In Coming Apart, Charles Murray argues that the gap between elite Americans and working class Americans has grown since the the mid-1960s. In addition to the widening income gulf between these two groups, there is also a huge difference in values and cultural tastes. Murray argues that we are sorting ourselves out geographically, cocooned in neighborhoods of like-minded people. Wealthy people hang out with other wealthy people who listen to NPR, drink red wine, and vote for Obama. Working class people hang out with others who watch American Idol, drive a pick up truck, and like Santorum.
There are a lot of problems with Murray's methodology for this book, but let's just say he's right. We do live in communities of like-minded people. Does it matter?
Read more here.
Apt. 11d 
I live in a small, university-owned rental neighborhood that offers somewhat below-market rents to faculty and staff. Oh, and we’re being replaced with a new building this summer, but nothing lasts forever. We have a lot of coming and going, but it’s very safe and cohesive. Since some demolitions this past summer, we have a beautiful central green space where neighborhood kids can meet and frolic and the whole neighborhood is visible from any front yard. It’s really great. *sniff* Among the virtues of the situation is that if we let our lawn go, it’s not like the neighborhood is going to go to hell in a handbasket. We don’t have to man the battlements and pour boiling oil to keep out undesirables (i.e. put out annuals and mow weekly).
We’re eventually moving to a similar neighborhood without the green space and visibility, but where the residents own the houses. That neighborhood currently has a lot of very old people who you never see, but it’s slowly starting to have more families, which will be nice for us.
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I live in a very diverse neighborhood where some of the other residents are very much like us and others are very unlike us. Our direct neighbors are a 30-something professional couple with young kids on one side and on the other side a retired principal and his professional wife. Across the alley is a place that houses a rotating group of migrant workers. Up the street is a drug dealer and his family. I would guess that our neighborhood is about 50% white and 50% non-white with African-American and Hispanic being the two other ethnic and racial groups with the largest representations.
We’re going to move eventually and, yeah, we’ll probably end up in a neighborhood with more people like us. We do know and like a lot of our neighbors and I will miss that sense of community. But the things we won’t miss outweigh the things we will: like witnessing smash and grabs right in front of our house on a Sunday afternoon.
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Good points.
My “upper-middle class, suburban community in New Jersey” went 60%/40% for Obama in 2008, which would be a “Democratic landslide” if that were the outcome nationally, but locally means that a really high percent of my latte-liberal neighbors are actually latte-conservatives, and certainly can’t assume that everyone is “just like me.” (Although by the end of the year, you’ll know most of your neighbor’s politics by the lawn signs.)
My quibble is with the equal weight you seem to give here:
Perhaps we’re sorting ourselves by highly practical matters – schooling for our children, access to cultural events, and proximity to highly paid employment.
Maybe to a degree. I don’t know exactly what town you moved to, but I’m guessing it wasn’t Newark, Jersey City, or Hoboken — two places with equal or greater access to cultural events and highly paid employment, but crappy schools.
It seems like we are sorting ourselves almost entirely based on how much we care about schooling.
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I think it matters if you don’t. Last summer we lived in a highly eclectic urban, Victorian era neighbourhood whose residents ranged from Margaret Atwood to frat houses to university professors to immigrant families to the elderly to families like ours. The IDEA of an ultra urban, economically and socially diverse neighbourhood was great. The reality – not so great for our six year old.
We all loved the proximity to the museums and galleries and theatre. We loved the gorgeous Victorian architecture. We didn’t love the beer bottles on our front lawn and the loud students leaving their parties at 3am.
In our new city we live 10 minutes from downtown by subway. It’s all young families like ours for the most part. And it’s a lot “easier”.
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As to your question, is there any actual data to support Murray’s thesis? I’ve only read the linked article and not the book but there doesn’t seem to be anything substantial to his argument other than that he decided It Is So and we’re just supposed to believe him for some reason. Because he has such a great scientific track record, I guess.
My guess is that while neighborhoods probably have less SES diversity than 50 years ago they have more racial diversity. What evidence do I have to support this assertion? None! Just the tiniest bit less than Murray has to support his.
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“Wealthy people hang out with other wealthy people who listen to NPR, drink red wine, and vote for Obama.”
Alas, I wish.
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I know. Even in the relative safety of the middle class, NPR-listening is annoyingly common.
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“(Although by the end of the year, you’ll know most of your neighbor’s politics by the lawn signs.)”
Right. Although the sneaky ones won’t put up signs.
“We didn’t love the beer bottles on our front lawn and the loud students leaving their parties at 3am.”
That’s where we’re living for the 2012-2013 school year. It may turn out to have been a very bad idea.
“My guess is that while neighborhoods probably have less SES diversity than 50 years ago they have more racial diversity. What evidence do I have to support this assertion? None! Just the tiniest bit less than Murray has to support his.”
Do you think he’d disagree with you? He might not at all. In fact, that sounds like a driver of SES homogeneity and of the sort of hyper-competitive real estate/school environment that Elizabeth Warren talks about. Here’s a possible internal dialogue: “Uh oh–anybody could buy a house in this less expensive neighborhood. We’d better spend another $100k elsewhere to be sure that riff-raff can’t afford to send their kids to the same public school as Muffin.”
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But even if you NEVER speak with your neighbors, the planners in your neighborhood and the folks on the school board, etc. treat you as a group and react to what they see as the demands of that group (For example, when we lived in the upscale part of Fairfax County, VA, there was an unwritten understanding that the principal of our kid’s elementary school was always someone with a PhD — which was not true for other neighborhoods). In your neighborhood, the Brownies and Scouts probably don’t go to monster truck rallies but instead they learn about recycling.
