Thursday, December 20, 2012

concentration of advantage and disadvatage

"Much homicide is black-on-black, much inner-city, much gang-on-gang, unlicensed illegal guns, whereas the mass shootings have all been individual, white-on-white, mostly non-urban, often licensed guns (although often licensed to others as in [Sandy Hook])."

distinguished criminologist, Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon University


it's time to essentially flip the construct of concentration and clustering on its head. Instead of focusing just on "concentrated disadvantage" to describe crime, we should also focus on "concentrated prosperity." He adds that the main problem in making the connection between the concentration of urban prosperity and disadvantage is that our measures are far too broad. To do so would require more micro-level data at the neighborhood or Census tract level, something like a "micro place-based Gini coefficient."

John Roman, an urban crime expert at the Urban Institute, took a detailed look at the declining homicide rates in America's largest 24 urban centers

The concentrated nature of economic advantage is a central feature, if not the central feature, of the rapidly evolving urban knowledge economy. We are seeing the rise of an increasingly spiky world where prosperity and economic advantage are becoming increasingly uneven and concentrated at every single geographic scale — between as well as within cities and metros, globally and national, and across neighborhoods and communities.

We have tons of research that compares metros. What we need is better data and more research which looks inside our cities — at their increasing economic and geographic divides, tracing differences in income and wage levels, class and industry composition, density and other factors at a much more fine-grained scale.

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