SS: *And you may like having your little boutique stores scattered around the city, rather than a big box out in the 'burbs, but tell that to the single woman without a car who has to haul her three kids around shopping with her. *
Actually, another of the problems with the big box stores out in the 'burbs is precisely that they’re so difficult to get to without a car.
Really? Every Wal-Mart I’ve seen around here is located on a major bus route, or even have covered bus terminals in the parking lot. Don’t they do the same in the U.S.? I think Wal-Mart understands that a lot of their clientele use public transit.
Sure. But as you like to point out to us on the transportation/suburban sprawl threads, it’s difficult and time-consuming to have to depend on long bus trips out to the 'burbs to do your regular shopping. And when you have to pay the fares for your three kids as well, it gets pretty expensive.
A few reasons;
One, most locate in the burbs cause many people will shop there as long as they dont have to do city driving to get there. There are places that only have a branch in downtown SF or SJ that dont get my business unless Im there for other reasons cause its just not worth the aggravation of dealing with the clusterfucks called cities.
Two, here in Cal anyway many have to open in unincorporated areas because the local small business owners, oops I mean city councils, dont want the competition to disrupt the little good ole boy thing they got going in their town. Its their town dammit, if anyone is going to exploit the local poor its going to be them. Dont want them getting too uppity.
Three, similar to one; because if you want to be accesible (again, here in Cal anyway), you build off a freeway, and most freeways skirt downtown areas by going around, which means the burbs.
I don’t understand. What do you envision as being an easier-to-get-to way of shopping than taking a bus to a Wal-Mart? Around here, if you couldn’t go to Wal-Mart, the only other option is to take the bus to a shopping mall. Either way, you’re taking a bus somewhere. Very few people have ever lived in a place where all their shopping needs were within walking distance.
I guess the only other option would be to build shopping malls with subway or LRT access, but then that only makes things better for the people who live within walking distance of a subway station. Walking distance with several young children.
SS: What do you envision as being an easier-to-get-to way of shopping than taking a bus to a Wal-Mart? Around here, if you couldn’t go to Wal-Mart, the only other option is to take the bus to a shopping mall.
What a nuisance; here in my city you can walk to a supermarket. Which is why having a more mixed commercial environment with a greater variety of shopping options is usually more convenient, particularly for people who don’t have cars. If you have to take a long bus ride out to the 'burbs (with the three kids) every time you need toilet paper, three pounds of apples and a gallon of milk, it’s much more inconvenient than if you can just walk a few blocks to the neighborhood grocery store.
Suburban shopping malls and WalMarts undeniably have their advantages for consumers, as I’ve acknowledged all along. However, if those are the urban consumer’s only options, as in your example, then they’ve ended up sacrificing a lot of time, convenience, and transportation expense for a modest saving in price. And the extent of the overall impact of the vertically-integrated box-store mega-retailers may mean that this Faustian bargain is difficult to undo.
I hope this is not a rude question. I honestly do not mean it to be. If it is, please forgive me.
Weren’t there some trouble during the first several decades or those time frames which might have interfered with the efficiency of such laws? I’m asking if it is possible that through something like 1950, could the truency laws have been lacidasically applied due to war, depression, and other troubles? Not, of course for the entire time. But for significant parts of those years (very roughly 1900-1949)?
We went over this at the begining of the thread. America may not be in the top 30, but how much variance is there?
Yea, but is that part of the story really relevant?
Google Cached version of this page from urban.org.
*"The Relationship Between Size and Availability of Economic Rewards
The size of the economic rewards, however, is less important than the availability of those rewards. In a society in which all individuals receive an equal share of the rewards over a lifetime, the actual distribution in any given year is almost irrelevant, even if the rewards were quite unevenly divided every year. On the other hand, a society in which the same individuals received the largest economic rewards every year would look quite different than the previous society — even if the income distributions of the two societies looked exactly the same every year. In a society in which the availability of rewards is largely limited to certain individuals, however, the size of the rewards that are available does take on a new importance.
Economic historian Joseph Schumpeter compared the income distribution in a society to a hotel that is full of rooms that are always occupied, but often by different people. 4 In order to have the most complete picture of an individual’s lifetime experience, we must know two factors: the quality of the various rooms in the hotel and the rate at which individuals switch rooms. Unfortunately, most available statistics in the United States are based on cross-sectional data that provides a snapshot of only a single moment in time. Thus, they are quite good at providing us with information on the quality of the rooms (i.e., we know the distribution of individual incomes each year), but they tell us little about how often individuals change rooms. 5 And without knowing how incomes change over time, we do not know how individuals’ lifetime incomes are distributed. *"
For instance,
"*Given the increase in inequality in the United States in recent years, the questions of how much mobility is present and whether the degree of mobility has increased become even more important. A number of recent studies, discussed below, have examined this question. Those studies that have measured relative mobility are generally quite consistent with one another (see Table 1), finding that mobility is significant and has remained stable over time.
