Tag: Gun ownership

To prove it, University of Chicago economists Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica taught machines to guess a person’s income, political ideology, race, education and gender based on either their media habits, their consumer behavior, their social and political beliefs, and even how they spent their time. The surveys were tuned and filtered to be consistent over time, which allowed Bertrand and Kamenica to measure how America’s cultural divides have evolved. Differences in social attitudes between liberals and conservatives have been widened over time, Bertrand and Kamenica found. The gap in social attitudes between whites and nonwhites has fallen slightly, but the difference in consumer behavior between races has grown. Within the surveys they analyzed, social attitudes and media habits were almost as closely linked to race as consumer behavior was. “In 1976,” the authors write, “one could correctly predict race based on views towards government spending 74 percent of the time but by 2016 this number was down to 56 percent.” Attitudes toward police violence are only a few percentage points less effective in predicting high (in the top 25 percent) income than they are in predicting whiteness. By 2016, its place as the key signifier of the country’s economic and cultural divide had been taken by Apple’s iPhone — which the researchers found to be a much clearer signifier of income than the condiment had been. Yes, high-income households buy different things from low-income ones, and white Americans and black Americans watch different television programs and movies. “For the past 40 years, liberals and conservatives are disagreeing more each year. The General Social Survey, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, polls between 1,093 and 3,735 people per year on their attitudes toward myriad social issues such as trusting others, marijuana legalization, and approving of police striking a man.