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The Great Sort and the Rise of Populism
Over the course of a generation, American politics has increasingly been shaped by a series of forces which are only now beginning to be understood. This phenomenon has created effects as divergent and seemingly disconnected from each other as the inflation of real estate prices in California’s Silicon Valley to the election of Donald Trump and the rise of populism. Trying to understand the underlying forces which animate these disparate occurrences requires traveling back in time to track both their origins and how they’ve progressed over time.
Let’s start in 1976 with Jimmy Carter winning the Presidential election with 50.1% of the popular vote. He does so with just 26.8% of counties voting for him with a margin in excess of 20%. After Carter’s inauguration in 1977, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs found the Apple Computer Corporation in April. Later that year, Paul Allen and Bill Gates found Microsoft. The median price of a home in the US is $33,000. The median price of a home in Cupertino, CA — where Apple will ultimately place its headquarters — is slightly higher, as California Real Estate tends to be.
I’ve picked this moment in time as a baseline. There was it seems, a much greater sense of interconnectedness between people throughout the country at the local level. The numbers bear this out. The still relatively small number of people who attended college mainly returned home and went to work, married a high school acquaintance (the even smaller number of women who attended college then practically guaranteed this) and lived their lives. People were far more likely to live next to a person of differing ideological persuasion or even a different income stratum.
Charles Murray discusses this phenomenon and how it came to be in his book Coming Apart. The forces that led to this change were only beginning to make their first appearance in 1976 — namely, the dawn of personal computers and other labor-saving devices which disproportionately benefited those with high IQs and advanced technical knowledge, which provided them the means to capitalize upon the coming boom in automation.
Fast forward to 1994. The Soviet Union lies dead, slain by its own hand. Bill Clinton is President, having won just a plurality in 1992’s three-way election due largely to a brushfire rebellion on the Right against George H.W. Bush. That fall, a landslide election happens, sweeping Republicans into control of both the House and Senate for the first time in living memory. Apple, meanwhile, is mired in a lawsuit against Microsoft for the theft of intellectual property regarding the Lisa operating system and languishes financially after several failed product launches. The median price of a home in the US is $130,000. Median housing prices in CA have begun to sharply diverge from the national mean however, closing in on $200,000. San Francisco’s prices are even higher; somewhere around $250,000.
1994 is one of the first very data points with a footprint large enough to see from the perspective of the national stage hinting at the underlying, large-scale changes that were happening behind the scenes. That change, of course, is a thing that demographers now identify as “The Big Sort” and its effects were many and varied. For starters, whereas prior to 1994 there was considerable ideological overlap between the parties, this election began in earnest the process of wiping out the ideologically marginal members of each party. Conservative Southern Democrats and Liberal Northern Republicans alike should probably recognize 1994 as the meteor that heralded their eventual extinction.
It’s hard to determine which came first in the chicken/egg problem of the parties’ subsequent ideological divergence. Did the parties’ centers begin to move away from each other first, which led to the defeat of their moderates or did the defeat of the moderates allow the parties to separate? But what is certain is that by the time that George W. Bush was elected in 2000, the number of counties that he won by >20% was 45.3%, in comparison to Carter’s 26.8% in 1976. Polarization seemingly created its own demographic weather, reinforcing and accelerating itself in some fashion.
What’s more likely however is that The Big Sort was beginning to cluster like-minded people more closely than ever with other people who reflected their own opinions and beliefs. But the Sort’s work was only beginning, and ideology wasn’t the only axis upon which these forces were operating.
Fast forward to 2016. Donald Trump wins the Presidency (barely) with an even greater number of highly polarized counties than President Bush. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are now four out of the top five largest American companies by market capitalization. Exxon-Mobil, formerly the globe-bestriding titan is practically a dwarf all the way down at number 6. Median Home Price in the US is $315,000. Meanwhile, Median Home price in Cupertino is $1.7 Million, five or six times the national median, driven mostly by a combination of restrictive land-use regulations, huge demand, and gobs of tech money.
But the election of 2016 turned out very differently from 1994 in both tone and result — as different in some ways as the housing prices from 1976 compared with today. The leader of the Republicans 23 years ago was Newt Gingrich, whose Contract with America electrified the nation and ultimately dragged an entire presidency to the right. Riding the crest of a clear ideological wave, the Republicans promised a popular but by no means easy-to-accomplish set of policy goals — and then found the political will to execute them. Contrast this with the election of 2016, where ideology took a backseat to sloganeering, personal insults, and grievance-mongering, with very little focus on specific policies that would produce measurable outcomes. What had changed so dramatically in the intervening 22 years?
