Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 66 | Will Wilkinson on Partisan Polarization and the Urban/Rural Divide

Episode Date: September 30, 2019

The idea of "red states" and "blue states" burst on the scene during the 2000 U.S. Presidential elections, and has a been a staple of political commentary ever since. But it's become increasingly clear, and increasingly the case, that the real division isn't between different sets of states, but between densely- and sparsely-populated areas. Cities are blue (liberal), suburbs and the countryside are red (conservative). Why did that happen? How does it depend on demographics, economics, and the personality types of individuals? I talk with policy analyst Will Wilkinson about where this division came from, and what it means for the future of the country and the world. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Will Wilkinson received an M.A. in philosophy from Northern Illinois University, and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Houston. He has worked for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and as a research fellow at the Cato Institute, and is currently Vice President of Policy at the Niskanen Center. He has taught at Howard University, the University of Maryland, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has written for a wide variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Vox, and The Boston Review, as well as being a regular commentator for Marketplace on public radio. Web site Niskanen web page The Density Divide: Urbanization, Polarization, and Populist Backlash Writing at The New York Times Wikipedia Twitter

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slash subscribe to get started. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Minescape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. We've all heard stories of families living in small towns where the children grow up and make different decisions. Some of them want to go to the big city and test their fortunes. Others want to stay behind and live a comfortable life within the traditions where their family grew up.

This kind of difference between moving to the city and living out in the country or even the suburbs is increasingly becoming a major. partisan divide, both in the United States and worldwide. As Will Wilkinson puts it in a recent paper, he wrote, there are no Republican cities anymore in the United States. Republicans live in suburbs in the country. Democrats live in urban areas. Wilkinson is a vice president for policy research at the Niscannon Center in Washington, D.C., and he's dug into this question in a paper, he wrote, called the density divide, urbanization, polarization, and populist

backlash. It's not just that people who go to the big cities become liberal and people who stay in the country become conservative. There's interesting cause and effect relationships. What kind of people move to the city? What kind of people leave the city and move? This June, the world comes to Los Angeles. Kick off FIFA World Cup 2026 at the FIFA Fan Festival of the iconic Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Watch matches live on giant screen. Feel every goal with thousands of fans. culture and flavors from around the world. Join us June 11th through 14th opening weekend as the tournament kicks off in Los Angeles. Tickets are just $10 and kids under 12 are free. Get yours now at Los Angeles FWC26.com. Move to the country. What do changing demographics, immigration and birth rates and so

forth, what effects do they have on how people think about the world, not just who they vote for, but their outlook on life, their outlook on other countries, their outlook on the economy. This difference between city life and suburban and country life is increasingly becoming the important difference between different kinds of people here and elsewhere. And so it's important to dig into how that's happening and why it is. So let's go. Will Wilkinson, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. Thanks for having me out, Sean. So you've written quite a wonderfully interesting research paper about the density divide, which I want to focus on for the podcast.

But first, just to get our listeners oriented as to where we are, why don't you say a little bit about who you are, what perspective you're coming from. And also, I'll give you a chance to plug the Niskenen Center, which is a recent new appear on the scene. Great. Well, I am Will Wilkinson. I am the vice president for research at the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.C. you pronounced it correctly in Finnish. It's a Finnish last name, but the guy we named it after pronounced in Niskanon. So it's the Niskanen Center.

Some of my best friends are Finnish. So I do learn a little bit, yeah. Yeah, the old Some of My Best Friends are Finnish line, huh? Yeah. And what we do at the Niskaner Center? We're a think tank. We focus mostly on climate and energy, immigration, welfare, and economic. and social policy, as well as a, you know, a few more areas, regulation and so forth.

And we've been around about four years, and we started as a sort of moderate libertarian institution. Most of the senior staff at Niskanen are expats from the Cato Institute, which we all left for various reasons. And we have over the course of the last three years or so been trying to find our niche and we've become less and less ideological and more and more pragmatic and just consider ourselves a moderate think tank. But we tend to have a, you know, free markety sort of focus, but not in a sort of traditional right of center way. We are big fans of social insurance and the welfare state and one of our themes is how capitalism and the welfare

state mesh well together. And so for those who don't know, the Cato Institute is, I take it slightly more straightforwardly ideological in the sense of being pro-capitalism, libertarian kind of place. Yes, it is. It's got a very orthodox version of libertarianism that people maybe. familiar with if they've read Ayn Rand or Robert Nozick or Murray Rothbard

you know it runs you know there's some diversity in views at the Kato Institute but it's a narrow band that's within a pretty orthodox libertarian perspective and

a lot of us who at Niskanon who used to work there left for because we grew out of it in one way or another, started to see that we were making certain errors. One of the nice things about arguing for a living is that you end up encountering people who are smarter than you.

Oh, yeah. Who, who, you know, and you can never accept that you lost an argument, you know, in the moment, you know, but, you know, afterwards when you're, you know, opening the fridge to make a sandwich at two in the morning and you're thinking about it and you're just like, yeah, there's really something wrong with my position. And as you try to work it out, you know, you try to cover the chinks in your armor. You know, you try to shore up your position and you're, and by the time you figure out how to like fortify your general position, you find that you've given up something that you

had been standing on before. And as you iterate that process, you just actually end up with a pretty comprehensively different set of views over time. But because it seems gradual, you don't really notice it necessarily. Yeah, actually, I mean, this is not what we're here to talk about, but I'm very happy to talk about it because it's awesome. You know, there's the idea of a phase transition in physics, which is very similar to this. And I was always skeptical of things like the backfire effect where you say that, you know, you give someone some piece of evidence against. their position and they hold their position more strongly. I'm sure that's true sometimes, but there's clearly a time scale question here. Presumably when they do those psychology tests,

they're asking the question right away. And underneath the surface, these little thoughts and facts percolate, and then a long time later, there can suddenly be whoosh. You're like, oh, crap, I've got to change my mind about everything. You might even forget where the initial impetus came from. Yeah, sometimes I, you know, I think the funny thing psychologically is that I don't know if it's the same for other people. I know I'm a little bit weird, but I tend to initially resist the idea that I have changed to my mind when I have. And I think that has something to do with kind of holding the narrative around your self-identity, steady in a way. And so there's a resistance even acknowledging that you changed your mind.

just kind of tend to interpret it in terms of, well, I didn't really change my mind so much as I, you know, I changed the emphasis on this point. And, you know, the view that I have now is just a better way to articulate what I thought all along. And there's a lot of rationalizing that goes around, you know, that goes into, you know, telling yourself what you think. And, and, and, and, and, But after a while, you start to notice that actually, no, I'm straightforwardly contradicting what I used to say. The very first episode of the Minescape podcast was with Carol Tavris, who wrote a wonderful book called Mistakes Were Made, but not by me. All about how we rationalize every single thing we do. And you're right.

Just continuing our sense of identity is a big part of it. But anyway, okay, good. I think we could talk about this for an hour, but we have other things to other fish to fry. And so in this paper you've written is actually let me finish the thought of the Niscan center because I think that a lot of things we're going to end up saying are going to seem to the outside observer like slightly critical of Republicans or of right-wing people more generally. But have you been a Republican most of your life? Is that a fair statement?

It's fair to say that I've been on the right for most of my life. Because I have been a professional libertarian for most of my professional life. You know, I went to grad school, you know, got some grad degrees and philosophy. And out of that, I started working at the Cato Institute. I've also worked at a place called the Mercatus Center, which is part of the large network of organizations that are run by the Cokes or by the Coke now. And the, and so I've voted for Republicans before. But, you know, in most presidential elections, I think I, you know, when I was younger, voted for libertarians. But, you know, I voted for Mitt Romney on identity politics grounds.

I grew up a sort of Mormon. And I was like, you know, that's my people, Mitt Romney. And I'm not, I think. I might have voted for George W. Bush in the over Gore. I'm not sure. Yourself in the test you press that. I don't, I don't, I don't, I honestly don't remember. Or I might have voted for whoever the libertarian candidate was. I remember favoring George W. Bush over, over Kerry, but I don't know who I actually voted for. It might have been a libertarian. But yeah, so my, most of my unprofessional life, I've been in some way a part of the right. And the libertarian movement was part of, of this right of center coalition that was initially forged around anti-communism. And libertarians were always the socially liberal part, the most socially liberal part of the right coalition,

you know, tend to be in favor of drug legalization and the decriminalization of sex work, tend to be anti-war. So there's a lot of commonalities with people on the left. And in fact, that's one of the reasons why I end up leaving the Cato Institute is that my colleague, Brink Lindsay and I had both decided that we were tired of what, you know, what people call right fusionism and the kind of fusion of social conservatism and more libertarian economic views. And at the Cato Institute, as libertarians, we would often say that we have just as much in common with people on the left as I'm. on the right, but institutionally, and just as a matter of the practical political reality, you're hanging out with Republicans. And those are the people you're helping.

