Tuesday, July 08, 2014

Demographic Tale of the Tape: Vox vs. FiveThirtyEight

Matthew Yglesias fails demography at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Ironic demographics.

Subject Article: "Map: The 25 cities nobody wants to live in."

Other Links: 1. "Population Shifts Had Nothing to Do With Cantor’s Defeat."
2. "Vox is our next."
3. "Fastest-Shrinking U.S. Cities: Detroit and other Michigan cities continue to lose population."

Postscript: A journalist screwing up demographic analysis is nothing new. But I have to wonder if Yglesias' poor grasp of demography influences his understanding of the relationship between zoning regimes and housing affordability. Greater density makes a lot of sense with such a superficial look at population change.

1 comment:

Allen said...

"Map: The 25 cities nobody wants to live in." is a catchy headline. It's pretty specious to say that a city that no one wants to live in a city from one _estimate_ to a 2nd _estimate_ 365 days later has "shrank" by .5%

It is, obviously, literally wrong since it nobody wanted to live in these 25 cities they would have a population of zero.