Social Heterogeneity

Kevin Drum writes,

Via Harrison Jacobs, here’s a recent study showing the trend in income segregation in American neighborhoods. Forty years ago, 65 percent of us lived in middle-income neighborhoods. Today, that number is only 42 percent. The rest of us live either in rich neighborhoods or in poor neighborhoods.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Drum goes on to say,

We increasingly lack a shared culture or shared experiences, and that makes democracy a tough act to pull off. The well-off have less and less interaction with the poor outside of the market economy, and less and less empathy for how they live their lives.

Some comments:

1. The increase in segregation by income over the past forty years is something that one can see and feel, at least if you are as old as I am.

2. My guess is that you could observe similar trends in terms of education. I would bet that today more Harvard students come from the top 20 percent of the income distribution than was the case 40 years ago. I would bet that more students who do not attend college come from the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution. Note that by “more” I do not mean “every.” With “gifted and talented” programs, “magnet schools,” and whatnot, school classrooms are much more segregated by income class than they were forty years ago.

3. Many trends are at work that are reducing social homogeneity. Skills are diverging, tastes are diverging, and cultural habits are diverging.

4. Both liberals and conservatives lament heterogeneity and would like to undertake a project to restore America to some prior era of less diversity. For liberals, economic homogeneity takes precedence. For conservatives, cultural homogeneity takes precedence.

5. Music might be a useful metaphor. In 1970, a lot of people listened to two or three popular radio stations in every city. Probably 3/4 of Americans recognized most of the top ten songs of that year. Even today, my high school students probably would recognize some of those songs. But music is much more fragmented now. Songs are iconic only for particular sub-cultures and only for short periods of time.

6. It could be that the project of returning to some bygone age of cultural and/or economic homogeneity is as unrealistic as expecting everyone to enjoy Simon Garfunkel, the Carpenters, and The Guess Who.

7. The middle of the twentieth century was about masses. Mass consumption. Mass production. Mass warfare. Mass destruction. Mass politics. We are not in the middle of the twentieth century any more.

10 thoughts on “Social Heterogeneity

  1. Echoing Warren Meyer – I wonder how much of this is driven by self-segregation to get into the “right” school?

  2. I side with the conservatives here. There are social pathologies afflicting lower class communities that don’t seem to have been there 50 years ago, and I suspect a healthy portion of it can be traced back to liberals trying to increase economic homogeneity via the welfare state.

  3. Is Kevin drum only now discovering Charles Murray?

    We are probably witnessing a current “triumph” of the “anti-individual” or “mass man” as identified by Oakeshott in his penetrating essay of 53 years ago. The “anti-individuals” are those who seek to avoid the characteristics of individuality and the accompanying “burdens” of the responsibilities and risks of making choices and determinations. Through numerical overweight in democratic societies they tend to, and in fact actually do, reduce and eliminate the functions of individual choice and determination for all within the whole of society.

    As a result the social order does stratify in accordance with the distinctly different motivations of the members as “individuals” and “anti-individuals,” with differentiations in cultures resulting from differentiations in aspirations and objectives, as well as in the means of attaining them.

    What we may be witnessing is one of those historic recessions of individuality that have occurred since its emergence in the era of the 14th and 15th centuries. Perhaps we shall be left with the “Remnant” referred to in “Isaiah’s Job” (A. J. Nock 1936).

  4. Arnold,
    1. Does this necessarily imply more narrowly defined commons (and fewer “public goods”)?
    2. Is the causality clearly exogenous (just a byproduct of the information age) or could social heterogeneity have been caused by policy choices?
    3. In the past such heterogeneity meant centralized forms of coersive government (monarchy). Is this necessarily the path of least resistance (as evidenced by general lack of social unrest and the feeble “occupy” movement)?

  5. “It is said that what is called “the spirit of an age” is something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world’s coming to an end. For this reason, although one would like to change today’s world back to the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done. Thus it is important to make the best out of every generation.”
    ― Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai

    The desire to return to the way things were — real or imagined — is ALWAYS futile.

  6. There’s also weird context – as Arnold notes, the middle of the 20th century was “special”.

    Here’s an example I remember pointing out some time ago – at it’s peak in the 1960s there were times when essentially everybody was watching one of three nightly news programs on TV, and at various points, one or the other of a small number of TV shows. That probably lasted for 2 decades or so and began to feel “normal”.

    It was weird.

    The current circumstance with many many groups people attach too that have relatively little to do with each other is, I claim, much more the norm.

  7. Your analysis makes sense — in particular, I think #3 aptly underscores the trends — but I am not sure of you bottom line. Do you, like Drum, worry about democracy as a result?

    • Not sure what #3 you were referring to, but you can already see that in the dysfunctional congress. It’s not that the intellectual quality of elected politicians has collapsed. It’s just that the underlying voter preferences on which they get elected are more different now. I think it means less Federal government is optimal. In practice it may play out very differently from optimal — I would like to see Arnold’s views on the paths of least resistance for this.

  8. Question for economic game theorists — Is it better to be the most or the least wealthy person in the neighborhood? Given any particular set of circumstances and income levels, will individuals, families, retirees etc maximize their satisfacion by locating in neighborhoods where they are at the upper end of the income range or the lower. Assuming crime levels are under control, it would seem most people will maximize the utility of thier disposable income by locating in low cost neighborhoods. But higher income locations may provide a greater range and quality of public services paid for by someone else.

    Has anyone analysed this question?

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