ARNOLD KLING
August 14, 2011
The Top Political Contributors
August 11, 2011
Gender and the New Commanding Heights
August 11, 2011
Jamie Galbraith Makes an Assumption
August 11, 2011
Macroeconometrics: The Science of Hubris
August 10, 2011
Real and Nominal Bond Yields
BRYAN CAPLAN
August 14, 2011
The Effect of Thumb Sucking on Income
August 12, 2011
The Voice of Cold, Hard Truth to All Would-Be Educators
August 12, 2011
Ability, Morality, and Prosperity: A Paper and a Report
August 11, 2011
The Theory of Time and Frittering
August 10, 2011
Male Variance and the Remnants of the Gender Gap
DAVID HENDERSON
August 9, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken", Part Two
August 8, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken"
August 5, 2011
James Bovard on the Peace Corps
August 4, 2011
Summers Way Off on FDR and 1941
August 3, 2011
The "Amazon" Tax
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The assortive mating explanation for neighborhoods assumes people move. Political economy suggests that districts move as politicians gerrymander themselves into safe districts. Probably we are seeing both.
i was so thrilled last week when i had a chance to use the term "assortative mating". i think it's quite a useful concept when explaining the society we live in.
I love Wikopedia, because I looked up the Theory of Everything, and lo and behold, I find the hierarchical chart of force interactions and it is the same binary, unbalanced tree that we found in the Founder`s Gene concept. Somehow, in any scale, it is always a two force model, and other forces are way off scale.
We can accept this in the founders gene concept because genes, bio-chemistry, and atomic physics are close enought that one could claim correlation in the physics.
But, if the thoery of everything exists, then such a two force model, unbalanced tree would act like a kernel, requiring all high congregates to obey the same law. We would expect the same organization to appear in the economy, and we use that theory to find the links between evolution and economic development, bridge the gap in sciences so to speak.
The assortive mating explanation for neighborhoods assumes people move. Political economy suggests that districts move as politicians gerrymander themselves into safe districts. Probably we are seeing both.
However, gerrymandering rarely affects county boundaries, which was the focus of the point. (I can think of a few examples-- Vance County in North Carolina was created as a gerrymander, but that was back in the day when state legislatures were allowed to use a one or two legislator per county for State Senate seats system; i.e., before Reynolds v. Sims)
Bryan/Arnold - You're in a perfect position to evaluate the Washington, DC area as a test case for assortative living. Most of the early to mid-career professionals I know who moved to DC from elsewhere eventually left the city once they got tired of forking over half their incomes to taxes. Some went north (literally and figuratively) to Maryland where they figured, "hey, if I'm going to pay so much in taxes I might as well get better quality services for my money. Some went went south to Virginia where they figured, "hey, I can get the same level of local government services for less money."