CAREER: New Methods for Understanding Race, Inequality, and Spatial Separation

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This proposal outlines a long-term research and teaching agenda related to developing new methods for understanding race, inequality, and spatial separation. The investigator's entire career covers nearly every facet of life for minorities in America including discrimination, education, the family, health, legal issues, and several aspects of social interactions and peer influences. Within this portfolio, this CAREER award supports two broad research projects, each having several avenues of exploration. Ethnic and racial segregation is an important and well-studied social phenomenon. For over 50 years, social scientists have been concerned with measuring the extent, and estimating the impact of, segregation in education, housing, and the labor market. The result of this scholarship has been nearly 20 different indices of segregation, and a consensus that the spatial separation of many minorities from jobs, role models, health care, and quality local public goods is a leading cause of racial and ethnic differences on many economic, social, and health related outcomes. The first project develops a new measure of segregation based on social interactions and then applies the index in various contexts in the United States and United Kingdom. The index is based on two premises: (1) a measure of segregation should disaggregate to the level of individuals, and (2) an individual is more segregated the more segregated are the agents with whom she interacts. The investigator developed an index which satisfies (1) and (2), and that is based on agents' social interactions. This newly developed index is used to measure the causes and consequences of residential and school segregation on racial and ethnic minorities in America and the United Kingdom. The second project concerns another important question of race, inequality, and spatial separation: the compactness of political districts and their effects on the racial representation of elected officials. The United States Supreme Court has long recognized compactness as an important principle in assessing the constitutionality of political districting plans. The investigator develops a measure of compactness based on the distance between voters within the same district relative to the minimum distance achievable which he calls the relative proximity index. The investigator proves that any compactness measure which satisfies three desirable properties (anonymity of voters, efficient clustering, and invariance to scale, population density, and number of districts) ranks districting plans identically to the proximity index. Using this index and the algorithm developed to implement it, the investigator measures the compactness of every state in America and other countries where political representation can be influenced by gerrymandering. Further, he re-runs congressional elections based on the maximally compact districts to discern the effect on racial representation. The first project offers a new index of segregation and is the first index to be based on individuals. All other existing indices are not defined at the individual level. This is a paradigm shift in how one thinks about segregation, which has important advantages over existing measures of segregation. First, as a gauge of residential segregation, it is invariant to arbitrary partitions of a city. Second, it allows one to investigate how segregated multiple minority groups are. Third, the index allows one to analyze the full distribution of segregation, allowing researches to move beyond aggregate statistics, which can be misleading. Fourth, there are inherent multiplicative effects captured which all other indices omit. The susceptibility of an individual to group-transmitted influences depends on how many contacts the individual has with members of the group, the susceptibility of her contacts, and the susceptibility of their contacts. The second project presents a new method for understanding the compactness of political districts. There are several features of the index which make it more appealing than existing measures, the most important of which is that it is the only compactness index which permits meaningful comparisons across states. Broader Impacts: The broader impacts of the long-term research agenda are substantial. Both projects have the potential to change how we think about two of the most fundamental issues concerning race, inequality, and spatial separation. The first project will provide a new way to think about segregation, which is based on actual social interactions. This will open many opportunities for more detailed empirical work on the causes and consequences of segregation on outcomes. The second project will provide a simple index of compactness that can be used to help adjudicate gerrymandering claims. Both indices are substantially different from the existing literatures and are the first to be based on desirable properties rather than more ad hoc approaches