And a White Picket Fence for All
Some predictors, in the aggregate, are set in stone. Party identification will always be a tremendous predictor of vote in federal elections, for example. (Which speaks to the challenge for Democrats winning back some of the gerrymandered Republican congressional districts currently in play.) Which generation a person’s family immigrated to the U.S. will always be a great predictor of which language the person speaks.
Some predictors I hope will go away. Today, race and ethnicity are a good predictor of income. But Sam Roberts of the New York Times reports that in Queens County, New York, black incomes have surpassed whites.
In Queens, the median income among black households, nearing $52,000 a year, has surpassed that of whites in 2005, an analysis of new census data shows. No other county in the country with a population over 65,000 can make that claim. The gains among blacks in Queens, the city’s quintessential middle-class borough, were driven largely by the growth of two-parent families and the successes of immigrants from the West Indies. Many live in tidy homes in verdant enclaves like Cambria Heights, Rosedale and Laurelton, just west of the Cross Island Parkway and the border with Nassau County.
May not be in my lifetime, but I look forward to the day where ethnicity is a very poor predictor of income. A pollster can dream, can’t he?
