Sigh.

OK moorhosj, let's try to step through this.

What does that have to do with Chicago's life expectancy disparity being 30 years? Are you saying then, that what we should really be doing is comparing the life expectancy of people in Chinatown, with people in Chinatown, instead of comparing people across your whole city?

Because what I'm trying to explain to you guys is that, this is not how the rest of us outside Chicago think. If you were to ask me, I would say, yeah, it seems totally reasonable to compare life expectancies across the entire city of Madison for instance. (I'm from Wisconsin.) I'd wager if you'd ask someone from Nebraska, they'd say, "Yeah, it seems reasonable to compare life expectancies for people across the entire city of Lincoln." We're not coming up with some off the wall metric to try to make Chicago look bad here.

You and this "jostmey" guy are doing that for us.

Finally, look, for the average person, we see a black guy, we're gonna say he's black. Not "Two or more races". Not "Black with hispanic origin". Etc etc etc. So, going back to the original point, we didn't get hung up on that stuff 3 decades ago. In 70, 80,90, whatever, we, even the census,just called people black. (Maybe we might have called them mixed if they were mixed, but that's certainly not how our censuses would have counted them back then.) So, you throw the 2 or more ethnicities or whatever group in and you get, what? 33, 34% of what we in 1980 would have simply called "black"? I'd be willing to bet money that the two or more races / hispanic census stuff started right around the same time that the percentage of blacks in the census declined.

Point being, these ratios aren't really changing much. Only society's definitions of what is black has changed. Maybe that's good, maybe that's bad, maybe that's neither? The point I'm making is that demographics aren't changing much from 80, 90, 00 whatever. At least racially. Fewer total people, yes. But the ratios seem to be relatively constant. Now if you go back further, obviously you get radical change. But the original post said "last three decades". So you have to look at the last 3 decades, and not cherry pick.

Would you please edit the snarky bits and personal swipes out of your posts to HN? You've packed a surprising number of those into your posts in this thread. They're not necessary, they degrade discussion, they weaken your argument, they invite worse from others, and they break the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Except that you are doing the same cherry picking that you accuse others of. I showed data from 2010 to 2017 to illustrate how significant the demographic change has been. For some reason, you decided to go back to 1980 to make a counter-point. Our definitions haven’t changed since 2010, so I’m not sure that’s a valid point.

To the rest of your point, test we should compare these things across cities, that is how we see the disparities. That point is more relevant to the original article and not the specific point I was responding to.

Because the original post said 3 decades ago. Which would be the 80s. Again, no one is making up stuff to try and make Chicago look bad here. You guys brought up the 3 decade time period, and I only said, "well, ok, let me look at the data since the 80s." There's nothing underhanded there guy.

And counting blacks since 2010, when you changed the definition, so that people who were called black in 1980, or 1990, or whatever, are no longer called black. Well duh. Yeah, if mixed kids are born in Chicago, and you guys call them, I don't know, whatever it is you call them. Then they won't be counted in your data as black. Is that surprising to you? So basically to me, I feel like you guys don't count any mixed blacks, and then are surprised that the number of blacks is going down? I mean come on man. That should be a no brainer. But the important thing here, is that no one really outside of Chicago would look at those people and say they are not black. And again, in 80 or 90 or maybe even 00, they counted them all as black in the census. That's all I'm saying.

Demographics aren't just white, black, brown iot runs deeper than that. In Chicago's case, the city's workforce is growing younger and more educated at a rapid clip. Here's an article written today about it, "Chicago’s new demographics: ‘A third San Francisco, two-thirds Detroit’":

==His analysis of U.S. Census Data found that between 2005 and 2017, the city of Chicago’s 25-39 year-old age cohort grew 15.7 percent, while falling dramatically in the rest of Cook County (7.2 percent drop) as well as the metro area outside of Cook County (5.9 percent decline).

==In addition, between 2005-17, Chicago’s population of 25-44 year-olds with a bachelors degrees or additional advanced degrees grew 42 percent. As Saunders wrote in a Twitter thread sharing his findings, “An older, less educated, manufacturing-oriented populace is being replaced by a younger, more educated, knowledge-economy populace.” Chicago now has a higher share of college educated workers than the surrounding suburbs.

This phenomenon is dragging down the already depressed neighborhoods the most. The jobs their residents relied on are disappearing. The residents with means are typically moving out (to the suburbs or Sun Belt cities), leaving behind the most at-risk residents.

>https://chicago.curbed.com/2019/6/24/18691792/chicago-econom...

I grew up in those neighborhoods. When people refer to the "South Side of Chicago", they're not talking about Beverly; they're talking about the neighborhoods you're in when you cross 90th St. to the north, or Ashland to the east.

The white enclaves you're talking about occupy a relatively small amount of real estate. The troubled South Side is comparatively vast.