RSS
Charles Murray continues to collect data from volunteers who take his social class isolation bubble quiz.
He’s now got a sample size of over 40,000 (probably disproportionately from NPR listeners) and he looks at it by zip code. Among zips with at least 15 respondents, the most upscale in class terms is Fremont in Silicon Valley followed by a zip code on the Upper East Side of New York.
If he loosens his rule to look at zip codes with 10 to 14 respondents, he gets:
Fourteen zip codes had 10–14 respondents and scores lower than 27, meaning that they were virtually a lock to have qualified for the top 100 if they had added just a few more respondents. In order of scores from low to high, they were Westborough, MA (with an incredibly low mean of 18.7), Rockville Centre, NY, Briarcliff Manor, NY, Old Greenwich, CT, Del Mar, CA, Mount Kisco, NY, Malibu, CA, Chestnut Hill, PA, Stanford, CA’s second zip code (94304), Lincoln, MA, Tarzana, CA, Rockport, MA, Greenwich, CT, and Manhasset, NY.
Westborough is an exurb of Boston. It was home to Eli Whitney.
Rockville Centre is on Long Island. It’s home to a lot of celebrities like Howard Stern and Sandy Koufax.
Briarcliff Manor is an exurb of New York City near the Hudson River in Westchester County. It’s home to Trump National Golf Club.
Old Greenwich, CT is part of Greenwich, the home of the hedge fund industry.
Del Mar is a north San Diego County home with a safe beach. It’s home to 3 NFL quarterbacks.
Mt. Kisco, NY is in Westchester County. It has a mansion and estate belt.
I may have mentioned Malibu, CA once or twice.
Chestnut Hill, PA is the Old Money neighborhood in Philly. Professor E. Digby Baltzell, coiner of “WASP,” lived there.
Tarzana, CA is named after Tarzan.
My guess is that Murray’s quiz tends to find upscale suburbs full of Indian (e.g., Westborough and Fremont) or Persian (e.g., Tarzana) immigrants who listen to NPR but don’t know much about America. I wonder what zip code Raj Chetty lives in?
Off-topic,
La La Land is problematic:
http://www.salon.com/2016/12/26/donald-trump-in-la-la-land-retro-romance-is-seductive-and-encourages-a-yearning-for-a-less-beautiful-past/
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/la-la-land-review-the-whitewashed-musical-about-jazz
Its the current year!
Del Mar has a great public beach where you can lay on sand or on well groomed grass.
DC probably scores a bit lower because of all the military in the area. (Both in general and because Murray’s test had several specific military questions.) It is also a bit more transient and has less old money and the transients coming from more of the country.
Steve, are you going to the march in Montana? You can catch a bus in the Bay Area if you need a ride:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/12/27/neo_nazis_are_planning_an_armed_march_against_jews_in_richard_spencer_s.html
Re “The return of the Bubble Quiz: The 100 zip codes with the thickest bubbles”, Charles Murray, December 29, 2016:
About:
I’ve known many people from Fremont. Fremont is essentially a commuter suburb of the core silicon valley area. If there is no traffic, maybe it is a 20 minute drive on 237 from Fremont to Mountain View and Sunnyvale, the Googleplex, Yahoo, Microsoft, and so on. (There’s almost always bad traffic, though.)
A large percentage of the Fremont population (perhaps larger than almost anywhere else in the US) consists of Indian and Chinese engineers (probably mostly Indian, Chinese seem to congregate in other places) who have done well enough to buy a house in one of the (relatively!) cheap places in silicon valley.
These days perhaps the majority of these folks are directly from India. That is, they attended Indian universities and they have not had any acculturation to the US in US universities. They tend to have strong social ties to other Indians, often work in almost entirely Indian groups, with Indian managers, and a good percentage of them will go back to India for a week to a month about once a year.
Many of these people work for the silicon valley multinationals we all know. These companies have large operations in India and China, as well as in the US. These days many of these multinationals have considerably larger engineering groups in India and China than the US. In practice it seems to be relatively easy for employees of these multinationals to move back and forth.
The old NUMI auto plant (which is now the Tesla plant) is in Fremont. It was once one of the scrappier little industrial towns in the area; there are still blue-collar whites. Of course these days there are a lot of hispanics and others who work in blue-collar silicon valley there.
A lot of people are in the same place with very little in common. It’s like a gold-rush town. Everyone’s there for the bucks, they barely recognize each other, outside their immediate circle.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094747/
Eastwood did it better 28 years ago.
Thelonius did it way better 70 years ago. Enjoy Monk and Coltrane:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/12/27/neo_nazis_are_planning_an_armed_march_against_jews_in_richard_spencer_s.htmlReplies: @Steve Sailer, @Desiderius
“We will be busing in skinheads from the Bay Area,”
That’s one of the more memorable lines of 2016.
Not sure many of them could afford to live there now.Replies: @Jefferson
Tarzana, CA looks pretty ordinary for SoCal. $73K HH income barely qualifies above poverty level. (It is about $58K nationally)
According to the 2000 U.S. Census, the racial composition was predominantly white (70.7%), followed by Asian (5%), and black or African American (3.6%). The Los Angeles Times considered the area as “moderately diverse”. Thirty-five percent of the population was foreign-born. Iran (24.2%) and Mexico (12.1%) were the most common foreign places of birth.
The percentage of divorced men and women was among the county’s highest. Some 9% of the residents were military veterans, considered high for the city of Los Angeles. The percentages of residents aged 50 and older were among the county’s highest. The median age, 38, was old when compared to the rest of the city and the county. The median household income in 2008 dollars was considered high, at $73,195.
Many, many Hispanics in Mt. Kisco.
Rockville Centre (whose residents insist on the British spelling) is nice, but it’s within a few miles of some distinctly non-nice communities such as Freeport and Roosevelt.
It's so bad that opposing high school football teams voluntarily cede their games to Roosevelt HS out of fear of appearing there.
Radio's Howard Stern's liberal parents forced him to attend Roosevelt HS. That's what made him what he is today (at least politically!).Replies: @prosa123, @Harry Baldwin
“… Westborough, MA (with an incredibly low mean of 18.7)…”
“Westborough is an exurb of Boston. It was home to Eli Whitney.”
-These days, Westborough is more known for its high concentration of Indians in the IT field.
Manhasset is on Long Island too. An executive vice president of a mutual fund company I once worked for lived there.
Rockville Centre is nice but has never seemed elite to me. It's certainly a town that has various income levels from what I can tell. It's not all mansions.Replies: @Dave Pinsen
La La Land is problematic:http://www.salon.com/2016/12/26/donald-trump-in-la-la-land-retro-romance-is-seductive-and-encourages-a-yearning-for-a-less-beautiful-past/http://www.wired.co.uk/article/la-la-land-review-the-whitewashed-musical-about-jazzReplies: @Jefferson, @Steve Sailer, @Daniel Chieh, @Altai
La La Land is racist for simply having White leads taking up the spotlight and Blacks in the background? Do Blacks know they are not the racial majority in The U.S? Everything is not going to revolve around them. This isn’t Haiti.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4ojGuA33X4Replies: @Jefferson, @Dan Hayes
A large percentage of the Fremont population (perhaps larger than almost anywhere else in the US) consists of Indian and Chinese engineers (probably mostly Indian, Chinese seem to congregate in other places) who have done well enough to buy a house in one of the (relatively!) cheap places in silicon valley.
These days perhaps the majority of these folks are directly from India. That is, they attended Indian universities and they have not had any acculturation to the US in US universities. They tend to have strong social ties to other Indians, often work in almost entirely Indian groups, with Indian managers, and a good percentage of them will go back to India for a week to a month about once a year.
Many of these people work for the silicon valley multinationals we all know. These companies have large operations in India and China, as well as in the US. These days many of these multinationals have considerably larger engineering groups in India and China than the US. In practice it seems to be relatively easy for employees of these multinationals to move back and forth.
The old NUMI auto plant (which is now the Tesla plant) is in Fremont. It was once one of the scrappier little industrial towns in the area; there are still blue-collar whites. Of course these days there are a lot of hispanics and others who work in blue-collar silicon valley there.
A lot of people are in the same place with very little in common. It's like a gold-rush town. Everyone's there for the bucks, they barely recognize each other, outside their immediate circle.Replies: @anon, @sanno tochigi, @Jacobite, @Old Palo Altan
So we need a new portmanteau/neologism like Chimerica & Chindia to describe Fremont; Chimerindia or Chimerindico if we include Amexico/Mexifornia in the mix.
According to the 2000 U.S. Census, the racial composition was predominantly white (70.7%), followed by Asian (5%), and black or African American (3.6%). The Los Angeles Times considered the area as "moderately diverse". Thirty-five percent of the population was foreign-born. Iran (24.2%) and Mexico (12.1%) were the most common foreign places of birth.
The percentage of divorced men and women was among the county's highest. Some 9% of the residents were military veterans, considered high for the city of Los Angeles. The percentages of residents aged 50 and older were among the county's highest. The median age, 38, was old when compared to the rest of the city and the county. The median household income in 2008 dollars was considered high, at $73,195.Replies: @Steve Sailer
Lots of Hollywood Hills, lots of Persians.
Plus it’s named after Tarzan!
I know he wants to get up to 15 people to get a bigger sampling for each place, but I think he should take the size of each place into consideration- ideally, he wants to get a representative sampling.