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The question is not necessarily where we LIVE, per se, it’s who we’re friends with. Even in my section of Manhattan, where there are lots of rich people, there are some housing projects too. But I’m sure many sociologists and anthropologists could go on at length about why I’m not friends with people who live in housing projects.
One of my FB friends recently posted this article about how people in small (rural) towns necessarily have more varied social circles–you may be interested.
http://www.dailyyonder.com/small-town-diversity/2012/02/24/3782
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Here’s an alternate internal dialog. “I don’t want to hang out with mothers at school events who think that Ira Glass is a construction company.”
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IN our area of the chicago suburbs, we are diverse ethnically/culturally (my daughter’s 3 best friends are respectively a 1st generation Korean girl, a Kosher-keeping Jewish girl and a non-citizen Indian girl from whom my daughter has learned all about the Hindu religion). However, economically and educationally everyone has to have enough money to move to this area and pay the property taxes so we are almost uniformly graduate school-level educated. Most everyone moves here for the “good schools” so we also are almost uniform in having high expectations for our children educationally and for expecting excellence in the schools.
I like that we are culturally diverse and it has helped myself and my kids to value and find interest in cultures other than our own.As well, the schools are excellent, driven by involved parents and high expectations for everyone. I wish there was more economic diversity though as my kids really cannot fathom someone living with much less than they have- all their friends have ipods, cellphones, computers, big screen tvs etc.
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krlock – Our neighbourhood is similar to yours – culturally and ethnically diverse but not economically. Vancouver is such a ridiculously expensive city that having economic diversity in a particular ‘hood is pretty much impossible.
And I am fine with that. Unlike Laura, I do know my neighbours. I don’t know their political leanings but I know their names, kids, paid work, etc. It’s a nice community of people who value education and community – just what I want for my daughter, to be around people who are educated and work hard while valuing family life.
There is economic diversity at her day school due to many subsidies but those are mostly newish Israeli immigrants who are still highly educated if not yet established financially.
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My neighborhood is nearly lock step dem, it’s trouble to recruit the required reep election officials at the precinct level sometimes. Mostly, the same nice reep ladies as have been doing it for years keep doing it, but if one of them dies or moves to assisted living, we are in trouble. The elementary school had a mock election in ’08, and I think it was 80-20 for Obama. It was a real puzzle for my kids how daddy could be a McCain voter, when all the other parents were for Obama.
Economics and education are also remarkably similar – when my #1 was in kindergarten, his teacher told me she had 10 onlies, 10 kids from families of 2, and mine was one of only 3 from families of 3 or more. Sort of a treadmill life trajectory: you go to college, you go to grad school, you save like mad to get into a house in a desired school district, you have a kid or two. By the time you get to ‘have a kid or two’ that’s all you can do, your breeding days are pretty much over.
So we are pretty well sorted, by political leanings and size of family and education and income. Roofers and electricians and plumbers who work here mostly commute from ten to thirty miles out.
Does this matter? Murray says he chose his outer-burbs community in large part because it was not so much sorted. Some of my kids’ friends, particularly the onlies, seem interested to see the family dynamics in our three, I guess if ones or twos is all they see maybe so.
Dems have tended to flock together in our state, which results in a number of overwhelmingly dem districts and a larger number of majority reep districts. So in a state which is reasonably closely balanced dem-reep, we have a huge reep majority in the House of Delegates, and only heroic gerrymandering has kept the Senate to a 20-20 tie. Dems living in cosy enclaves of likemindeds has resulted in political power flowing strongly to the reeps, I think that matters.
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“Roofers and electricians and plumbers who work here mostly commute from ten to thirty miles out.”
And then make you pay through the nose, yes?
“Dems living in cosy enclaves of likemindeds has resulted in political power flowing strongly to the reeps, I think that matters.”
And then these Democrats wonder why they don’t get their way more often, because EVERYBODY is progressive, aren’t they?
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I was coming home yesterday all ready to be more open to my neighbors. First person I saw was on his porch playing an acoustic guitar so that plan ended quickly.
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When I am feeling both bored and nosy, I go to this web site and find out which party primaries my neighbors are registered, and when they last switched registrations. You only need name and age. Age is easy to find online, and if they’re not a Facebook friend, it’s only 12 guesses to find the month.
Then, I can make semi-unfounded speculations about their politics. “Hmm . . . registered in 1990, but switched affiliation to Republican in February, 2008. Must be a former Independent who wanted to vote for Ron Paul . . .”
https://voter.njsvrs.com/PublicAccess/servlet/com.saber.publicaccess.control.PublicAccessNavigationServlet?USERPROCESS=PublicSearch
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“It was a real puzzle for my kids how daddy could be a McCain voter, when all the other parents were for Obama.”
And, how did you explain it to them?
Your demographic is similar to ours (and, I think the mock election might have been even more skewed than 80/20). But we’re in the majority on that equation. Since our family manages “diversity” (i.e. being in the minority) in so many other ways, it was interesting to think about how one manages/explains being in that minority. It made me more understanding/appreciative of the courage of the one friend of my daughter’s who wrote her letter to Obama starting with “my parents didn’t vote for you . . . .” and saw that posted on the board with all the other letters of appreciation and admiration. She still didn’t explain why, so I can’t quite admire her, but I did see the courage required to be an openly Republican in my kids’ school.
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“First person I saw was on his porch playing an acoustic guitar so that plan ended quickly.”
This could be so much worse–it could have been an electric guitar or your neighbor could be a drummer.
Of course, maybe they’re in a band.
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My backdoor neighbors’ kid (college age) did have a bongo drum party while his parents were traveling (I assume). I get along well with the family and they were inside the house, so I didn’t want to cause problems. However, there was no getting around the fact that it was pretty loud. I waited until midnight and called with a request for them to please stop. They did.
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