Scientific Presentations

LabTalks­@DCD

Department of Digital and Computational Demography
Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), Rostock, Germany, September 17, 2025

11:00 AM: Talk with Boris Barron - When All Measures Fail the Same Way: A Fundamental Correction to American Segregation Trends

Abstract

The prevailing view in segregation scholarship is that the United States has experienced a modest decline in White/Black segregation since 1970, while White/Hispanic and White/Asian segregation have held steady. Given the rapid growth of Hispanic and Asian groups, this consensus relies on compositional invariance—the assumption that segregation measures remain constant if only the racial composition of a city changes. This talk demonstrates three key findings: (1) All common index measures—dissimilarity, Gini, Theil’s entropy, Hutchens’ R, Fossett’s separation—fail to satisfy compositional invariance in both simulated and real-world scenarios. (2) All common measures have a similar dependency on composition, explaining why this dependency has gone undetected. (3) Following the removal of compositional dependency, the United States has experienced declines in all segregation comparisons, with White/Hispanic segregation declining as much as, if not faster than, White/Black segregation. In short, this talk demonstrates that widely-believed segregation trends are primarily the result of a measurement artifact.

About

Boris is a Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, where he develops mathematical methods for measuring social phenomena. He obtained his Bachelor’s in Biophysics from York University, Master’s in Mathematical and Theoretical Physics from the University of Oxford, and PhD in Physics from Cornell University. Before pursuing science, he majored in dance.