Geographic Segregation By Education 230
The wage gap between college-educated workers and those with just a high school diploma has been growing — and accelerating. But the education gap is also doing something unexpected: clustering workers with more education in cities with similar people. "This effectively means that college graduates in America aren't simply gaining access to higher wages. They're gaining access to high-cost cities like New York or San Francisco that offer so much more than good jobs: more restaurants, better schools, less crime, even cleaner air." Most people are aware of the gentrification strife occurring in San Francisco, but it's one among many cities experiencing this. "[Research] also found that as cities increased their share of college graduates between 1980 and 2000, they also increased their bars, restaurants, dry cleaners, museums and art galleries per capita. And they experienced larger decreases in pollution and property crime, suggesting that cities that attract college grads benefit from both the kind of amenities that consumers pay for and those that are more intangible." The research shows a clear trend of the desirable cities becoming even more desirable, to the point where it's almost a necessity for city planners to lure college graduates or face decline.
Re:Translation (Rough) (Score:4, Informative)
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what an analogy is. An analogy is not the same as saying that two things are exactly alike. It's saying that two things are similar in one or more ways. Understand that, and you'll soon stop replying as if someone said that two things are exactly alike even when it's perfectly apparent that they did not
Perhaps people who post "analogy fail" mean that the differences between two things outweigh the similarities so much as to invalidate reasoning from situations with the one to situations with the other.
Actually you may have something here (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Chicken or egg? (Score:5, Informative)
" In Austin, people are being priced out of their homes because they voted for every social program out there, and now the taxes are too damn high." -- commonly stated, but bullshit and contradicted by the facts. I own two houses in the Austin area -- one near downtown Austin which I rent out, and one in Williamson County near Cedar Park (suburban, bedroom community to Austin, the anti-Austin politically) where I live. When the two houses were at near identical values the total property taxes on the Williamson County house were HIGHER than the Austin house. The county taxes and and school district taxes were about the same. The Austin Community College taxes were the same. The difference was that the taxes of the Municipal Utility District (entity formed by developers to provide utility services in unincorporated areas normally provided by cities) were higher than the City of Austin taxes. So for the same level of services, I pay more in taxes to the MUD than I would have to the city of Austin -- actually I get fewer services because the MUD has no libraries or "social programs" as Austin has.
The reason that people are being priced out of their homes in Austin is because it is such a desirable place to live that property values are going up rapidly -- my house in Austin has appreciated by a factor of four since I bought it in 1996. Perhaps all those improvements the people of Austin voted for did contribute to the problem because they help to make it such a desirable place to live.