As a non-specialist, I think a surprising statement is that in this particular field, there is an expectation that large, dense cities encourage socioeconomic mixing. That seems counter to everyday experience and policies that are sometimes enacted in cities to counter the trend, like bussing kids in poor neighborhoods into richer school districts. The term "ghetto" famously describes an urban trend to cut off poor enclaves, generally with some racial or ethnic component. I guess I felt like it was "common knowledge" that urbanization increased social stratification, whether in ancient times as agricultural societies developed, as I was taught in high school social studies, or in more modern cases where people leave the land to find opportunities, as in Latin America, for instance, where terms like favela are familiar even to English speakers to describe the cut-off, under-serviced and impoverished neighborhoods that have developed. Common knowledge being what it is, that isn't to say that anyone should believe that cities necessarily increase or decrease stratification without making measurements but stories of urban inequality seems to be so prevalent in popular culture that it seems strange that one would state that the opposite is a popular expectation but they have citations so I'm not questioning that the idea is out there, only that it is surprising that it is so prevalent that they need to open their article as though they are bucking a trend in the literature.
I think you are misunderstanding the argument. Yes, there have always been rich neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods in cities, but the idea was that with everyone "packed in" together and making use of shared resources like sidewalks, stores, and subways, that people would essentially be forced to come into contact with others from different socio-economic levels.
I agree with AnimalMuppet's comment - car-centric behavior kills this. For example, if you go to older cities that were developed "pre-car" in the US like NYC or Boston, I feel like you get more interaction just because you're likely to interact with more people on the sidewalks or subway/T. Living in a car-centric city like Austin is totally different. As much as Austin likes to promote its progressive ethos, this is definitely one of the most segregated cities I've ever experienced, even more so now that housing prices have gotten insane - poorer people live further out, and the public transportation system is pretty abysmal and there is much more of a socioeconomic divide in people who use it (primarily because, and I see this all over the US, but many people love to talk about the need and benefits of light rail, but buses are often seen as "for the poors").
But in cities that aren't car centric you commonly have stores embedded into the neighborhood at walkable distance. For everyday needs like groceries you just go to whatever shop is closest, which will be a posh Whole Foods in a rich neighborhood and a cheap discounter in a poor neighborhood.
You share sidewalks, public transportation, etc when going for work or shopping for something that isn't a daily necessity. But the same could be said about less urbanized places.
The counter argument are towns and villages that only really contain one socio-economic group. You can have small towns that are basically only rich people, or only poor people. Cities provide less segregation than that.
I can't speak for the whole country but having lived most of my life around dense parts of California I'd choose dealing with fighting traffic over the dregs on public transit every single time. I still distinctly remember back when I'd take the the bus to the local community college for my pre-transfer credits where a few times I had to intervene to help women who were being harassed. And that's just one problem type! It's not counting all the other enjoyable public transit experiences like when I'd stand for the entirety of my bus ride because the only open seats were beside some junkie mumbling erratically or even sometimes inaccessible because a hobo had brought a literal sack of trash to fill the space beside them.
I’ve never been to Boston or Austin, but here in Paris many people take the public transit, be it metro or buses: rich, poor, and in-betweens.
Talking to random strangers when out and about is very much not the norm. Being forced to come into contact with the others is seen more as a negative than a positive.
The only places where I see some kind of mingling is where that’s the goal, such as bars, and possibly “hobbies”. Although, IME, even those tend to have people from similar “categories”.
In the US, there used to be the idea of "sidewalk culture" - deliberately structuring cities so that different kinds and classes of people would meet, literally on the sidewalk, and from that would form, at least to some degree, a shared culture. There was the idea of deliberately breaking the silos that separate people. And maybe that even worked.
Worked. Past tense. In most of the US, it's now a car culture. And even in cities where people walk, it's now an earbud culture.
I'm not sure GP is accurate, even without that. The privileged descending to the lower quarters to hobnob with the masses is as old as civilization, and of course the working lower class generally have to go where everyone else is to serve them. If segregation is increasing, there are plenty of mechanisms to point to, also: anti-poor urban design protocol (including law enforcement-related), low/no-contact resource delivery, WFH, the increased cost of transportation and housing, etc.
