Value stacks determine outcomes

Another example of the cognitive pollution which infests our public discussions on important matters - and usually sourced to critical justice enthused academics and journalists with poor reasoning skills or little knowledge.

From Unpacking the Power of Privileged Neighborhoods by Tanvi Misra in CityLab. CityLab is distinctly left leaning, but they occasionally have well argued pieces which are a good test of received wisdom. Not necessarily correct, but sufficiently well-argued to a careful reexamination of one's own opinions.

But nothing like that here. This is a straight up mess.

Conventional wisdom says that place matters more for people who live in distressed neighborhoods—places with low median incomes and not a lot of opportunity. That’s why policymakers have traditionally focused on one of two place-based solutions. Community development grants and tax breaks, for example, are aimed at improving conditions by luring investment into disadvantaged areas. Housing voucher programs, meanwhile, are supposed to help low-income families escape distressed neighborhoods and move to ones with higher median incomes and better educational outcomes.

But what if our approach to geographical inequality is lopsided? What if we’re overlooking the contribution of so-called advantaged neighborhoods in maintaining status quo?

There's the first issue, within two paragraphs. Virtually all critical justice postmodernists are trapped in zero-sum thinking. They are always about dividing the existing pie in a different way rather than figuring out how to grow the pie. From Stalin to Lenin to Mao to Castro to Pol Pot to Chavez- every statist central planner wants to direct the tactical activities of an economy in order to ensure equal distribution of outcomes (zero-sum view) rather building an unconstrained system where everyone grows, even if at differential rates.

In a new paper published in Sociological Quarterly, Junia Howell, a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh, argues just that. “As important as investigations into disadvantaged neighborhoods are,” she writes, “the nearly exclusive analytical focus on them has the unintentional consequence of downplaying the role that advantaged neighborhoods play in stratifying educational outcomes.”

Yep, there's that old chestnut as well. The rich cause the poor. Researching Howell to discover her philosophical background, there it is "Additionally, her work uses Critical Theory to expand and enhance quantitative methodologies." Actually, I suspect it would be more accurate to say that quantitative methodologies are the beard to her Critical Theory orientation.

Howell concludes in the paper:

Findings suggest neighborhood structural effects are asymmetrical. These results suggest that educational inequality is driven by the compounding privileges of the most advantaged residents.

[snip]

Another striking finding of the study is how these results differ by race: She finds that whites are concentrated in the most advantaged areas, and experience a strong positive effect of living in these areas that drives the overall strong influence of these neighborhoods.

Black residents are more widely distributed across wider variety of neighborhoods, although still overrepresented in disadvantaged ones. But educational attainment is not as affected by this geography. That means, even if African Americans live in advantaged neighborhoods, they may not experience benefits compared to what their white counterparts experience.

“This patterns speak to the fact that the mechanisms that are enabling advantaged residents in advantaged neighborhoods are ones that excludes black residents and enhancing white residents,” Howell said. “There are ways of drawing lines that are not just the neighborhoods… [the neighborhood effect] is not the only piece.”

Howell is wanting to find that poor neighborhoods are poor because of reasons outside the neighborhood. She finds what she is searching for. But she can't explain it.

The study doesn’t say anything about how exactly privilege compounds in advantaged areas, or why it manifests more for white residents than their black neighbors. But Howell has some theories: Generational advantages (legacy admissions, family wealth), social networks that give white kids preference in private school and college admissions, and institutional practices (like inequality in high school “tracking”) may all play a role.

Actually, this is about the only element of her discussion with which I agree. Social networks are beneficial and if you are a member of a productive and consequential network, there are all sorts of beneficial spillover effects (see the research in Connected by Nicholas Christakis). But while there are beneficial network effects, they are not determinative.

But just as a mythical Good Old Boy network has been the bugbear of feminist scholars, Institutional and Generational Privilege is the bugbear of critical theory scholars. It is not that that these things don't exist at all. Its just that they are rarer, smaller and more marginal than is imputed to them.

That has implications not just for the way policy interventions tackling inequality are designed, but how cities themselves are planned, Howell said; it challenges a central assumption that poor areas, and the people who live in them, are the problems. To solve disparities, therefore, a single-minded focus on pouring resources into disadvantaged neighborhood may not just be ineffective, but also counterproductive. The core problems lie in places and in institutions outside those communities.

