Transforming the mosaic - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 142

alternative colour scheme is used here to depict which industries grew the most
and which showed most decline.
The distribution of occupations, as might be expected, hardly altered at all
over the ten years to 1981 (Figure 5.7). Therefore, although employment rates
can rise and fall quickly, industries come and go more slowly. Those areas that
tend to house the managers who are in charge, and the workers they are in charge
of, tend to remain much the same for far longer, even as what is being done alters
from bashing metal to pushing paper.
5.5 House price inflation
... if 'economics is all about how people make choices, sociology is
all about why they don't have any choices to make' ... . For many, the
idea of a free choice in housing is a sick joke, especially amongst the
unemployed, those in insecure jobs, and for many in high house-price
areas.
(Murphy, 1989, p. 101) 10
Before the 1980s we could not draw detailed national maps of house prices
changing across many small areas; we simply did not have good enough data, let
alone a way of mapping it. For the maps produced here a large sample of house
sale information has been collected for the years 1983 to 1989 inclusive. This
has been converted for processing at the ward level by linking every postcode
used then to a grid reference and hence a ward.
The static picture of housing price has been shown before in this topic; now
inflation at every place in every year is shown. Here, a different shading scale
from that used above is adopted. Understanding housing price change involves
comparing years as well as areas, so fixed continuous shading is employed: light
to indicate rapidly increasing prices, dark for falling ones.
The picture is at first murky, a problem, perhaps, with the somewhat unreliable
figures typed into the dataset by building society clerks in the first year mapped
(Figure 5.8). With so few homes and such different houses and flats being sold by
particular building societies in particular wards in particular years, spurious price
changes can be suggested. To produce the maps shown here the mix of houses
being sold in a ward is weighted to match the national mix before a weighted
mean housing price is calculated for the area.
10 Here Murphy is quoting Rex and Moore (1967), Duesenberry (1960) and others. In full the
quotation reads: 'A rational choice model is clearly oversimplified: the idea that couples have a
free choice between sectors is - in both senses of the word - untenable: access to different types of
housing is determined by “constraint” as well as “choice” (Rex and Moore, 1967). In Duesenberry's
words if “economics is all about how people make choices, sociology is all about why they don't
have any choices to make” (1960, p. 233). For many, the idea of a free choice in housing is a sick
joke, especially amongst the unemployed, those in insecure jobs, and for many in high house-price
areas' (Murphy, 1989, p. 101). The 1960 and 1967 references are given in the original source.