Self-segregation
One of the best things about living in a big city like London or New York City is the cultural diversity. People of all backgrounds come together and form a melting pot of life. Or do they?
The melting pot mythology is mostly an American one, but it persists also in other cities around the world. Unfortunately, though, in the age of big data it is possible to measure not only where people life, but where they go to work and what they do in their free time. All you have to do is track people’s credit cards or mobile phones.
In a new paper published in the Journal of Political Economics, Donald Davis and his colleagues tracked 50,000 users of the internet review site Yelp in New York City and looked where they lived, worked and went out to eat. And while we know that neighbourhoods in New York City are segregated by race, just like in most big cities, these racial differences also don’t disappear when people go out to eat. The chart below shows the residences of the tracked users on the left and the places where they consumed food on the right.
Where people live (left) and eat (right) in Manhattan
Source: Davis et al. (2019). Note: Green dots indicate white people, red dots indicate Asians, yellow dots indicate Hispanics and blue dots indicate African-Americans.
If the two maps look about the same than that is the point, though if you measure it, segregation of consumption is significantly lower in New York City than segregation of residence. But it still is clearly visible in the maps. Even though most New Yorkers would consider themselves not racially biased, the researchers found that they stayed within their neighbourhoods to go out to eat. Theoretically, there are two reasons why this segregation of consumption exists. It could be that people just have a hard time getting from one place to another or it could be they simply don’t want to go to another neighbourhood. Davis and his colleagues built a model that allowed them to differentiate between the two factors and they found that both factors played a role.
If the travel time to restaurant A is half as long as to restaurant B, then people are about three times more likely to go to restaurant A than B. However, the social differences play an even more important role. People are about 25% to 50% less likely to go to a restaurant in a socially different neighbourhood than in a neighbourhood that is socially similar to their own. This effect seems to be particularly pronounced for black Americans, though the researchers cannot say why.
The truth is that while people may think of themselves as open-minded and liberal, they subconsciously self-segregate into neighbourhoods that look increasingly homogenous. I live in a middle-class neighbourhood in leafy southwest London and I admit, I spend most of my free time there. If I go to a restaurant, I tend to go to places that are full of other white middle-class people, even though I go there with friends from all cultural and ethnic backgrounds (come to think of it, I never asked them how they feel about this…). And if I had children, I would send them to schools that are full of mostly white children. Not because I am racist, but simply because the best schools cost money and white middle class people want to send their children to the best schools they can afford.
This happens everywhere and is a somewhat understandable instinct of parents. But the effect is that schools become more and more segregated along affordability over time – and this means they become segregated along racial lines as well. In a city like New York or London where the cost of living is particularly high, and a lot of people are very competitive, this self-segregation is even more pronounced than elsewhere. No wonder then that New York has the most segregated schools in the US.
But can we do anything about that? I think not. I think we all should be open-minded, and everyone should get the same chances in life. But the hard truth is that no matter how much we try to deny it, in a free society, people look for groups that are similar to themselves. It makes us feel safe and gives us comfort, not because we are racist, but because evolution has programmed humans to live in small social groups of max a few hundred people that live in close proximity to each other. These evolutionary forces drive the self-stratification of societies. And it means that on a macro level, this kind of segregation is likely going to exist for a long time to come. But that does not mean that on the individual level it has to be the same way. Our genes are not our destiny and we can all make conscious efforts to seek out communities that are racially and culturally different from ours. And if everybody makes a conscious effort to do so, I think the world could become a better place one step at a time.