It's not actually a surprise that society is bifurcating, is it? Not after the anaphasing of school demographics, voter behavior, and so on.
> In the US, there used to be the idea of "sidewalk culture"
> In most of the US, it's now a car culture.
In my experience cars have nothing to do with this. I grew up outside the US in a very car-required area.
And yet what you call sidewalk culture was and is the norm of daily life. You go outside, meet the neighbors, play board games on the sidewalks, have beers with them deep into the evening, simply hang out outside a lot. I miss this a lot.
In the US they invented an actual fake crime for the idea of hanging out outside - loitering. You try your sidewalk culture in the US and the police will show up to break up your illicit activity (eyeroll).
In the US you must be at home or at work or commuting between them, or spending money shopping or in some corporate-sanctioned entertainment venue.
Even take out the cars sidewalk culture is dead when the rich people are buying coffee for $7 and the working class are getting it from the self serve pitcher in the gas station. A lot of places today are highly economically stratified thanks to the prices of goods and services offered. It also doesn’t help that when people close their eyes and imagine “third place” somewhere that obligates you to spend money to be there comes up.
I was definitely taken back by that statement. Marginalized groups, for example, have always noted how cities offer increased isolation away from bigots as compared to smaller towns and rural areas. It may be a prevalent idea in academia, but I'm not sure anyone thinks that way on the streets.
Actually i do agree with the statement.
I live near the biggest city in my state and my friends are different in ideas, political opinions and preferences (also kinda different in economic possibilities) due to the fact that we all went to the same highschool, and there are few places where the young can socialize.
on the contrary my brother lives in that big city and its friends are ALL coming from the same cultural background, with the same ideas and the same political leaning (that he chooses during university)
A lot of that has to do with the fact that you chose your friend group during public high school and he chose his during university, which itself already selects for the upper socioeconomic statuses.
Urbanization increases social stratification in that the upper class and the upper middle class tend to live in or near cities. As far as the poor and working class, the majority live outside cities in agricultural societies, and in or near cities in modern societies.
It is worth saying what you describe is the classic European view of things. In English-speaking countries post industrialisation the reverse was the case, with inner cities being the regions of notorious poverty, with the upper classes engaged in rural pursuits as a pure leisure activity.
It's important here to differentiate between the big cities and the next tier. The big, dense cities (SF, NYC, Boston, London, Tokyo, etc) have accumulated wealth and privilege within the city and lower income folks are on the perimeter. In second tier cities, it's more common for suburban sprawl to have led to "white flight" and wealth accumulation outside city centers... but those cities frequently don't have near the economic draw in their downtowns anyway so it doesn't matter.
IMO, the GP was perfectly clear, and there's no need to misunderstand it on purpose to insist on some unverified narrative.
You could just as easily disagree, with a valid point.
(And anyway, the phenomenon you are talking about stopped on most of the world at around the middle of the last century. The very few exceptions where it is still happening do not support you claiming it's a rule.)
> the upper class and the upper middle class tend to live in or near cities. As far as the poor and working class, the majority live outside cities in agricultural societies
I'm not sure that tracks. Farmers are the epitome of the upper to upper-middle class, deriving their living wholly or mostly from land and capital ownership.
Perhaps you meant upper to upper-middle income rather than class?
> Farmers are the epitome of the upper to upper-middle class
This must be why in the 1950’s large swathes of Europe saw so many farmers fleeing their land to go live in the city and take up those new fangled factory jobs. Same for Britain in the 1850’s. Or China in the 2000’s.
Usually when people talk about “farmers” in the context of social class migrations, they mean subsistence farmers eeking out a living from the land. Not the modern American or European industrial farmer who in effect owns and runs a multimillion dollar business. Although I hear margins are razor thin even for those.
>This must be why in the 1950’s large swathes of Europe saw so many farmers fleeing their land to go live in the city and take up those new fangled factory jobs.