And so we're like, well, let's make good on this thing that we say. And so we had a project where we were reaching out to people who worked at think tanks on the left to center, left-leaning magazines and journals of ideas. and we're building a kind of left fusionist sort of libertarianism that for a while we called liberalitarianism, which is a terrible name. I remember those days, yes. I was paying attention to that. And that was going okay. And then the Tea Party came along and a lot of people at the Kato Institute got super excited about it and thought it was the kind of the president at Kato at the time,

had sort of believed that there was something essentially libertarian in the American, in the American political culture and that this, you know, strand of our cultural DNA would someday, you know, rise up and there would be this great efflorescence of, you know, populist libertarianism. I mean, he thought the Tea Party was his moment. And the stuff that Brink and I were saying was, uh, was, uh, was, uh, a bit critical of the Tea Party and all of a sudden our concentration on building this coalition with Democrats seemed counterproductive and so we kind of had a bit of tension and a parting of the ways over that. But for the most part, you know, I've seen myself as part of the right and what we do

at the Niskanah Center mostly and though it's not publicly visible as we go down on the hill, we work with moderate Republicans on our issue priorities. And the Trump presidency has been a horror show for us because our main goals are things like getting Republicans to support a carbon tax, getting something like comprehensive immigration reform passed, things like that. And then Trump has not been very friendly to those efforts in the Republican Party. party under Trump has been friendly to those efforts. But that is where most of our time goes. That we had, and this I guess gets to the point of my paper, the genesis of my paper. We, like most everyone, had expected Hillary Clinton to win the election. And we thought that our comparative advantage was going to be bringing along some moderate Republican votes to support

things like legislation on climate change, comprehensive immigration reform, and things like that. And because there's going to need some Republican votes to get through. We were building the kind of network of allies on the hill that would be able to make that happen. And then Trump won the election. And we were like, oh, no. And like a lot of people, I was like, what the heck happened? You know, like, what?

You know, something's gone screwy or we're missing something. And, you know, at this, you know, just a bit before that, there'd been the big Brexit vote in the UK. and you're starting to see these uprisings of the populist right in Europe and elsewhere. And it seemed like a general thing that was going on. And the explanations that I was hearing, you know, to account for it weren't that satisfying to me. You know, like it's a backlash to neoliberalism or it's a backlash to political correctness or demographic change in immigration. There was a lot in all of those things that have, you know, makes some sense. But it seemed somehow bigger than that and more general.

So I started digging into the kind of why Trump question and the, you know, with an orientation to try and understand where kind of right-leaning populism was coming from, why nationalism was all of a sudden a thing again. You know, like it turns out that history didn't end. I was never quite taken in by that one, yeah. Yeah. And so I was like, okay, so like what's what's happening now? And so the genesis of this paper was trying to understand basically why Trump won the election, but also why Brexit was happening, why populist nationalist parties keep winning more and more vote share in even the most liberal European countries. And I hit on a couple of things that I thought had been overlooked.

So I dug into them in this paper. Well, it's especially interesting to me because I'm finding this, you know, a year plus into the podcast that certain themes keep reappearing, even though I talked to very different people about very different things. So the idea of cities and urbanization as a major driver of the future of the world is absolutely one of them. I talked with Jeffrey West, who talked about how innovation and creativity are driven by high-density populations. And I talked to Joe Walston about how there's this optimistic future where we can save the planet by getting everyone into cities and preserving the environment outside. And now you're saying that in some sense, major political trends worldwide and in the United States especially, have a lot to do with urbanization as a phenomenon. Yeah, that's right. So the thing that really got me started is, you know, after 2016, and it was Jonathan Rodin at Stanford especially, published some things about the relationship between population density and party vote chair.

And Rodin's stuff, I thought, was just mind-blowing that there's this almost, very tight, almost linear relationship between. higher density, higher Democratic vote share, lower density, higher Republican vote share. You know, if you go to the densest part of any town in the country and then start walking towards the edge of town, it just gets, you know, if you're at the middle of the town, at the densest part, it's the most democratic part. And if you just kind of walk toward the country, it just gets progressively less democratic. And then the less dense it gets, the less Democratic it gets, the more Republican it gets. That struck me as crazy. Like, how could that be the case? And then the second thing, which relates to an interest that I've had for a long time in political psychology.

In my grad studies, I was a PhD student in philosophy. And I studied stuff at the intersection of political philosophy and cognitive science. I have long been interested in, you know, what explains why people have the moral temperament dispositions that they do, why people have the kind of political impulses that they have. So I was aware of all of these literatures that correlate personality types to, you know, different political attitudes. And so I was looking at those pictures of the relationship. between population density and party vote share. And just kind of mapping that on to what I knew about the relationship between partisan loyalty and kind of left-right ideology and personality. And I was thinking, well, if both of those things are true, this means that there has to be that gradation along density from less democratic to more.

Republican has to be a gradation in terms of personality as well. And I was like, could that be the case? And I got really interested in that. And the paper started to take shape out of that. Like how did we get this kind of division in our politics? It seems to reflect a real. division in, real spatial division in where left and right-leaning kind of people end up living. Let me pause for a second to talk about the Great Courses Plus.

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three different courses with the great courses. You can check out my course on dark matter and dark energy, the dark side of the universe. And right now, for Minescape listeners, there's a special limited time offer, a free month of unlimited access to the entire Great Courses Plus library. To get this offer, you can sign up now through this special URL. Go to the greatcoursesplus.com slash Mindscape. Remember all the words there. That's the greatcoursesplus.com slash mindscape. Start learning today. Yeah, the personality stuff I think is especially fascinating. in fact, I listened to your paper. I listened to the fact, you know, you did an audiobook reading of it, which I thought was fantastic, because now if you ever have a viral tweet, you can actually say, you know, go to my sound cloud and listen to my reading of this paper.

But also, it induced me even to take the Big Five test online, so we can talk about that later on. But before we get— I can guess you, Sean. Like, I've been doing this so much. When we do that, when we get to there, I want to. you to guess me because I guess myself four out of five, I would say. But let's just emphasize the size of the effect that we're talking about here, because it really is remarkable before we get to explaining it. You know, a pithy summary is that you say in the paper, there are

no Republican cities, which, you know, when you put it that way, sounds kind of dramatic. And not only that, but it didn't used to be the case, right? I mean, this is a relatively recent phenomenon, but it's extremely strong now. Yeah, it didn't used to be the case. I mean, so in the paper, I go through three different mechanisms of sorting. I mean, maybe I should back up a second and just, you know, just mention the overarching context of urbanization. That is one of the things that I felt was being overlooked in a lot of explanations that I was seeing

for just a lot of social developments broadly. Like, if you look at it, like urbanization is clearly the most momentous thing that's happened in human social life over the past 200 years. It's this just absolutely immense transformative force. The entire human population has basically filtered itself out from, you know, we used to be really diffusely spread out over. the territory. When we had agricultural economies that sprinkles people around in a, you know, relatively

uniform sort of way, but the end of the agricultural economy, the beginning of industrialization, you know, led to this slow shift of the population towards these big concentrated, you know, hubs of commerce and trade. And that is a worldwide phenomenon. It's just absolutely immense. And, you know, a lot of people don't realize how big the effect is. Like in 1790, when the Constitution was written, New York City had like 33,000 people in it.

And, you know, that's about the size of my hometown, which I talk about in my paper in Marshalltown, Iowa, which is just a bit less than 30,000. But now we have just scores of cities that are over, you know, metro areas that are over a million people. And all over the world, just populations are continuing to concentrate more and more and more. And that fact has to really mean something, right?

Like that's going to make a difference to the way people are relating to each other. And then thinking about, that, one of the things that immediately came to mind was Thomas Schelling's work on segregation, which may or may not be familiar to... I wrote about it in my book The Big Picture. You did. That sounds like what you want, do you want to explain it?

No, no, no. This is why we're here for you to explain it. But, you know, it's a way of explaining segregation, even when people have only mildly pro be by my own in-group kind of attitudes, right? Yeah, exactly. So shelling, and if you've, you know, he's a big influence on me. I love Thomas Schelling. He was a economist at Harvard.