The Big Sort, whose existence became obvious in 1994, didn’t stop but continued apace, taking the form of further dividing the country, not merely along ideological cleavages, but along lines of “urban and rural” and even “educated versus not.”
2016’s outcome is where we see its most recent manifestation: the rise of populism. But how did it take us from the previous political order and lead us to where we are today? Its effects on politics are reflected in what’s happened in places like Cupertino and replicated in a variety of locations across the country. The Sort, which delivered such staggering political victories to the right in the ’90s was, it seems, always doing one other thing with particular and ruthless efficiency: skimming the the highest echelon of cognitively elite students from the across the country, and then transplanting them to one of the various technological powerhouse locations in the nation with the promise of earning extraordinary salaries. In the past, the high school valedictorian in Spokane, WA or some other mid-sized city would attend college and return home to work at a local company or begin their own business.
Now, they go to work at Apple.
With a market value value of $700 billion, Apple has a very different set of requirements for employment than GM or Ford did in 1976, with a gaggle of job descriptions straight out of that earlier era’s science fiction. The pay is even more fantastical. With Apple-like companies occupying four out of the top five slots of the nation’s most valuable corporations and those companies’ headquarters being in Cupertino and Santa Clara, CA and Redmond and Seattle, WA, respectively, there’s precious little an average person in Pine Bluff, AR will have in common with people in those spheres, either culturally or intellectually.
The effect that this has had upon rural America has turned out to be nothing short of catastrophic; as institutions of higher learning (aided by national standardized testing systems geared towards finding such talent) systematically denuded rural areas of most of its best and brightest, those areas of the country have been left barren and devoid of their most intelligent and entrepreneurial residents.
This “brain drain” is precisely what is speculated about by Philip Auerswold on Russ Roberts’ recent episode of EconTalk — which explains why there has been explosive growth in the value of real estate in Cupertino and its other, tech-driven urban enclaves, while Americans in rural areas increasingly struggle to make ends meet. The rise of the opioid epidemic and the sense of hopelessness that precipitated it are mere reactions to the destruction of the previous order at the hands of this impersonal force.
This in turn explains the rise of populism. Populism is a reaction is not solely due to the fact that some people are making immense sums of money; indeed, Americans have always had remarkable tolerance for and even invited inequality, considering it to be a feature, not a bug. What’s different now is that unlike in the past, where the immense wealth wrought by new technology was a harbinger of a tide that would lift all boats, this newest iteration of the Gilded Age doesn’t seem to have egalitarian powers of vitalization. On the contrary, this revolution has had the paradoxical effect of destroying many of the jobs and occupations upon which the less cognitively able once relied to provide themselves with a chance at a better life.
Toss in a dose of these newly wealthy urbanites scoffing at and scolding their rural neighbors for being poor — or worse, poor racists and bigots of every stripe — from the heights of the popular culture, and you have a recipe for backlash spelled with a capital “T.”
History it seems, is not without a sense of irony. If you ask most Americans whether people basically get what they earn in this country, the answer is likely to be “yes.” In some sense, the class of cognitive elites who inhabit the Googles and Apples of the world are simply riding the meritocratic wave. Having educated themselves, built up their human capital and created products and services that people in 1976 didn’t even know they wanted, they’re now reaping the rewards of having changed the world in the well-worn fashion of previous American entrepreneurs and companies.
But the new, populist consensus has awoken the nation to the reality of what meritocracy can create, and discovered that all of its fruits aren’t sweet.
Published in Economics
So 2008 is fully modern and 2068 will be what, 1.33 modern? Did any one in 1948 really feel like they lived in that much a different world than 1928? I think what drives our sense of change is lack of physical memory or connection to earlier times. If you have never known a person who never had a telephone not having one seems unimaginable. In 1948 many people knew people who had not always had telephones. A few month ago I had a chat with a 17 year old. It was kind of amazing to me. The kid had never not had the internet or a smart phone. I felt old (and I’m only 32). Imagine this if you are 30 today your grand children will probably never know anyone who has not had the internet. How can you even conceive of a world without the internet if you have never met anyone who has not had it? What a leap it would seem to go from a world without it and one with it.
