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Seems spurious. Could be talented people move to cities with high earning potential—which happen to be walkable. Do the authors control for that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have better support for this statement than what the authors of cited paper have? You did, after all, dismiss a whole paper with a glib remark.
One example doesn’t strike me as a glib dismissal, particularly since this study was done in the United States.
Seems spurious. Could be talented people move to cities with high earning potential—which happen to be walkable. Do the authors control for that?
It's longitudinal tax data. >We 1st identified the relationship between walkability and upward mobility using tax data from approximately 10 million Americans born between 1980 and 1982.
Reading the abstract, it looks like the authors are trying to make a causal argument: people are more likely to improve their economic standing because they moved to a walkable city.
OP pointed out that this could be due to self-selection of people with the potential of upward mobility to walkable cities. This would lead to spurious correlation between economic mobility and walkability. That is, a third variable (a potential candidate, awareness of climate change) could explain both upward mobility (usually, climate change awareness correlates with education level) and economic mobility (education correlates with higher wages).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One example doesn’t strike me as a glib dismissal, particularly since this study was done in the United States.
They don't give an example, they express their impression rather than providing contrary data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have better support for this statement than what the authors of cited paper have? You did, after all, dismiss a whole paper with a glib remark.
One example doesn’t strike me as a glib dismissal, particularly since this study was done in the United States.
Correlation not causation..nothing to see here.
First and foremost, we should attempt to replicate it and see if the correlation holds up independently.
Second, we should attempt to determine if their is a causal relationship. The arrow of causality going in either direction is of great interest to urban planning.
Or third, if there is no causal relationship between them, we should attempt to determine whether there is a third correlating factor, or better still, another factor that has a causal relationship with these two.
This discovery is highly interesting, and points in the direction of useful further research to perform. I would definitely not say that there is nothing to see here.
Authors often do some research, and then present some conjectures. Their conjectures may not be supported by the research, but they point in the direction of further research to confirm or refute the conjectures.
Research like this may not be sufficient, but it may be useful.
Walkability is a proxy for whether a city has a knowledge economy (closely packed buildings) or an industrial economy (large warehouses and factories, less walkable). The knowledge economy cities have far outperformed the industrial cities in economic growth over the last four decades.
So they buy/beg data for 382 "community zones" from walkscore.com, do linear regression, and find a correlation. Then they get funding to do an individual-level survey and there's no correlation. And it doesn't appear in South Korea either.
Their explanation is some statistical magic to pull out a "sense of belonging" as a mediating factor and a statement in the conclusion that "It may be that walkability is an emergent property most clearly visible at the level of aggregate, not at the level of each individual."
No discussion of data accuracy besides noting that even perceived walkability and actual amount of walking are barely correlated in their surveys (i.e., their data sucks).
Interesting paper idea, but the implementation seems like more statistical garbage.