The Big Sort
ED/CD is a policy area whose policies/strategies/programs are produced by a policy system. The Big Sort is less about what created the types of policy systems in vogue during any particular period, then how they came to be distributed across regions, states, and metro areas. Big Sort population mobility is only one factor, an important one after 1970, but still only one factor. Because of the Big Sort our two cultural ships could dock in jurisdictions (and neighborhoods) within each metro area. Post-suburban jurisdictional demographic homogeneity, however, could easily result in metropolitan heterogeneity. This is a testimony to local democracy is also a prescription for polarization. Yet one more force has injected politicization and polarization into ED/CD policy-making. What is this Big Sort? Why is all this stuff happening?
Bishop argues that since 1965 or so, we have incrementally evolved into a “post-materialism culture”. Borrowing from Inglehart’s (Inglehardt and Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy) (Inglehardt, the Silent Revolution) provocative research, we left post-WWII moderation, characterized by a bi-partisan consensus, public civility and non-ideological, expert-driven decision-making, for the current cultural mind frame. Inglehardt borrowed heavily upon Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and he held that the booming post-WWII economic growth created a ‘worldview” (augmented by each successive generation) that increasingly replaced the previous, longstanding worldview. With few aware of, and with nobody’s permission, a new kind of politics gradually formed after 1965. The new society was more about personal taste than attachment to any specific public policy. It was more concerned with self-expression, aspirations and personal belief than with social-economic class issues (Bishop 103-4). People who knew their basic needs were satisfied gradually adopted different values from those who lived with scarcity.
Some individuals or groups, of course, did not adopt the new culture and instead sought to retain the post-WWII traditional culture either as a defense against worsening economic tides, or some measure of stability, continuity and meaning in a rapidly changing world. For Bishop, religious orientation was especially important in this bi-polar cultural evolution. Woodard asserted that the cultural values and traditions of the Eleven Nations played a role as well. This geographic cultural Big Sort is the inherent driver of our politicization and polarization[i]. How did this occur in our jurisdictions?
Bishop explained migrants choose one jurisdiction over another, creating a “political segregation of American communities”. Borrowing from Gimpel’s studies and Patchwork Nation (Gimpel and Schuknecht), Bishop found that “most of America and most Americans were engaged in a thirty year movement toward more homogeneous ways of living”; both political segregation and polarization resulted (Bishop 11). Facilitated by the car and discretionary income that freed households from “want and worry” allowed them the opportunity “to reorder their lives around their values, their tastes and their beliefs. They were clustering in communities of like-mindedness” (Bishop 12). Mobile people selected neighborhoods and cities whose lifestyle and values reflected their own. Obviously, the household locational decision involves many factors. Certainly price is one of them, “like-mindedness” is another. Big Sort population mobility produced concentrated power bases for the two political parties.
“Lacking the understanding and ties [issues, patterns and traditions that characterize a jurisdiction] … new residents will import and then act upon their own partisan affiliation and viewpoints. If a volume of migration is high enough, a place’s political distinctiveness can be washed away rather quickly as the native population is overwhelmed … by newcomers” (Gimpel and Schuknecht 382).
Not all of Woodard’s eleven American cultures completely adopted the more secular, more Progressivist worldview. Some adopted only parts, or injected different meanings and definitions. Some nations change more deliberately than others. The various old political cultures that floated our two ships thus far through this history, in one way or another became a part of this Big Sort polarization. The post-1970 Big Sort population mobility “docked” migrants into demographically unsinkable communities and jurisdictions
Big Sort Background
Bishop’s Big Sort provides a helpful backdrop to the reader—and a neat icon-like expression that guides our analysis of the interplay between political culture, population mobility, and policy system/policy output change. A few observations and caveats concerning the Big Sort are advisable. The book is focused on politics/voting behavior which can be helpful to us, but for the most part is not a primary objective of the history. More limiting is its close association with Richard Florida’s the Rise of the Creative Class (Florida). The two books share much as do the authors. A great deal of Bishop relies on the application and legitimation of Florida’s Creative Class. This history finds that linkage limits our analysis greatly—and for the most part we do not rely on the association of creative class migration with the Big Sort. To the extent it has utility for the history, it comes from its overlap with our generational cohort concept.
Secondly, as might be evident from our past chapters, population migration inherently involves some level of “-sorting”—it is not limited to post-1965 Big Sort. Also as “Go West Young Man” implies, population migration has been historically associated with young, new households, and frequently men—with women and families more in a second wave. This has been captured by our generation cohort concept. The rising Sunbelt has caught a great deal of this generational mobility—to the extent that post-1970 generational cohorts have been integrated by many commentators into the redefinition of “western” economic growth, and the refocus of ED attention to the neighborhood. One reason we discuss Del Webb’s Sun City is to alert the reader that one characteristic of post-1965 population mobility is that older generations can be an important element in our “Big Sort” and that intra-county migration by all age cohorts can play a meaningful role in our ED history.
Necessarily it is also sensitive to economics, jobs, and occupations—the economic base of jurisdictions. New sectors and industries have driven migration, and so gold miners follow gold rushes and educated computer programmers settle in “tech centers”—not to mention oil rig roughnecks to fracking agglomerations. New sectors, as often as not, tend to agglomerate and clusters of associated sectors also concentrate in regions and jurisdictions. World War II industrial decentralization deliberately created new industrial bases through migration. The Great Migration and the Southern Diaspora exhibited close linkage between war production and the automotive/aerospace industries. The Nineteenth Century ethnic immigration sorted itself out with farmers going some places and industrial workers others—the latter mostly in the industrial cities of the hegemony. The earlier Yankee Diaspora and the other “national” migrations also sorted themselves out geographically and jurisdictionally.
