So the pull of urbanization has segregated us geographically on those traits, and it has done it so thoroughly that Democratic vote share now rises, and Republican vote share drops, in a remarkably linear fashion as population density rises. What’s surprising is that, if you’re white (and if you’re not, you’re almost certainly urban), the personality traits that make you more or less inclined to leave or stay - that make you more or less magnetized to the rising attractive force of the city - also predict how socially conservative or liberal you’ll tend to be, and which political party you’ll tend to support. It’s no shock that leavers leave and stayers stay. The same process that has filtered better-educated, more temperamentally liberal whites out of lower density places has left those places with less vibrant economies, but also with more place-bound, ethnocentric populations. This self-segregation of the population, I argue, created the polarized economic and cultural conditions that led to populist backlash.īecause the story of urbanization just is the story of a strengthening relationship between density, human capital and economic productivity, it’s also the story of relative small town and rural decline. The upshot is that, over the course of millions of moves over many decades, high density areas have become economically thriving multicultural havens while whiter, lower density places are facing stagnation and decline as their populations have become increasingly uniform in terms of socially conservative personality, aversion to diversity, and lower levels of education. I explore three such traits - ethnicity, ideology-correlated aspects of personality, and level of educational achievement - and their intricate web of relationships. I claim that we’ve failed to fully grasp that urbanization is a relentless, glacial social force that transforms entire societies and, in the process, generates cultural and political polarization by segregating populations along the lines of the traits that make individuals more or less responsive to the incentives that draw people to the city. In this new paper, I weave recent research in political science, economics, psychology and more into an account of political polarization and the rise of populist nationalism as a surprising and overlooked side-effect of urbanization.
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