It is not about race, it is about public policy and opportunity

Hmmm.  I am respectfully dubious.  But . . . 

From Local government, exit, and voice by Arnold Kling.  The subheading is Charles Tiebout is vindicated.

Kling quotes from Kaufmann

White progressives in America, as in Britain, avoid diverse neighborhoods and are more likely to leave diverse places than white conservatives. In effect, they don’t practice what they preach. These are the findings from large-scale quantitative research in the United States and Britain, recently published in my academic article, “White flight from immigration?: Attitudes to diversity and white residential choice.”

The larger point Kling is making is that

When I was two years old, economist Charles Tiebout published an article that is still referred to today. The Tiebout hypothesis was that households would move to locales in which the mix of public services and taxes suited their preferences. If you want a lot of local services and are willing to pay high taxes, you move one place. If you prefer low taxes and are willing to do without lots of public services, you move to another.

Tiebout competition also should promote efficiency. If you have high taxes and not such good public services, you will lose people. Inefficient governments won’t go out of business, exactly, but they will lose “customers” and perhaps find themselves under pressure to reform. New York and California are losing customers, but I don’t see them reforming any time soon.

The Tiebout hypothesis is highly relevant to the relationship between exit and voice. You might think that government policy on taxes and spending is determined by voice, as expressed through voting. Tiebout suggested that at a local level policy will be determined by exit, as carried out by people moving to different jurisdictions.

 [snip]

When it comes to local government, Tiebout competition does not work very well. But it works way better than voting. In a jurisdiction that is proudly progressive, trying to vote against teachers’ unions is futile. Exit is your only option.

My anecdotal observation is that Kaufmann is correct. I have many friends who voice progressive values. But they choose to live in very white neighborhoods and to live very conservatively. Their foot voting contrasts with their voice voting.

All fair enough.  Some good points with which to agree and some points requiring more discussion.

But there is an interesting underlying tension and it relates to that original Kaufmann piece of research.  We are mixing the categories or Race, Ideology, Preferences, and Political Orientation without much seeming regard.  Makes me nervous about the conclusions.  

And there is the issue which just doesn't feel addressed.  Race and progressive ideologies and public policies tend to be highly correlated.  Progressive states lose population to Classically Liberal states (a la Hume, Locke, Smith, etc.) and Progressive Cities lose population to Classically Liberal towns and suburbs.  Not because of race but because of public policies.  If public policies are driving population movements, as I believe it is, that is not directly picked up in this research.  

The original research is White flight from immigration?: Attitudes to diversity and white residential choice by Eric Kaufmann.  From the original Abstract:

Background

Work on whites’ mobility behavior finds that they tend to move to less diverse neighborhoods than minorities. Work on white mobility preferences finds that whites who dislike diversity prefer less diverse neighborhoods. Do liberal whites practice what they preach, and do conservative whites really avoid diversity?

[snip]

Results

Whites select significantly less diverse neighborhoods than nonwhites, but there is little or no racial difference in the destinations that white liberals and conservatives, British Brexiteers and Remainers, and American Trump supporters and opponents move to.

Conclusion

Ethnicity matters for segregation, but conscious white ethnocentrism is much less important. Future work could explore unconscious ethnocentrism, differing ethnic information about neighborhoods or ethnically divergent amenities as potential explanations.

Kaufmann is both and ambitious and clever in terms of trying to make the data reveal useful information.  Reading through the original paper though, I can't help but feel that he goes a long way out on thin data ice.  He is not necessarily wrong, but I can't accord high confidence in the conclusions.

His articulation of the results are more assertive in his Diversity for Thee—But Not for Me by Eric Kaufmann.  The subheading is White progressives vote one way with their ballots, another way with their feet.

The analysis is reasonably sophisticated but also, I believe, truncated.  I see nothing in the analysis or conclusions which contradicts my default position which is that racial animus or affiliative desire is at most a minor element in considerations of residence or movement.  That segregation occurs along a variety of affiliative attributes such as education attainment, income, religion, family structure, educational aspiration, business and professional sectors, class, culture, etc.  

The background to that default position is documented in Root causes of demographic inversions, Communication Signal Loss and segregation, and European and American political systems, locality and minority political power.  

Kaufmann's research is interesting and does not contradict my default position.  He introduces some new wrinkles (the limiting constraint when one group is preponderant for example).  But he had to bridge a lot of incomplete data and while I am confident he is doing so is the best manner possible, bridged data is always a red flag to me.  

I don't reject his hypothesis that white progressives are more likely to avoid diverse neighborhoods and are more likely to leave diverse places than white conservatives.  That much was reasonably inferred from Charles Murray's Coming Apart.  

We are left with the issue that authoritarian progressives are still obsessed with race as explanation for disparate outcomes no matter how little evidence there is to support that interpretation and that they are uninterested in the real dynamics behind choice and prosperity.  Until we focus on making life better, or at least making it easier for more people to choose to lead better lives, then we are wasting time, money and opportunity and leaving people mired in dysfunctional abstractions and ideological fantasies.