If he gets, say 10 people from Westborough, with a pop size of 18k, that may be more representative than 20 people from a zip code in NYC. Granted, NYC has multiple zip codes, but still….
"Westborough is an exurb of Boston. It was home to Eli Whitney."
-These days, Westborough is more known for its high concentration of Indians in the IT field.Replies: @Steve Sailer
So, Murray’s quiz tends to find zip codes full of Indians who listen to NPR but don’t know much about America. I wonder which zip code Raj Chetty lives in?
Jazz is very, very White in terms of who buys records and attends Jazz shows. This has translated into a lot more jazz musicians being well, White. Musicians like Grover Washington Jr. and Kamasi Washington yes aver very Black and in the case of Kamasi Washington very Afro-oriented. BUT, the hot guys in Jazz now are Brian Culbertson (playing drums, piano, trumpet, trombone, euphonium) or Chris Potter, the Brit saxophonist. And of course the best-selling and most lucrative career musician you might have heard about … name of Kenny G.
Black people are just not that interested in Jazz. As opposed to Rap. Eventually the musicians will resemble the audience, not the least of which is that mastery of instruments that are difficult — the trumpet (very hard), clarinet, alto sax, trombone, piano, requires a middle class background, lots of lessons, and free practice time as well as family support through the lean early years. The way that “journalism” is just a “respectable” career for young women from rich families living in expensive cities like NYC while being paid peanuts.
Any occupation that has a long deferred income (perhaps up to 8 years) before real earning will become very White or Asian very rapidly.
La La Land is problematic:http://www.salon.com/2016/12/26/donald-trump-in-la-la-land-retro-romance-is-seductive-and-encourages-a-yearning-for-a-less-beautiful-past/http://www.wired.co.uk/article/la-la-land-review-the-whitewashed-musical-about-jazzReplies: @Jefferson, @Steve Sailer, @Daniel Chieh, @Altai
Damn white guys like Damien Chazelle have too much talent.
Steve, is Del Mar where you went on vacation at friend’s beach house?
Steve: Have you ever written about Michael Wolff? Was just reading your linked 2013 Maxwell article. Wolff is very dismissive of the Maxwell sisters at fellow imploding dotcom in his book Burn Rate (great read by the way).
Yes, but he sold the house a few years ago, so no more free stays in the guest cottage out back.
Bay Aryans…….
Small world, I was born in Rockville Centre. My brother lived there until about 5 years ago. My uncle used to be on the police force. It’s nice, mostly white still, which is rare nowadays. Upper middle class, not rich. Good schools. They still have firefighters and cops living there, but most of them bought their houses long ago when they didn’t cost nearly a million dollars. You’re not allowed to park on the streets overnight. Still, they had a fair amount of low level (mostly property) crime, houses burglarized, etc. Some rough neighborhoods not too far away as another poster mentioned.
Agree and very astute. Many of those zip codes have substantial Asian Indian or other affluent immigrant households.
My grandpa grew up in Manhasset. His dad was a big shot editor for the New York Herald Tribune. He used to go hunting on the beach as a boy — with a shotgun. He also loved playing ice hockey and tinkering around with machines. I think I now know why he got out as soon as he could and never went back.
Fremont is in the East Bay, not Silicon Valley, and it’s rather grungy by Bay Area standards. Not Richmond, but the only places that bad on the Peninsula are East PA and South SF.
Fremont is full of million-dollar houses and has a top-notch school system. It's also got a lot of Afghan immigrants who would probably get a 2 on Murray's test.Replies: @Jacobite, @manton
Fremont is not ghetto and neither is South San Francisco. Not everything with the word South in it is as hood as South Gate, South Central Los Angeles, The South Bronx, and The South Side Of Chicago.Replies: @Marty
I have a suspicion you have never got off the freeway in Richmond. Comparing Richmond to Fremont in any way is like comparing Santa Monica and Watts.Replies: @Jefferson
La La Land is problematic:http://www.salon.com/2016/12/26/donald-trump-in-la-la-land-retro-romance-is-seductive-and-encourages-a-yearning-for-a-less-beautiful-past/http://www.wired.co.uk/article/la-la-land-review-the-whitewashed-musical-about-jazzReplies: @Jefferson, @Steve Sailer, @Daniel Chieh, @Altai
“…it’s a frustrating watch in 2016.”
Its the current year!
So what was the issue with DC?
Murray mentions that it was the dog that didn’t bark, but why?
Btw, I’ve always found Murray’s choice of where to live interesting since it’s not dissimilar to mine. He moved out to a very, very distant town in MD – though close enough to get into DC or inner suburbs once or twice a week without much trouble. I did the same thing except in VA. He probably lives 10 or 20 miles due north of me.
I couldn’t live in Arlington or nicer Fairfax in part because they’re stupidly expensive but mainly because they’re filled with D-bags.
Del Mar is where people go who aren’t quite rich enough to live in La Jolla, or want to live closer to the ocean than they would be in Rancho Santa Fe. A small minority of Del Martians (yes, that’s what people call the denizens of Del Mar) are people who are so desperate to live there that they will scrimp and save to live in a tiny apartment close to the beach. A great place if you can afford it though.
My bubble score is 61; thanks to the pointer to the online quiz. I gave up NPR years ago.
“So, Murray’s quiz tends to find zip codes full of Indians who listen to NPR but don’t know much about America.”
Some of the Indian engineers (and their wives, often also engineers) that I’ve know who have lived in Fremont are charmingly, humerously very, very “professional Americans”. They can often tell you far more about such things as the history of architecture or somesuch in the US than one would expect of native-born Americans. Meanwhile they sometimes completely miss the most basic local politics.
Sometimes it seems like there’s a competition to see who can pretend to be the “best Americans”. It can occasionally be a bit off-putting and does reflect a lot of attention paid into “how the system works”.
Trump strongly underperformed in all of the superzips in massachusetts relative to Romney. A representative example of this is Weston, MA which is has the highest median family income in the state at $192,563 per year. In 2012 Romney had only slightly less than Obama, but this year Trump only got 26% of the vote. As a side note on Weston, Obama held fundraisers there including at the house of democrat super fundraiser Alan Solomont in Weston, whom he later appointed ambassador to Spain.
I found out something similar in Connecticut, though I did it comparing Hillary to Obama in 2012.Overall, Obama got about 4% more of the CT vote than Hillary did. However, there were some towns that bucked the trend. The two towns that had the biggest increase in Hillary % of the vote compared to Obama % of the vote were New Caanan and Darien, where Hillary's percentage of the vote was 16% and 18% better than what Obama got in 2012. [For example, Obama got 34% of the vote in Darien in 2012, while Hillary got 52%.]
Not coincidentally, New Caanan and Darien have the largest per capita incomes in the state. President Goldman Sachs delivered for Darien and New Caanan, so they figured that Hillary would do the same.
There is a rather strong correlation between a town's per capita income and difference between Hillary's % of the vote compared to Obama's percentage of the vote: 0.8. The lower the per capita income, the greater will be the difference between Hillary's and Obama's percentage.Even Hartford, which gave Hillary 90% of its vote, didn't buck the trend.
http://www.sots.ct.gov/sots/lib/sots/electionservices/electionresults/2012/2012_election_results.pdf
http://www.courant.com/politics/elections/hc-ct-town-by-town-election-results-2016-htmlstory.html
Per capita information from Wikipedia
You sure you’re not confusing it with Hayward?
Fremont is full of million-dollar houses and has a top-notch school system. It’s also got a lot of Afghan immigrants who would probably get a 2 on Murray’s test.
I just drove through it the the other day and, granted, didn't look closely, but it didn't look that great.
I found an online version of the bubble quiz and took it. I got a 27. I’m “a second generation upper middle class person who gets out a lot”, my score is a little on the high side for that, but I’ve served in the military.
I also may have cheated on two questions. I spent a year on an American army base in Kuwait. I counted that as “living in an American community outside of a metropolitan area with a population under 50,000”. I also spent a year living in pre-gentrified Jersey City, and guessed that most of my neighbors didn’t have college degrees, but could well be wrong about that. But I rarely watch TV or movies, which makes up for this.
I didn't like those pop culture questions either because I don't consume the stuff. I also didn't like the restaurant question as I don't eat out much. Also, why no questions about gun culture? There's a good indicator of "bubble " mentality of any. Score 45.Replies: @Chrisnonymous
Tarzana?!
I got to know too much abut that community when I had to evict them. The low bubble scores don't surprise me due to their insularity.Replies: @Old Palo Altan
A large percentage of the Fremont population (perhaps larger than almost anywhere else in the US) consists of Indian and Chinese engineers (probably mostly Indian, Chinese seem to congregate in other places) who have done well enough to buy a house in one of the (relatively!) cheap places in silicon valley.
These days perhaps the majority of these folks are directly from India. That is, they attended Indian universities and they have not had any acculturation to the US in US universities. They tend to have strong social ties to other Indians, often work in almost entirely Indian groups, with Indian managers, and a good percentage of them will go back to India for a week to a month about once a year.
Many of these people work for the silicon valley multinationals we all know. These companies have large operations in India and China, as well as in the US. These days many of these multinationals have considerably larger engineering groups in India and China than the US. In practice it seems to be relatively easy for employees of these multinationals to move back and forth.