He won the Nobel Prize for his work in game theory. And he's got this terrific book called Micromotives and Macro Behavior. Is that what it's called? And, you know, and the whole point of the books to show how you get, you know, aggregate effects out of, you know, individual choices. And he's got a very, very simple, elegant model where you can do the, you can do it on the checkerboard if you want. Like, you can take the white pieces and the black pieces and just distribute them on squares randomly. And the rule is that each of the pieces wants to, you know, we're imagining each of the squares as like a house. And so there are eight squares that touch any square unless it's at the edge, right?

you know, the up, down, left, right, and both diagonals. And the constraint is everybody, you know, nobody minds being in the minority. It's fine to be in the minority. You just want three of those eight squares to be the same type, you know, white or black as you. And so what you have to do is you have to move each piece until it satisfies that constraint. But, you know, so you do it over and over again because if you mean, you know, move one, then it opens up a news base and it violates the condition for some other piece. And as you get them all situated, you find that you've like pretty radically segregated the board.

Right. And so even this mild preference for, you know, homophily, as the social science is calling it, homophily is just, you know, liking sameness. And that seems to be a pretty deep feature of human psychology that we, everybody likes people like them. Our friends tend to be people like us. You know, people, you know, it's interesting. People's friends even tend to be like the same height they are and stuff like that. So you see homophily in all sorts of different things. And so that's an assumption of a sort of uniform weak homophily.

I talked to Nicholas Christakis on a previous podcast, and he labels it mild in-group preference, mild in-group bias or something like that. Yeah. Something that he says just appears all. over the place in the animal kingdom whenever social structures become to exist at all. Yeah, absolutely. And so if you look at Shelling's experiment, which just this little model, and tons of people have done all sorts of elaborations on this, and you can watch them on YouTube, like, you know, you can set up a population of millions of reds and blues or whatever you want them to be, and you can change the constraints. But like if you use Shelling's assumptions,

you know, it can take, you know, if you've got a huge population, it can take millions of rounds, but over time those populations segregate fairly cleanly. Like, you know, not just like in half, but you'll get these very clear clusters of reds and blues that are sharply demarcated from one another. But those are, those assumptions, again, are weak. That's weak in group preference. And you can change those assumptions and you can say, like, well, suppose the whites and the blacks on your, checker board have slightly different preferences and one of them has stronger in group preferences

than the other and you can mess around with it and you'll get even sharper segregation. And I was thinking about that in the context of this massive, you know, glacial shift of populations from the country to the city. like if there is even small differences, and this is what I think shelling is telling you, like, like, you know, even if everybody's the same in terms of wanting to be near members of their in-group, if there's, you know, differences in the nature of those groups can can make a big difference. So this is one of the first cut in my paper on in terms of what,

of what predicts urbanization is just ethnicity. So almost the entire non-white population has sorted itself into cities. And that is explained largely by in-group preference. You know, everybody likes to be around people like them. And especially if you're a minority who has, who is discriminated against, who has a history of oppression, right? You're going to want some safety in numbers. And so you're going to have to coordinate on a place to be.

If you just scatter a minority around the territory of a country at random, they're going to be isolated and that's scary, right? So they tend to gravitate toward cities, pretty much. minority, and it doesn't have to be an ethnic minority. You know, gays and lesbians are very, very heavily concentrated in cities, and other kinds of minorities are as well. And, you know, there's a lot of reasons for that, but it's a clear thing that you see. And it's not that African Americans or Hispanics or Asians are, have more in-group bias

than anybody else, is they're the same on average. But in order to satisfy even a weak preference or being around people like them, they're all have to basically go to the same place. Because there are fewer of them, yeah. That's the few of them. There is no real option if you're a person of color. You might prefer to live in a rural place, a low-density place. But there's no way to satisfy the preference of being around people like you and living

in a rural place for the most part if you're an ethnic minority. So you have to give up on one of those two things. And most people who would have, you know, whose residential preferences lean more in the direction of low density. If they're an ethnic minority, they generally give up on living in the country and end up living, you know, in a slightly pastoral suburb or something like that. in a way in a place that's close enough to other members of their of their of their of their group but whites uh the white majority in the united states has um uh it's easy um if you if you really like to live around other white people and you don't like urban density you're in you're in luck you can live basically anywhere that's not a city is uh almost entirely white um and and that is kind of the crux of a lot of the thinking in my paper where I'm just like, so are there

difference? Because one of the things that then you're starting, so if you first pass as ethnicity, non-white ethnicity sort into city, some white people sort into cities, but others don't. And if you're trying to explain why the Republican Party is the way it is, and the Republican Party is almost entirely composed, of white people who haven't sorted in cities. Then there's an interesting question about if there are systematic differences between the white people who sorted in the cities and the white people who didn't. But also, before we get there, there is this issue of sorting in the sense of picking up and going somewhere versus just choosing not to leave, right? I mean, how many of the white people who are outside the city started inside a city and said, nope, this is not for me. I'm going to move out to the country?

You know, I don't know the number, but it's surpassingly small, just given the overall trend of urbanization. So just a huge percentage of moves are toward higher density. And that's one of the most important facts about urbanization. That means that almost all mobility is from lower to higher density. It's not always the case. I mean, there's been a big shift of population. within big urban areas where suburbs are gaining population faster than the denser cores. And some of that is because of housing prices.

And part of what it means is that a lot of people, but there are a lot of people who are getting priced out of urban cores. And so moving from higher density to slightly lower density suburbs, but those suburbs are still urban, right? Yeah. And so there's not a lot of movement. So there is some movement from higher to lower density, but there's very, very little movement overall in the aggregate from metro areas to rural areas or from the city, from the core of a city to, you know, the fringe excerpts. You just don't see a lot of that. There are places like rural places that are gaining population. A lot of them are people who are from cities moving to the country, but they tend to be, you know, in the recreational rural category. Like, so people who are buying a country home or, you know, you're moving to a ski resort, or you love to hike and mountain bike. And so you move out into the, you know, to some, you know, nice spot, you know, outside Boulder or something like that.

So there's some rural growth in those areas that involve people moving. from cities to those places. But the overall trend. But very roughly speaking, yeah, we have, you know, sort of whites who want to be in the city moving to the city and minorities also moving to the city and then whites who don't want to be in the city just staying put where they are. Yeah, so there's a lot of staying put. But then there's also that the trend of urbanization is so strong that still there's a lot of movement in any case, right?

But where you stop is going to reflect. these differences among individuals that determine what kind of place they like to live in. So the incentive to urbanize is so strong that even people who are resistant to cities, still you're going to earn more in a city. If you want to capitalize on the wage bonus to higher education, it's hard to do if you don't move to a large labor market. So, you know, I live in Iowa most of the time. My wife is a professor at the University of Iowa.

And there's a lot of students here, you know, like I grew up in a smaller town in Iowa. And if you want to, if you go to a public university and you get a bachelor's degree and you want to benefit economically from the, from that training and that increase in your skills, you just can't go back to your mind. Can't go back to Marshalltown, Iowa and make what I make as a think. Vice President in Washington, D.C. Like, I can't. Right? Like, I'm lucky that I can also live in Iowa City, Iowa. But, like, the...

Sorry, I think this is worth thinking into a little bit also because, you know, I grew up in the 70s and 80s where cities were just thought of as, you know, vast oceans of poverty and crime. And it's still, correct me if I'm wrong, but cities still have a lot of poverty in them, not just rural areas, but there's a lot more inequality in cities, right? There's very wealthy people, there's a healthy middle class, and there's poor people in cities, whereas there's a little bit more homogeneity in the rural areas, and it's homogeneity at an overall level of lower income than you might find in a city. Is that a fair, if rough?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Cities have a massive amount of inequality. Like, it's where poverty is very heavily concentrated, and there are a lot of reasons for that. Ed Glazer has some great stuff on why cities are better for. poor people and why they're particularly attractive if you have less money. But cities are increasingly productive. As some of the podcasts that you've done, there are these efficiencies, increasing efficiencies from the population density, from agglomeration, as the economists call it.

And that is increasing the wage bonus to urbanization. So you've got these two things happening at once. You've got a wage bonus from higher education. That's increasing because of technological change. As technology changes, it doesn't affect everybody's productivity equally. You need to have a higher and higher level of education to have your productivity amplified by the new communication and information technology. So the, you know, and we aren't educating people fast enough to keep up with demand.

So there's a rising bonus to getting higher education and higher levels of education. And that is amplified by this independent, not independent, but related thing that's happening in cities where there's something about the knowledge economy and the information economy. in the information economy. Paul Romer, the economist, another Nobel Prize winner, has done great work on how growth is increasingly a function of just coming up with new ideas. The ideas drive growth.

