Rubbing Shoulders: Class Segregation in Daily Activities [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Rubbing Shoulders: Class Segregation in Daily Activities [pdf]

maximmassenkoff.com

42 pointswallflower47 comments

Not directly related, but a fun(?) anecdote: I worked for a dog-friendly company in Seattle for a few years in the mid 20-teens. I started out commuting from my parents' place (who dog-sat for me), taking a commuter train and then a bus. I rarely chatted with anyone on the train/bus during that period.

After a few months I managed to find a place in the city and would ride the (pet-friendly) bus with my 90-pound samoyed, who despite usually being anxious in crowds took to it really well.

Long story short, the dog was an amazing cross-class ice breaker. I'm pretty introverted, but just about every trip someone would strike up a conversation with me, and it was usually folks I wouldn't otherwise interact with.

So anecdotally, usable public transit can be a good class desegregation strategy, and taking a charismatic dog with you supercharges it.

Yes! Public transit is mentioned, so this is now a certified HN thread.

But seriously, whenever I go for a walk, people with dogs are the only ones I see stopping and interacting with each other.

It seems like the dogs have the right idea, and they take their humans with them...

In my opinion, I see this as affirming that sharing resources can facilitate human interaction.

In this case "personal space". I speculate this increase in interaction is dogs facilitate boundaries being crossed with people.

Boundaries like: they sniff (suggesting something important is smelly, to us all with noses), stare (eye contact communicating starts), make odd sounds (prompting communication), are furry + warm (texturally appealing for touching), and they are usually naked (shocking taboo trigger). In short, they are "an experience" to most nearby humans.

Extrapolating, when one person depends on another person, this can deepen a relationship (good / bad). So, to increase human interactions, increase number of scenarios where we depend upon each other.

Note also that dogs themselves will interact with just about every dog they see, even moreso than the dog owners interact with each other.

No dog required: in college I would throw a t-shirt on in the dark morning and run to the bus.

50% chance the shirt was inside-out. Drives other people crazy. Whomever was behind me would tap me on the shoulder to tell me. Met a lot of people that way.

I have never observed that, given free choice, people prefer to associate with people that are unlike them. When you've recently immigrated to the US from a foreign country, you don't think "finally, I'm away from my countrymen, I can't wait to form a work group of zero people who speak my language and don't understand any of my assumptions and references." When you're planning a high school party, you don't think "me and my friends are on the football team, so we'd better not invite too many football players and will be sure to invite the comp sci guys, the band kids, the theater kids, and the stoners."

That said, I do agree with the meta-implication of this paper, which is that it's bad for society at large when the classes don't encounter each other socially at all.

> When you've recently immigrated to the US from a foreign country, you don't think "finally, I'm away from my countrymen, I can't wait to form a work group of zero people who speak my language and don't understand any of my assumptions and references."

Some people have been hurt or persecuted by their "countrymen" and they'd rather put on a cowboy hat and go have a bbq and a beer than continue hanging out with their countrymen. The issue is you won't see them, because they won't live or hang out in a segregated *-town communities. You may find them in an average home, in some average town, going to average grocery stores and so on.

Not sure why you're downvoted. Both phenomena (*-town immigrants and cowboy-hat immigrants) happen all the time. I'm an immigrant in the latter camp, though I moved to Canada, not the USA.

Right, anecdotally first generation middle class mexicans are extremely patriotic. Sometimes even to the extreme (maga and all that).

I have observed exactly what you're describing. Even as an introvert, I see the value in and seek out those experiences every once in a while. I imagine extroverts probably do so even more. My own mother is another example - she's an immigrant to the US and 20 years later still loves meeting 'real' Americans to learn more about the quirks of this country.

As another sibling comment mentions, we also all seek out products, foods, and experiences belonging to other cultures/groups. Even without getting into the meta, all of this mixing up is important so that Kelly in Texas can try Pho or John in Minnesota can eat BBQ.

Finally, your high school example, as I got older I chuckle more about the cliques of grade-school and now find myself approaching the jocks that I never would have before to see how they turned out. I've heard that a few times, though I've heard the opposite like you're saying as well.

All in all, both of us have had very anecdotal experiences. We should be careful not to generalize _millions_ based on one experience.