The old NUMI auto plant (which is now the Tesla plant) is in Fremont. It was once one of the scrappier little industrial towns in the area; there are still blue-collar whites. Of course these days there are a lot of hispanics and others who work in blue-collar silicon valley there.
A lot of people are in the same place with very little in common. It's like a gold-rush town. Everyone's there for the bucks, they barely recognize each other, outside their immediate circle.Replies: @anon, @sanno tochigi, @Jacobite, @Old Palo Altan
I would agree with the comment about Fremont. Surprisingly there is a suburb in Bangalore, India where those who live in Fremont also all congregate when bouncing back and forth from their expat assignments at the big tech companies. Engineering in India has now drifted to the lower middle class/lower classes from the upper classes of the 60s. Thus todays immigrants come in knowing far less about the US than earlier generations and with greater difficulties to acclimatize. The successful older generation tends to live in Atherton/Los Altos Hills/Palo Alto/Menlo Park rather than the East Bay (Fremont)
Off topic but iStevey:
The Baffler has published a lengthy and cynical piece on the word “vibrant” — but it’s not cynical enough.
http://thebaffler.com/salvos/dead-end-on-shakin-street
“Fremont is in the East Bay, not Silicon Valley, and it’s rather grungy by Bay Area standards. Not Richmond, but the only places that bad on the Peninsula are East PA and South SF.”
Fremont is not ghetto and neither is South San Francisco. Not everything with the word South in it is as hood as South Gate, South Central Los Angeles, The South Bronx, and The South Side Of Chicago.
Rockville Centre (whose residents insist on the British spelling) is nice, but it's within a few miles of some distinctly non-nice communities such as Freeport and Roosevelt.Replies: @Dan Hayes
Roosevelt Long Island is a very, very bad place!
It’s so bad that opposing high school football teams voluntarily cede their games to Roosevelt HS out of fear of appearing there.
Radio’s Howard Stern’s liberal parents forced him to attend Roosevelt HS. That’s what made him what he is today (at least politically!).
I also may have cheated on two questions. I spent a year on an American army base in Kuwait. I counted that as "living in an American community outside of a metropolitan area with a population under 50,000". I also spent a year living in pre-gentrified Jersey City, and guessed that most of my neighbors didn't have college degrees, but could well be wrong about that. But I rarely watch TV or movies, which makes up for this.Replies: @newrouter
” But I rarely watch TV or movies, which makes up for this.”
I didn’t like those pop culture questions either because I don’t consume the stuff. I also didn’t like the restaurant question as I don’t eat out much. Also, why no questions about gun culture? There’s a good indicator of “bubble ” mentality of any. Score 45.
It's difficult to figure out what the quiz is trying to capture--current bubble state or overall lifetime bubble.
My father is 1st gen upper middle class (from working class background) with much different tastes. I'm downwardly mobile, tastes are more upper middle class.
I scored a 25.
However, I think my overall lifetime bubble is not very thick because of the things my father exposed me to. For example, I got points for having seen Star Wars movie and participating in a parade, but it's my father who's responsible for both those re my childhood. Now that I'm an adult, I don't participate in parades, and my taste in entertainment is generally less low-brow than Star Wars. Also, I got points for taking a long-distance bus, but this was because my parents believed they couldn't afford a plane ticket when I came back from university (they could have).
My point is that if my father hadn't been 1st gen, my score would be much lower, but it reflects my lifetime experiences, not my lifestyle now.
I can't decide if I'm happy about my upbringing or not.
Took it. Scored 66.
The Baffler has published a lengthy and cynical piece on the word "vibrant" -- but it's not cynical enough.
http://thebaffler.com/salvos/dead-end-on-shakin-streetReplies: @newrouter
“The Baffler has published a lengthy”
piece wanting big philanthropy/gov’t solutions to problems best solved through subsidiarity.
Fremont is not ghetto and neither is South San Francisco. Not everything with the word South in it is as hood as South Gate, South Central Los Angeles, The South Bronx, and The South Side Of Chicago.Replies: @Marty
If Steve ever gets serious about playing golf, not just admiring the great venues, he might be interested in learning that South San Francisco is home to the Michelangelo of golf club customization. His name is Joe Kwok, and club hoes fly in from all over the country to “get kwokked.”
One problem with the “zip codes full of Indians who listen to NPR but don’t know much about America” theory is that he filters out people who don’t have valid zip codes at age 10. So they’d have to be second generation Indian-Americans.
The zip code I grew up in is a lot richer now relative to the rest of the country than it was when I was ten years old. I wonder if he takes that into account.
And yes, my growing up zip code has gone off the charts wealthy. When I lived there in the 70's and 80's it was normal suburbia and now it's hoity-toity, fancy-schmancy. Which says absolutely nothing about me and my bubble.
My bubble score is 61; thanks to the pointer to the online quiz. I gave up NPR years ago.Replies: @pyrrhus, @anon
Del Mar has always been one of our favorite towns in CA, we go there to stay near the beach at least a couple of times a year. It’s an easy drive from AZ.
According to my amateur sleuthing through public records, Mr. Chetty used to live in a lovely house near the Radcliffe quad which he sold for $4 million in February, to move out to Stanford. Not surprisingly it’s in one of Charles Murray’s top 100 bubble zips.
It also appears that Mr. Chetty currently lives in another one of the top 100 bubble zips, although this is less certain. If what I’m seeing is correct the middle school for Mr. Chetty’s district is named after an iSteve favorite.
Moonlight is the flick with the official SJW stamp of approval.It’s both Black and Gay:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/oct/29/moonlight-movie-barry-jenkins-black-gay
Moonlight was a television show starring Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd. So the remake of this White Heterosexual show is now a Black Homosexual movie? Cultural appropriation much.Replies: @syonredux
94305 (Palo Alto, CA)
I read the comments on the Slate article. They don’t seem to be getting the joke.
Think " Night of the living dead": the zombies are everywhere.
“I read the comments on the Slate article. They don’t seem to be getting the joke.”
Think ” Night of the living dead”: the zombies are everywhere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4ojGuA33X4Replies: @Jefferson, @Dan Hayes
“Moonlight is the flick with the official SJW stamp of approval.It’s both Black and Gay:”
Moonlight was a television show starring Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd. So the remake of this White Heterosexual show is now a Black Homosexual movie? Cultural appropriation much.
Tarzana has been in transition for decades. It used to have aerospace and other people who worked in Woodland Hills, or commuted to the west side. Then Persians began moving in, and into the eastern part of neighboring Encino, when they could not afford to live closer to Teherangeles (Westwood, now the proud home of Persian Square which is Westwood Boulevard from Wilshire south to Pico).
I got to know too much abut that community when I had to evict them. The low bubble scores don’t surprise me due to their insularity.
My friends in Holmby had a Persian family move in behind them a decade ago. At his first meeting with my friends, the new owner made it clear that he was not a Persian "of the Jewish sort".Replies: @Ivy
Speaking of Murray’s Super Zips.
In the current year that’s about to end, I moved from a zip code with a score of 90 to one with a score of 79. Now, I don’t know what the standard deviation is of his original Super Zips research, but I know each zip code has a whole number score from 1 to 99, with 95 or above being a Super Zip. Going on a rule of thumb that you subtract bottom from top and divide by six to get a quick and dirty estimate of the standard deviation, we get (99-1)/6 = 16.33. Which means I moved down in the world by (11/16.33), or two-thirds, of a SD. That’s not chump change. Yet, I don’t really see or feel that much of a difference between where I moved from and where I moved to. Probably the reason my old zip code has a higher Murray Score than my current one is that the Murray Score is a mashup of college degree attainment rate and household income. My current zip code has a lower college graduation rate than my old one, because it’s close to Washington University, and therefore during the school year, has a lot of students in rental units. Meaning students, not graduates. The older, non-college, population, tends to be upper middle aged to elderly working-to-middle class, again, a lower college graduation rate.
DC probably scores a bit lower because of all the military in the area. (Both in general and because Murray's test had several specific military questions.) It is also a bit more transient and has less old money and the transients coming from more of the country.Replies: @Jacobite
A certain very ritzy San Diego neighborhood immediately to the south of Del Mar has waaaay better surf breaks.
A large percentage of the Fremont population (perhaps larger than almost anywhere else in the US) consists of Indian and Chinese engineers (probably mostly Indian, Chinese seem to congregate in other places) who have done well enough to buy a house in one of the (relatively!) cheap places in silicon valley.
These days perhaps the majority of these folks are directly from India. That is, they attended Indian universities and they have not had any acculturation to the US in US universities. They tend to have strong social ties to other Indians, often work in almost entirely Indian groups, with Indian managers, and a good percentage of them will go back to India for a week to a month about once a year.
Many of these people work for the silicon valley multinationals we all know. These companies have large operations in India and China, as well as in the US. These days many of these multinationals have considerably larger engineering groups in India and China than the US. In practice it seems to be relatively easy for employees of these multinationals to move back and forth.
The old NUMI auto plant (which is now the Tesla plant) is in Fremont. It was once one of the scrappier little industrial towns in the area; there are still blue-collar whites. Of course these days there are a lot of hispanics and others who work in blue-collar silicon valley there.