Oh, I’ll take the rations from the 50’s over what they had in the Civil War. Hardtack would shatter your teeth…
But hard tac is so flavorless and hard how could you say no to it? I think both Korean War and Civil War soldiers would shoot their officers to be able to get a modern MRE.
Sure. Just look at a 1928 movie and a 1948 one. Just as we see black and white TV shows or movies as being in a different, older, stodgier world, silent movies were a different era and even 1948 audiences that remembered them felt that way. 1948 anticipated that atomic energy was going to be more significant than electricity. To us, the big differences between ’28 and ’48 are flattened out by the telescope of history.
From the Eighties through the late Nineties, I used to run a film festival, and our all-night movie marathons usually featured older films. I’d tell the audience, “Go ahead, I know you’re going to laugh at the high heeled shoes and white gloves on the women, the guys with hats and suits, and the bright colors on the tailfinned cars. Just remember that someday, you, your life, your clothes and surroundings will look equally cartoonish and silly”.
They’d laugh and they wouldn’t believe me. You could see them think, “But the Forties and Fifties are so old fashioned and obviously wrong about so many things, whereas we, on the other hand…Well, who’s going to ever laugh at normal stuff, like big hairdos, wide lapels, leg warmers and Adidas?”
I was just thinking something like this.
Even those “left behind” could have something to offer the “new elite” (highly-paid “tech” people are not immune to nostalgia and desire for more open spaces – think of Amish tourism!) – but the contempt just shuts those doors
I’ve been mulling over wrapping a post around the attached graph, but have not had the time. This is from RCP’s excellent series of posts on the 2016 election, which culminates in the essay “How Trump Won”. The vertical axis is the Democrat share of the 2-party vote, and the bars represent geographic areas aggregated by population size/density, from rural to mega-city.
This graph shows the current partisan divide as well as any I’ve ever seen. The Democrats are doing very well in the very largest cities (which helps them in the popular vote “beauty contest”), but have ceded considerable support in the smaller population centers to the GOP (which in 2016, cost them PA, MI, WA, and the election in the Electoral College). It also shows the divide emerged well in advance of Trump, although one can argue he accelerated the shift.
A few caveats: The election of 1992 (and to a lesser extent, that of 1996) was perturbed by Ross Perot, but that’s one reason why it is limited to the 2-party vote. More seriously, each population class does not carry the same electoral weight.
The chicken/egg question posed by Majestyk goes unanswered, but this kind of divide is not a good thing and its further growth does not bode well for the future. My 2 cents: both parties have been engaged, at least periodically, in short-sighted ideological purges, but the “progressive”-dominated Democrats have been more effective at driving out/away the heretics. (In the name of tolerance, diversity, and inclusion, of course.)
Thank you for this – what a great illustration of the thing that I was trying to say in such a fumbling fashion.
I wanted to talk about 1994 more extensively and what I’ll say about it now is this: The demographic trend that we call “the Big Sort” was not captured in the way that we apportion Congressional districts via the census very well. So, what was happening was more blue-types were self-deporting from rural areas to cities, concentrating their political power in cities but leaving those rural areas to be dominated by Republicans.
This explains relative Republican hegemony of Congress in the late 90’s. Then, when reapportionment hit in the early 2000’s you saw Democrat fortunes pick back up, only to have a second wave of rural depopulation strike and give Republicans back control of Congress.
I think after the census of 2020 we could be in for some hard times.
Not meeting “the other kind” in person can result in more presumption of contempt on both sides than is realistic, or at the very least helpful. Both sides presume, “They must despise us!” and now perhaps have fewer of the kind of interactions with their “opposite number” that would tend to correct that impression, while having more of the kind that would reinforce it (see Twitter).
You guys are doing it wrong. You dip the hard tac in your coffee. Sure it will leave a light layer of weevils on the top of your coffee, but you just skim them off and there is no distinctive taste.
I honor your impulse to spread blame evenly, but in this case I disagree that it’s “even.”
Who has the wherewithal to travel to meet the “other?” Not the “left behind.” That is a luxury for the “winners.”
And the news media telling their story in which the left-behind are contemptible … not helping, especially because both sides are seeing that.
Twitter … people behaving badly, with no “social controls” on them because they can quite literally ignore the people they madden … internal controls are more important than ever, but it’s not fashionable to submit to any controls that interfere with what you want. Not good. Not good at all.