And that idea production really seems to be higher when you concentrate a lot of really, really smart people together. Like, you know, you're a professor at, you know, one of the world's great universities. And, you know, it's kind of obvious when you're at, you know, a Caltech or something like that, that, that you're more productive there than you would be, you know, somewhere else because you have all these incredibly smart people that you interact with every day and that levels you up. You know, it's like, I like to play pickup basketball. And you become a better basketball player if you play with better players, right? Like, like, and that's just what it is for a large part.

So there's two aspects of that increase in productivity from concentration is that, you know, if you're a coder and you are around other great coders, you learn a lot from them. And there's a kind of competitive pressure that pushes your level up. But that's not where most growth comes from. Most growth doesn't come from just these marginal increases in individual productivity. It comes from these bigger ideas that lead to innovations that increase productivity in a way. that scales across huge parts of the population. And so those ideas tend to get produced more quickly when you get smart people together, you know, kind of shoot in the breeze.

And so there's a, you know, increasing concentration of economic production in cities. And that makes them, as I say in the paper, more magnetic, right? Like a good way to think about urbanization is that over time, cities, you know, cities are like magnets. and the incentives to urbanization are like the, you know, level of magnetic attraction. And it keeps getting, you know, it's like an electromagnet. You keep turning it up. And, you know, it keeps getting, the pull keeps getting stronger and stronger. And as that cluster of people gets bigger and bigger, it turns up the magnet again and again and again.

And which is why the whole population is filtering toward the cities. unless you know you're a not very magnetic kind of person like like as I say the paper like you know if you imagine to just ball bearings just distributed on the table with a magnet in the middle and the ball bearings are made out all sorts of different metals all the magnetic metals are going to get drawn toward the uh toward the magnet eventually in a but if you know you're aluminum or a plastic ball ball ball ball ball ball ball. or something, you're just going to basically sit where you were the entire time. And I think there's something like that going on in the way urbanization has been working. Some of us are less magnetic than others. And so despite this very strong, just dynamic that's just happening, drawing millions and millions of people towards cities, some people are just less likely to filter in. And my conjecture, which I think there is some basis in, is that the things that make people less likely to urbanize are also things that predict more right-leaning political views.

We're very fond of the physics-based analogies here on the Mindscape podcast, so we approve of that. But yeah, so that's what we want to get into. There's urbanization is a fact, and it affects the environment, and it affects the knowledge economy and everything. it also sorts. It's right. It doesn't affect everyone equally. And political leanings are one of those. But maybe the, you also talk a lot about personality types in the big five. And is maybe causally that comes before the political leaning? Yeah, I think so. I mean, there's there's controversy about the extent to which, you know, personality is a independent variable. you know, to the extent to which it's sort of exogenous of people's political opinions, right? So the question is, you know, maybe does moving to a city make you a more liberal personality type? Does living in the country make you more conservative?

Or education, right? Or education. So the trait among the big five that are most politically relevant are, are openness to experience and conscientiousness. These predict whether you're more liberal or conservative in your social views. Tell us what all five of them are, because we might not know. A good mnemonic is ocean. Openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Neuroticism is often called emotional stability, if you kind of flip the sign of it. And most of those have no relationship to political views. But openness and conscientiousness have pretty significant relationships. Do you want to guess what my results were? You are, well, so all academics are relatively high openness. Yeah, super open, yeah. Your high openness, you've got a podcast about discussing ideas. And that illustrates what openness is.

So openness is, you know, curiosity is a large part of it. It's a large, you know, it involves just interest in new things. So if you're high in openness, you're more interested in reading the new novel, you're interested in the cool new movie, you're interested in traveling to places you haven't been before and encountering other cultures, encountering people who aren't like you. you're interested in trying new cuisines, things like that. And that correlates, that's the strongest correlate of liberalism or conservative. High, high openness people tend to be more liberal, lower openness people tend to be more conservative. The other trait that has a significant relationship is conscientiousness. And conscientiousness is the, you know, getting it done personality trait.

It's, you know, highly conscientious people like keep lists, you know, meet deadlines. They just generally have their shit together, right? Like, that's what conscientiousness is. And but it's, so it might not be clear how that, how that relates politically. High, high consciousness people tend to be more conservative, low conscientious people tend to be more liberal. The conservatism of conscientiousness is, is involved in one thing that conscientious people really dislike his uncertainty. There's a strong, conscientious people want there to be a clear relationship between effort and reward or inputs and outputs, right?

And it's like it's the a student personality trait. I mean, it's Hermione Granger. Yep. like you want to know what you need to do to get the thing. Yeah. And so like what do I have to do to get the grade? So like the conscientious students are the ones who like badge you after class about what exactly the syllabus means, you know, because they got to know.

Wanting the world to be just. Yeah. Yeah. And and in low conscientiousness, people like me. It was like who don't keep lists. and just are amazed if they ever make a deadline, you know, like are much more tolerant of this kind of uncertainty and inflexibility. And so there's an inflexibility in conscientiousness.

And there's a there tends to be a slight fear of just a strong desire for stability. Just want to know how everything works. so they can hit their marks. I was very low on neuroticism and completely middle of the road on conscientiousness, extroversion, and agreeableness. But it's interesting to me this,

you know, both conservatives and liberals get one good quality that they correlate strongly with, right? Because most people would probably say being conscientious is good, being open is good.

That's the sort of normal valence that those terms have. But is there, I take it that because they're supposed to be useful dimensions in five-dimensional personality space, there must be people who are high conscientiousness and high openness and low in each, right? And they don't have an obvious place to fit. Absolutely. Yeah, like the way these traits emerge, I mean, you know, like it's not exactly

that they're real things. But the traits come out of like a factor analysis where you're trying to figure out the minimal set of traits that don't correlate very strongly with one another, right? So the whole idea is that they're independent of each other. And so higher, you know, openness and conscientiousness just swing completely freely of one another. So the academic personality type is very high openness and relatively high conscientiousness. Like, like academics tend to be A students, right? Like, you know, it's hard to become a professor if, you know, to get through that much school if you can't turn papers in on time. Right. And low conscientious people. struggle with that. But conscientiousness is the best trait to have in terms of predicting success in school and in your career. So higher conscientiousness people are more likely to finish school. They're more likely to finish anything if they start it. And high conscientious predicts

higher salaries. People, highly conscientious people tend to be a little more productive. But conscientiousness doesn't make you want to do anything, right? Like it's like it's it's it's it's it's a kind of auxiliary or kind of workhorse trait. Openness has more motivational drive to it. Like so if you're high openness, it makes you attracted to certain kinds of things. So conscientiousness is the trait that makes you good at school. Openness is the trait that makes you want to learn. Right.

And those are, you know, and those are relatively independent of one another. You know, one of the, there's a sad finding that I report in the paper from Shelley Lundberg, labor economist at Santa Barbara, I think. And which is that, you know, generally conscientiousness predicts academic performance. But it actually doesn't for lower socioeconomic, status students. Like you'd want to think that the working hard and getting stuff done to mention would predict academic success for for less wealthy black students, for example.

But it doesn't. But it turns out that openness does, right? And I think that that's a good example where you're seeing the motivational aspect of openness that if somebody's less privileged and they've got a lot, the deck is stacked against them, the thing that really pulls you through is just the desire to learn. Interesting, yeah. And so these traits, they're interested.

And one of the reasons why I fixed on the big five, as opposed to there are other kind of personality theories that are specifically intended to explain political views. and moral views like Jonathan Heights Moral Foundations theory. But some of those are a little bit problematic. It's hard to, it's hard sometimes the,

it's not so clear that the, you know, that if, that if I identify as a conservative, that that doesn't just affect my answers on the, you know, the moral foundations quiz. But the big five isn't intended to explain your politics. And it explains lots of other things and has been replicates really, really well. And, you know, helps explain all manner of behavior.

And that's one of the things that I found interesting about it. So like, like, because high openness, you know, explains, like, you know, weekly predicts your inclination to go to college at all. even though it doesn't mean that you'll be good at it, it makes you want to go to school. And if you go to school and get a college degree, that amps up your magnetic attraction to cities because that's where you're going to benefit from your degree. And presumably even if not, right?

I mean, the idea that if you did grow up in a rural environment, the chances that you would pick up stakes and move to a scary, diverse, pluralistic, urban environment are probably much greater if you score high on openness. Yeah, absolutely. And that's one of the most important aspects of the set of correlations that openness and conscientiousness have with other stuff. So both openness and low openness and high conscientiousness relate to a broad set of traits that you could just call ethnocentrism or in-group. bias. And so people who are lower openness tend to be more ethnocentric, their degree of homophily, the strength of their preferences for sameness are stronger. And so lower openness people are more

put off by difference and diversity. And so if you're lower openness, that's going to make you less interested in and maybe averse to places where there are a lot of people who are unlike you. And that's very, very interesting. And especially since, you know, in the context of a, of someone like Donald Trump, who's doing everything he can to elicit people's sense of, you know, ethnocentric, solid. So the, so the, so higher openness people, as I said before, are interested in people who aren't like them.