A lot of people are in the same place with very little in common. It's like a gold-rush town. Everyone's there for the bucks, they barely recognize each other, outside their immediate circle.Replies: @anon, @sanno tochigi, @Jacobite, @Old Palo Altan
Compared to the Peninsula, Fremont is a dump.
This quiz never quite range true to me, because it is based on the obsolete idea that there is still a dominant monoculture in which only a small elite declines to participate.
Take the list of TV shows, for instance – it is true that supposedly uncool shows such as NCIS and The Big Bang Theory get much higher ratings than elite-approved shows such as The Americans or Inside Amy Schumer, but no TV show comes anywhere close to being watched by a majority of Americans. The top-rated shows have ratings that would have been cancellation-level in the 1970s. On his more substantial questions, the days when a majority of Americans smoked cigarettes, belonged to a union, or worked in a factory are long gone. Service economy store clerks do not feel pain at the end of the day, but they are hardly in the elite bubble.
The top-rated shows have ratings that would have been cancellation-level in the 1970s."
That's because the number of channels today on cable television is well into the hundreds.
You are not going to get over 125 million Americans at the same time watching the same show like what happened with the final episode of M.A.S.H in 1983. How many channels were available in 1983? Only a handful, certainly nothing like today in 2016/2017.Replies: @James Kabala
Fremont is full of million-dollar houses and has a top-notch school system. It's also got a lot of Afghan immigrants who would probably get a 2 on Murray's test.Replies: @Jacobite, @manton
Million dollar houses are a dime a dozen in the Bay Area. Fremont has no class at all and the physical surroundings are nowhere near as nice as Kensington, Mill Valley, or Piedmont let alone Atherton or Portola Valley.
Speaking of which, Fremont isn’t even as nice as Tarzana.
Fremont is full of million-dollar houses and has a top-notch school system. It's also got a lot of Afghan immigrants who would probably get a 2 on Murray's test.Replies: @Jacobite, @manton
$1 mil in the Bay Area these days isn’t even a starter home. I’ve known a few people who were SV commuters across Dumbarton who lived in Fremont and said it sucked, the services sucked, the police are terrible, and the schools not much better. They all moved to Texas.
I just drove through it the the other day and, granted, didn’t look closely, but it didn’t look that great.
The zip code I grew up in is a lot richer now relative to the rest of the country than it was when I was ten years old. I wonder if he takes that into account.Replies: @stillCARealist
Agree on both points. I really doubt Indian Americans are responding to this test. They do their work and then go home to do family and friends cultural Indian stuff.
And yes, my growing up zip code has gone off the charts wealthy. When I lived there in the 70’s and 80’s it was normal suburbia and now it’s hoity-toity, fancy-schmancy. Which says absolutely nothing about me and my bubble.
I used to work in Westborough. I now think Murray is wasting his time.
La La Land is problematic:http://www.salon.com/2016/12/26/donald-trump-in-la-la-land-retro-romance-is-seductive-and-encourages-a-yearning-for-a-less-beautiful-past/http://www.wired.co.uk/article/la-la-land-review-the-whitewashed-musical-about-jazzReplies: @Jefferson, @Steve Sailer, @Daniel Chieh, @Altai
I didn't like those pop culture questions either because I don't consume the stuff. I also didn't like the restaurant question as I don't eat out much. Also, why no questions about gun culture? There's a good indicator of "bubble " mentality of any. Score 45.Replies: @Chrisnonymous
I agree about the guns.
It’s difficult to figure out what the quiz is trying to capture–current bubble state or overall lifetime bubble.
My father is 1st gen upper middle class (from working class background) with much different tastes. I’m downwardly mobile, tastes are more upper middle class.
I scored a 25.
However, I think my overall lifetime bubble is not very thick because of the things my father exposed me to. For example, I got points for having seen Star Wars movie and participating in a parade, but it’s my father who’s responsible for both those re my childhood. Now that I’m an adult, I don’t participate in parades, and my taste in entertainment is generally less low-brow than Star Wars. Also, I got points for taking a long-distance bus, but this was because my parents believed they couldn’t afford a plane ticket when I came back from university (they could have).
My point is that if my father hadn’t been 1st gen, my score would be much lower, but it reflects my lifetime experiences, not my lifestyle now.
I can’t decide if I’m happy about my upbringing or not.
I think you missed the point. It’s not whether or not you watch what majority Americans watch but whether you have been (are) exposed to anything outside your elite bubble. It doesn’t matter that the thing is American monoculture but that it is something that is not elite culture.
Del Mar is a nice beach for rich people with small grandchildren because there’s a reef that keeps the surf from getting very rough. But therefore it’s not very exciting for surfing.
This 30-minute documentary compares Rockville Centre’s South Side High School, Howard Stern’s alma mater, to nearby Wyandanch High School, nothing surprising given the demographics. LINK
Del Mar is good to surf in the winter.
Pretty deeply bubbled at 25 here in bubbly Berserkeley.
I’m certainly surprised to see Fremont rated as it is, for reasons others have discussed. Whether or not it is part of Silicon Valley is debatable. If so, it is on the extreme NE corner.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/12/27/neo_nazis_are_planning_an_armed_march_against_jews_in_richard_spencer_s.htmlReplies: @Steve Sailer, @Desiderius
He doesn’t need to be there physically, he controls Spencer and Anglin via a giant lidless eye on top of his tower in LA.
FYI, the Bay Area had a sizable WN/WP skinhead scene in the 80s&90s.
Not sure many of them could afford to live there now.
68. The TV shows nailed me. We do Netflix and PBS.
“One problem with the “zip codes full of Indians who listen to NPR but don’t know much about America” theory is that he filters out people who don’t have valid zip codes at age 10. So they’d have to be second generation Indian-Americans.”
I’m not sure I see a problem. All the Indians I can recall who owned houses in Fremont had kids; most of the kids would probably be past high school age now. A 2-professional Indian family living in Fremont will have kids, it’s almost one of the reasons they are here. (They often will bring over grandparents also to babysit.) I’ve worked with a number of these kids, hired out of local community colleges and places like Santa Clara, San Jose State, as well as the Cals. They are pretty similar to their parents, the size of their local community, and their connections to India (traveling back to visit extended family and such), mean their parent’s community is their primary community.
I would think it’s pretty easy for an Indian kid to grow up in Fremont without knowing a great deal about white America.
From the wikipedia page on Fremont, California:
African-americans are thin on the ground.
So “american whites” are around a quarter of the population. Over half the population is “asian” (including Indian); about a fifth the population is Indian.
Why wouldn’t an Indian(-american) kid grow up in a place like this and not know as much about white america as white american kids do, on average?
It's so bad that opposing high school football teams voluntarily cede their games to Roosevelt HS out of fear of appearing there.
Radio's Howard Stern's liberal parents forced him to attend Roosevelt HS. That's what made him what he is today (at least politically!).Replies: @prosa123, @Harry Baldwin
“Roosevelt Long Island is a very, very bad place!”
While Roosevelt hasn’t improved any, it doesn’t get as much attention as in past years. Today the center of badness on Long Island seems to have shifted farther east to Brentwood and Central Islip. Though Central Islip has recently gotten some upscale housing developments, built on the site of a former funny farm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4ojGuA33X4Replies: @Jefferson, @Dan Hayes
I really miss “In Living Color”. But it still amazes me after all these years (1990-1995 production) how the Wayans Family got away with what they did!
Bonus question: who was the Fly Girl who went on to be Real Famous?Replies: @biz, @MarkinLA
Same here. I haven’t watched TV in decades.
Fremont is in Silicon Valley by any non wannabe definition. “Silicon Valley” is not a synonym for the Peninsula.
I have a suspicion you have never got off the freeway in Richmond. Comparing Richmond to Fremont in any way is like comparing Santa Monica and Watts.
I have a suspicion you have never got off the freeway in Richmond. Comparing Richmond to Fremont in any way is like comparing Santa Monica and Watts."
Fremont is what India would look like if India was a 1st World country.Replies: @Jacobite
“no TV show comes anywhere close to being watched by a majority of Americans.
The top-rated shows have ratings that would have been cancellation-level in the 1970s.”
That’s because the number of channels today on cable television is well into the hundreds.
You are not going to get over 125 million Americans at the same time watching the same show like what happened with the final episode of M.A.S.H in 1983. How many channels were available in 1983? Only a handful, certainly nothing like today in 2016/2017.
Black people are just not that interested in Jazz. As opposed to Rap. Eventually the musicians will resemble the audience, not the least of which is that mastery of instruments that are difficult -- the trumpet (very hard), clarinet, alto sax, trombone, piano, requires a middle class background, lots of lessons, and free practice time as well as family support through the lean early years. The way that "journalism" is just a "respectable" career for young women from rich families living in expensive cities like NYC while being paid peanuts.
Any occupation that has a long deferred income (perhaps up to 8 years) before real earning will become very White or Asian very rapidly.Replies: @Harry Baldwin
No only jazz, but the blues. I have a station on my cable package that plays blues non-stop and a lot of the best blues music of the last 20 years is by white singers. Granted, they sound pretty black.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWLAAzOBoBI
It's so bad that opposing high school football teams voluntarily cede their games to Roosevelt HS out of fear of appearing there.
Radio's Howard Stern's liberal parents forced him to attend Roosevelt HS. That's what made him what he is today (at least politically!).Replies: @prosa123, @Harry Baldwin
A Hillary Clinton supporter?