Mutual needn’t be the same as even. Blame doesn’t have to be even for each side to participate in mutual presumptions of contempt. When it comes to any one of us, cosmic evenness of blame matters less to what we can do to check our presumptions than acknowledging the mutual tendency of the presumptions does. We don’t have much power over the masses on “the other side”, or even the masses on “our own side” – how much could any of us “even the score” if evenness were the criterion? Not much, I suspect. Observing that the contempt is often mutual, often stemming from “the other guy’s contempt” is an observation that keeps us honest, I hope, but isn’t meant to make us “even”.
Modernity ended with World War II. Everything after that has been post-modern.
I think that difference in the nature of tools makes a lot of difference in social impact, when you consider the range of individuals’ physical and mental abilities. The returns to ability on physical augmentation are fairly limited. If you’ve got a certain minimum mental and physical ability you can run, say, a combine or a drop forge. You can get incremental more return from the tool for higher mental ability, but it’s marginal – thinking up new techniques rather than having to be taught them, for instance, but at the limit you might be 2x more productive than a marginal worker. (And notice the change from unaugmented physical labor. It took the mighty blacksmith to handle a hand cranked forge and hammer and anvil. A steam power drop forge will do the job nicely, almost regardless of physical ability.)
Mental tools – so far – seem to be different in offering a continuing, probably super-linear, return on mental ability. The coder with 10-100x the output of the average is well known in the business. It takes a certain mental level even to work at the abstract levels of systems architecture and business design of the platform companies. The mentally skilled and trained certainly get far more out of the Internet than those whose horizon is porn or cat videos. That plus the low capital, increasing returns nature of the virtual economy has a lot to do with economic and social stratification today.
What we don’t know is whether that’s an inherent nature of mentally augmenting tools, or just a sign that our state of the art is immature. When and if more of the intelligence is from the machine, does that level off the returns to ability like a steam drop forge did to physical ability? Or does it put even more power in the hands of those able to conceive of new ways to marshal and command machine intelligences?
Who says it has to be “or”? 100% efficiency gained!
I see segregation in my line of work; residential construction. Even in the poorer areas of the country, there are subdivisions where the upper class live, some gated even. This is where the financially successful and professional live. They may serve the underclass, but they don’t identify with them, or even respect most of them. Their lives, where they go for retreat, don’t include them. They may have huge kitchens, but eat at the local country club. Zoning laws also encourage separation. You have to work here, shop there, and sleep in another area. Compartmentalized living means people are exposed only to blips of life. It is static, not dynamic living. The little store or bakery in the neighborhood has been outlawed. The traffic makes noise, etc. The extended order that Hayek talks about does not exist in construction. Give an engineer the job of planning, and you come up with cold, static places that remove the touch of humanity.
The well educated intellectual should be on bowling teams and join the elks. They’d find out they don’t have all the answers to every problem. And that is ok. They might find the humility they need to be happy. I live in a small town, where the local coffee shop regular table includes the retired doctor, a few farmers, the undertaker, a mechanic, a local business owner and a few others I don’t know the occupations of. I love that scene.
Some colleges now pay for med school if you will agree to work in under served areas for three years after school. So, the kids aren’t returning home.
I wonder to what extent that scene has been disintegrated and reintegrated on-line. Here at Ricochet we have college kids and retirees, members and former members of all the armed forces, teachers, artists, lawyers, poets, doctors, home makers, professors, truck drivers… In other on-line forums to which I belong there is a similar broad scope of backgrounds, ages, interests, nationalities and, in those cases, political opinions. But we don’t talk about politics there (beyond the usual reflexive left-of-centre sneer that assumes everyone must think Reagan/Bush/Bush/Trump is moronic – although even that might be changing). And maybe that makes all the difference.