Sawhill and Condon (1992) use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to look at individuals who were between the ages of 25 and 54 in two different years (1967 and 1977), and examined what happened to their family income over the following decade. In attempting to determine the extent of economic mobility that existed, Sawhill and Condon use a technique employed by a number of the later studies discussed below. In a base year, they rank all incomes in their sample from highest to lowest, and then break them into five equal-sized income quintiles, with the top twenty percent in the highest quintile, etc. They then do the same to the incomes of the same individuals in a later year, breaking them into equal quintiles, and then examining the relative movement of individuals within the distribution (see Table 2 for an example of a transition matrix that results from such an exercise). 6
Perhaps the simplest measure of economic mobility is the percentage of individuals who move into a new income quintile. 7 In both periods examined, Sawhill and Condon find that slightly over 60 percent of individuals were in a different family income quintile a decade later (60.5 percent between 1967-76, and 60.7 percent between 1977-86). Mobility rates were lower for individuals in either the lowest or highest quintiles (44 percent for the bottom quintile and 48 percent for the highest quintile between 1967-76; 47 percent and 50 percent, respectively, between 1977-86). 8 Examining similar years using the PSID, Hungerford (1993) comes to similar conclusions regarding broad trends in mobility, as he finds significant mobility, but little change between 1969-76 and 1979-86.*"
If you have an escalator with people continually getting on at the bottom, and while the ride is in progress, the end point is being raised ever higher and higher, it seems silly to point out that those at the top are farther and farther away from those at the bottom.
Yea, I know that this is not an accurate analogy to our economy. Mobility goes in both directions. The hotel analoby is much more apt. I am saying that complaining about income inequity is not either.
Oh, crackers. That link does not work. I’m sorry about that. Try a google search for “economic mobility” look for the urban.org citation, and google has the whole article cached. urban.org does not seem to be responding right now.
I was able to edit the post and get the link to work. For complex URL’s (like a Google cache), it’s generally best to un-click the “Automatically parse links in text” box at the bottom of the post; otherwise, the vB software likes to stick in random [URL] tags in the middle of the address, and havoc–well, some kind of “404” page, anyway–invariably ensues
Im still wondering how the pseudo religous belief that everyone should have relatively the same income is used as some sort of standard as to what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Since all people are different, and all people value different things in different measure in different ways, and labor in different measure in different ways, why on earth would one think that everyone being forced to have relatively the same amount of income is something to strive for??
Show me a place where everyone has relatively the same income and Ill show you a boiling pot of water with a lid on it. The fact that the US has a growing income disparity is an indication that the people of the US have increasing economic freedom of choice. Thats a Good Thing, not a Bad Thing.
I hear that, brotha man! You must have libertarian leanings to feel that freedom is more important than economic equality.
Also, I wonder how much this disparity between the rich and poor is exacerbated by the 8000 illegal aliens which enter the country every day from Mexico. It can’t help the middle class to compete with people who are far too happy to be paid less for the same work.
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[QUOTE=Kimstu]
Suburban shopping malls and WalMarts undeniably have their advantages for consumers, as I’ve acknowledged all along. However, if those are the urban consumer’s only options, as in your example, then they’ve ended up sacrificing a lot of time, convenience, and transportation expense for a modest saving in price. And the extent of the overall impact of the vertically-integrated box-store mega-retailers may mean that this Faustian bargain is difficult to undo.[/QUOTE
Can you give us an example of an **urban **environment whose **only **shopping option is WalMart (or the equivalent)? Not that your argument necessarily has any validity even if it were true, but I wonder where you get the idea from in the first place
OK, I’m not sure which particular posts to address, but in general:
The US is emphatically not the freest economy in the world. The freest economies in the world are Hong Kong, Singapore, and New Zealand, in that order (Hong Kong has been number 1 since the rankings began in 1995). The US scores in at number 10 – still not bad, but behind the first three, as well as six European states. Index of Economic Freedom (I skim-read from page 2 of this thread onwards, so apologies if this has been brought up already).
The US has a high level of productivity, and productivity gains in recent years have (mostly thanks to investment in IT) been substantial, but there are indications they may be levelling off:
See also http://www.stern.nyu.edu/globalmacro/cur_policy/new_economy.html for same content and several other data.
And compared to coutries like China (or Hong Kong for that matter) Americans are not that hard-working, barring the various abuses forced by insanely powerful companies like Wal-Mart. Around here, if you get two weeks’ holiday you’re considered quite fortunate and are probably holding a moderately senior position. But quite apart from yearly holiday allowance (which is not necessarily a good indicator of how hard one works), if you’re engaged in any kind of international business then you know the advantages and disadvantages inherent with dealing with the US: you value American straight-talking and deal-making, but dread the laziness and the attitudes involved. That’s why one will put up with (for example) Chinese or Japanese convolutions, rituals, and dances involving various degrees of face-giving and personal exposure, because there is a pretty good work ethic that comes with it. A generalization, true, but one I have found to be quite accurate.
JM: *Can you give us an example of an urban environment whose only shopping option is WalMart (or the equivalent)? *
Sorry, “urban” was a slip of the keyboard in that case, I meant the comment to apply to any consumer. My hypothetical carless single mother of three whose only shopping options involve bus rides to a WalMart or a shopping mall was simply borrowed from Sam’s example, and I don’t know where he got her or where he thinks she lives.