Yes, Howard Stern is a Hillary supporter. Can it be attributed to the fact that he was beaten up every day during his sojourn at Roosevelt High School? A little head pummeling will do wonders for ones mental faculties!
In contrast to 50 years ago:
Just sports for me. Even that, I used to just go to a bar. But I just relented and got cable and a box (I mean window, what do they call the flat ones now?) Good to watch the Skins at home occasionally.
To save my soul, I cannot figure out how so many of you got high scores. (Is claiming a high score a humble brag, btw?) My score was in the low single digits—I can’t even bring myself to quote it exactly. I did get tripped up by the “parent’s occupation” thing. My father was a military officer, but also a licensed engineer with an MS from MIT. There now, that’s bragging. I outdid him, too, at least in the education department. There now, that’s bragging.
BTW, I’m fully aware that there are few sadder things than bragging on the internet. But which kind of bragging is the saddest? I’m just bragging about being out-of-touch. Although I think white people are just fine, I’m sort of glad to be generally out of touch these days. Is that so wrong?
I did bomb the TV and military sections.
We are simply each of us the way we are.
I found a site which gave both Murray's original test, and then an "updated" one, both with 25 questions.
I got a 1 on the original test, and a 5 on the later one.
And I know why: for the first (and the second ) I knew two of the military ranks; for the second, I also had seen one of the films listed, Jurassic Park. I am a sucker for any film about dinosaurs, and have watched each Jurassic film as it came along with, sadly, diminishing enthusiasm.
Grew up the son of a non-college dad and a schoolteacher mom in a small Rust Belt town. Maybe 10% of my HS classmates finished a BS. I have a STEM PhD from our state univ where I worked my way thru undergrad doing construction. I was the only US citizen out of about 15 grad students in my department. I worked on the Space Shuttle and my Erdos number is 4. If I didn't exist, Steve would have to invent me.
Not sure many of them could afford to live there now.Replies: @Jefferson
“FYI, the Bay Area had a sizable WN/WP skinhead scene in the 80s&90s.”
No they didn’t. The Bay Area does not have pockets of Right Wingers. The whole Bay Area from the north to the south to the east is all very Left Wing.
There is however a White nationalist scene in rural areas of the Sacramento metropolitan area.
"No they didn’t. The Bay Area does not have pockets of Right Wingers. "
Watch your tenses, bud.
PS-Yes, Sacto had a large skin scene back then as well.
I have a suspicion you have never got off the freeway in Richmond. Comparing Richmond to Fremont in any way is like comparing Santa Monica and Watts.Replies: @Jefferson
“Fremont is in Silicon Valley by any non wannabe definition. “Silicon Valley” is not a synonym for the Peninsula.
I have a suspicion you have never got off the freeway in Richmond. Comparing Richmond to Fremont in any way is like comparing Santa Monica and Watts.”
Fremont is what India would look like if India was a 1st World country.
Survey overstates the degree of cultural elitism in these affluent areas, likely from sampling bias. Cultural values are transmuted by both parents, not just the male breadwinners that take the quiz but also their better-halves, the inclusion or exclusion of which skews the results from a practical standpoint.
For affluent two-parent household in bubble-prone zips, the woman likely works, which tends to reign in cultural insularity. This leads to two earners who fall in the 10-30 range. Now sample equivalent affluent two-parent, single-earner home: you find dads falling in 10-30 range, and moms falling in the oblivious 1-5 range.
Seems to also coincide with personal experience as well. Children from affluent households who exude the worst qualities of Murray’s bubbles, typically had mothers, who were perhaps academically-accomplished in younger years, but from 27-onward stayed at home.
Lincoln, MA
Back in the mid ’80s, I was working at a large Rt. 128-area government defense contractor. One night I met an attractive early-20s young lady in a local nightclub. She lived in Lincoln, MA; the daughter of an MIT professor. She had me over to her parents’ house a couple of times – a very nice, leafy, quiet, well-off community. The houses were mostly built in the early 1900s, small, but very nicely kept. Back then, the house was probably worth $250K; which the prof probably purchased for less than $100K ten years prior. Today, it’s a million dollar home. High property taxes, but regularly one of the best school districts in the nation.
I quickly learned that the young lady was home on extended break from UC-Boulder to rehab for a vicious cocaine habit. A couple of years later, I ran into her waiting tables in a local chain restaurant.
The top-rated shows have ratings that would have been cancellation-level in the 1970s."
That's because the number of channels today on cable television is well into the hundreds.
You are not going to get over 125 million Americans at the same time watching the same show like what happened with the final episode of M.A.S.H in 1983. How many channels were available in 1983? Only a handful, certainly nothing like today in 2016/2017.Replies: @James Kabala
I am well aware of the reason why. I never said that it was mysterious, just that it was true.
About Fremont: It is not Silicon Valley, and not one of the elite white places that Murray thinks he’s dealing with. It is across the bridge from Silicon Valley, and populated by Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Afghan families squeezing in to ranch houses, some of whose fathers commute to Silicon Valley. The reason it scores as such a “bubble” is because these are first generation Americans who have no idea what NASCAR is and don’t care, but not because they are too high class for it.
But then it is less “Real America vs. the Bubble” and more “my bubble vs. your bubble” – and what makes one bubble more pure or authentic than the other?
If nothing else, I'd bet Trump's election proved the premise of an elite bubble--I'd wager none of the superzips were won by Trump.
The LA Times precinct maps are interesting:
http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-california-neighborhood-election-results/
To find a Trump precinct in LA, you have to go to Simi Valley, north Orange County, Glendora or a speck of Palos Verdes.
In the Bay Area, to find a Trump precinct it appears that you have to go over to the Central Valley. Most of the closer ones are ‘red herrings’ so to speak with fewer than five votes cast.
Having been raised and educated in SuperZIPs I can understand how they create the bubble among their residents. You look around and everything seems to be working. Everyone you see seems to be winning and doing OK. What’s not to like? Only when you exit the bubble to you start to see the real costs that Progressive Conventional Wisdom imposes among the left half of the bell curve who lack the cognitive, social, financial and cultural resources of the elite.
It's not so much the left half anymore. It's more like the left 80%.
On the other coast, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore all have many precincts and even whole wards that the GOP regularly wins, including Trump. I see nothing in California.
Agree completely. ILC was hilarious, and Men on Film was my favorite. I too was surprised they got away with it, though I am sure being black shielded them somewhat.
Bonus question: who was the Fly Girl who went on to be Real Famous?
A little. Probably safe to deduct five or ten points from any self-reported test score.
If you grew up in the Midwest/70s you get some freebies there, but I was also “stationed” in some small towns as a young manufacturing engineer and decided I might as well get involved in the local communities (churches, sports, civic/arts orgs) while I was there and ended up liking it.
I did bomb the TV and military sections.
Those who would otherwise make good leaders and are already familiar with the non-elite culture tend to pick up a lot of the elite stuff naturally. Certainly the fake elite stuff is everywhere.
Manhasset is known for producing lacrosse players, so it’s definitely an upscale town.
Rockville Centre is nice but has never seemed elite to me. It’s certainly a town that has various income levels from what I can tell. It’s not all mansions.
“Now there’s trouble busin’ in from outta state”
Bruce Sprinsteen as performed by Levon Helm
Willie Mays vs Mickey Mantle
Bob Dylan vs Van Morrison
Tonya Harding vs Tanya Gersh — tough broads, both.
“…“zip codes full of Indians who listen to NPR but don’t know much about America” theory…”
I’ve been in the cars of Indians who own houses in Fremont numerous times, going out to lunch, going to business meetings, and so on. And they really do listen a lot to NPR. Occasionally conversations will occur based on things said on NPR. Many of them do want to learn a lot about the US and stay up on things as much as possible.
“…So “american whites” are around a quarter of the population…”
This is probably slightly wrong, a larger proportion of the non-hispanic whites in Fremont are probably immigrants from europe, including eastern europe and the balkans. So the actual number of american-born whites is lower than a quarter. I’ve known some of the american-born whites who have stories about their parent’s generation farms, about how much of the south bay was orchards.
“…They do their work and then go home to do family and friends cultural Indian stuff.”
I’ve been in houses of Indians in Fremont on a number of occasions, met their kids and so on. They and their kids seem to spend a lot of time working on things like getting the kids into the UCs. Because of their numerous ears on the ground, connections, and english, they are often good at taking advantage of programs such as UC summer sessions/programs for high school students, things that help. The kids are in their own milieu, like living on a military base, in particular when including traveling back to India ever so often.
“…“Fremont is in Silicon Valley by any non wannabe definition…”
It’s the 237 connector that makes Fremont such a part of silicon valley, along with the location of Cisco, Seagate, and other large multinationals that skew towards hardware and are located around the 880 corridor.
“Fremont is what India would look like if India was a 1st World country.”
Apt observation. Politically they are all to the left of the Democrats, but that might just be normal voting their interests. Stay up late enough with some of them and you start hearing about how Indian civilization must be the best because it’s lasted the longest and some of that new-age Hindu stuff. There are Indian PhDs from US schools who take that plenty seriously.
It’s a bubble.
