The Big Sort - Bill Bishop with Robert G. Cushing - Book Review - New York Times
“We have built a country,” Bishop writes, “where everyone can choose the neighbors (and church and news shows) most compatible with his or her lifestyle and beliefs. And we are living with the consequences of this segregation by way of life: pockets of like-minded citizens that have become so ideologically inbred that we don’t know, can’t understand, and can barely conceive of ‘those people’ who live just a few miles away.”
Over the last decade, as 100 million Americans have moved from one place to another, they’ve clustered in increasingly homogeneous communities.
Bishop and Cushing swam around in different sets of data — voting records; I.R.S. income figures; patent filings; poll numbers from advertising firms — to figure out how thoroughly, and in what ways, Americans had sorted themselves.
Their conclusion: “By the turn of the 21st century, it seemed as though the country was separating in every way conceivable.”
