Another issue that came up over my weekend in Ohio was the following.....
How much of the intensity of RED in the middle of America (urban areas not included here) has to do with highly educated people leaving their home towns for areas where they can persue more education or work for big industry/high-profile organizations or live in a place that is highly accepting of liberal ideals? I fully accept that there are fantastic institutions of higher learning throughout the midwest (my college and Spice and J.Bro's grad school as examples) and incredibly liberal cities/towns (Minneapolis, Madison, Chicago, Athens GA (true, not the midwest), etc). But if I think about it, in part considering my own options for further education and occupations, many top schools and highly desirable professional organizations (i.e. - high-profile government institutions, global non-profits, etc.) exist on the coasts. Is brain drain an issue in this age of easy transportation?
And then there's always my favorite theory - that democrats are concentrated in urban areas and college towns and along waterways because these are the places where one is exposed to a wide range of different people (ethnically, culturally, religiously, gender identificationly, etc.)
Discuss.
Thursday, December 02, 2004
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6 comments:
That sounds like a self-enforcing cycle to me.
It's interesting to think of the causality there. Do the liberal-minded and diversity-loving flock to places that espouse liberalism and diversity, or do those who live in such places become more liberal and diversity loving? My conservative relatives would say the latter, with their theory of higher education poisoning the minds of today's youth. I think it probably goes both ways - people who feel out of place where they are flock to places with others like them, and in the process probably become more like the way they are.
As for the correlation between liberal university towns and coastalism, I think there's a pretty easy historical explanation. The big burst of higher education expansion occurred when the mountain west was barely developed, so you have lots of private institutions throughout the northeast, south and upper midwest, plus the land grant universities - and not much in the space between the midwest and the west coast. My knowledge of west coast higher education is more sketchy, but my impression is that a burst in population density there led to a somewhat later expansion - in the late 1800's - and was coupled with a lot of progressivism, leading to strong state financing of public education (especially in California). Basically, universities ended up where the people were (or in pastoral settings near where the people were), which leads back to J.Po's point about the waterways, etc. And the fact that business and research innovation typically occurs near clusters of academic institutions (since over-educated people seem to come in handy once in a while), leading to industrial and economic advantages in those areas as well.
All of this is a big spiral. Since today's higher-education expansion is not of the elite variety, those who are interested in book-learnin' end up in a non-random set of places, and those places also attract cutting-edge businesses, leading to more flocking of the smart. And since those people either start out more liberal or find themselves immersed in liberalism, you end up with the pockets of latte-loving elites that everyone seems to hate right now.
We should note that J.Bro and I are sitting next to one another right now. Although we came up with the self-reinforcing spiral thing separately, his brevity is due to his desire to beat me out in posting first.
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