h/t Instapundit
The anger against the ruling elites that fueled the election of Donald Trump was not understood by them for good reason: they genuinely are isolated from the realities of life as experienced by most Americans.
A fascinating survey has created a data-based measure of the social isolation of the urban elites, the people who run the country who have no contact at all with the lives of most people. Charles Murray, co-author of the groundbreaking study The Bell Curve, and author of Coming Apart: The State of White America, devised a clever survey to identify the social isolation from the rest of America that characterizes highly educated, affluent elites. He explains for the American Enterprise Institute, where he is a scholar:
In Coming Apart, a book I published in 2012, I asked my readers to score themselves on a 25-item test titled "How Thick is Your Bubble?" Scores could range from 0 to 100. The lower the score, the thicker one’s elite cultural bubble.
For PBS, he created a similar version of the quiz, taken by over 130,000 people who watch PBS.
...The data yield some remarkable conclusions about the way elites cluster together and cut themselves off (snip)
When I controlled for the age of the respondent and the urbanization of the zip code, it turned out that virtually all the effect on the bubble score is driven by the percentage of adults with a college degree in the zip code where the respondent lived. The zip code’s median family income had almost no independent effect. Another interesting finding: the zip code where people lived at age 10 had a modestly larger effect on their bubble scores than their current zip code.
In other words, there really is an elite at the very top of our income, education, and status hierarchy, and they cluster in just a few areas and cut themselves off from different people. Moreover, they tend to be children of people of higher status and education.
A hereditary class cut off from the society they rule ‐ not exactly the Jeffersonian ideal of America. More like the European, Latin, and Asian nations from which many Americans fled. And they live exactly where you would expect (list below).
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