THE idea of two Americas is a trope of political commentary: a population divided in mutual incomprehension by income, race, religion or region—flyover country versus coastal elite. The idea that cultural fissures are growing is used to explain increasing political rancour and the rise of Donald Trump. But those explanations may need tempering. Two papers on cultural distance, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in June, suggest the idea of cavernous and expanding cultural fissures is over-wrought.
The papers both use data from the General Social Survey, a long running poll of Americans’ attitudes towards issues including free speech, same-sex relations and crime. They examine how closely respondent’s characteristics including where they live, what they earn, their education level and religion, are associated to particular attitudes and suggest that, at the level of individual attitudes, the relationship is weak. Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica, the authors of “Coming Apart? Cultural Distances in the United States...Continue reading
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