As for the orchards: absolutely true. I can remember driving from Palo Alto to Carmel for our occasional holidays there c. 1956 - 1960 and revelling in the beauty of the many orange and other orchards we would pass through before the long haul over the hills to Santa Cruz.
The problem is that Murray, who is bubble wrapped despite his best efforts, has devised a quiz that only works for white people. What many here is observing is that high Asian immigration areas will also get bubble scores but aren’t rich elites. They are, at best, reasonably wealthy professionals. And Asians tend to lie about their net worth and education status. There is just no way that all the Indians I meet have college degrees. I meet Hindu parents living in these high SES areas that can barely speak English and work in a 7-11. I meet Chinese parents who bus dishes.
Any test showing Fremont more of a bubble than Palo Alto is akin to saying that Queens is more bubbly than Manhattan.
I sent Charles Murray a note suggesting that he look up voting rates for each city. Any town that has a 50% or lower voting rate is not a bubble place, because rich whites vote.
For affluent two-parent household in bubble-prone zips, the woman likely works, which tends to reign in cultural insularity. This leads to two earners who fall in the 10-30 range. Now sample equivalent affluent two-parent, single-earner home: you find dads falling in 10-30 range, and moms falling in the oblivious 1-5 range.
Seems to also coincide with personal experience as well. Children from affluent households who exude the worst qualities of Murray's bubbles, typically had mothers, who were perhaps academically-accomplished in younger years, but from 27-onward stayed at home.Replies: @Desiderius
Traditionally “non-working” mothers were the community builders and would be the opposite of oblivious. “Stay-at-home” is a misnomer.
Harry Baldwin:
Yes, Howard Stern is a Hillary supporter. Can it be attributed to the fact that he was beaten up every day during his sojourn at Roosevelt High School? A little head pummeling will do wonders for ones mental faculties!
Bonus question: who was the Fly Girl who went on to be Real Famous?Replies: @biz, @MarkinLA
J-Lo!
Bonus question: who was the Fly Girl who went on to be Real Famous?Replies: @biz, @MarkinLA
Jenni from the block – Jennifer Lopez.
http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-california-neighborhood-election-results/
To find a Trump precinct in LA, you have to go to Simi Valley, north Orange County, Glendora or a speck of Palos Verdes.
In the Bay Area, to find a Trump precinct it appears that you have to go over to the Central Valley. Most of the closer ones are 'red herrings' so to speak with fewer than five votes cast.
Having been raised and educated in SuperZIPs I can understand how they create the bubble among their residents. You look around and everything seems to be working. Everyone you see seems to be winning and doing OK. What's not to like? Only when you exit the bubble to you start to see the real costs that Progressive Conventional Wisdom imposes among the left half of the bell curve who lack the cognitive, social, financial and cultural resources of the elite.Replies: @Boomstick, @Andrew
“among the left half of the bell curve”
It’s not so much the left half anymore. It’s more like the left 80%.
To hell with Charles Murray’s “social bubble survey,” dammit! The only bubbles that matter are the asset bubbles created by the monetary extremism emanating from the privately-controlled Federal Reserve Bank.
There is a global financial implosion on the way. Stocks, bonds and real estate will be crushed. Murray’s upper middle class oafs are the bastards who have benefited the most from the asset bubbles created by the Fed. Volckerize those Upper Middle Class Murray Bubble Sonofabitches with 8 percent interest rates and watch the action.
Andrew Jackson populists used to understand the simple issue of central banking. East coast banker rats were controlling the money supply. Trans-Appalachian planters and farmers were getting hammered by sneaky scumbags such as that Nicholas Biddle guy. Murray should know, he has Scotch-Irish ancestry.
I am noticing that Steve Sailer doesn’t write much about central banking, why is that? Monetary extremism and mass immigration are the two big issues of our time and Sailer says zilch about central banking.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
I got to know too much abut that community when I had to evict them. The low bubble scores don't surprise me due to their insularity.Replies: @Old Palo Altan
Last September, during my triennial visit to old California haunts, I would drive the ten minutes from Holmby at about eight each morning to buy breakfast pastries at the Paris Bakery, now slap dab in the middle of Persian Square. Funny writing everywhere, but otherwise not so very different from ten or twenty years ago.
My friends in Holmby had a Persian family move in behind them a decade ago. At his first meeting with my friends, the new owner made it clear that he was not a Persian “of the Jewish sort”.
Why is it in any way bragging to admit to a low score?
We are simply each of us the way we are.
I found a site which gave both Murray’s original test, and then an “updated” one, both with 25 questions.
I got a 1 on the original test, and a 5 on the later one.
And I know why: for the first (and the second ) I knew two of the military ranks; for the second, I also had seen one of the films listed, Jurassic Park. I am a sucker for any film about dinosaurs, and have watched each Jurassic film as it came along with, sadly, diminishing enthusiasm.
A large percentage of the Fremont population (perhaps larger than almost anywhere else in the US) consists of Indian and Chinese engineers (probably mostly Indian, Chinese seem to congregate in other places) who have done well enough to buy a house in one of the (relatively!) cheap places in silicon valley.
These days perhaps the majority of these folks are directly from India. That is, they attended Indian universities and they have not had any acculturation to the US in US universities. They tend to have strong social ties to other Indians, often work in almost entirely Indian groups, with Indian managers, and a good percentage of them will go back to India for a week to a month about once a year.
Many of these people work for the silicon valley multinationals we all know. These companies have large operations in India and China, as well as in the US. These days many of these multinationals have considerably larger engineering groups in India and China than the US. In practice it seems to be relatively easy for employees of these multinationals to move back and forth.
The old NUMI auto plant (which is now the Tesla plant) is in Fremont. It was once one of the scrappier little industrial towns in the area; there are still blue-collar whites. Of course these days there are a lot of hispanics and others who work in blue-collar silicon valley there.
A lot of people are in the same place with very little in common. It's like a gold-rush town. Everyone's there for the bucks, they barely recognize each other, outside their immediate circle.Replies: @anon, @sanno tochigi, @Jacobite, @Old Palo Altan
What I don’t understand is how such people would even have known about Murray’s test, much less have felt compelled to take it.
As much as some like to pronounce US elites as living in a bubble, bubble might be inapt. The quiz appears to identify socio-cultural isolation. As the quiz score scale is 1-100, with (IIRC) a mean/median of 45 and a SD of ~15, suggesting those scoring 60 and 30 would have nothing in common. The elite 100 superzips implies that those that “run” the country have little in common with the country at-large.
If nothing else, I’d bet Trump’s election proved the premise of an elite bubble–I’d wager none of the superzips were won by Trump.
No humblebrag here (I said earlier that my score was 61, and I was brutally honest in my answers). It’s very simple in my case: I score relatively high on Murray’s bubble quiz because I grew up in a very small rural town that was mostly populated with blue collar types and their families (including mine; neither of my parents went to college); although I did earn a college degree in a demanding field (engineering), I have worked jobs that were physically demanding, and (unlike a few other people I know with a similar background, including my sibling) I am not ashamed of my background (e.g., I know that Jimmie Johnson is a NASCAR driver, even though I don’t follow NASCAR). I choose to live in what many would term a coastal enclave, and have no desire to return to my roots, but I am well aware that I don’t really fit in here in some ways – for example, at my highly technically demanding job, I know nobody else among my immediate circle of coworkers whose parents were not college graduates. So I fit Murray’s classification as someone who is only slightly removed from the blue collar circles.
I got curious and took the test and got a 65. Half of my family has been “professionals” for hundreds of years but a succession of single mothers will do things to your background. Moreover I have no problem living in a working class burg rather than a phony upper middle development. It’s a matter of taste. Military service breaks down a lot of barriers.
My friends in Holmby had a Persian family move in behind them a decade ago. At his first meeting with my friends, the new owner made it clear that he was not a Persian "of the Jewish sort".Replies: @Ivy
So that new owner was not what people call “The best of both worlds”?
“What I don’t understand is how such people would even have known about Murray’s test, much less have felt compelled to take it.”
Drive down to Fremont, central Sunnyvale, or some parts of San Jose and check it out in some of the more expensive restaurants, or whatever.
This stuff is like honey to professional, often managerial class, technically-educated silican valley Indians who want to understand/ape white americans as much as possible. It’s often helpful to their career advancement, particularly if they haven’t had any direct previous acculturation to the US and aspire to roles such as program managers.
These are very much not your standard Patel Indian immigrants running the local Motel 6. More like the Indians you run into on Wall Street. A good chunk of them want to do start-ups.
“Is White, Working Class America ‘Coming Apart’?”, NPR Staff, February 6, 2012:
Sounds like he got a lot of PBS press as well.
By the way, I’ve overheard there is starting to be a similar bubble of professional Indians, mostly in IT, somewhere around Washington, DC.
I'm not sure I see a problem. All the Indians I can recall who owned houses in Fremont had kids; most of the kids would probably be past high school age now. A 2-professional Indian family living in Fremont will have kids, it's almost one of the reasons they are here. (They often will bring over grandparents also to babysit.) I've worked with a number of these kids, hired out of local community colleges and places like Santa Clara, San Jose State, as well as the Cals. They are pretty similar to their parents, the size of their local community, and their connections to India (traveling back to visit extended family and such), mean their parent's community is their primary community.
I would think it's pretty easy for an Indian kid to grow up in Fremont without knowing a great deal about white America.
