Which is the most ideologically diverse American city?

First, article is talking more about ideological divide (democratic/republican) than ideological diversity (which would presumably mean many other viewpoints).

Not sure about ideological diversity, and how to even measure it, but ideological divide to me seems as an inevitable result of two party system (and majority voting system), as both parties struggle to get supporters. In order to do that, they often abandon or shift in ideology. The result is that the "ideological divide" is so very fluid that it is not really representative of any particular ideology.

In short, I think measuring the "ideological diversity" in terms of democrats/republicans is probably quite misleading.

Wait, this is just someone's opinion? There's no data here! This should be an empirical exercise, why should we trust these cities the author pulls from random anecdote?

One idea would be to use voter registration records and census blocks to measure the polarization of the population wrt political behavior. There's also survey data on attitudes and beliefs that could be aggregated by city. But there's no data at all, it's just the author's personal speculation.

Given that we tend to over-emphasise the differences between ideological positions that we're more familiar with, and under-emphasise the difference between positions that we aren't, it's hard to see how an exercise like this tells us anything except the author's own political experience and imagination. Even if there were empirical data here, how could we objectively determine the distance between ideological perspectives? And what dimensions of their many differences do we emphasise?

We see this most clearly when we look at ideologies that are dominant today. For example, a fairly core ideology over the last 30 years is that more and more aspects of society either should, or inevitably will, be governed by the market. As a result, ideologies that don't subscribe to this this idea are generally viewed as similar no matter how much they might otherwise be unrelated. Which is kind of strange, since 'ideologies that don't subscribe to this idea' amounts to most of the ideologies adopted over the course of human history.

What I find interesting is that Tyler makes it all about his personal POV. Everyone _he_ talks to in Washington is obsessed with hour-by-hour politics. Everyone _he_ talks to in San Francisco and Seattle are obsessed with blockchain. But only in other places he's apparently never actually visited, he assumes, those people probably have "regular lives". The only thing this post shows is how insulated Tyler's own life is from the vast majority of Americans.

The server seems dead, can't handle the load.

I wonder if the author considered the collision of urban-philia being a political distinction, and geographic boundaries are mostly a political or geographic accident. So statistically the most diverse city will have 100% non-diverse neighborhoods like any other city, but will have weirdly large boundaries for legacy historical reasons such that the "diverse" city includes distant rural farmland and suburbs whereas "non-diverse" city with identical neighborhoods and demographics will have small city limits boundaries.

How can this question be reasonably answered?

Maybe places with high numbers of academics and articulate people can be measured but that's about it.

There's multiple dimensions when it comes to ideology and multiple approaches to each dimension. There's even fundamentally different interpretations of the categorical differences on how to subdivide the classifications of these systems. And each of these facets have wide diversity at every nuanced level.

For instance, many San Francisco "lefties" are anarcho-capitalists who want to do away with market oversight along with having drug legalization, amnesty for all immigrants, gay rights, and unlimited gun rights for all. They want to privatize all public services and call that process "progressivism".

Some of them call themselves libertarians, others "classical liberals" and yet others will tell you long stories about how they aren't either of those... It's really quite complicated and throwing them all in a "liberal" column with people who believe entirely different things for entirely different reasons (such as, for instance, those who believe "money"(another debated term) is a fundamentally corrupting influence and the state needs to tame the market through strict oversight), is pretty incorrect. In fact, some socialists I've spoken with consider the entire libertarian project as a form of tyrannical autocracy by the ruling class - so they view those lefties as actually far-righties.

But let's pretend you can map all those out and ignore that perspective matters. Do you need population size? Representation in governments? Places of discussion?

I really can't see how to even approach this question.

Houston for sure. It’s close to a true melting pot. You have everything from cowboys to Marxists, libertarians to La Raza activists. You have an old, tight knit African American community mixed with limousine liberals, George H.W. Bush style globalist conservatives along with large Latin American communities, GLBT flag-wavers and evangelicals. There is even a small, but extremely tight-knit Jewish community along with a large and welcoming Islamic community. I could go on and on. Houston wins by far when it comes to ideological diversity. The ciry itself does trend leftwards, however if you add Harris Coubtry into the mix, it’s almost an even split with many people straddling the left-right ideological divide (voting for liberal mayors but conservative county commissioners.)

> The proper conclusion may be that intellectual bubbles are a useful means of moving forward.

Read the last sentence. Unless I misinterpret this grossly, the author is making fun of demands for "ideological diversity", i.e. lack of conservative/Republican mindshare, a la maybe Jonathan Haidt.

As long as we are defining this qualitatively, I nominate Charlottesville VA. Yeah, it's much smaller, but the community feel means people are actually interacting across ideaological lines, not just sharing municipal services.

To change an old joke we have all types of politics Democrat (centre right) and republican ( originally centre right but now take over by far right entryists).