Returning to the title, “the great sort” and the Econ talk discussion of the same topic. The topic is crucial and all the light we can shine on it from different angles can’t hurt. The giant divide we see empirically is between the mega cities and every place else. It’s global. The question is, are these divides inevitable given new technologies that require a narrow set of intellectual skills which are beyond many people? Or is there a layer of sludge that causes stagnation in all old sectors and makes it difficult for folks to adopt new skills to replace those that have been made irrelevant, or/and cost of living in mega cities excludes their access. Are the divides we face permanent, an inherent aspect of these new technologies? I’m reminded of the Latin American countries or the Philippines where I lived and others I studied. Long before the new technologies these countries had one mega city where one had to live to escape poverty or lower middle class standards. The reason was that the political and governing elite lived there and used the instruments of power and the need for personal contacts to leverage being there into personal wealth. This could’d happen in the smaller towns and rural areas except where a large land owner or regional politician had sons and brothers in both camps. These mercantilist descended centrally controlled systems were not free markets in our Anglo Saxon meaning of the term. One had to have access to the levers in the capital because regulation was ubiquitous, e.g.think Fernando De Soto. I believe this is what is happening to us. We could lower rents in our megacities by making it easier to build and build up. The scarcity is not land but freedom and perhaps water. We don’t do this because vested interests in government and the private sector do not want to lose value on their existing real estate. Or could not smaller cities attract new investment if their taxes were still lower, their schools better and if the firms did not have to conform to burdensome Federal and State regulations? The economies of scale which are heading toward infinity with digital technologies are quite similar with Federal and state regulation. Moreover, and I’ve never found a good way to make the point, when things begin to come apart, i.e. industry leaves, or technology sweeps too much away, disintegration begins and accelerates, sweeping culture and the cultural glue away with it. Change tends to overwhelm and entropy results. When the US was concerned with tumultuous anti American politics in Latin America during the early stages of the cold war we set out to try to modernize these places, develop them, believing these movements were because of poverty or modern communications. but we made it worse because post war modernization was sweeping all before it and these rigid systems couldn’t adapt fast enough.
You bring up some very interesting points, I’m just going to quote this one, here, as food for thought.
Touche however I think we are well past post-modern as well. Maybe Neo Classical Modernism?
Post-Industrialist-Grunge-Hop?
sludge swim
How about Deconstructed Post-Industrial-Grunge-Pop. You know as a compromise.
Some relevant quotes from a piece at LibertyLawSite:
“While a free and competitive market economy makes everyone better in the long run, in the short run some people lose, and the short run is not always so short. For some, it can be two or three generations. To simply extol the virtues of the market or tell people to get trained in another field and relocate is not sufficient. We have a social responsibility to those who took a hit for the team.”
The sentence I’ve bolded and italicized is, of course, a significant topic of discussion. Just how much moral responsibility do we have, toward those who took one for the team?” (I believe the writer’s use of “social” rather than “moral” is … itself questionable.)
And: “Yet it is naïve to think that capitalism is simply a given. As nature tends toward entropy, so too does a market economy tend toward cronyism and mercantilism unless intentionally and continually made free and fair.”
And: “Economic freedom does not simply happen. It is always difficult of achievement, requiring a moral commitment by those in power to choose against their own economic incentives for the common good.”
Edit: Oops, forgot the link. Fixed it.
So, the problem with this construction is the weird paternalism of it. We essentially have this right now in the form of assistance given to people specifically displaced from their jobs due to outsourcing and other forms such as long-term unemployment insurance and disability, etc…
I think the problem with that is that it saps the life out of the people who take it. Once you’re living in a place where there’s nothing to do and you’re getting money every month from the Government just for existing, you don’t just do nothing – you do Mountain Dew, Video Games and Meth. And when those get boring you up your game to heroin because you’re in chronic pain.
A different solution than “paying people off” and warehousing them is probably in order.
Yes.
I want a solution that actually has a positive effect. I don’t like the idea of pulling the rug out from under people who have previously done their part, and writing them off as casualties of creative destruction.
But those are expressions of emotion. Because of those emotions, I’ll give a good, hard listen to almost anything that someone puts forward as a possible path out of the mess.
I’m not sure I completely buy into the ‘automation will take everyone’s job except the 100x programmers’ take.
Uber probably has a few 10x programmers left; and certainly has many people wealthy on the left coast. But it has created hundreds and thousands of 10x/100x taxi drivers – people who know where to find passengers and how to deliver them better than the best unaugmented taxi driver. Airbnb might have a 10x programmer or two, but it has created millions of real estate entrepreneurs of various sizes and scales. A 10x programmer might make other programmers obsolete, but she creates value by making things scale for multitudes.
As for the sex- – and other – bots – well, someone has to actually build them. The skills and aptitudes required for careful assembly of precise mechanical contraptions are not, I suggest, correlated with the ability to sit in a classroom (or cubicle) and pass written exams. This is what the European apprenticeship systems get so right, and the monomaniacal anglo-saxon focus on university education gets so wrong. STEM is as much – if not more – about the workshop as it is about the classroom.
I do want to thank everybody for what has been an enlightening and fascinating discussion. It truly is the best of what the site has to offer.