policy “has a disparate impact, i.e., a disproportionate and unjustified effect on students of a particular race.”

Put another way, the administration was demanding racial parity in school discipline, regardless of who was being disruptive, which is as silly as demanding racial parity in police arrests, regardless of who’s committing crimes.

The result is that more schools have been disciplining fewer students in order to achieve racial balance in suspension rates and stay out of trouble with the federal government. Civil-rights lawsuits are embarrassing—to be accused of racial discrimination is often tantamount to being found guilty of it. They’re also expensive to fight, and the federal government has far more resources than any school district. The easier course for schools is to pretend that students from different racial and ethnic groups misbehave at similar rates. School safety becomes secondary.

In Oklahoma City, principals told teachers not to request a suspension “unless there was blood.” After school districts in Los Angeles and Chicago softened their policies to curb suspensions, teachers reported more disorder, and students reported feeling less safe. Following a similar move in Philadelphia, truancy increased and academic achievement fell. Schools in Wisconsin that followed the guidance also saw subsequent reductions in math and reading proficiency. Like other liberal advocates of school-discipline reform, Arne Duncan, who was serving as President Obama’s education secretary when the guidance was issued, insisted that blacks are suspended at higher rates than other groups only because school officials are racially biased. “It’s not caused by differences in children,” he said. “It is adult behavior that needs to change.”

Yet many of the schools where these uneven discipline rates persist have minority principals and no shortage of minority teachers and administrators. What would be their motive for singling out black and brown kids for suspensions and expulsions, unless those students’ behavior warrants it? And why shouldn’t we expect to find varying rates of misbehavior among racial and ethnic groups in school, when that is exactly what we find outside school?

The bigger problem with these antisuspension crusades is that they ultimately harm the groups they are supposed to help. After New York City made it more difficult to remove troublemakers from the classroom, schools with the highest percentages of minority students were more likely to experience an increase in fighting, gang activity and drug use. A federal report on school crime and safety released last year by the National Center for Education Statistics found that 25% of black students nationwide reported being bullied, the highest proportion of any racial or ethnic group.

Some kids go to school to learn, while others go to generate disorder. If we want to narrow racial gaps in academic achievement, policies ought to prioritize the needs of the former—and a school stripped of its ability to effectively discipline students will be hard-pressed to effectively teach them. Don’t believe me? I know a father in Harlem you should talk to.

FRBSL finds gender pay gap is function of marriage status, even controlling for age

"...But when marital status is factored in, single men tend to earn roughly what single women and married women do, while married men far out earn the other three groups, according to a recent Economic Synopses essay. Research Officer and Economist Guillaume Vandenbroucke first broke down wages by men and women, focusing on employed people with at least a high school diploma.... Vandenbroucke’s first observation is that there was very little, if any, difference between single men and single women. Next was that single women and married women also earned similar wages. “This is surprising since married women may be more likely to have children than single women,” he noted. “Thus, this second point is not consistent with the view that the gender wage gap results from women having children earlier in life and losing ground in human capital accumulation relative to men.” Hisfinal observation was that married men earned significantly more than the other three categories. He cautioned that the data don’t imply that being married increases a man’s wage: “It might be that men with higher wages are more likely to marry; therefore, the average married man earns a higher wage than the average single man.”..."

Married Men Outearn Single Men (and Women as a Whole)," Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, December 25, 2018, https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2018/december/married-men-outearn-single-men

Note as of May 2020 she hasn’t followed up with a paper

“…Using the American Community Survey’s five-year data estimates, I studied socioeconomic and demographic data for 16,732 census-designated places, ranging from major cities like New York City and San Francisco to rural communities with fewer than 5,000 people like Danville, Pa., where I grew up. With my doctoral student Andy Eisenlohr, I divided these places into cities, with populations above 100,000; small towns significantly outside cities, with 5,000 to 15,000 inhabitants; and rural America, those places with fewer than 5,000 inhabitants. We tracked homeownership, unemployment, white unemployment, mortgage payment and household income, along with demographic measures such as education and ethnic diversity. What we discovered surprised us. By most measures other than education, median households in small-town America tend to be doing at least as well as their counterparts in urban America. Congressional districts that voted Republican in both 2016 and 2018 tend to have higher median incomes than those that went Democratic in both years. Of the 45 states we studied in detail, 28 have a lower share of significant poverty (defined as family income of under $10,000 a year) in small towns than in urban centers. Fifteen of them have a higher median household income in small towns than in cities. That share would undoubtedly be higher if we adjusted income for cost of living, which is lower in small towns. And 40 of the 45 states we analyzed have lower unemployment rates in small towns than in cities….”

Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, "The False Stereotype of Two Americas,"Wall Street Journal, December 26, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-false-stereotype-of-two-americas-11545869142

The False Stereotype of Two Americas

In the popular stereotype since the 2016 election, America is divided into two unappealing halves: irate, disenfranchised, often poor rural dwellers versus smug, satisfied and woefully obtuse urban elites—the latter joined in 2018 by suburbanites. The voting map illustrates this narrative: skinny coastal arms of blue, likely holding oat-milk lattes, alongside a giant, angry sea of red.

This story of division may be unsettling, but it isn’t true. Using the American Community Survey’s five-year data estimates, I studied socioeconomic and demographic data for 16,732 census-designated places, ranging from major cities like New York City and San Francisco to rural communities with fewer than 5,000 people like Danville, Pa., where I grew up. With my doctoral student Andy Eisenlohr, I divided these places into cities, with populations above 100,000; small towns significantly outside cities, with 5,000 to 15,000 inhabitants; and rural America, those places with fewer than 5,000 inhabitants. We tracked homeownership, unemployment, white unemployment, mortgage payment and household income, along with demographic measures such as education and ethnic diversity.

What we discovered surprised us. By most measures other than education, median households in small-town America tend to be doing at least as well as their counterparts in urban America. Congressional districts that voted Republican in both 2016 and 2018 tend to have higher median incomes than those that went Democratic in both years. Of the 45 states we studied in detail, 28 have a lower share of significant poverty (defined as family income of under $10,000 a year) in small towns than in urban centers. Fifteen of them have a higher median household income in small towns than in cities. That share would undoubtedly be higher if we adjusted income for cost of living, which is lower in small towns. And 40 of the 45 states we analyzed have lower unemployment rates in small towns than in cities.

These results hold true for rural America, too. Take the mid-Atlantic, where 90% of all communities with fewer than 5,000 people voted Republican for president in 2016. The median homeownership rate for these places is around 73%, compared with 32% in New York City and 52% in Philadelphia. Fifty-eight percent of rural communities have a higher median household income than that of their state’s reference city. Between 2012 and 2016, these places had a median unemployment rate of 6%, which is lower than in New York City (9%), Philadelphia (13%) and Washington (9%).

Midwestern rural communities, 96% of which voted Republican in 2016, show similar trends, with a median unemployment rate of 5%, both overall and for the white population. Forty-two percent of these rural places have higher median household incomes than cities such as St. Louis, Chicago and Milwaukee. In New England, these results are even starker. Sixty percent of rural communities have a higher median household income than the nearby cities. Rural New England places have a 66% homeownership rate, in contrast with New England cities such as Boston (34.7%), Providence, R.I. (34%), and Manchester, N.H. (47%). Homeownership—a key factor for intergenerational upward mobility—is almost universally lower in cities.

The data are more complicated than the stereotype when it comes to income inequality, too. Philadelphia’s income distribution is remarkably similar to that of small Pennsylvania towns, which if anything are closer to a statistically normal distribution. While 3% of Philadelphia residents make over $200,000, so do 2.1% of small-town Pennsylvanians, and whereas 14% of Philadelphians make less than $10,000, only 8.1% of small-town Pennsylvanians do. A greater share of small-town Pennsylvanians fall into the prosperous $100,000 to $150,000 income range than do Philadelphians, and the proportions making $150,000 to $200,000 are similar (2.9% in small towns vs. 3.4% in the city).

The same pattern holds in New York City and Pittsburgh compared with the small towns of New York state and West Virginia, respectively. While 17.7% of Pittsburghers make $100,000 or more, 18.5% of small-town West Virginians fall within this income bracket. Consistent with the wider income gaps in cities, notably more New York City households earn more than $200,000 (8.3%) than in the Empire State’s small towns (3.3%).

Education is the one area in which urban Americans exceed rural ones. Almost half of Austin, Texas, residents have bachelor’s degrees, vs. 12% of Southern rural dwellers. The same contrast holds for Minneapolis and Denver compared with the rural Midwest and Southwest. (The same pattern is evident comparing cities with small towns.) Yet in urban areas we see ranges from 12% (Santa Ana, Calif.) to 60% (Seattle). If anything, the differences within urban or rural America are greater than those between the two.

And that’s the point. We have created a false dichotomy between urban and rural America by cherry-picking places like San Francisco and New York and pitting them against equally specific examples of rural America, like Appalachian Kentucky. We have painted a portrait of an out-of-touch elite vs. an angry populist movement. But both are tiny minorities of the population. Most Americans aren’t in the top 1% and don’t attend Pilates classes or read the New Yorker. But neither are the lives of most rural Americans captured in the pages of “Hillbilly Elegy,” nor are they angry and resentful of globalization and Manhattanites.

Extreme poverty and chronic unemployment exist in rural America. But these problems exist in the cities, too—evidence of a class divide that cuts across geography and demographics.

