Dave is More Right (and Almost Modal)

The new episode of Planet Money attempts something ambitious, to determine the "modal American" . . . it's easy enough to find the median or the mean, but the mode-- the most common-- is more difficult because you can't categorize things too large or too small-- there are more women than men, but that seems like too large a category and they had to discount kids-- because kids all fall into all the same categories-- they don't work, they haven't been to college, and they aren't married-- but once they narrowed things down a bit-- they were looking for age, marital status, income, college education or not, race and ethnicity, and where the person lives-- and the solution, spoiler ahead (you might want to listen to the podcast) is surprising and-- for me-- fairly relatable . . . the most common American-- and they are 2 million strong-- is a Gen X married white dude who lives in the suburbs, works full time, does NOT have a college degree and earns (as a household) an upper middle class income . . . they actually talked to a 47 year old guy who fits the categories, he works at a car dealership and is married to a nurse and has one kid and owns some plaid shirts (grunge!) and while I can realte to this guy, the big differences are that he doesn't have a college degree and he lives in the suburbs . . . although the definition of suburban and urban areas are not particularly well-defined and you can really go down a rabbit-hole trying to figure out which areas are urban and which are suburban, even within city limits (Alec, Connell, Paul and I had quite an argument about this on the way to the pub) but if you go by some data compiled by FiveThirtyEight, then Highland Park is definitely urban, as urban areas tend to have more than "2,213 households per square mile" and Highland Park is 1.8 square miles and-- in 2010-- it had 6,200 households and the town's population has grown since then, so while Connell is right to say that Highland Park is the outlying area of a larger city (New Brunswick) and thus sub-urban, I am more right in saying that the density and feel of Highland Park is more urban than suburban.