The article's argument doesn't seem logical to me.

The economists claim that poor blacks spend more on conspicuous consumption because they're competing with neighbors who earn roughly as much as they do, while poor whites have richer neighbors that they can't afford to compete with. The reasoning is, because black median income is lower than white median income, poor blacks will cluster while poor whites will be surrounded by wealthier neighbors.

But why should that be? The median income isn't necessarily the most common income, or the income of people living next to you. There's no reason to assume that whites don't cluster by income just as tightly. In other words, why should the $42,000 household be living near a $60,000 household?

One factor that the article didn't bring up was suburban vs. urban patterns of residence. Black people are more likely to live in cities, where their neighbors will actually see them daily (and their sneakers, designer clothes, and cars.)

The other thing is the education gap. For college- and graduate-educated adults, their children's schools and, yes, phonics toys, are status symbols.

As you are pointing out, in general, most neighborhoods tend to contain people of similar economic status, regardless of their racial background. The only exception to this I can see is small towns, where persons of all economic backgrounds are in a small enough area that they may interact; for example their kids may all go to the same schools. My subjective observation is that a disproportionate percentage of poorer white people live in small towns or rural areas. Also, small town culture isn't quite as much into flashy showoff behavior, at least in the upper midwest which I'm most familiar with.

This article proves one of my long-held beliefs. That being, over-attention to the details of social behavior is largely a waste of time. In the matter of conspicuous consumption and it's connection to poor racial groups, the questions and answers are pretty much a waste of time.

Blacks, asians, hispanics and whites don't "tend" to do anything in social groupings, or in socio-economic groupings. Families do the best they can individually. Nuclear families and single-parent families make decisions about spending. Some of those decisions are impulse-driven, some are carefully planned, but ALL are independent of their neighbors.

My oldest son is about to move toward a college major. I'm doing what I can to steer him away from sociology because other than as a trivial pursuit, it seems a waste of time. The article satisfies my bias as far as I'm concerned.

To me Poor people show wealth through fancy sneakers, and expensive name brands. Rich People show wealth through their investment portfolio. When a poor person stops spending all their money on signals, they have started to make the transition to being a rich person. What we need are extensive finance classes taught to kids at a young age ( 6th grade or so ). I know way too many people with home loans that don't know the definition of amortized. Kids should learn at a young age about loans, stocks, options, investing, ext... Our Kids spend more time in front of a TV than they do studying. As a result they sponge up all the advertising that tells them what they need and want.

Kids need to ask themselves. Does this activity make me money, or teach me things that can be used later to make money. If the answer is no, they should find something else to do.