I just finished re-reading The Clustering of America, by Michael J. Weiss. It is a narrative description of forty different socioeconomic clusters, derived primarily from census data, mixed with some market information. It was published in 1988.
1. Somebody should keep this project going. Weiss published an updated version in 2000, which I will read next. But there would be much to be gained by providing a narrative that describes socioeconomic clusters based on the most recent data available (2010 if you take the most recent census, but my guess is that you could get reasonable estimates for 2015). It would be valuable to look at the cluster evolution over time.
2. The company with the data, Claritas, still exists. Elsewhere, of course, there is much more data, at companies like Google and Amazon. I suppose it is easier for those firms to merge census data in with their own proprietary data than it is for someone outside of those firms to start with the Claritas data and attempt to acquire and integrate the information from the web giants.
3. Weiss offered a brief section, called “clusters of the future.” One of them, which he called Gentrification Chic, seems spot on. Other predictions are not as easy to defend.
Stanford University reports that twenty occupations will account for 35 percent of the new jobs in the ’80s, but only two of them, elementary-school teaching and accounting, require college degrees. The AFL-CIO predicts that by 1990 the nation will be home to 500,000 “surplus college graduates” with outmoded skills. The end of the decade may bring about a cluster for the postindustrial age: New-Collar Condos. In city condo and townhouse developments, singles and couples will work in service-industry professions, as paralegals, computer programmers and medical assistants.
Before you snort at the prediction of “surplus college graduates,” consider why that prediction appears to be wrong. Yes, if you compare incomes of people with college degrees with those lacking a college degree, the gap is wide and has gotten wider. However, (a) it may nonetheless be true that a lot of college graduates are doing jobs that use skills not acquired in college; (b) some of the “college premium” represents returns to signaling or licensing requirements; (c) the ordinary BA has not done so well in the market. Graduate degrees and STEM undergraduate degrees account for much of the college premium.
Weiss does not appear to have obtained an advanced degree. However, The Clustering of America is a classic work of social science.
I was looking at that book just a few months ago, as I was helping to homeschool a nice young man who lives in an industrial suburb of Buffalo. He and his mother and I were trying to pin down for him the demographics of his particular neighborhood. His neighborhood was white working class, and had a lot of uninhabited decrepit housing stock and abandoned industrial plant, along with some very nice well kept craftsman / bungalow type housing (often with Roman Catholic lawn statuary).
I found the book less readable than I had hoped, more schlocky, with too many bar charts discussing the relative disposition of a particular neighborhood’s residents to buy cornflakes or above-ground pools. The book’s zingy, colloquial names for neighborhood demographics are certainly entertaining (“Blue blood estates”, “Two more rungs,” “mines and mills,” etc).
A problem one eventually reaches is that we get more information when we look at households, and many zip codes are poor proxies for households.
I will admit that reading Judith Rich Harris’s _The nurture myth_ really changed my thinking, as did thinking about things such as language acquisition, educational attainment, and foreign language maintenance.
Some of the effects of neighborhoods probably emerge from peer effects. Neighborhoods are what we experience when we look at society as outside observers.
A lot of what is really going on in human development and career / educational attainment is probably driven by genetic endowment, household factors, and peer networks. But it looks to the casual outsider as if neighborhood environment and social exclusion must be driving it.
(As usually, I’m thinking out loud. but indulge me as a I continue)
There are way too many variables in social science. And the directions of causality are not always clear.
I think one issue with neighborhoods is that of revealed preference and budget constraints. There are people who live in (say) a modest neighborhood because it’s all they can afford. There are others who live there because they like to live modestly.
The late Thomas J. Stanley made this point in some of his “Millionaire” books. Many tony suburbs are full of families living paycheck to paycheck. Many of the successful entrepreneurs Stanley interviewed lived in unpretentious, modest areas and enjoyed being frugal and keeping away from the consumption treadmill. I’m not certain Weiss managed to deal with that issue.
This reminds me of a discussion I once had with a colleague from Colombia who admitted she had trouble discerning the class status of Americans by their dress, since in Colombia only the poor wore clothing that had holes in it or was threadbare.
I think one issue is one of “strivers.” There are people who are strivers and aspirers who are living beyond their means, or almost beyond their means, and they want a fashionable place to live.
Another sort of person may be maximizing the accumulation of wealth, or success in a business, while being somewhat indifferent to certain status symbols.
In _Millionaire next door_ or one of the followup books, Tom Stanley noted that when he focus-grouped successful entrepreneurs, including millionaires and decamillionaires, many were indifferent to the sort of food and drink he served at events. But bank loan officers all gravitated to the fancy food.
“All hat no cattle” is how Stanley summarized it.
Stanley said he sometimes couldn’t spot the boss at a successful enterprise based on dress, demeanor, activities. You could obviously get information on this somehow–but not necessarily just based on the zip code someone lives in.