Did they though? Doesn't match my knowledge.
Most farmers at the time who owned plots of fertile land would rather break their backs working the land themselves (even if for thin margins of subsistence farming) rather than move to the cities to live in cramped conditions and break their backs working factory jobs for low pay.
The only country folk who migrated to cities to take factory jobs were mostly people who didn't own much land or any at all, making them relatively poor, so a factory job in the city was a better prospect than poverty in the country side working someone else's land. But land owning farmers would never downgrade by going to work factory jobs.
> This must be why in the 1950’s large swathes of Europe saw so many farmers fleeing their land to go live in the city and take up those new fangled factory jobs.
Sure? There is nothing about upperclass-hood that implies that it is desirable or infinitely maintainable. In fact, beyond the romanticizing of the upper-class we see in popular culture, I suspect most actually prefer to be working class, especially when coupled with an upper income. There are way fewer nightmares when your only concern is showing up to work.
It depends on what you mean by "farmers." Even small individually- or family-owned farms are going to depend to a large extent on seasonal agricultural labor. It's worth being clear when you talk about this whether by "farmers" you mean those laborers, who are often poor, or the landowners, who usually aren't.
Farmers (farm owners) are middle
(petit bourgeois) class for small fanily farms dependent largely on the labor of the owners, and upper class for large farms, but are a small share of the rural population and, in modern society, the latter are not necessarily rural at all, whereas the bulk of rural population are farm or farm-supporting laborers.
The bulk of the modern upper class are non-farm-specific capitalists, who tend to be urban-dwellers, and bulk of fhe petit bourgeoisie (middle class) are non-farm-specific small business owners and elite urban laborers whose wages have sufficed ti give them a capital nest egg sufficient to be a significant share of their economic support mechanism.
The modern farm, even small family farms, relies on capital to do the work. The farm owner's input is into the management of the operation. If management is considered labour then there is no such thing as upper-class. You can't own land and capital without some management.
> The modern farm, even small family farms, relies on capital to do the work.
All businesses rely on the application of labor to capital; if that labor is largely that of the owners, the owners are petit bourgeois, if it is predominantly rented labor of the proletariat, the owners are haut bourgeois. (In the simple case where the owners derive their support exclusively from that property.)
> If management is considered labour then there is no such thing as upper-class.
Management is labor, but that fact does not mean that there aren't a distinct class of people who, while they may incidentally do some labor in the marketplace, relate to the economy and derive support within it primarily through the returns of capital whose value is realized primarily by renting labor from the proletariat.
> that fact does not mean that there aren't a distinct class of people who, while they may incidentally do some labor in the marketplace, relate to the economy and derive support within it primarily through the returns of capital whose value is realized primarily by renting labor from the proletariat.
Yes, we call them retirees. Who, incidentally, as a group have a slight preference towards small town living.
From the article: As plausible as the cosmopolitan mixing hypothesis might seem, big cities also provide new opportunities for self-segregation, because they are large enough to enable people to seek out and find others who are similar to themselves
It kind of makes sense that people that earn more or have a higher potential want to mingle with people that are the same. There's no upside for better off individuals to stay in low income neighborhoods.
No matter how much subsidized housing or whatever, low income individuals will be priced out of events or social gatherings.
And the bigger the city, the more opportunities there are, the more segregated economically they tend to be because just a small percentage will "make it". And the rest I think will follow a half Bell curve.
They’re also priced out of basic food in gentrified areas.
I posit that rich people actually enjoy having groceries cost double what they do just a few miles away, because it means only the ‘right people’ mingle with them in public.
Personally I exemplify this. I make enough to go to the fancy Whole Foods and shop in peace, whereas the local Safeway in the same neighborhood has people screaming and throwing objects and items are locked behind bars. Simple price differentiation keeps those people from bothering to enter WF.
