I’m not actually a parent yet, but I do plan to have kids and to raise them in a mixed-income neighborhood (somewhere in Cambridge MA).
I do think peer effects exist. Having worked in a local school full of both “underclass” kids and professors’ children, which is the mix you get in Cambridge, I do think the poorer kids have a somewhat negative effect on the richer kids. I expect there will be some negative effects to my kids from not living in a bubble. However, I love the area and I think that living there will be good for the family, better than going into the kind of debt Vladimir_M mentioned to afford all-rich neighborhoods or private schools. We like living in a city, we like not owning a car, we having no debt. Those things mean living near some poor people.
I accept the correction, but now I don’t see a difference between your points of view. Certainly what you write above is more delicately phrased than “poor people are crocodiles”, but VMs comment was also more delicately phrased than that.
I’m not actually a parent yet, but I do plan to have kids and to raise them in a mixed-income neighborhood (somewhere in Cambridge MA).
I do think peer effects exist. Having worked in a local school full of both “underclass” kids and professors’ children, which is the mix you get in Cambridge, I do think the poorer kids have a somewhat negative effect on the richer kids. I expect there will be some negative effects to my kids from not living in a bubble. However, I love the area and I think that living there will be good for the family, better than going into the kind of debt Vladimir_M mentioned to afford all-rich neighborhoods or private schools. We like living in a city, we like not owning a car, we having no debt. Those things mean living near some poor people.
I accept the correction, but now I don’t see a difference between your points of view. Certainly what you write above is more delicately phrased than “poor people are crocodiles”, but VMs comment was also more delicately phrased than that.