Do you live in a bubble?
I should probably explain what that means, except I don’t think I can. Here’s what some folks at PBS said:
White America is coming apart at the seams.
That’s the thesis Charles Murray, a libertarian political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, puts forth in his new book, “Coming Apart.” In a piece soon to appear on the NewsHour, Murray argues that the super wealthy, super educated and super snobby live in so-called super-ZIPs: cloistered together, with little to no exposure to American culture at large.
Murray came up with a 25-question quiz to determine the size of your bubble. I’ve heard of Murray, but don’t know much about him. Since I tend to agree with libertarians on roughly 50% of issues (the issues involving keeping government out of the business of individual humans, as opposed to corporations that only exists because of government blah blah blah. I digress), I try to give the benefit of the doubt to those with whom I’m not familiar. Murray and I align at least somewhat on issues like marriage equality and some aspects of reproductive rights, but I’m sure there’s divergence elsewhere. His “bubble quiz” told me a lot more about what Charles Murray thinks of city folk than about any bubbles I may inhabit. (HINT: Eating at chain restaurants, identifying military rank insignia, and personally knowing at least one evangelical Christian will significantly reduce your bubblage.)
At any rate, I got a 36 out of 99, which overlaps two different bubbles. A 99, by the way, would mean the broadest exposure to American culture, while a 0 would be a Howard Hughes-esque bubble. Of the two bubbles in which my score fits, the one that seems closer to me is “A second-generation (or more) upper-middle-class person who has made a point of getting out a lot.” It was actually all the upper-middle-class evangelical Baptists I knew growing up that gave me most of my supposedly non-bubble experiences, but whatever. Take the quiz yourself and see how a 70 year-old libertarian who works for a think tank judges your life!