Across the river in Alexandria and the surrounding suburbs, this was true as well (not sure about Netflix, but the housing boundaries)
The bureaucrats, lawyers, doctors, and career officers (Pentagon) were highly concentrated in a few neighborhoods that border the Potomac (Old Town through Fort Hunt). A few blocks away, the Rt 1 corridor was largely working class or lower class, with some young enlisted families from Ft Belvior.
This extended to my high school - there were 3 buildings - first was arts/music, second was STEM and honors, and the third was the gym, auto shop, wood shop, and cooking. It's not hard to imagine there were students who never entered building 1. And the only reason I was ever in building 3 was the weight room and the one semester of auto shop I took.
I have lived in several countries and always observed that, irrespective of the political views, people try to flee poor areas when they can, and try to have their kids put in good schools when they can.
This is particularly funny in the case of left-wing politicians paying extras bucks to have their kids in elitists white schools with strong discipline, while advocating "diversity" for the other kids when they are interviewed on TV at night.
I have never seen non competitive elite class parents regardless they are left or right or races. When it comes to children, all bets are off and the only action is to send the children to the best school that's available
> This is particularly funny in the case of left-wing politicians paying extras bucks to have their kids in elitists white schools with strong discipline, while advocating "diversity" for the other kids when they are interviewed on TV at night.
There is nothing wrong with advocating for a society wide rule change, but still playing the game according to the current rules.
They aren't playing the game by the rules in this example, they entirely misunderstand the game which shows their biases. The kid with two wealthy parents in a functional household is going to do well in life wherever they get their k-12. Sending them to private school signals you bought into racial fears over actual logic of what factors actually contribute towards these differential outcomes we see among public and private schools.
I think people really overweigh k-12 on outcomes anyhow. Thats never the difference maker, what you specialize in college certainly can be though. And you can be sure that the child of a wealthy person will be going to college no matter where they go.
Think of how an LLM is trained, should we assume that humans are necessarily different, even if it goes against their scientific principles? If the principles are not in the cognitive context window, then they essentially do not exist. If you try to inject them, the emotional centre is typically invoked (some form of fight or flight I'd think), disallowing the addition.
Human cognition is very strange if you watch it carefully with pure curiosity.
I think the goal of attempting to reduce in-group bias is laudable. I generally think that any attempt to remove race as a component from any decision making is a good thing.
That being said, I think that if you plot, for example, the black and white American populations for things when it comes to language, interests, economics, education, culture in general, at the population level, these populations diverge pretty dramatically. So if you take a random black person and a random white person and say "go be friends," that is far less likely to be a compatible relationship than if you took two individuals of the same "race."
People seem to have problems keeping these thoughts simultaneously. Not being friends with somebody on the basis of their race: bad. Being more likely to be friends with people who happen to share your superficial characteristics because the populations associated with those superficial characteristics happen to be pretty different: fine.
As Thomas Sowell has essentially said in virtually every book he's written: it doesn't make sense to take two populations that do not behave the same way and then expect them to produce identical outputs. It doesn't make sense to slap the label of racism on that delta.
Attempts to align the circumstances/behaviors etc of different populations, should, in theory, reduce the delta. I think in some cases, it's commendable, and in some cases, it's fundamentally authoritarian and functionally "cultural erasure."
I'm glad that you're amused by me, but nothing I said implies that I have a a "version" of what a Black person is, should be, or that this version is the "only correct one."
From an economics and intelligence standpoint it's basically inevitable due to globalization and automation.
The US has shifted to high skill tertiary economy. This leaves less opportunities for lower skilled individuals. These lower skilled individuals don't have nearly the same earning power and thus have fewer choices (location, housing, schools, etc) and will naturally end up as a higher percentage in the lower cost choices. In some ways it's also how the work has moved vs the people. Entire regions like Appalachia have seen industries die and have left almost nothing to properly replace them.
> The US has shifted to high skill tertiary economy.
I don't think this has anything to do with it. The physical class divides have been around since the beginning of the United States. If anything, it's a symptom of capitalism where those with greater wealth use it to segregate themselves from poorer folks.