I'd imagine this would correlate with ethnic and/or economic diversity, which makes it surprising that Sacramento (my hometown, and consistently in the top 15 of the variety of "most ethnically/economically diverse American cities" lists, sometimes venturing into the top 5 or the #1 spot) seems to be absent from the article.

Cowen uses intellectual and ideological diversity interchangeably.

I would argue that intellectual and ideological bubbles are only partially intersect and most of his readers are more interested in intellectual diversity.

I also suspect that binary conservatives/liberals division is not bringing enough diversity either ideologically or intellectually. The political diversity is large cities with large universities with lots of students and immigrants far outweighs the diversity in local politics. Smart Nepalese student who is communist may cut trough the conservative/liberal axis in a surprising way that is really new and interesting.

Well, it won't be any large or mega city. Statistically as they grow larger they'll homogenize. It's far more likely to be some tiny hundreds of person, barely incorporated place no one has heard of. In those the deviation won't be smoothed out.

The question is complicated by the fact that a big part of the modern Republican ideology is a hatred of cities and an anti intellectualism. Which, by the way, is historically a very dangerous ideology and led to things like the Khmer Rouge's genocide.

Republicans and Democrats aren’t that far apart globally speaking. So probably the answer is the same as what it would be without the word ideological—i.e. NYC and specifically Queens.

As a foreigner I must say Americans are rather blinded in their thinking about ideology from having a political system which doesn't allow for more than two parties.

Yes sure legally speaking there can be more parties, but due to the winner-takes all form of voting, there is no practical way for a third party to ever enter politics.

The existence of the republican and democratic party in the US for such an exceedingly long time has created a very ingrained sense of what politics and ideology is in the US.

People naturally have a much wider spectrum of ideologies than those represented by democrats and republicans. Yet there is no way to express that at the voting booth. Hence whatever people vote wouldn't really reflect the ideological divide.

Seen from my Norwegian perspective, if Norway was a city in the US, then Hillary Clinton would likely have gotten 90% of the vote. However that doesn't mean there is a lack of ideological diversity in Norway. There are 9 major parties in Norway and several much smaller ones, representing quite a diversity of opinion. The democratic party would have been quite an outlier politically in Norway, yet Donald Trump and republicans are even more extreme that people would naturally vote Hillary.

That a diverse set of people vote on some common lesser evil doesn't really make them all that similar.

Well, I'd guess the most culturally diverse city (Los Angeles) is a likely answer.

>2. Washington, D.C. and environs. The intellectual class in this city is about half conservative/Republican/libertarian and always will be — just don’t think too hard about who actually lives here!

Um....what? DC resident here. The only conservatives I see, anywhere, are tourists from the South/Midwest. The "intellectual class" is not linearly mapped to the Congress proportions. While conservative politicians (by the way most politicians live in the suburbs, outside DC) have conservative staffers, there's way more non-profits which are overwhelmingly liberal.

It's true that some cities are bubbles without conservatives, but you have to keep in mind that America itself is a bubble without any real left wing to speak of. If you care about getting the full range of ideology that exists in most other western countries, you need to choose a city with a large international population like NYC.

This just goes to show that the idea of 'diversity' is always a value judgement about what the 'right' mix of people is.

Well the "diverse" part is mostly choosing one or the other of the two mainstream views.

Kind of stupid without a definition of ideological diversity.

Cowen uses "ideological diversity" as a stand-in for Democratic/Republican balance. Which is one kind of diversity, and you would likely find the most balanced distribution of opinion on such questions as "is Mueller biased against Trump?" and "is Paul Ryan's tax plan good?" in the cities mentioned.

But here's a couple other questions that are likely more balanced in e.g. San Francisco than the cities mentioned: Are microstate monarchies the ideal form of government? Did the Constitution establish white supremacy? Should Keystone XL be blocked? Does trans ideology unnecessarily essentialize binary genders? Should we establish a generous universal basic income? Will blockchains lead to utopia on Earth? Should blockchain enthusiasts be sent to the gulag already?

Cowen enjoys occasionally getting under his elite coastal readership's skin, but this is pretty weak tea.

I hypothesize NYC

I think Toronto.

What is the point diversity for the sake of diversity? What you want is a community of people who can analyze data and have sufficient knowledge of statistics to know how to distinguish valid information from garbage. There's no point in being around anti vaccine people, or people who base their arguments in assumptions (beliefs) from old stories.

> Washington DC: The intellectual class in this city is about half conservative/Republican/libertarian and always will be.

While I think the 50 percent figure is high, people tend to only think of DC as a liberal city.

Of course it primarily is, but there is a large population of well-educated conservatives and libertarians living here.

Most of my social circle leans left, but it was always good living in DC to hear different perspectives, rather than shouting into an echo-chamber.

Also an extremely diverse population (51% Black) along with on-going gentrification leads to DC being one of the more intellectually stimulating cities to live in.

"Mexicans fit along a political spectrum of their own."

Tell me more about this mexican political spectrum. I'm only half can I join? Btw what do we believe in?