From the wikipedia page on Fremont, California:African-americans are thin on the ground.
So "american whites" are around a quarter of the population. Over half the population is "asian" (including Indian); about a fifth the population is Indian.
Why wouldn't an Indian(-american) kid grow up in a place like this and not know as much about white america as white american kids do, on average?Replies: @Jacobite
I took the BART train from Fremont to Berkeley a couple of years ago. There was exactly one other white person on the train with me until it got to MacArthur station.
Fremont is a city of 230,000 and made up of 5 districts, which are quite different compared to each other. The poorer districts are similar to Hayward, Union City, and Newark, other East Bay towns that are economically bleak and shabby in appearance (but has low to moderate violent crime). One poor district, Centerville, is home to the largest Afghan community in America. The city has poor services with a very low number of city employees per capita. Although there doesn’t appear to be much need for a large police force with a very low homicide rate, the response effort to property crime is not up to stuff.
The richest district is Mission San Jose, which borders Silicon Valley (the strict definition of the boundaries of Silicon Valley). Mission San Jose is a super zipcode of affluent professionals who typically own a 2 million dollar house.
MSJ is home to a high school that is one of the 6 best public high schools in the Bay Area (stiff competition in this region so this is a title to hold). The high school is about 80% Asian (Taiwanese, Chinese, and Indians). It may be the only majority Taiwanese high school in America. The strong connection to Taiwan I assume comes from the semiconductor industry, which is the national industry of Taiwan and Fremont is home to quite a few main bases for semiconductor companies.
I've been in the cars of Indians who own houses in Fremont numerous times, going out to lunch, going to business meetings, and so on. And they really do listen a lot to NPR. Occasionally conversations will occur based on things said on NPR. Many of them do want to learn a lot about the US and stay up on things as much as possible.
"...So “american whites” are around a quarter of the population..."
This is probably slightly wrong, a larger proportion of the non-hispanic whites in Fremont are probably immigrants from europe, including eastern europe and the balkans. So the actual number of american-born whites is lower than a quarter. I've known some of the american-born whites who have stories about their parent's generation farms, about how much of the south bay was orchards.
"...They do their work and then go home to do family and friends cultural Indian stuff."
I've been in houses of Indians in Fremont on a number of occasions, met their kids and so on. They and their kids seem to spend a lot of time working on things like getting the kids into the UCs. Because of their numerous ears on the ground, connections, and english, they are often good at taking advantage of programs such as UC summer sessions/programs for high school students, things that help. The kids are in their own milieu, like living on a military base, in particular when including traveling back to India ever so often.
"...“Fremont is in Silicon Valley by any non wannabe definition..."
It's the 237 connector that makes Fremont such a part of silicon valley, along with the location of Cisco, Seagate, and other large multinationals that skew towards hardware and are located around the 880 corridor.
"Fremont is what India would look like if India was a 1st World country."
Apt observation. Politically they are all to the left of the Democrats, but that might just be normal voting their interests. Stay up late enough with some of them and you start hearing about how Indian civilization must be the best because it's lasted the longest and some of that new-age Hindu stuff. There are Indian PhDs from US schools who take that plenty seriously.
It's a bubble.Replies: @Old Palo Altan
Thank you. I understand now how these people would know about Murray’s test, and I suppose curiosity would explain why they would then take it. But surely they are intelligent enough to understand that their isolation is not the same as that of native white Americans with low scores?
As for the orchards: absolutely true. I can remember driving from Palo Alto to Carmel for our occasional holidays there c. 1956 – 1960 and revelling in the beauty of the many orange and other orchards we would pass through before the long haul over the hills to Santa Cruz.
I have a suspicion you have never got off the freeway in Richmond. Comparing Richmond to Fremont in any way is like comparing Santa Monica and Watts."
Fremont is what India would look like if India was a 1st World country.Replies: @Jacobite
Hah! One used to have to get off the freeway in order to get to the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. Does anyone remember that liquor store on Cutting Blvd? It is getting safer lately though as the murder rate is down.
Most likely they did not take it; unless it was promoted on NPR/PBS and hence they did it out of curiosity. Many comments here seem to focus on NPR; so, it may actually be measuring NPR listening habits rather than anything else. NPR/PBS are extremely popular channels for the well educated, especially those who may not be able to appreciate more modern “American” culture like those focused on sex (hetero/homo/premarital/non-marital/extra-marital), crime/police/violence, drugs, politics, reality/game shows etc.,
In the current year that's about to end, I moved from a zip code with a score of 90 to one with a score of 79. Now, I don't know what the standard deviation is of his original Super Zips research, but I know each zip code has a whole number score from 1 to 99, with 95 or above being a Super Zip. Going on a rule of thumb that you subtract bottom from top and divide by six to get a quick and dirty estimate of the standard deviation, we get (99-1)/6 = 16.33. Which means I moved down in the world by (11/16.33), or two-thirds, of a SD. That's not chump change. Yet, I don't really see or feel that much of a difference between where I moved from and where I moved to. Probably the reason my old zip code has a higher Murray Score than my current one is that the Murray Score is a mashup of college degree attainment rate and household income. My current zip code has a lower college graduation rate than my old one, because it's close to Washington University, and therefore during the school year, has a lot of students in rental units. Meaning students, not graduates. The older, non-college, population, tends to be upper middle aged to elderly working-to-middle class, again, a lower college graduation rate.Replies: @Bill
College students always screw up demographic statistics (not only are they “uneducated,” they are also “poor” and “not in the labor force.” They own cars and rent apartments despite not having jobs. They live with adults they are unrelated to by either blood or marriage. etc. Unless you are on the look-out for them, they are damn weird-looking) . Normally, you deal with this by removing currently enrolled students from your sample or restricting your sample to 25 years old and older. Did Murray really fail to do this?
That’s a great comment. One nit:
After working a long shift at a retail store, I promise you that not only will you have pain in your back and feet, but your feet will be visibly swollen and may not go back into your shoes after you take them off. That doesn’t compare to, say, having some molten steel dumped on your leg, of course.
Moonlight was a television show starring Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd. So the remake of this White Heterosexual show is now a Black Homosexual movie? Cultural appropriation much.Replies: @syonredux
The show with Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd was called Moonlighting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlighting_(TV_series)
I know I was kidding.
“The show with Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd was called Moonlighting:”
I know I was kidding.
Interesting quiz. I got 38 and my husband 48. His background as an “army brat” was definitely more varied than mine in the DC suburbs, but our life choices and experiences since age 20 have been very similar (although we didn’t meet until our late 20s). Wonder why the question re fishing (which I’ve done once or twice but not in years) as opposed to shooting/hunting (a family hobby)? He watches loads of tv and I watch none, but he channel surfs a lot and we don’t go out to see movies, so our “cultural” answers in that area were much the same. Another factor has been our older kid’s life and choices, which has involved pick-up trucks and defiantly NOT going to college (although my husband and I both have degrees and post grad study, plus highly-credentialed work experience). Otherwise our relative lack of bubble (at least compared to a number of commenters) is due to our deliberate choices and political opinions.
Too much of your commentariat lives in CA, Chicago, or on the East Coast, Steve. It’s been obvious since you moved to Unz. They’re so accustomed to their bubble they don’t even see it.
BTW, I got a 46, despite living in a yuppieville (surrounded by the ghetto) and being the son of college educated professional parents. Time in the service and growing up in a small solidly middle class (but generally not too educated or affluent) enclave in a lower middle class part of town (in a smaller city in Iowa) boosted my score.
They didn’t? Were you there? I was. Baker St. Boys, Skinhead Hill, etc. Many of the skins in Rolling Stone article and that Geraldo episode lived in SF/Bay Area.
“No they didn’t. The Bay Area does not have pockets of Right Wingers. ”
Watch your tenses, bud.
PS-Yes, Sacto had a large skin scene back then as well.
Rockville Centre is nice but has never seemed elite to me. It's certainly a town that has various income levels from what I can tell. It's not all mansions.Replies: @Dave Pinsen
I always figured you’d rather live on the south shore if you wanted to surf or body surf. But maybe it’s like the Del Mar situation Steve mentioned, where some rich folks prefer the calmer waters of the Long Island Sound to the Atlantic.
“Too much of your commentariat lives in CA, Chicago, or on the East Coast, Steve. It’s been obvious since you moved to Unz. They’re so accustomed to their bubble they don’t even see it.”
Yeah, we’re in bubbles inside bubbles… it’s no wonder US politics seems so strange these days. And we aren’t even politicians. There probably are a few of us who wander around quite a bit like rubble in the machine, though. We’re probably the people with the dazed zombie expressions you sometimes see 😉
“There is just no way that all the Indians I meet have college degrees. I meet Hindu parents living in these high SES areas that can barely speak English and work in a 7-11. I meet Chinese parents who bus dishes.”
I don’t doubt this, but suspect you are seeing chain migration effects. Not all of the people in these households have PhDs, the grandparents brought over to raise the kids don’t, for instance. It will be interesting to see how much chain migration takes place over time. On a somber note, I’ve know Indian families who bring over parents dying of diseases like cancer to give them a few more years fighting chance and let the kids try to help. So you end up with all kinds. Sometimes driving in these areas is a bit scary, not everyone is that experienced, to say the least.
