AKA, “Follow ups no-one asked for”.
Last year I spent some idle time doing some rough work to see if ethnic and religious populations1 were more clustered in Sydney than in Melbourne – presumably due to geographical factors. This was done by calculating Gini coefficients and Herfindahl indices on the numbers of various foreign born populations by postcode.
The answer was “plausible”.
OK, it was about a week of work, but since then I have discovered far quicker ways of doing things, and this morning the 2011 Census results were made available to plebs. Subsequently I have done the same calculations for the 2011 data.
For the three people who are interested here are the Gini Coefficients. I don’t think the Herfindahl Indices add much, but they are available if you really want them, as well as comparative Lorenz curve graphs. I’ve included the 2006 results for comparison.
| 2011 | Melbourne | Sydney | Difference |
| Assemblies of God | 68.24 | 66.35 | -1.89 |
| Atheism | 45.39 | 42.89 | -2.50 |
| Buddhism | 63.97 | 63.81 | -0.16 |
| Hinduism | 63.67 | 72.39 | 8.71 |
| India | 64.88 | 72.00 | 7.13 |
| Islam | 73.96 | 76.63 | 2.67 |
| Judaism | 87.22 | 83.21 | -4.01 |
| Korea | 69.62 | 72.52 | 2.90 |
| Philippines | 69.67 | 67.09 | -2.58 |
| Samoa | 83.55 | 84.36 | 0.81 |
| Everyone | 42.85 | 39.91 | -2.94 |
| 2006 | Melbourne | Sydney | Difference |
| Assemblies of God | 60.43 | 59.52 | -0.91 |
| Atheism | 42.88 | 44.99 | 2.12 |
| Buddhism | 64.79 | 65.59 | 0.80 |
| Hinduism | 61.71 | 70.97 | 9.26 |
| India | 60.97 | 68.86 | 7.89 |
| Islam | 73.21 | 75.82 | 2.61 |
| Judaism | 87.54 | 83.64 | -3.89 |
| Korea | 70.65 | 72.46 | 1.81 |
| Philippines | 67.91 | 68.80 | 0.89 |
| Samoa | 82.30 | 83.02 | 0.72 |
| Everyone | 42.88 | 39.44 | -3.44 |
Green has a sign that supports the hypothesis that there is greater clustering in Sydney. I’ve arbitrarily denoted differences of more than 2.00 as important and coloured them bright green. “Everyone” is an indication of the the inequal distribution of all residents accross postcodes in the city. This indicates that even if there were no difference in clustering tendency, you’d expect to see higher Gini numbers for Melbourne.
Like last time, the ethnic group that prompted the investigation (Indian Australians) has the most remarkable divergence.
Atheism has swapped places. There were minuscule numbers in 2006, so I expect any change has a lot to do with the rise of Movement Atheism, and not much should be read into things.
Filipinos still do not show any non-clustering nature relative to other groups, so that’s still not a good hypothesis to explain the lack of Pinoy restaurants.
Samoans seem very clustered, but I think this is a relic of low numbers.
The Jewish population seems more clustered in Melbourne. Are there more Orthodox in the South whom need to be in walking distance of the synagogue?
All in all, the major finding is how much the differences between ethnicities is larger than the difference between cities. In almost every case, if you wanted to see how clustered a group in Sydney was, you’d get a very accurate estimate by looking at Melbourne. These cities are really staggeringly alike, despite our constant efforts to find differences between them. There are no two cities this size in the world that are so similar. I doubt this will discourage the eternal narcissism of small differences though.
2 And presumably other groupings of like mindedness. Unfortunately the ABS does not have a “hipster” box in the census, so I was restricted to recorded characteristics.
yes, the city-similarity is remarkable. You’d intuitively think because of the similarity of the sub-populations rather than the cities (i.e. mainly a function of how much different ethnicities stick together).
I would expect these concentration indices to correlate highly with inter-marriage rates, which one should be able to calculate from the census.
richard
Are historical figures available for clustering? are there figures for say 1960, 1970 and 1980 ..?
I’m not sure that putting hipster on the census is needed. I find it pretty easy to avoid them by not going to places with single origin / fair trade coffee or milk crates for seats.
And keeping an eye out for men with no socks; see my tumblr below for assistance.
http://sexyankles.tumblr.com/
Paul – That’s a very interesting hypothesis regarding assortive mating. Just an hour after I had posted this I was reading something about economists marrying each other, and feeling glad/smug that I had not married within my own professional group, or indeed professional interests [ethnicity wasn’t considered]. This I hoped would avoid some closeting of my world view. Given the clustering I am considering is as much worldview, subculture and other immeasurables as it is ethnicity and religion, I’m not sure why I didn’t make the connection. I’ll think about how I can investigate this further, given time.
John – They can be calculated, but the data isn’t in an easily machine readable form. TableBuilder is a luxury that doesn’t extend to past years, and absent a compelling reason/hordes of research assistants, I don’t think calculating them would be worth the many many hours it would take.
Interesting stuff Richard, thanks. There are two points that occur to me. First is that the 2006 data for atheist and no-religion was a bit weird because there was a movement to get ‘Jedi’ recognised as a religion in the 2006 census. Consequently, it is better to compare 2001 to 2011, at least regarding atheist and no-religion responses. Second is that Sydney is far hillier. I may be wrong, but I got the impression that suburbs are more inter-connected in Melbourne than Sydney.