“We need to start by reframing, both on the public side and the policy side, how we think about and talk about these spaces,” Howell said.

So rich neighborhoods cause poor neighborhoods and, surprisingly, a social justice critical theorist believes thinks we need to remake everyone else's places and institutions in order to improve poor neighborhoods. Despite not knowing "how exactly privilege compounds in advantaged areas."

Aside from the simple issue that social justice scholars are ideological charlatans whose research work is always slave to a system of governance by experts (i.e. determinist statists), the frustration is that they are ignoring a long observed and understood issue.

Poor neighborhoods are rarely poor because of absences of money (with which Howell apparently agrees). Nor are they poor because of the market economy (proven everywhere worldwide where it has been embraced - markets make everyone more financially well-off.)

Ideologists such as Howell, as well as many well intended people, are mistaking causal flow.

We saw this in the housing crisis of 2007. A couple of generations of political leaders on both sides of the aisle held the unstated (or understated) position that home ownership was causal of middle class status. If we could make it easier for people to acquire homes, we would help secure their position in the middle class.

It was always a well intended illusion but it was none-the-less an illusion based on a faulty understanding of causal flow. People are not middle class because they own a home. They own a home because they are middle class. More specifically, they exhibit the bourgeois virtues of the middle class - they value education, they value marriage and intact families, they value hard work, they value saving, they value self-control and self-discipline, they have a low time preference orientation, they cultivate considered risk taking, etc.

This is not to say all neighbors in wealthy neighborhoods practice all these virtues to the same degree. But these values, and others, represent a "values stack" if you will. The more these values are present in combination with one another, the greater the probability of successful life outcomes. A libertine lifestyle might be offset by careful risk taking. A spendthrift lifestyle might be offset by exceptional work ethic, etc.

And as with all affiliative networks, like tends to attract to like. Of course networks of people with similar values systems (neighborhoods) emerge in a common physical place because they choose to affiliate with their value peers. Some of these value systems are very productive and some are not.

Despite Howell's efforts to interject race into her analysis by implication rather than by data, wealthy neighborhoods are not ipso facto white neighborhoods. In fact, they are often exceptionally diverse not just in iconic locations such as San Francisco and the Silicon Valley townlets, but all across the nation. Wealthy neighborhoods typically have a large number of immigrants (legal, educated, and accomplished) and a large number of people with similar value systems despite differences in race and history (sino-confucian cultures with northwestern protestant cultures for example).

It isn't something inherent in a geographic place which determines outcomes - see the uproar over gentrification which is the displacement of poor communities by wealthier communities in the exact same geography.

It isn't about access to capital - As Howell appears to agree, simply pumping money into a place makes little difference as is well documented in the economic development literature.

It isn't about institutions - As is becoming clearer the more we digitize processes. We used to be able to argue that police were unfairly targeting black neighborhoods because they were racist suppressors. With automated crime reporting and dispatching, it becomes ever clearer that police are concentrated where crime is occurring, not because of the race of the residents. Residual racism by individuals can never be ignored or dismissed as a causal factor for some issues but AI and digital processes are demonstrating that is far less a factor than earlier claimed.

It isn't about race - See Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld in The Triple Package for plentiful examples of minority emigrant groups in America who have done not just exceptionally well but better than native born whites.

It is marginally about networks - As mentioned, see Connected by Nicholas Christakis for plenty of examples of the benefits (but also the negative consequences) of affiliative networks.

But mostly it is about values systems. America, and other Anglo-cultures such as Britain, Australia, Canada, etc. has a long and distinctive track record for absorbing emigrant groups from different countries, regions, religions, races, etc. To the extent that those groups demonstrate the bourgeoise virtues, they tend to all do exceptionally well. The critical theory fantasy that all interactions are based on group identity and are zero-sum in nature is refuted daily but the dream (actually, nightmare) lives on of an intersectional group identitarian society in which experts of a self-appointed Mandarin Class determines who should get what through a coercive process of central decision-making and where everyone participates equally in a limited zero-sum economy.

Which is what passes for scholarship at CityLab.