In effect, capitalism takes advantage of human nature and as a side effect that same human nature self-segregates based on how "nice" any given area is. You want rich folks to mingle with middle class folks? Make the middle class area the nicest place and don't let the rich completely "take it over" (aka gentrification).
The way the modern world is becoming though we're self-segregating more and more though so I don't think it's realistic to expect any sort of top-down planning or policies to force mingling. Upper middle class people don't even go to the grocery store anymore and thus, don't end up mingling with lower middle class people.
Maybe we should promote more "mixing hobbies" where people physically need to show up and interact with each other? Subsidize board game shops, paintball, indoor rock climbing, and similar? Might help humanity a little bit.
I segregated myself from crime. I segregated my family to keep them safe.
I don’t care if someone is poor, I care that at 2am my neighbor is beating his girlfriend and she’s screaming and I have to go out there to stop it. I care that the neighbor kid is shooting a gun into the air yelling “MOTHER FUCKER” as a car screeches away, when my daughter is playing in the front yard, and the cops say “it was just a .22” and nothing is done. Whelp, I guess a .22 won’t kill my kid, nothing to worry about!
So I moved to the most expensive house I could afford (and honestly couldn’t afford it then, can now after some raises).
To be fair, my current neighbor beats his wife too, but at least he keeps quiet about it and didn’t make a whole scene when he got arrested. The lady down the way sells weed but like, she’s not getting into fist fights with the people she’s dealing to. People know how to behave in a nicer neighborhood, or at least keep their business their business.
It also has nothing to do with race as this neighborhood is more diverse than where I moved from (old neighborhood was basically only black people and white people vs professional immigrants of every stripe from every continent in the new neighborhood).
Yes, but consider that people of higher SES do not want to mix with people of middle and low SES.
And part of that is because they are not fun to be around! People of low SES tend to be meaner, more anti-social in their behaviors like littering, not maintaining their environment, more likely to commit crime, less family formation, etc.
Access to well behaved people is not a human right.
>people of higher SES do not want to mix with people of middle and low SES.
To some extent the opposite is also true, because spending time with people with higher SES might cause a discomfort/decreased self-esteem or simply expose the asshole-side of elites which quite often appears in face of "paupers".
All social classes benefit when social differences are minimised, like in 70s Sweden.
For the high SES people, this means that they can move freely without worrying about their safety.
Walking home late from a party, biking to work or working from a coffee shop on a busy plaza are pleasures in life that rich people like, too!
The opposite is something like Mexico, where, as a rich person, you are basically forced to stay inside a bunch of confined areas and only move in public inside an armoured car. (Slightly exaggerating, but you get the point)
All social classes have an interest to provide the universal high quality education system that is necessary to achieve this. Some rich people might think that they are better off if the rest of the country is poor. But they are mistaken.
I was invited to a Parisian party for 'high SES' people (200€ the entry ticket, it was two month of food at the time for me, but you get champagne with it!). I don't think i've ever seen as much antisocial behavior, even when I worked in a youth camp for abandoned/placed teenagers. I don't understand how prison aren't filled with those people. So much coke, sexual slavery in plain sight, drunk driving... One police descent and you have half the club in prison for a few years. And the person who invited us told us it was quite tame, and not the most expensive place (it was after a student hackathon with different schools participating, he was the MBA grad, we were devs/design type).
Wow you went to a party in paris with sexual slavery and drunk driving in plain sight? Did someone drunk-drive a bus full of sex slaves up to the party and drop them off? What the hell are you talking about?
I meant very young eastern European women who did not speak French and clearly did not have any business there (also not sure if some weren't minors, there was a scandal with that and football players around the same time), and people being clearly drunk who snorted coke to 'get right' and be able to drive home.
Quite likely true, which means we now have an excellent argument against the libertarian ideal of private property.
In practice, we can put constraints on, for example, the kind of business one can do with one's private property, and the constraints one is under while doing that business (equal service laws, ADA compliance, and you can even cap rents to leave room open for low-revenue business to keep operating).
