Morning Must-Read: Trevon Logan and John Parman: The Rise of Residential Segregation
The most important paper I have read this year so far, at least as far as changing my view of our history and thus of where we are today:
Consider a city like Chicago… 1880 to… 1940…. Black residents rose from 1.2% to 7.7% of the… population. Unsurprisingly… 1% of white households had a black neighbour in 1880…. The percentage of white households with a black neighbour declined to only 0.4% in 1940…. The percentage of black residents with a white neighbour declined from 66% to only 5% over this period. This dramatic decline in opposite-race neighbours could have profound impacts on the evolution of racial biases and ultimately become self-reinforcing…. Changing racial attitudes requires interactions between the races. In this respect, the sweeping rise of residential segregation patterns over the 20th century may very well have created an environment that has allowed racial prejudices to harden and lead to the stubbornly persistent racial inequalities we see today.