The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of
Like-Minded American is Tearing Us
Apart by Bill Bishop
How Is This A Surprise To Anybody?
In 2004, journalist Bill Bishop coined the term the big sort. Armed with
startling new demographic data, he made national news in a series of
articles showing how Americans have been sorting themselves into
alarmingly homogeneous communities -- not by region or by state, but by
city and even neighborhood. Over the past three decades, we have been
choosing the neighborhood (and church and news show) compatible with
our lifestyle and beliefs. The result is a country that has become so
polarized, so ideologically inbred that people dont know and cant
understand those who live a few miles away. How this came to be, and its
dire implications for our country, is the subject of this ground-breaking
work.

In The Big Sort, Bishop has taken his analysis to a new level. He begins
with stories about how we live today and then draws on history, economics
and our changing political landscape to create one of the most compelling
big-picture accounts of America in recent memory.
Personal Review: The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-
Minded American is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop
1. Washington was, from its beginning, a politically segregated city.
Congressmen lived, ate, and slept at boarding houses. Members living in
the same boarding house sat together on the same floor and voted
similarly, sectional conclaves.
2. Cultural segregation in early America was enforced by lack of
mobility.
3. Many political leaders reflect the political segregation of American
communities. They are coming out of a society that is more self-isolated
and self-absorbed.
4. What we think of what hear or see depends largely on who said it.
We are likely to find evidence that confirms our preconceptions.
5. People find safety in groups. "We come to accept a wide array of
positive outcomes with acceptance and love from others."
6. Like-minded groups enforce conformity and tend to grow more
extreme in the majority view. Like mind company polarizes.
7. People are more committed to a position once they have voiced it.
8. Isolation creates clashes of opinion. Federalist believed the best
antidote to factions was to see that communities weren't cut off from new
and sometimes conflicting ideas, a constant mixing of opposing opinion.
9. Should legislators mirror the interests/opinions of the people they
represent? A republican form took the view that the representative would
act for the general benefit of the whole community.
10. Homogeneous communities become self-propelling engines of
partisanship.
11. People's faith, culture, and politics have a lot to do where they live.
12. The mass culture by media, organizations, and association brought
about more segmentation and more homogeneousness.
The Economies of the Big Sort:
1. 100 million American resettled across a county border in the 1990s.
There was an order to the flow of movement. A large group of people
migrated to Los Vegas. Economies, lifestyle, and politics merged in the
Big Sort.
2. U.S economy, its culture, and its politics were changing town to
town, city to city.
3. People with College degrees moved to places where other people
with degrees lived. The personage of adults with college degree increased
for 17 percent in 1970 to 45 percent in 2004. In 2000, 45 percent of
twenty-five to thirty four year olds had finished college in Raleigh-Durham,
North Carolina.

4. The cities that grew the fastest and the richest were ones where
people with college degrees congregated. People with different levels of
education sort themselves into cities. The migration patter set off
segregation by income.
5. People went to high-tech cities: Atlanta, Phoenix, Denver, Portland,
Austin, Dallas, Raleigh-Durham, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Boise.
6. Corporations began moving where pools of talent were deepening.
7. Creatives are people who think for a living: manager, artists, writers,
engineers, and teachers. Creative class workers were sorting themselves
into the same cities: Washington, Raleigh-Durham, Seattle, San Francisco,
and Austin. Few cities had a sizeable working class and a large creative
class.
8. People with skills and education were less likely to work for a
business that hired employees without a college degree.
9. Robert Solow argued that technical knowledge combined with labor
and capital increased economic productivity.
10. Paul Romer said lots of oil, deep ports, or fertile ground does not
make a place rich. The places that grew wealthy were those whose
people learned to arrange their ingredients in ever new and economical
useful ways.
11. Economies grew because people were constantly incorporating new
ideas into all aspects of their work.
12. City life was key for economies of ideas to flourish.
13. A series of small innovations ca spawn entirely new industries.
14. Cities were essential because they represented a social network of
problem solving, discovery, and innovation. This process of connecting
and sharing ideas worked best when people involved in related kinds of
work could meet face-to-face and share new ideas.
15. People migrate to maximize their economic returns. People were
moving to cities that cost more than wage advantage increase for lifestyle
reasons. Cities had become entertainment machines. The city's new
product was lifestyle. The entertainment machines needed to attract
people who would power their economies.
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