Corroboration: An OWS Follow-Up

A quick follow-up to last month’s OWS post. You may recall I speculated the 99% might be a little bit short when it comes to including the lower half of the income distribution. Well, over at The Atlantic Megan McArdle has a post about a neat little bit of data sleuthing done by the Daily Caller.

Using reasoning that any marketer would be proud of  (in its simplest form the same logic provides the basis for every clustering and profiling scheme I’ve ever seen),  DC looked up the addresses of the folks arrested at the orignal, New York outpost. And surprise, the median value of the homes at those addresses is about 2/3 higher than the national figure. Not surprising.

The whole post is worth a read because it takes on a lot of shibboleths about modern urban living. I just enjoy when the data backs up intuition.

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OWS in MPS

OWS Demonstrators in MPS (couretsy MSNBC blog)

Just back from Minneapolis where the locals tried to make me feel right at home by having their very own OWS moment. Even allowing for differences in scale (the New York media market is about 5 times larger than Minneapolis/St. Paul), the demonstration didn’t seem to attract quite the number of people I might expect. But a string of unrelated incidents (could there be anything else in this space?) set me to ruminating.

Plenty of pixels have been activated over OWS by now and some themes are consistent. One is the lack of focus.