They're interested in other cultures. They're interested in other foods. So if you're higher in openness, you're just going to find the urban diversity, more attractive. And if you're low in openness, you're going to find it unsettling. So that's important just in and of itself. But then secondarily, and this is one of the things that I found most interesting, is that lower openness also just predicts your inclination to migrate at all.

Yeah. So higher openness people, and it makes sense when you start just thinking about how it relates to an interest in novelty and difference. Lower openness people are less likely to want to move and they're less likely to actually move. Higher openness people are, you know, way more likely to want to go somewhere new. There's, which is one of the reasons about higher openness people are, you know, somewhat less. I want to be careful about not making it sound like openness is great and low openness is terrible. Right. Because low openness people are just better friends. They stick with their group.

They stick to their group, right? Like, like, you're low-opinous friend is the guy who's going to show up at three in the morning and bail you out of jail. Yeah. Right. Like, if you're, your lowest openness kid is the one who's going to call you when you're old. Yeah, I'd be there for you. Sure. Right.

Yeah. I mean, I have two anecdotes. I know this is not really systematic data, but it helps make all these points vivid to me. One was driving someone around, an older person who I'm sure would score in low openness, driving around my neighborhood. driving around my neighborhood here in L.A. And seeing all of these signs on the storefronts, many of which are in Spanish, some of which are in Asian languages. And they just said, you know, doesn't that bother you?

And I'm like, no, the food is much better here because of all this kind of diversity we have. But it just struck me that I wouldn't even have thought that that should bother me. And on the other side of the Valen's side, you know, I knew a guy who had been in the Army, his whole life and he retired and he immediately got a job as a security guard and explaining why he he mentioned the fact that he got to wear a uniform every day. And again, that sort of never would

have occurred to me as a good thing, but I get it, that it is a good thing. And it's, I kind of don't like the label openness for that reason. It's sort of biases us towards instantly thinking that openness is good, but there are absolutely values. I think that I think that having different restaurants with different ethnicities is an unambiguous good thing. But I get the idea that there are people who just want to keep things simple, uniform, doing the same thing every day, so they have space to worry about other things. That's not intrinsically personal failing. No, not at all. And that is, and I think, so if my overall hypothesis is right in that, And that over time, the higher openness people are more likely to migrate and therefore urbanized because migration is mostly urbanizing migration.

And lower openness people are going to be more resistant to or less sensitive to the incentives that drive people to urbanize. over time, the less dense populations, the rural populations, should become lower and lower openness. That is kind of an implication of the view. And as the magnetism of cities ramps up, right, like it will tend to pick people off who are on the margin, right? Like, each of these traits is normally distributed. And so, you know, people who are on the low-tail, of openness are, you know, least likely, I mean, most likely to be rooted, to put down stakes, to be incredibly loyal to their community, to family, to the people around them. They're not going to

want to give up on that, you know, but most people are in the middle, you know, like, by definition. And, you know, and as you kind of move down the bell curve, as the magnetism of the city, you know, ramps up, starts picking people off, you know, further and further down the bell curve. but that leaves the average in a lot of these places, you know, like higher, like lower and openness. Yes. And that will tend to give an increasingly conservative, ethnocentric caste to a lot of these places. You know, I wanted to mention that openness and conscientiousness predict your, predict social and liberal, or sorry, social liberalism and social conservatism, things like abortion, same-sex marriage, immigration,

attitudes towards race. But it doesn't relate at all to economic views. Those don't relate in any systematic way to any of the personality stuff. So it's just these social views. So if over time the sorting dynamic of urbanization is leaving these places increasingly low in openness. They're also getting higher in ethnocentrism. And then on top of that, you have the effects of the thing that's driving people to the city in the first place,

which is that that is where economic production increasingly happens. So I draw heavily in the paper on work by Enrico Moretti, who's got, talks about, the great divergence, that there is this real divergence in our economy between a handful of extremely high productivity cities and everywhere else. You know, everywhere else includes a bunch of other cities, including like kind of rust belt cities that are in decline. So it's not that all the places that are in relative decline are not urban. But almost all the places that are on the upswing are urban.

and almost the entire lower density parts of the country are either stagnating economically or actually declining in terms of economic welfare. And so when you add an increasingly low openness, high ethnocentric white population to this economic stagnation, you're going to get a lot of disgruntlement. And those populations as well are the average level of education is going down. Again, because of the overall magnetism of cities to highly skilled, highly educated people. And that is basically the reason why that's the kind of first order explanation for the great divergence that the increasing wage bonus to higher education and the concentration of all the jobs where you get that wage bonus in big cities has filtered almost the entire highly educated population out of the rest of the country. And that leaves these other places at a permanently kind of like lower level of productivity. And I did want to ask an economics question here.

I've seen various graphs that seem pretty convincing that after the 2008 recession, there was a comeback, but the comeback went very strongly to people who were doing well in the first place. Like the rich people are doing fine after 2008, the middle class is doing okay, and almost none of the gains went to people who were doing badly. Is there substructure there in terms of rural versus urban? Did urban poor people come back more than rural ones or vice versa? I'm not sure about the poor population specifically, but urban populations bounced back much, much, much quicker than rural populations.

And that is a big part of the story, that those places don't do well with these. Here's an interesting, you know, like a little sidebar. you know, conscientiousness, as I said, is the individual trait that most predicts just success in your career. And conscientiousness also, you know, conscientiousness doesn't make you less likely to migrate. But if you are, but it makes you more resolute in in executing any preferences that you might actually have. And so if you're the most conservative profile, if you're low openness and high conscientiousness, you're going to, you know, really stick to not going anywhere. And so higher conscientiousness at the individual level, you know, means that you're going to have a higher income. But hiring conscientiousness at the population level doesn't predict a higher level of productivity.

And I think that has to do with the fact that that growth is an ideas thing. And that it's also like has to do with flexibility. So there's a great paper about the U.K. In terms of population-level personality traits. and the higher conscientiousness places didn't bounce back from the recession as fast as the higher openness places. And that seems to be because higher openness people are more flexible. They like to like, how are we going to deal with this problem? The high conscious people are the ones who want to know what the rules are.

But if the rules change, they struggle. And so high conscientiousness people can take advantage of opportunities, but high openness people are more likely to get the opportunities or go out and actually. and actively get them. Yeah. And they're also, they're going to be the kind of people who explore the space of bossibility and see how to adapt to the new situation. So it's,

it's the creative personality type. The most creative profile is, is mine as it happens. Like very high openness, very low conscientiousness. It's associative and, and flexible. But high,

conscientiousness, low openness is very, you know, you just want to do the done thing. And if the world changes around you, it's just incredibly confusing. And I think it's like super important not to be judgmental about that. It's that that's just how, one of the things that writing this paper is done for me is it's actually made me feel more empathetic toward Trump voters. to try to get inside what the mindset is of lower openness, higher conscientious as people, like the changes that our culture, economy, population is going through are truly unsettling. If you have that kind of mindset, like, this is a high openness thing trying to get inside somebody else's head. The paradox of openness.

Yeah, paradox of openness. But that's partly why higher openness people are more, have, you know, higher racial sympathy, for example. They're more likely to be able to understand what it might mean to be a minority and have opportunities systematically denied to you in these kind of structural ways, whereas low openness people just don't get it. they have a hard time understanding what other people's experiences like. Well, just to make this... Yeah, I mean, just to make this very clear, I think that, you know, the picture that you're painting

seems to come together in a view where there's a set of people who live outside the cities who are, you know, have been legitimately really damaged by the economy. And at the same time, and maybe for related reasons, are ones who are naturally prone to be a little bit more skeptical of minorities and change and foreigners and immigrants and things like that.

And it comes together. And maybe this argument we had over why Trump won after he won, was it because of economic anxiety or because of racism or nationalism? You know, these things are all different aspects of the same underlying causation. Exactly. And that's one of the things that I try to draw. that they're not really two separate explanations. There's this big macro economic fact, which urbanization really is. It has to do with the changing structure of the economy and the incentives that that gives people to resettle.

And that has these strong effects on who gets the benefits of economic growth. And if this dynamic is filtering the population in a way that leaves lower density populations, basically more increasingly socially conservative, but also depriving them of the benefits of growth, it's not happening where they live, and they're not getting the full benefit of it, that puts those people in a position where it becomes very easy to. sell them a narrative about why things seem so bad to them. So if somebody like Trump comes along and says, things are going shitty for you, I'm going to make America great again, which means make America like it was when you felt comfortable.

