Creative Class

“Big Sorter” Bill Bishop blogs “Stuff” psychologist Sam Gosling. Both live in Austin coincidentally, and each is one of my very favorite thinkers.

Conservatives’ bedrooms tended to have more calendars and postage stamps. They had more flags and sports posters. Conservatives’ bedrooms were neater and better lit—they had more laundry baskets, ironing boards, cleaning supplies, and sewing thread.

Liberals’ bedrooms had a greater variety of books (especially books about travel, feminism, and music). They had more CDs and a greater variety of music (folk, world, classical). Liberal bedrooms had more art supplies, cultural memorabilia, and maps of other countries.

These same traits carried over to the work life. Conservatives’ offices “tended to be more conventional, less stylish, and less comfortable compared with liberal offices.” Liberals’ offices were more colorful and contained more CDs and “a greater variety of books.”

Now we know your secrets…

More here.

Over at his terrific Slate blog, my old comrade Bill Bishop explains the election in maps and graphics.

Graphic via the New York Times.

What a great map that accompanies a very nice NYT review of Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort.

Bishop cites research suggesting that, contrary to the standard
goo-goo exhortations, the surer route to political comity may be less
civic engagement, less passionate conviction. So let’s hear it for the
indifferent and unsure, whose passivity may provide the national glue
we need.

The full review is here.

I’m a huge fan of Planetizen and of Bill Bishop, author of the fabulous new book, The Big Sort. Click here for a Planetizen podcast of me and Bill with Nate Berg.

Writing in the NYTimes Magazine, Bill Galston and Pietro Nivola reflect on the sort:

You are less likely to live near someone whose politics differ from
your own. It’s well known that fewer states are competitive in presidential
races than in decades past. We find similar results at the county level. In
1976, only 27 percent of voters lived in landslide counties where one candidate
prevailed by 20 points or more. By 2004, 48 percent of voters lived in such
counties.

What accounts for the decline of ideologically mixed localities? Bill Bishop,
a journalist, and Robert Cushing, a sociologist, who have studied this issue,
stress that the age of “white flight” to the suburbs is over. Instead, during
the past two decades, many whites have moved to one group of cities and many
blacks to another. Meanwhile, young people have deserted rural and older
manufacturing areas for cities like Austin and Portland. Places with higher
densities of college graduates attract even more, so that the gap between such
communities and less-educated areas widens further. Zones of high education, in
turn, produce more innovation and enjoy higher incomes, generating communities
dominated by upper-middle-class tastes. Lower-educated regions, by contrast,
tend to be more family-oriented and more faithful to traditional authority.

Not surprisingly, this demographic sorting correlates with a widening
difference in political preferences. What’s more, according to Bishop and
Cushing, once a tipping point is reached, majorities tend to become
supermajorities.  … Polarization feeds on itself.