For many Americans, polarization is a major concern. They worry that diverging worldviews threaten to fracture a common American identity into competing subgroups, making it harder to interact, communicate, and trust one another.
And while there are some signs of increasing division, it’s unclear how much American culture is really diverging.
In a paper in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, authors Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica developed a new measure of cultural distance and tracked it over a recent 60-year period.
Using machine learning techniques, the researchers were able to predict group membership based on media diet, consumer behavior, time use, social attitudes, and newborn names. They argue that the likelihood of correctly guessing an individual’s group membership based on those variables serves as a good indicator of cultural distance—where a higher chance of guessing group membership correctly suggests a larger cultural gap between groups.
Figure 1 in the authors’ paper shows how these indicators changed in the United States from the 1960s to the 2010s. Income, education, gender, race, and political ideology correspond to high or low income, high or low education, male or female, White or non-White, and liberal or conservative groups, respectively.
Πηγή: www.aeaweb.org