Or like you thought it was when you felt comfortable, yes. Or at least how, yeah, exactly. Like your sort of nostalgic fantasy about the past was like. And the thing that's causing all these problems is all these immigrants and the, elites who live in cities who are selling you out to the Chinese and giving your jobs to Mexicans and so on and so forth. That kind of person who lives in those places is going to be very prone to find that really persuasive. And then the additional factor that I lay onto it. So like most of this explanation is, in the overall story I'm telling, is about selection effects

and some selection effects that have been, I think, overlooked in the way that urbanization has segregated the population in this sort of shelling-like way. But there are these treatment effects, right? Like there's this large literature on how growth tends to be liberalizing that the further you get from a, sense of economic insecurity. Basically, the more tolerant and open you are to difference and change. And this is really, really well confirmed. Like it feels to a lot of us like there's a kind of one-way arrow to kind of moral progress that's in a liberalizing direction because economic prosperity or rising economic

prosperity tends to make whole populations more culturally liberal. You get a transition from Ronald Englehart is the big innovator in this area from what he calls survival values to self-expression values. But you don't get that in a uniform way over an entire population when growth is increasingly. increasingly economically concentrated in cities. So all of the already more liberal people in cities are experiencing the benefits of growth, which tends to make those populations even more liberal, right? And so a good example of that is, you know, the change in, you know, just even the past few years towards transgender people and the norms around it.

So that rapid shift in norms about acceptance of transgender people, like how important it is to use people's preferred pronouns to acknowledge their preferred gender identity. That's textbook increase in self-expression values. But the kind of growth that makes people, you know, have increasing self-expression values, if that's not going to these already more conservative. lower openness populations, then you're getting even further polarization in terms of culture and values. Right. So to that population who's not experiencing the same increase in prosperity and they're already more conservative, they hear talk about like using somebody's preferred pronoun,

and they're like, what the hell is even happening? Like there are two, like I get emails from all of these conservative institutions, and they're just all going crazy. right now about like how we can't tell the difference between a man and a woman. And I think that is a really direct effect of the joint filtering of the population, leaving the rural population's more conservative in terms of disposition, but also depriving them of the kind of treatment effects of growth that would make them a little bit more liberal intolerant. They're just not getting it. And so the urban and rural cultures,

moral cultures and political cultures are just growing further and further apart. And to the extent there's a kind of backlash, I think it's driven by those combined effects where it just seems literally crazy to conservative people, conservative white people in small towns, to hear people talking about you just like choose your own gender. It just seems like it just seems absolutely, it seems like the whole world's upside down. but for us. And so what is the, then there's the, we haven't quite yet talked about the role of education here because I think this is like the final piece of the puzzle, right, that you talk about in the paper.

We, you know, we have this set of people, rural people, low on openness, things are changing all around them. They've been left behind by the economy. Those populations or, you know, people and families from those regions might have their perspectives shifted if they got more education. is that, but I never know what the causality is. Is it just the people who are more open in the first place tend to go to college or people who go to college become a little more open? It's very clearly both. So the personality stuff is, you know, it's not fixed.

The openness, say, is about the heritability goes at about 60%. You know, like the variation that's explained by genes is about that. there's still, that that leaves a lot of room for change, for, for differences that are, that are environmentally determined. And it's very clear that getting a college degree makes you more open, you know, traveling when you're young, makes you more open. So going to college would increase openness and does increase social liberalism. But, you know, it's also the case that if you're already more open, you're more likely to want to go to college. And I think one thing that people have overlooked, which is clear to me, like having grown up in Iowa and living in Iowa City, where there are a bunch of students from rural areas, people overlook, especially, you know, high openness urban people tend to overlook the extent to which going to college is a form of migration that is uncomfortable to really rooted socially.

temperamentally socially conservative types. You know, going to college means moving away from your family. It means moving away from your friends. And there's a huge attrition rate, you know, from freshmen, not coming back for their sophomore year. And I think in some of it is just like it's a bad fit. And if you're from a small Iowa rural town and you come to the University of Iowa, it's way more diverse than any place you've ever been.

It seems like a wild big city to you. And if those rural populations are becoming more conservative over time, I think their parents find it less attractive to send their kids as well. Like, it is true that sending your kid to college is going to make them a little bit more liberal. But it also means sending them away from you. You don't want to do that. Like, you love them. You don't want them to go away.

And you especially don't want them to go away to a place that's going to make them even more different from you. and that if they get a college degree, they're going to have to move even further away from you to this really scary big city that is dangerous and full of weird languages and smells and food. Like it's unappealing, right? And so I think some of the right-wing reaction against universities currently has to do with some of this just very deep-seated discomfort in and there's a there's a feeling that somehow it's like left-wing propaganda that is, you know,

making their children different from them. But, you know, I think that's a, you know, kind of rationalization and the deeper thing is just not wanting to be separated from your loved ones. Yeah, and which I was going to say, you know, that's totally understandable in some way. I mean, we do live in a society where the idea

that families live together in the same neighborhood over generations is more or less disappearing in most of our population, right? Yeah, absolutely. And that's a real loss. Yeah. Like there's a real loss of rootedness. These lower openness places tend to be higher, you know, social capital kinds of places. Like when people stick around, they know each other better.

they tend to be more deeply invested in churches, in, you know, the Lions Club and the Rotary and all these civil society institutions. Those places have a kind of like rich, informal, you know, really tightly woven together social life, which has a lot of advantages. It's a really nice way to live. if you fit that kind of place, right?

Like it's suffocating for a certain kind of person. Right. But everybody doesn't have to live the same kind of life. But that kind of life is becoming less and less feasible. It's becoming less economically feasible. And it feels if you live in one of those places, it feels like the world is trying to destroy everything that's important to you. And it's worth taking that seriously.

Yeah, you briefly mentioned churches, but you didn't talk about religion a lot in the paper, is that, I mean, there's this, even above urbanization, there's just the whole idea of modernization, right? And the strong attachments we have to community, to family, to churches are weakening with time. And probably the increasing secularization of the country and the world is something that is both significant and very bothersome to the low openness, people who are out there in the rural districts. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like, the secularization is one of those things that, like, it tends to go along with rising self-expression values. So religious participation tends to fall as, you know, like GDP per capita increases.

You know, as people get more and more wealthy, you know, what self-expression values mean is that you, that, that, that, that, what tends to dominate your interest is, you know, being myself, you know, like, like, like, like, like, and, you know, and, you know, and consumer cultures really play into that. Um, and, and, and that's not really what the idea of religion is, uh, like, it's, you know, like, yeah, like, so, so people who are high in self-expression values are going to be really annoyed that the Catholic Church won't change its views on birth. or on same-sex marriage, right?

Like, you know, you're like, get with it, folks. But, but, like, that's not what religions are for. One of the interesting things about the United States is one of the reasons it, I think, maintains a higher level of religious participation than a lot of European countries is that it has this history of really entrepreneurial religious activity. When I lived in Houston for a couple years, and there's this guy, what's his name, Joel Osteen, he's a big TV pastor, and he's got the old basketball stadium as his church. Like 15,000 people. And I went to it a couple times.

I'm just fascinated by, again, another high openness thing. I want to see what the low openness people do. And, you know, it's barely a religion. I mean, like he said Jesus twice. It's just this prosperity gospel stuff. But it's all, and so it's really heavily customized to what a certain kind of person wants to hear. And that keeps people coming to church, right? Like, it's, you know, it's about how if you have faith and, you know, and try to look good, you know, like, buy a car that's nicer than you can afford and then God will help you afford it.

Positive feedback, yeah. And so like, you know, but that keeps people going to church, right? It's adaptive in a way that, you know, Catholicism isn't. But it also just rinses the actual religious content out of it. And I think that has a lot to do with evangelical support for Trump. It's a certain kind of person, but the actual content of their religious convictions is, you know, you know, evangelicalism is basically Americanism with a light Christian gloss on it. And it doesn't really, it's more political than it is religious.

It's more about being against abortion and being in favor of American exceptionalism than it really is about, you know, exemplifying the lessons of Christ in your personal life activity. Right? That's not just, and I don't want to, you know, paint with two brat a brush. There are, you know, deeply devoted evangelicals who are, who spend all their time helping people in need. But there's just a, but there's also just a very vulgar, self-expressive version of it that that isn't really about anything other than the expression of a suite of right-leaning views. Well, it can seem very weird, bizarre to outsiders that people whose self-identity is so centered around their Christianity and religiosity are fervent supporters of Donald Trump for a whole bunch of different reasons. But, I mean, so maybe the diagnosis is on the table. I want to sort of move on to prescriptions in a couple ways, unless you think we've missed anything that you wanted to say about the overall picture you're painting. No, no. I think we got most of it in. Yeah, I mean, I think that there's two big things looming in my mind here.

