Ed Glaeser and I released our second decennial report on the state of racial segregation in American cities yesterday. In some coverage of the issue, our views are contrasted with those of some other giants in the literature on segregation -- Doug Massey, John Logan et al.
Allow me to point out why our take on the issue is different from theirs. Whip out your dog-eared copy of Massey and Nancy Denton's American Apartheid and turn to page 64. They show that dissimilarity declined by about 4 points in Northern cities between 1970 and 1980, and by seven points in the South. If you glance at my work with Ed, you see our numbers show a decline of about 10 points over the same time period. We use the same data. What gives?
The difference is all in the weighting. The big segregated cities of the rust belt have declined in population while the less segregated cities of the sun belt have grown. So, while it is true that there are some cities where segregation has declined only a little over the past 40 years, a shrinking proportion of the population lives there. Think about Detroit and St. Louis, two very segregated places where the population is less than half what it was in 1950. Then think about Atlanta, a city much less segregated than the others and also a place where more than a million African-Americans have moved in the past few decades. Focusing on the Rust Belt cities gives you an inaccurate portrait of true social trends over the past half-century.
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