I started weightlifting for the first time in high school. When I think back to this time, what strikes me the most about the experience is how my strong teammates became stronger during the four years while most of the weak players barely seemed to benefit from the strength program (1). The progression in the weight room mirrored progression in other skill areas - a good player often improved under the watchful eyes of the coaches while a poor player remained poor despite being trained by the same coaches as those ever-improving good players (2).
My experience with high school sports was my first exposure to a fairly universal problem – it’s easier to help people closer to the top than those down at the bottom. I think some of this is explained by definition. A good player is good at most things (including being coached) so a coach can focus on improving just one or two deficient areas. In comparison, a poor player isn’t good at much of anything and therefore the coach must find a way to improve on almost everything. The latter is, simply put, a tougher coaching job, and tougher coaching jobs generally require good coaches. Unfortunately, just like there are more bad players than good players, there are more bad coaches than good ones. You do the math, reader.
Where is the universality of this phenomenon? I see it everywhere, reader, and I’m afraid a comprehensive list would waste all my remaining time. It applies to medicine, insurance, income inequality, mass transit, education, and more. Generally speaking, whenever a given field or endeavor’s results can be aggregated and averaged, the temptation to ‘lift from the top’ comes into play.
I think the local rental market is a good example. Let’s say a given neighborhood has eight units at $100 a month. Their tenants earn, say, $300 a month (and therefore spend close to the recommended thirty percent of income on housing). Then, a construction project creates a new building with two luxury apartment units. The rent for each unit is $200 per month. Two new people move into these units, each earning $600 a month (and therefore maintaining the same ratio of income to housing as their new neighbors).
Let's pause for a moment to review the neighborhood's aggregate metrics. After these new units are rented, the average rent has increased from $100 per unit for eight units to $120 per unit for ten units. The average income is up from $300 per tenant to $360 per tenant. Given that absolutely nothing changed for the eight original tenants, these changes in the aggregate metrics are quite significant.
The impact of these changes is felt in the next rental cycle. The landlords of the $100 units will look around and say to themselves – hey, pay in the neighborhood is going up and we should get a fair share because, after all, we provided and maintained these units that served the foundation for our tenants earning recognition at work! Only fools would continue charging below the market price! And so after leases expire, rents immediately increase, perhaps up to $120 per unit so that their tenants who are now on $360 wages per month maintain the same proportion of income to housing costs as they did prior to the rise in income.
Sounds good, of course... but did incomes rise? On average, of course they did, since the average income of all tenants in the area went up 20%. But only an idiot would care about something that was true on average (!) - in this carefully constructed example, no one is actually making more money than they did a year ago except for the landlords. And even if some folks do eventually get that raise - perhaps by citing those same aggregate statistics to their employers as evidence of rising costs of living - it’s highly unlikely their raises would approach the 20% mark imposed by the landlords. The most likely end result after a rental cycle or two with these new luxury units in place is that the folks who once paid $100 on a $300 income will now pay $120 on $300 - which is forty percent of income on housing costs and, for pretty much everyone I know, not affordable.
When people around here talk knowingly about ‘the up and coming Boston neighborhoods’, this is what they are actually talking about – the income redistribution to the rich that comes whenever real estate appreciation outpaces wage growth. If I were more of an alarmist I would use the b-word here (rhymes with 'rubble') - instead, I'll settle once more for acknowledging that most people are bad at math, worse at statistics, and completely hopeless with economics. Given these realities, I suppose I should be kinder about the ways people misunderstand the reality of Boston's rental market.
Of course, the problem with being bad at math is that you can just not bother doing the math, instead settling on 'talking' as a way of guessing at the truth often a calculation or two away. But why wax poetic about such a simple concept? Is gentrification so difficult to measure that all we can do is talk about it in the abstract? I have another b-word for that mentality (rhymes with 'horseshit') but who knows, maybe I'm wrong, just waxing prophetic, because in some long run and aggregated sense we're always on the same rocket ship, being propelled upward by these luxury units that stretch closer and closer to the stars, ever higher and higher, so close to the sun that soon enough whinging on will have no use at all.
Footnotes / a tempting thought / no spit-balling in the bench press area, please / wtf, math now?
0. I suppose some of them didn’t graduate at all…
Another application of the ‘pull from the top’ concept was the way my school system growing up seemed to operate – some of my classmates went on to Ivy League schools, the best undergraduate institutions in world history, while others barely scraped together enough passing grades to make it to graduation. The temptation here is to suggest factors outside the classroom played a big role. I get it. But does this really explain the huge variation? How much bigger can variation in an educational outcome get than one student going to Yale while her classmate drops out of high school?
1. Objection: speculation…
I know strength training is influenced by a lot of factors beyond a coach’s control – genetics, nutrition, things like PEDs, and so on (I repeat: I get it). But if these were such critical factors, why did the coaches continue having the weak players lift? The fact that everyone remained in the program despite varying levels of success implies a belief that additional strength training benefits everyone regardless of how much it benefited them in the past.
2. I say this because most of the worst helmet football players – the one sport I remember where nobody was cut – rarely got any better over the course of the year…
I wonder if this is why the worst players were cut during tryouts – this way, at least the coach wouldn’t waste everyone’s time by failing to improve him over the course of the season.
