Super Zips

“Super Zips” — a term coined by American Enterprise Institute scholar and author Charles Murray to describe the country’s most prosperous, highly educated demographic clusters. On average, they have a median household income of $120,000, and 7 in 10 adults have college degrees.

Although these areas would be considered rare in much of the country, they’re fairly ordinary by Washington standards.
One in four households in the region are in a Super Zip, according to the Post analysis. Since the 2000 Census on which Murray based his analysis, Washington’s Super Zips have grown to encompass 100,000 more residents. Only the New York City area has more Super Zips, but they are a much smaller share of the total of that region’s Zip codes and are more scattered.

As the affluent become more isolated, the working class and the poor become confined “to communities where no one has a college education and no one has connections to the world,” Klineberg said. “The social capital that’s so necessary for upward mobility is more difficult to come by than it was in the old days when there was broad-based prosperity.”

Michael Sandel, a Harvard philosopher who wrote “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets,” calls the parallel lives led by the affluent and everyone else the “skyboxification of American life,” characterized by skyboxes in public arenas and faster security lines at airports.

The impact may be greater on children who grow up with a distorted view of the world, because they don’t know anyone from a different socioeconomic class.

confuzzled dude wrote:

“Super Zips” — a term coined by American Enterprise Institute scholar and author Charles Murray to describe the country’s most prosperous, highly educated demographic clusters. On average, they have a median household income of $120,000, and 7 in 10 adults have college degrees.

Although these areas would be considered rare in much of the country, they’re fairly ordinary by Washington standards.
One in four households in the region are in a Super Zip, according to the Post analysis. Since the 2000 Census on which Murray based his analysis, Washington’s Super Zips have grown to encompass 100,000 more residents. Only the New York City area has more Super Zips, but they are a much smaller share of the total of that region’s Zip codes and are more scattered.

As the affluent become more isolated, the working class and the poor become confined “to communities where no one has a college education and no one has connections to the world,” Klineberg said. “The social capital that’s so necessary for upward mobility is more difficult to come by than it was in the old days when there was broad-based prosperity.”

Michael Sandel, a Harvard philosopher who wrote “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets,” calls the parallel lives led by the affluent and everyone else the “skyboxification of American life,” characterized by skyboxes in public arenas and faster security lines at airports.

The impact may be greater on children who grow up with a distorted view of the world, because they don’t know anyone from a different socioeconomic class.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/local/2013/11/09/washington-a-world-apart/?hpid=z1

-> Super SuChers may want to take a note of perils of being a Super Zipper