Ms. Currid-Halkett is a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California.

“…Our deepest anxieties about the future of where we live are embodied in other cities — in Portlandification, Brooklynification, Manhattanization. The comparison is seldom a compliment. You don’t want to become Manhattan (too dense), Portland (too twee), Boston (too expensive), Seattle (too tech-y), Houston (too sprawling), Los Angeles (too congested), Las Vegas (too speculative), Chicago (too indebted)….”

Emily Badger, "Happy New Year! May Your City Never Become San Francisco, New York or Seattle,"New York Time, December 26, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/upshot/happy-new-year-may-your-city-never-become-san-francisco-new-york-or-seattle.html

Or Portland, Denver, Boston, Dallas, Houston or Los Angeles.

Seattle does not want to become San Francisco, a fate that has come to refer exclusively to the city’s worst traits: its $5,000-a-month rents, its homeless encampments and the ever-present dissonance between those two.

As San Francisco’s troubles have grown more vivid, so too has its status as other cities’ worst nightmare. In Portland, Oakland and Sacramento, residents and pundits have voiced dread at becoming The Next San Francisco, where the middle class is disappearing.

San Francisco is worried, too — about becoming Manhattan. That fear has lurked for decades behind every new proposed skyscraper. And now cranes are erecting them all over downtown. The new Salesforce Tower sits at the center of the construction zone, 1,070 feet tall and butting into every vista in the city.

Surely there is nothing left to fear in New York, a place that already has tall buildings and high rents. But the pending arrival of Amazon in Long Island City, as Vice recently put it, has some residents on edge about “becoming Seattle on steroids.” The specter captures the particular mix of high housing costs, tall buildings and tech bros.

Our deepest anxieties about the future of where we live are embodied in other cities — in Portlandification, Brooklynification, Manhattanization. The comparison is seldom a compliment. You don’t want to become Manhattan (too dense), Portland (too twee), Boston (too expensive), Seattle (too tech-y), Houston (too sprawling), Los Angeles (too congested), Las Vegas (too speculative), Chicago (too indebted).

San Francisco has come to stand for the most specific set of horrors. It is the place where extreme poverty and tech wealth occupy the same block, while the schoolteachers and firefighters all live two hours away.

Consider other nuances: Portlandification can be Brooklynified, as happens when ambitious media-savvy types commercialize twee. Manhattanization has evolved over time. It once meant building up. Now it increasingly refers to building only for the rich.

Seattle-ization, meanwhile, is a particularly dire diagnosis: The high housing costs and tech riches there have remade the city with startling speed.

Denver seemed to imply no obvious meaning until The Kansas City Star’s editorial board assigned it one last month. “Stop the Denverization of Kansas City,” its headline said. Befuddled readers in Denver realized their city was now a synonym for gentrification — at least, among cities not yet expensive enough to worry about San Francisco-ization.

In truth, most of these cities have qualities other cities would reasonably desire. Denver has one of the country’s fastest-growing tech labor forces, with minorities and women relatively well represented in those jobs. Seattle and Portland have among the fastest all-around job growth. New York has some of the fastest-growing wages. San Francisco has unemployment well below the national average and household incomes among the highest in the country.

But San Francisco-ization and the other -izations don’t refer to the process of acquiring any of these good things. Rather, those terms capture the deepening suspicion of many communities that the costs of urban prosperity outweigh the benefits. The tech jobs and the high wages aren’t worth having if they come with worsening congestion, more crowded development or soaring housing costs.

Amazon’s search this year for a new second headquarters made this trade-off explicit for many cities. Despite the tens of thousands of new high-paying jobs in tech and construction on offer, protesters in Chicago and Pittsburgh — even some in the winning areas of New York and Washington — concluded that they didn’t want to be the next Seattle.

Numerous writers in Seattle warned that they were right to oppose that future.

Embedded in these fears is something slippery, seemingly inevitable. Once you let tech giants in the door, you have a homeless crisis. Once you allow more density, you’re surrounded by skyscrapers. Once housing costs begin to rise, the logical conclusion is San Francisco.

“Bostonians: Do you worry more about Manhattanization? Or San Francisco-ization?” Tim Logan, a Boston Globe reporter who covers development, asked on Twitter this year. To him, the cities represent different routes to the same end of creating urban playgrounds for the rich.

Manhattan has built its way there, through the construction of luxury condos seemingly affordable only to oligarchs and venture capitalists. San Francisco has become equally expensive, but it has arrived there by not building much for decades (its present construction boom is too little too late).

There are, in other words, multiple models to creating what others see as an urban dystopia. It’s much harder to point to cities that have gotten all of this right — the growth without the congestion, the tech jobs without the homeless crisis, the affordable housing without the sprawl.

We could use a word for the condition of becoming such a place. Maybe Minneapolisization?