Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/03/deceptive-averages.html
…
4 Likes
17 Likes
And of course even this understates the divide, because zip codes are not intentionally drawn along economic divisions. Plenty of zip codes will have a mix of new mcmansions and older, tract housing.
11 Likes
When do we all get to acknowledge that all the evidence of the past 30 years says there’s only one thing that trickles down, and you probably don’t want it trickling on you?
12 Likes
Absolutely. I would like to see this same data mapped over school districts or gerrymandered legislative districts, for example.
11 Likes
I think the callback to Obama is important here. People said that Obama mostly deserved the credit for the “good” economy of Trump’s first two years. But it’s not just republican economy policies that are failures, it’s the democrat ones too. Every time I see someone on the news wondering if Trump’s approval ratings are being held up by the “good economy” I want to laugh or scream. I think they are being held up moreso by the bad economy and the fact that people with university degrees keep saying it’s good, reinforcing the idea that science is disconnected with reality.
12 Likes
Both school districts and congressional districts can be as large as an entire state, so those won’t work particularly well. Hawaii has a single, statewide school district, and there are 7 states with a single representative in the House of Representatives.
1 Like
The economy is good for 1%ers and they put considerable ammounts of money into the political system to make sure that it stays that way. So yeah, the economy is good for those that “matter,” those that stuff the ballot box with Benjamins.
2 Likes
What, Capitalism isn’t working?
4 Likes
no no…it’s working just fine for the “right” people. /s
2 Likes
Here’s an example I sometimes use: if the payday loan business is doing great, do their record profits bode well for the economy as a whole? Nope. Quite the opposite.
8 Likes
Zip codes have similar problems In LA alone (I had the data around) there are 4 zip codes with over 100,000 people and 9 with under 20. There are more zip codes with under 20 people in LA than serve the state of North Dakota
There are some big issues with their methodology that aren’t addressed in the paper and leave me wondering about the fundamental reliability of their output. They say they are using the ZIP codes. Are they using the actual postal ZIP codes (almost certainly used in the Zillow data they used for home prices) or the ZCTA (the census department’s zip code equivalent). Normally the two are the same thing, but they update on different schedules and the difference would matter over this time period. Rapidly growing areas, which tend to be more affluent, will often have new ZIP codes because of changes in how postal sorting facilities are managed and the opposite happens in a lot of areas losing population. This means that most of the places that would show change show as no change in their maps. On top of that measuring household wealth by multiplying Zillow listings for median prices by the number of households in a ZIP code will cause huge distortions because home prices aren’t distributed anything like a normal distribution. Places in economic distress will generally have fewer home transactions and the ones they have will generally be among the most financially stable people, meaning a lot of struggling people will simply disappear from the statistics and that is before you hit on the rent/own split.
3 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
