Comment on “the age of extremes: Concentrated affluence and poverty in the twenty-first century”

Douglas Massey's presidential address challenges demographers, sociologists, economists, and other social scientists to focus their research and policy analysis on emergence of unprecedented spatial intensification of both privilege and William Julius Wilson's (1987) The Truly Disadvantaged was catalyst for extensive analysis of emergence of urban underclass; Massey's paper should do same for emergence of the age of extremes. He states that principal motivation for my pessimistic candor and perhaps overly brutal frankness is to galvanize colleagues, students, politicians, and reporters into action. Massey thoughtfully connects several strands in his widely cited research: immigration, racial and ethnic segregation, and causes and consequences. of concentrated poverty. He then demonstrates that an understudied component, spatial concentration of affluence, ties these topics to recent research on increased inequality of earnings and incomes. Research on problems of inner city and on inequality have evolved independently, for most part, and studies of rising economic inequality cited by Massey neglect spatial concentration of affluence. Numerous studies have analyzed longitudinal data and have documented negative effects of growing up in a poor family or a poor neighborhood (holding family background constant) on children's life chances (for a review, see Corcoran 1995; for a case study, see Rosenbaum 1995). Few studies, however, have estimated models which test whether there are effects for children growing up in affluent families and in affluent neighborhoods. If these effects turn out to be as important as Massey surmises, they should not be ignored. ' Massey's analysis of simultaneous increase in poverty and affluence and geographic concentration of both