Population mobility, our post-1965 Big Sort especially, necessarily involve “place”, geographies, jurisdictions, states, regions, and nations. Obviously migration is a two-sided coin, with winners and losers. In an era of great population growth, which historically has been for much of our history, the more nasty effects of losing people can be obscured, muted, or even eradicated. When migrating populations are not replaced by new migrants, however, a very serious economic development problem is created. This has been a major aspect of the post-1965 Big Sort. Some individuals choose for many reasons to remain in their original settlement area with very serious ED implications as these geographies can enter a period of chronic economic and demographic decline. Again, the inherent “sorting” involved in population migration means that aggregations of similar people move out while a different aggregation of demographic groups can chose or be forced to remain. The theory and practice of ED might well be very sensitive to these variations and distinctions. It ought not concentrate exclusively on the winners, or pin labels on the losers.
The interplay between the various elements of migration “sorting” (i.e. age, education, occupations, sex, and place) often make it difficult to “sort” out the various independent variables associated with both change and various dependent variables. One can see this in Moretti’s “the New Geography of Jobs” (Moretti) as well as several of Florida’s works. Aggregate data analysis can suggest many “storks in chimneys”, for example, twentieth century young migrants often possess more education than preceding generations; how that translates into ED strategy and initiatives, particularly as it is applied to those who remain at original settlements can be very complicated. Also, the attachment of “character” or values to demographic, even occupational categories can be a perilous enterprise indeed. Creativity can be an element of advertising, for example, but might not be encouraged in accounting. They both, however, can hold a college degree.
Bishop: migration as lifestyle choice
Bishop asserts the Big Sort that he discovered created “inequality” (which he never defined, or even indexed). He posited that “the Big Sort was creating greater inequality among cities—in patents, incomes, and levels of education[ii]—we wondered whether there was a relationship between culture and economic success”. Using Putnam’s Making Democracy Work” civic culture he concluded there was a NEGATIVE relationship between the health of the local civic culture and the well-being of the economy. The tighter the social ties, the fewer the patents, the lower the wages, and the slower the rates of growth.
Using another Putnam database, the DDB Needham Life Style Survey he found that the civic culture of high-tech cities was the reverse of low-tech cities. He believed this represented a post-materialist culture (Bishop 141-4). The difference between the two was prevalence of Generation Xers (possessing the past-materialist culture). “Educated young people in the ‘creative class’ would flock to places where they would not be bound by old ideas or tight social ties”. While we may agree the cultural variation was precipitated by migration of Generation Xers I have no idea whether old ideas/tight social ties or the existence of jobs by rising sector gazelles—or any other confluence of multiple factors– prompted the migration. That the cultural values and proclivities of a young generation traveled with them as they fled their parents and/or pursued economic opportunity, is, for me, an open question fifteen years later.
Bishop joined Gen Xer’s “culture” and migration to Romer and Solow’s knowledge-based innovation. Arguing that Solow’s third driver of economic productivity (the first two being the traditional land and capital), technical knowledge with Romer’s finding that cities grew according to their ability to arrange the three factors to “innovate” successfully. Having physical capital (a harbor) and capital was not sufficient, a city had to creatively create more value through ideas and processes (innovation) that produced growth. Cities made ideas and incremental innovation possible. The culture of a city either facilitated this innovation or it didn’t.
The process for innovation was, Bishop asserted, at heart a social process, best advanced through face-to-face contact and sharing. The lack of social ties and weakness of old ideas facilitated this innovation process. What distinguished growing cities from declining cities was “their life style” that derived from their culture—Gen Xers moved to cities for their life style. These cities were Edward Glaeser’s consumer cities” (Glaeser and Gottlieb, Urban Resurgence and the Consumer City) and Florida’s “creative cities”. And Clark’s “entertainment cities” (Clark).
The way Americans sorted themselves created a new kind of cultural separation. People living in different cities literally had different ways of relating to family, to government, to strangers, and to religion. This gave people choice. There were places they could enjoy the comfort of strong families, bustling civic groups, near universal political participation, and abundant volunteering. And there were cities that offered anonymity, the opportunity for self-invention, and the economic benefits [innovation] of loose ties. (Bishop, p. 153).
Over three decades people separated themselves by education, income, race, and way of life. The best educated abandoned old manufacturing cities … and rural communities … and moved to high-tech cities. Finally, people segregated by the way they wanted to live … willing to pay a premium for the lifestyle found there … Prospects for prosperity deviated wildly, as innovation sprang from some cities, but not others. And all this migration created political imbalances that grew more pronounced by the year. (Bishop, p. 155)
[i] Religion, as Bishop treats it, is not doctrines, denominations or specific religious practices; religion is a value system which is expressed in choices, behaviors, expectations, and hopes carried forth daily in one’s life. Religion forms a prism which colors how one evaluates events and ideas and which sets one apart from other religions or from the secular perspective (see Chapter 7).
[ii] Bishop also asserted post-material cultures were characterized by greater talent, individual skills, and economic growth. This is Richard Florida’s Creative Classes at work—an assertion with which I do not concur.
Ron W. Coan 