It's a little irrelevant what evolution "prefers." We have multiple examples of what has been called "dangerous evolutionary baggage": behaviors that were sensible in the past but in the present, rapidly-changing world actually hinder optimal outcomes for people. Two examples are ingroup-outgroup bias in a densely-connected world where the decisions of someone halfway around the planet can impact your day and scarcity / hoarding behaviors in a world with more than enough stuff in several categories to satisfy every human being more than they could possibly ever consume.
I have no idea. My point is it's irrelevant for modern humans.
As a social construct: caste could be useful for specialization. But I sort of fail to see the point of making the specialization birth-based (observation seems to indicate that people's interests and skills, particularly in technology spaces which dominate the human condition now, are randomized / environment based more than bred. Give me an interested kid who wants to be a programmer, and I can teach them how to program regardless of who their parents were).
Whether there's some natural selective pressure to encourage caste is irrelevant in the modern human condition. Probably better to optimize for letting people have experiences and finding what fits them best under the theory that people do the best work / live the best lives if they're doing what they're into.
Can it truly be irrelevant? Our so called society may be modern based on some subjective chronocentric premise, but our biology and the sociological patterns
from which they are derived are largely just as they've been for millennia.
My point is that we can attempt adjudicate out our biological programming through social conditioning, but it's still there lurking under the surface. It's built into us and we can never truly hope to escape it as long as we shall live.
Some of us are conditioned to want to murder. Those people, if they act on that impulse, are murderers and we jail or slay them. There were probably good evolutionary reasons to kill those like oneself in the past, but context has changed and what was once perhaps evolutionarily advantageous (elimination of resource competition) is now counter-advantageous (elimination of members of society and allies, not to mention the vast resources spent on defense if "You can just kill who you want" were to become part of the social code; those resources can be spent otherwise if people check their urges).
Yes, we're riddled with dangerous evolutionary baggage. Yes, perhaps it never goes away. We learn to regulate it so that we can live in a society, because none of us are as strong as all of us.
If anything, one of the greatest risks to modern humanity is the risk that we will fail to regulate such urges. Because the urge to murder, the urge to divide, the urge to have ingroups and outgroups... Those urges are an existential threat in a world of nukes and gene-engineered virii, where someone acting on such an urge could slaughter a whole city or a whole species.
Are we talking about the physical cost to produce eggs and sperm? I don't think that's that high. Also, a woman already has all her eggs at the time she's born.
Are we talking about the physical cost to maintain eggs and sperm? I don't think that's that high.
Are we talking bout the physical cost of pregnancy? If so, it doesn't make sense to say eggs and sperm. colonelpopcorn should have said pregnancy.
Yes, it takes 9 months to grow a baby and it’s a health toll and a health risk. Fair.
But unless you’re planning to abandon your kids, most of the investment comes in the years after and this responsibility is equally on both father and mother.
But unless you’re planning to abandon your kids, most of the investment comes in the years after and this responsibility is equally on both father and mother.
One of the players in this game can freely walk away with no negative consequences. The other player is biologically attuned to lose their mind until they reunite with their child. Also, one player can have children up until 30-50, depending on how well they roll. The other player can have children until the moment they die. One player will have 3-5 years of extremely negative health effects starting with conception. The other player can fulfill their obligation in their sleep and never think about it again.
You seem to suggest that a father’s love and responsibility for their child is just an unnatural delusion. Even that it’s a bad thing somehow.
My narrow response to that is what I hinted at above:
Fathers love their children no less than mothers love their children.
My broader response is: Trying to be moral, and sometimes failing at it, is better than never trying and thus always failing.
Some people decided that they will just always do what’s best for themselves.
Such people like to claim that anyone who tries to be moral is always a lying hypocrite and thus worse than the absolute asshole. Because there is one sin that the absolute asshole can never be accused of: hypocrisy.
These people are hard to counter, because anything that is said will be labelled as hypocrisy.
The truth is that many, many people in this world sometimes do things because they are right, not because they benefit themselves.
That's what a religion historian more or less said: in USA 2 people from 2 different neighborhoods cannot underestand each other (they don't speak the same language).