My bubble score is 61; thanks to the pointer to the online quiz. I gave up NPR years ago.Replies: @pyrrhus, @anon
I think Newport Beach has more money than Del Mar or Yorba Linda but Steve likes to do the high zips that vote Democratic. Believe it or Not Mission Viejo has more income on average than the San Diego cities.
Here’s a story for you. In July ’83 I was attending a bar review course which met in the basement of the then-Regency theater on Van Ness avenue in San Francisco. We would line up on the sidewalk on Sutter to wait for the doors to open. One day, there was a pretty blonde standing behind me in line who I’d never seen before. She silently handed me a flyer for some kind of meeting, upcoming in Hayward. I looked it over for a few seconds – it was a white supremacist gathering. Being a soft liberal at the time, I felt offended. Thinking about it now, I’m more amazed, since throughout my life I’ve been told I look like Elliot Gould. A very inclusive group, those Hayward KKK’ers!
I got a 49 and only 1 of those points came from the TV, movies and restaurants section.
Grew up the son of a non-college dad and a schoolteacher mom in a small Rust Belt town. Maybe 10% of my HS classmates finished a BS. I have a STEM PhD from our state univ where I worked my way thru undergrad doing construction. I was the only US citizen out of about 15 grad students in my department. I worked on the Space Shuttle and my Erdos number is 4. If I didn’t exist, Steve would have to invent me.
It is interesting to observe a strange ingroup-outgroup dynamic in this thread. Normally, assimilation by immigrants in considered a good thing and highly desired. However, in this bubble test experiment, many ingroup members seem to feel uncomfortable that some outgroup members seem to be over-assimilating; their fondness for NPR being a source of (high) American culture cause for discomfort.
In any case, Murray's book was purposefully focused on the growing cultural divide among whites, and the quiz was placed in this context. When not framing this as an intra-white divide, the terms "bubble" and "elite" are less appropriate; it's more like being out of touch with the historical American nation.
Oh, I agree. But sometimes (I assume, never having had a cubicle job) one can even feel pain at the end of a day trapped in a cubicle. I think Murray means a higher level of pain.
http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-california-neighborhood-election-results/
To find a Trump precinct in LA, you have to go to Simi Valley, north Orange County, Glendora or a speck of Palos Verdes.
In the Bay Area, to find a Trump precinct it appears that you have to go over to the Central Valley. Most of the closer ones are 'red herrings' so to speak with fewer than five votes cast.
Having been raised and educated in SuperZIPs I can understand how they create the bubble among their residents. You look around and everything seems to be working. Everyone you see seems to be winning and doing OK. What's not to like? Only when you exit the bubble to you start to see the real costs that Progressive Conventional Wisdom imposes among the left half of the bell curve who lack the cognitive, social, financial and cultural resources of the elite.Replies: @Boomstick, @Andrew
That is an incredible map from the LA Times. I had no idea how uniformly Democrat all of California’s big cities had become despite a general absence of blacks.
On the other coast, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore all have many precincts and even whole wards that the GOP regularly wins, including Trump. I see nothing in California.
Murray means the way you feel after you have to throw chains on a tractor trailer in freezing rain immediately after sitting on your butt for eight hours. At least that’s my personal take on it.
Too much of your commentariat lives in CA, Chicago, or on the East Coast, Steve. It's been obvious since you moved to Unz. They're so accustomed to their bubble they don't even see it.Replies: @Hibernian
Chicago is not a bubble. Chicago is the City of Big Shoulders.
BTW, I got a 46, despite living in a yuppieville (surrounded by the ghetto) and being the son of college educated professional parents. Time in the service and growing up in a small solidly middle class (but generally not too educated or affluent) enclave in a lower middle class part of town (in a smaller city in Iowa) boosted my score.
“Normally, assimilation by immigrants in considered a good thing and highly desired.”
In the modern world of cheap ubiquitous world-wide phone, email, and internet video, if you can easily afford to fly your family back to the home country for a month once a year (or if you can drive across the border to Mexico as you please) you never really have to fully assimilate. I’ll bet more then you might think of the Indians we’ve been talking about in this thread have worked, in addition to in the US and India, in places like Hong Kong, Japan, and Ireland. It’s one of the things people mean when they talk about “globalists”.
Quoting comment #34 (sanno tochigi) which illustrates this:
When I first read this I thought that “Tarzana” was a portmanteau from Tarzan and Tanzania, and I thought, OK, he’s referencing Freddy Mercury, but suggesting that “African” Persians have some je ne sais quoi that…
Whatever, happy new year!
“She silently handed me a flyer for some kind of meeting, upcoming in Hayward. I looked it over for a few seconds – it was a white supremacist gathering. Being a soft liberal at the time, I felt offended. Thinking about it now, I’m more amazed, since throughout my life I’ve been told I look like Elliot Gould. A very inclusive group, those Hayward KKK’ers!”
Hayward looks like a mix of The Philippines and Mexico, so Elliot Gould would be extremely White by Hayward standards. So they can’t narrow their definition of White to only people who look like they came straight out of Sweden. Beggars can’t be choosers.
Interesting observation. What is the basis for saying that these Indians don’t know much about America?
If you read the comments, it is not so much that these Indians don’t know much; it is that they don’t know much of what unzers consider “real” America. They are unhappy that these Indians listen to too much NPR which is “wrong” kind of America. Not enough Football/baseball/basketball/NASCAR/guns etc., Lefties call this “Cultural Appropriation”; unzers call this becoming “professional” American or “wrong” kind of American.
In the modern world of cheap ubiquitous world-wide phone, email, and internet video, if you can easily afford to fly your family back to the home country for a month once a year (or if you can drive across the border to Mexico as you please) you never really have to fully assimilate. I'll bet more then you might think of the Indians we've been talking about in this thread have worked, in addition to in the US and India, in places like Hong Kong, Japan, and Ireland. It's one of the things people mean when they talk about "globalists".
Quoting comment #34 (sanno tochigi) which illustrates this:Replies: @anon, @Desiderius
Are the upper crust Americans who vacation in Europe annually also not “real” Americans? Are the snowbirds who winter in Florida or Arizona or Caribbean not “real” Americans/Canadians?
You seem yo have trouble reading. It was 1983. Filipinos hadn’t left Daly City yet.
“You seem yo have trouble reading. It was 1983. Filipinos hadn’t left Daly City yet.”
But Mexico have already planted their flag in Hayward.
You’re misreading this. The point was that they weren’t assimilating but rather “aping” or neutrally studying the culture. The fact that some do listen to NPR (which is at most middle-brow culture, but looks high brow to the less clued-in), yet still seem to score low is evidence of this.
In any case, Murray’s book was purposefully focused on the growing cultural divide among whites, and the quiz was placed in this context. When not framing this as an intra-white divide, the terms “bubble” and “elite” are less appropriate; it’s more like being out of touch with the historical American nation.
“Are the upper crust Americans who vacation in Europe annually also not “real” Americans?”
You’re assuming all these people have US citizenship. That’s not a correct assumption. Even for the people who have citizenship, not all their family living here necessarily do. Plenty of people work here for a few years, make a pile of cash, and go back to live a pretty good life in India. People keep dual citizenship. People don’t get visas after working for some years and go back. The details matter.
As has been noted in this thread, many of these people move around the world quite a bit working for multinationals. It’s somewhat like being in the military and moving all over the world. It is what it is.
You’re thinking too narrow. “There are more things under heaven and earth…”
Trump strongly underperformed in all of the superzips in massachusetts relative to Romney.
I found out something similar in Connecticut, though I did it comparing Hillary to Obama in 2012.Overall, Obama got about 4% more of the CT vote than Hillary did. However, there were some towns that bucked the trend. The two towns that had the biggest increase in Hillary % of the vote compared to Obama % of the vote were New Caanan and Darien, where Hillary’s percentage of the vote was 16% and 18% better than what Obama got in 2012. [For example, Obama got 34% of the vote in Darien in 2012, while Hillary got 52%.]
Not coincidentally, New Caanan and Darien have the largest per capita incomes in the state. President Goldman Sachs delivered for Darien and New Caanan, so they figured that Hillary would do the same.
There is a rather strong correlation between a town’s per capita income and difference between Hillary’s % of the vote compared to Obama’s percentage of the vote: 0.8. The lower the per capita income, the greater will be the difference between Hillary’s and Obama’s percentage.
Even Hartford, which gave Hillary 90% of its vote, didn’t buck the trend.
http://www.sots.ct.gov/sots/lib/sots/electionservices/electionresults/2012/2012_election_results.pdf
http://www.courant.com/politics/elections/hc-ct-town-by-town-election-results-2016-htmlstory.html
Per capita information from Wikipedia
Digby grew up there. During his adult life he lived near Rittenhouse Square, in the 1700 block of Locust Street, which is #100 on Murray’s list.
In the modern world of cheap ubiquitous world-wide phone, email, and internet video, if you can easily afford to fly your family back to the home country for a month once a year (or if you can drive across the border to Mexico as you please) you never really have to fully assimilate. I'll bet more then you might think of the Indians we've been talking about in this thread have worked, in addition to in the US and India, in places like Hong Kong, Japan, and Ireland. It's one of the things people mean when they talk about "globalists".
Quoting comment #34 (sanno tochigi) which illustrates this:Replies: @anon, @Desiderius
They’re assimilating into the global culture rather than any particular national one.