One is you make the point that people like to do these maps of the United States and who voted red and who voted blue. And especially if you do it at the county level, the blue counties are very, very tiny. And in a sense, that's because you're just painting by acreage, right? Yes, it's absolutely true that most of the acres, most of the land area in the United States voted for Donald Trump. but most of the people voted for Hillary Clinton. They also, most of the people voted for Democratic Senate candidates, but they didn't win. And you make the extra point that a vast majority of the GDP voted for Hillary Clinton, right? There's much greater economic productivity in the blue regions than there are in the red ones.

But furthermore, the trends are all in the direction of increasing representation. for those blue areas in various reasons. So it paints a picture where the Republican Party, forget about conservative versus liberal as ideological designations, but as an institution, the Republican Party is taking advantage of certain not really democratic features

of our Republican government, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the electoral college, but that can't go on forever, right? And, you know, are we facing at some point a tipping point as we started talking the conversation about a tipping point where the Republican Party just collapses and, you know, gets 30% of the vote share and is in the wilderness for 15 and 20 years. Well, we think a lot about that at the Nisgannon Center because one of our big projects is trying to kind of restore a moderate element to the Republican Party, you know, the more the kind of Rockefeller Republican. publicin type of right uh type of moderation um and and it does seem extremely unstable but it's but it's but i think

we're at a really dangerous moment as well like so as you said that like it's the a lot of people you know about the you know after the 2012 election the GOP did this kind of analysis about what we need to do to you know to to win and the overall consensus was that we need to just increase non-white vote share. And if we can do that, we can hang on with big national majorities, you know, indefinitely. There was a lot of talk about, you know, how, you know, George O.B. Bush got like 42% of the Hispanic vote. If the Republican Party can do that consistently, they're golden because there is this baked in low-density bias in our entire electoral system. So if we have what I'm calling the density divide and the less dense part of the density divide is systematically advantaged by the overall electoral structure of our system, then like, you know, they can win.

They don't need majorities to win. They just need to, you know, keep, you know, just chipping away at democratic non-white vote share. Oh, you know, just by one or two points every cycle and they can just win. forever, right? Now, that was the idea. And, you know, and the whole party apparatus bought into that, and, you know, that's why in the last, you know, election, you had, you know, Rubio, Cruz, all these guys were in favor of, you know, comprehensive immigration reform. That was part of this pivot. But, like, that's out of sync with where a lot of the Republican electoral base is. and there was a $20 bill laying on the ground that Trump picked up that this, you know,

increasingly ethnocentric lower density population who's, you know, experiencing economic stagnation, kind of cultural vertigo. Like, they don't want more immigration. And so he just doubled. down on this kind of nativism, which has shrunk the GOP's electoral base. So now it's almost exclusively white. It's almost exclusively exurban and rural. And they can't keep winning with that coalition.

So they've got two options, which is either to do what they're going to do in 2012 and start chipping into the Democrats. you know, advantage with non-white voters or they can cheat. Basically, and it looks for all the world like there's a very strong investment in cheating. And that is super dangerous and it's very, very bad news. So, you know, everybody knows about either Russian interference in the election, Everybody knows about how the GOP is doing nothing about securing our elections at all. How the Supreme Court has said that pretty radical partisan gerrymandering is okay.

And so the GOP right now seems to be just doubling down on winning elections with a shrinking minority by disenfranchising. Democratic voters and just straight up cheating. And that really threatens the legitimacy of our democratic system in a way that could be really destabilizing. Yeah. And I do think that, well, I mean, we actually didn't talk as much as I wanted to about what I think of the paradox of racism here, you know, in the sense that, you know, in the sense that it seems weird at face value to say that it was increasing racism that caused the

white Democratic candidate in 2016 to lose, even though the black Democratic candidate won in 2004 and 2008, or sorry, 2008 to 2012. I mean, why would increasing racism have more in effect when both of the candidates were white? But there is a, I think that there is an explanation there. You can tease that out a little bit. You know, one of the getting into the more political alignment side, you know, one thing that's been happening over the past 30 years, like part of this overall sorting story is that the parties have just become better sorted on a bunch of stuff. And there used to be a lot of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats.

And that's changed. Like there are very few of them anymore. So all the conservatives have gone into the Republican Party. all the liberals have gone into the Democratic Party. But like one thing that's really hard to get across to a highly educated people who follow politics closely is just how little most people pay any attention to politics at all. And how little people know. And so party alignment is, you know, first of all, it's, you know, nobody lays out all their views. Here's my view on the minimum wage.

here's my view on abortion, here's my view on blah, blah, blah. And then, oh, let me, and then let me check which party matches that better. That's 100% not how it works. Like how it works is first you, it's what social identity is most salient to you. And that's more complicated for white people because being in the majority, just being white isn't so distinctive. But it's, you know, but it's pretty clear for other groups, right? like I'm, I'm, I'm black. I want to vote for the party that's going to protect me against discrimination, right?

And so, and you learn that that's the Democrats and then you're a Democrat. And then once you're a Democrat, then you adopt democratic views about things. You know, same on the other side, right? So it's, you know, it's come to beat that, you know, if you're a certain kind of white person, you're a Democrat, and if a certain kind of white person, you're a Republican. But like people pay so little attention. And this is like what I found one of the most depressing findings is that they're a big part of the flight of working class whites toward the Republican Party really does seem to have been caused by Barack Obama being president. Just existing.

Just existing. A black Democrat in the White House was a clear enough signal for people who don't generally tune in to communicate. that, oh, Democrats are the party for black people who are for civil rights. Oh, I'm not for that. And so there was a huge shift in whites with lower levels of education toward the Republican Party that really does seem to have been generated simply by the fact of the clarity of the queue that Obama's blackness sent. But that doesn't seem to explain people who shifted from being Obama voters to being Trump voters. That's interesting. It doesn't. But I think there is you see that shift. The interesting thing is you see that shift happening well before Trump. And so it was happening anyway, largely sparked by just reaction to Obama's race. And then you have Trump eliciting these.

ethnocentric impulses that are more common in that population. So part of the sorting story is also involves deunionization. So the close connection between organized labor and the Democratic Party locked a lot of working class people into the Democratic Party, like kind of reflexively. It's just part of their identity. I'm a member of the AFL-CIO, so I vote Democratic. But falling union participation, just, you know, like falling rates of union membership have weakened those ties. There's party loyalties, you know, kind of sticky over generations.

Like if just the fact that your parents are Republican makes you way more likely to be Republican. And if your dad was a steelworker who was a, you know, staunch union guy and Democratic voter, you're likely to identify that way too. But if you're not a member of the union and that culture is just fading away where you live, those connections become more and more tenuous. And then those people tend to start sorting more on these other identities, right? Like I'm a white person. I don't like urban liberals.

I don't like, you know, ubiddy black people in the White House. President Obama. And that kind of person, if a guy like Trump comes along and activates, really encourages any sort of ethnocentric impulse that you might have, I think that can, you know, instigate, you know, a further shift. But I think it was happening before him. He just, he just heightened the dynamic. Yeah, it's just a little, it is just a little weird to me. But, okay, let me just, let's just, you know, put a conclusion on this thought about the future of the Republican Party because I think I totally would have bought that strategy that you outlined for, you know, Republicans in 2016, that if we can just get some non-white people to be in our party,

you know, there are African Americans, Asians, Latinos who are low on openness, strong social conservatives, pro-family, and a coalition of urban people of that form, rural whites, and high education, high income whites who just want tax cuts, that could potentially be a winning party. But that's not the direction they went in. But on the other hand, we have a system of government that really, really favors having two political parties with almost equal chances of winning, right?

So either, I mean, putting aside the disaster scenario where we just, you know, have some sort of nationalist coup and get rid of our representative democracy entirely, I'm not quite seeing how we're going to reach, that new equilibrium where Republicans do start reaching out in the post-Trump era and to maintain actually 50% of the demographic. Yeah, I mean, currently, I mean, they're kind of locked in partly because the way Trump has remade the GOP, like what parties do is, is, you know, kind of determined by, you know, like political scientists called the policy demanders in the coalition. And at this point, he's so strengthened the nativist, you know, kind of nationalist wing of the party that one of the big demands of the party is keeping the party a party of rural white people. Right?

