This article from Thomas Lifson at The American Thinker provides some insight into the question of whether there really is an out of touch and over-educated coastal elite that has little or no contact with the vast majority of Americans who live elsewhere in the country. In this piece, we take a look at social scientist Charles Murray, author of “The Bell Curve” and “Coming Apart” and his Bubble Quiz. This quiz is designed to identify how thick is the bubble that separates the test taker from the working class Americans in fly-over country.
A fascinating survey has created a data-based measure of the social isolation of the urban elites, the people who run the country who have no contact at all with the lives of most people. Charles Murray, co-author of the groundbreaking study The Bell Curve, and author of Coming Apart: The State of White America, devised a clever survey to identify the social isolation from the rest of America that characterizes highly educated, affluent elites. He explains for the American Enterprise Institute, where he is a scholar:
In Coming Apart, a book I published in 2012, I asked my readers to score themselves on a 25-item test titled “How Thick is Your Bubble?” Scores could range from 0 to 100. The lower the score, the thicker one’s elite cultural bubble.
For PBS, he created a similar version of the quiz, taken by over 130,000 people who watch PBS. It asked 25 questions, such as:
Did you grow up in a family in which the chief breadwinner was not in a managerial position or a high-prestige profession (defined as attorney, physician, dentist, architect, engineer, scientist or college professor)?
Have you ever lived for at least a year in an American community with a population under 50,000 that is not part of a metropolitan area and is not where you went to college?
Have you ever walked on a factory floor?Have you ever held a job that caused something to hurt at the end of the day?
Have you ever held a job that caused something to hurt at the end of the day?
Have you ever had a close friend who was an evangelical Christian?
