untitled (cognitive assortment)

I’ve been noticing a disturbing confluence lately in a number of things I’m reading. It all started with The Bell Curve and I see it popping up in all kinds of things – most lately in Robert Reich’s The Future of Success. It’s the whole idea of assortment: cognitive assortment, income assortment, racial assortment, social assortment. The basic thesis is as transportation costs and information costs go down, the number of choices increase and the segmentation of the market into the very best you can afford, or at lease tailored to your niche, becomes easy to find. As each person / family drops out at their level of maximum level of input, they no longer have any contact with those in dissimilar circumstances. I see this in my daily life, and especially as a student of urban organization. Every day people seem to get more isolated and more insular, especially in Dallas, where class is becoming almost exclusively divided by language and ethnicity. Increased insularity increases two things: fear of the other (refer to the Los Angeles chapter in Edge City) and in-group-specific narrowing of interests. Already class divisions (at least down here by Mexico) are becoming more strained; rather than understanding the person you’re trying to work with because you see yourself in them, there is a tendency to view people as members of a competing foreign society and both distrust them and refuse to compromise in a misunderstanding. Both political and economic thinking seems less about ideas or goals than about “our kind” versus “their kind,” whether there is a complete understanding of “them” or not. (Richard Reed, anyone?) Maybe things have always been this way, but I wonder if there is enough commonality of interest to create enduring institutions anymore. There’s probably a brilliant regional economics paper on this somewhere.

More about cognitive assortment later.