Like there's an understanding that making, like, that broadening the coalition, bringing in a higher. percentage of non-white voters kind of digging into, you know, right now the divide geographically is around, you know, 1,000 people per square a mile, right? Like if the Republicans just pushed in a little bit, you know, inside the outer suburbs, they could pick up, you know, more than enough to keep winning. But that means picking up some more higher education voters, it means picking up more non-white voters. And if you get those people in your coalition, then those people's demands.

matter too. And if what you want to do is just shut down the borders and basically you're interested in in in in in in in stopping demographic change, like you're not going to be able to cater to those voters, right? Like, they're not. And so you so you just, you want to keep them out because they're going to get in the way of what you want to do. And so they're just, they're just kind of stuck. And I think the only way they change at this point is there needs to be a, you know, catastrophic electoral defeat. You know, so my fingers are crossed for just a gigantic democratic victory in 2020 because that will at least force the party to consider whether it can keep going as a ethno-nationalist party of rural white people. and will create some opportunities for others to come in and say, hey, like, the idea that we had before was a good idea and to, you know,

push toward the moderation of the Republican Party. But, like, the integrity, the entire political system really depends on there being a, you know, responsible governing right. Like, power is bound to change hands over time. And you need two parties in a two-party system. that will actually try to govern instead of what the GOP under Trump is trying to do, which is basically destroy the system to keep itself in power. That's how places collapse into banana republics.

And so it's really, really important that they face a electoral catastrophe in order to force that change. Yeah, I mean, I couldn't agree more. I think I would love to be back in a world where it was not obvious. used to me to which party to vote for. I would much rather have a much healthier, vibrant opposition party. Even if I didn't vote for them, I want them to be good. And it's always hard to tell when, you know, a party changes in one direction. Is that the beginning of a trend that will last toward the future? Or is it just the last gasp of certain parts of the party? So we'll have to see. It'll be very, very interesting, as you say, fingers crossed.

The other thing I wanted to close on is, like you said, when you did the research for the paper, it does make you more empathetic with the rural voters who you were trying to understand better. And I'm entirely, even if they, you know, gave into some bad impulses with respect to nationalism or ethnocentrism, I'm completely on board with the idea that the system has failed them. Their economic situation is not very good and their prospects are not very good. I don't think that Donald Trump is fixing things very well, but how should we fix it? things. I mean, how can we, you know, organize, given the fact that technology is changing the world very rapidly, that urbanization is happening, how can we, you know, carve out space for economic and

social success for people who just want to live in rural environments and have a lifestyle more or less similar to what their families have had for the last couple generations? Yeah, I mean, I think that's an incredibly important question. One of the perverse things about the GOP currently is that it has very very little interest in actually aiding its own base. I wrote a piece for the Times a couple months ago, which showed the relationship between like economic stagnation and just Republican, you know, areas that the Hamilton project at the Brignings Institution did a study on economic vitality. And so they have an economic vitality index. and the huge majority of counties in the United States that are way underwater in terms of economic vitality

or, you know, staunchly Republican places, their low-density, kind of rural, small-town kind of areas. But the Republican Party's ideology, it's kind of free market anti-welfare state ideology basically gets in the way of them doing anything at all to mitigate the slide that's going on economically among their own voters, which does create a big opportunity for kind of populist Democrats. I think both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have their fingers on the opportunity there. They really see what it is.

And what needs to be done really is we need to improve our social insurance system. We need to make sure that people have access to health care. The United States is one of the only countries in the world in which there are some major populations. The white population has declining life expectancy. And there really is genuine, desperate economic institutions. security in a lot of places. You know, the opioid epidemic, I think, reflects a lot of the, you know, self-medication around the anxiety of the loss of jobs, the loss of economic vitality in a lot of places where people live. So at Nisgata, we have a project called the Struggling Regions

Initiative, which is a whole slate of policies that are intended to help, you know, bolster largely lower densities, rural areas, not just rural areas, but places that aren't doing so well. Because, you know, it's only until very, very recently that even the economics profession has got its head around the fact that that inequality is increasingly a, you know, a regional thing, that there's a big geographic aspect to the way our economy is changing. and that there's not going to be a way to just, you know, we can't reverse the trends, but we can mitigate the damage through just social assistance, but there's also a lot of things that we can do to improve the atmosphere for development and growth in a lot of these more rural states that we aren't currently doing. So there's a lot of good ideas that can be pursued.

But it's just really hard. I mean, a lot of people are just going to have to recognize the fact that a lot of small towns have no function. They don't have a reason to be. The reason there are all of these small towns here in Iowa, they're just kind of peppered all throughout the countryside. And that has to do with the fact that agricultural employment, you know, required getting people into these fields all over the place. But agricultural employment has collapsed, right? And these little towns were hubs of education, you know, where you could buy milk at a store and housing. But like nobody needs jobs in those places anymore.

There are no jobs in these places anymore. They're leaving. There's just automated, you know, combines plowing through the fields. There's very little need for agricultural employment. So there's really little need for these towns at all. And those populations, a lot of them, we just have to recognize that they are, we have to basically put them on life support. But like people are, there are older people in these towns. They're never coming back.

And they just need help. We just need to help them and make the decline of these places as comfortable as we can. While at the same time trying to do our best to promote. development in the places that the people from those small towns are moving to. So like all the populations in the more rural states, like here in Iowa, you know, Des Moines is doing really, really well. Here in Iowa City in Cedar Rapids, we're doing really, really well. Ames is doing really, really well, these places with universities, with big medical centers,

these hubs of employment and innovation and activity, there can be a lot more done to promote the health, health and growth in these places. build these kind of mini agglomerations that will be self-sustaining over time, but they do need subsidy. They need some, they need a boost from the government in order to get on the track where they're going to be appealing places for people to live. And you can staunch some of the flow of your, you know, educated population moving to other states if you do have attractive places with good jobs for them to work. But there's a lot of work that has to be done to make that possible. Yeah, we should have said this earlier. Well, we talk about urbanization. We're not talking about

New York and Los Angeles exclusively, right? Places like Des Moines and Ames absolutely count, and there's a huge benefit in terms of cost of living to living in places like this. So there can be a very vibrant and diverse set of urban environments throughout the country in some sort of future equilibrium. Yeah, we need to do a lot. We can do a lot to build up these mid-sized cities. They do have an economic function. They can be very, very productive. But the way things are structured now, we're effectively subsidizing the trend of hyper-concentration in a few big cities. and we don't need to be subsidizing that in the way that we have been, you know, kind of strangely, we've been the moving in the other direction. You know, there's a huge problem in terms of housing costs in these big megacities.

And that actually mitigates the problem of concentration a little bit. That effectively redirects people toward smaller cities. and that's so it's actually, you know, helpful in an unintended way. But we pay a big economic price for that. Workers are less productive in these smaller secondary hubs. But there's a lot to be said for making these smaller secondary hubs for building them up to the point where the difference in productivity isn't as large as it is now so that people have a bigger menu of options in terms of urbanization.

You know, it's a wonderful corrective, the whole conversation, because we, We talk so much these days about the internet and being online and connectivity and forget about the fact that where you physically live still has a huge effect on how you live, who you talk to, how you think about the world. It absolutely does. And that's one of the puzzles about kind of agglomeration efficiencies. Because the technologies that have increased the bonus to density are also the technologies that make it seem like you ought to be able to work from ever anywhere. I mean, like, I do work in Washington, D.C. from Iowa most of the time that's possible technologically. But it turns out that it's hard. I mean, like, before we started, we had a technological problem, right?

Like, it's difficult to communicate over these distances, even with the technology. And as someone who works remotely, I can really feel it. Like, we're mammals and we're hyper-social mammals. and I'm by myself in my basement and I feel lonely and disconnected from the people that I work with and I start to be like, what am I even doing and blah, blah, blah. But when I'm in the office in Washington, D.C., I have this sense of, you know, Bono-O-Me and camaraderie and like, hey, let's do this guys. Right.

And there's just a real effect of getting like mammals physically close to each other and being like, we're a team, we're doing something. And I just don't think you can replicate it. I don't think we'll ever replicate it through technology. We can, we can, you know, kind of, you know, maybe asymptotically approach it through virtual reality or whatever, you know, low latency versions of, you know, communications technologies. But but I just don't, you know, like, I don't think there's any replacement for actually being able to touch somebody and, you know, smell them subconsciously. I mean, like, it's like we're animals and there's an impulse in a lot of the tech sector to see us as more abstract and less embodied than we really are. And I think that actually leads people to make serious mistakes in understanding how economies actually work.

Yeah, all the technology out there in the world does not change the fact that we are mammals. You're absolutely right. All right, Will Wilkinson. Thanks so much for being on the podcast. This is a fascinating talk about. That's great talking to you, Sean. Thanks so much. Schools First Federal Credit Union, serving school employees and their families.

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