Sublime

than liberal homeowners.[24] Perhaps we are not so polarized after all. Maybe above a certain income level, we are all segregationists.

Evidence also suggests that when average incomes tend to rise in a neighborhood relative to its surrounding areas, the racial demographics of the areas are slower to change. Sociologist Patrick Sharkey, for example, finds that the lessening of poverty in US neighborhoods between 1970 and 2000 is not associated with white residents displacing blacks

Many counties combine all the main ingredients for success. Return, again, to Boston. With numerous universities, it is stewing in innovative ideas. It is an urban area with many extremely accomplished people offering youngsters examples of how to make it. And it draws plenty of immigrants, whose children are driven to apply these lessons.

Nations, states, and regions with higher degrees of income inequality actually have less upward mobility, a relationship known as the Gatsby curve.

When epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett studied a range of high-income countries in their 2009 book, The Spirit Level, they discovered that it is national inequality, not national wealth, that most influences nations’ social welfare. More unequal countries, they found, tend to have more teenage pregnancy, mental illness, drug use, o

MANHATTAN AS MECCA If—in America—dense, transit-served cities are better, then New York is the best. This is the clear and convincing message of David Owen’s Green Metropolis, certainly the most important environmental text of the past decade. This book deserves a bit more of our attention, so profound is the revolution in thinking that it represen