David Cutler: belief

Transcript context

…As you know, early in the 20th century, recent immigrant arrivals to the United States clustered together fairly tightly in terms of living in the same areas, often within cities. That trend then weakens throughout much of the 20th century, and in the last few decades, it’s been re-emerging. Why is it coming back? There’s a line of work that, at least on the health end, comes from Anne Case and Angus Deaton. They and a colleague, Arthur Stone, wrote a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper last year, where they argued basically, my shorthand is that education is the new race, that we’re learning how to dismantle some of the barriers that have existed by race, certainly not all of them, but some of them. What’s coming up is that education is increasingly associated with where you live, what resources you have access to, and so on. I think that maybe some of what’s going on — which is that society is bifurcating along the haves and the have-nots based on socioeconomic status as opposed to race — that the have-nots are really a large share of the population, and the have-nots can’t afford to live in Silicon Valley, and they can’t afford to live in the Boston metro area, and they can’t afford to live in New York. If you look, mobility used to be everyone moved to the high-wage areas, but now the high-wage areas have such high house prices that nobody can afford to live there except if you’re extremely wealthy. If you want to move, you’re getting compressed into areas where there are more lower-income people as opposed to more high-wage stuff. I’m really quite worried that society is becoming a kind of insider’s game as opposed to a situation where outsiders get to play as well. We, alas, have time for only two more questions. Your book with Ed, Survival of the City — if you had to pick an area — it doesn’t have to be disagreement, though it could be, but simply something you and he see differently. What would that be, of the topics in the book? And where does that difference come from?…

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