I think you're thinking too narrowly -- some of the most popular neighborhoods in many cities are the very specific cultural ones (e.g. K-Town in LA, the Mission in SF, Chinatown in NYC, etc) where people from all backgrounds meet and mingle. You might go there with a few coworkers that are the same age/race/sex as you, but a big part of the reason that you don't stay on your block is for the diversity of experience. Rec sports are another good avenue where your 5-a-aside soccer team might be very homogenous but the league obviously isn't.

I believe this is a topic where many people have predefined narratives they repeat. The comments above are about the benefits and costs of diversity (different but informed opinions), yet the non-narrative fitting opinion is downvoted. In my experience diversity provides access to new ideas and a variety of experiences through the people you meet. However there are also costs to diversity which shouldn’t be ignored. Communication is more challenging in diverse groups. Also values, beliefs, and norms vary more in a diverse group. That’s beneficial for those looking to expand their understanding of others and the world. However it also means less cohesiveness within the group which reduces feelings of belonging. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. There are similar trade offs in building technology. Having access to a wide variety of frameworks and technologies helps you learn more ideas and discover better ways to do things. However groups also create standards which allow for interoperability. Pros and cons.

Agree. But also if Chinatown wasn’t founded by one group it wouldn’t be Chinatown. When we are appreciating a culture, that culture is a set of values, norms, and beliefs that are consistent, not diverse.

But it isn't founded by one group, most Chinatowns are a hodge podge of Asian cultures, conveniently labeled Chinese because they are the majority.

I didn’t have any background knowledge on this so started looking on Wikipedia. It looks like Chicago has one of the largest Chinatowns so I started there. You can read about its origin in the history section https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown,_Chicago. From what I’ve read, it appears it was people primarily from China. Do you have any information about Chinatowns being formed by other Asian cultures?

What national culture is not diverse

Nations which are heavily monocultural. Japan or South Korea are good examples, I think.

Japanese culture is diverse. Maybe you’re just unfamiliar

I'm quite familiar. Would you care to elaborate?

It didn't feel like "meet and mingle" in the mission... more like a strange outlandish transition from people living in tents on the street and three blocks away Valencia street filled with nice shops and restaurants. Walking to work was like "oh this is nice" interspersed with needles and feces in the sidewalk.

Yeah, the experience is obviously different if you're at 16th and Mission compared to 24th and Folsom -- but there's a reason the neighborhood has been one of the more desirable in SF despite the very visible problems.

Yeah I lived in the mission. People loved to talk about how they loved the diversity. And always to the group of exclusively techies they were socializing with at the time.

I'd say you should observe more. I've lived in multiple countries and have zero desire to seek out members of my default peer group. I frankly do not understand people who move abroad and then want to spend all their time hanging out with other expats.

Wanna bet? Before I moved to the US, my grandfather explicitly told me to avoid associating with people from my home country. He had reasons and he wasn't wrong!

I belong to a religion that's really strong in western U.S. and less prevelant as you go east. Congregations are assigned based on geography and sometimes language.

I prefer the congregations out east that cover half a city because you interact with more doverse people across a lot more socio-economic classes just due to the wider geographic area.

I wish there were good incentives to build combined/intermingled housing to have more mixed neighborhoods.

Much "affordable housing" is built in this way -- the market rate units in new buildings subsidize the below-market units so you do get a good mix of socioeconomic classes in each building. Moderately successful in my experience.

I have no direct experience living in such a building but I would guess that it's a mix of lower and middle, but very few upper class folks. The people who can afford other options would generally avoid living in a building like that.

When I was saving for my first house I rented an apartment that was a lot cheaper than I could afford. I was one of very few white people living there, possibly the only one. I got a lot of "dude, are you lost?" looks from the other residents, especially going to work wearing a suit every day, but very little other interaction or cultural mixing happened.

> I wish there were good incentives to build combined/intermingled housing to have more mixed neighborhoods.

I feel like there are natural incentives for building a diverse variety of housing in an area. You have to go out of your way to only build expensive single family homes in an area.

Incentives for building mixed neighborhoods: You get a diverse population in an area which means support for all types of jobs within the city as opposed to requiring people to commute outside the city for work. Fewer homeless people because cost of living becomes more manageable. Shorter commute/travel times for people who have to go outside the city since most people are commuting within the city.

Incentives for building homogenous neighborhoods: You and your children won't have to interact with people who can't afford to live there. Everyone gets to live in a single family house (whether they want to or not).

I agree, from my experience it seems that areas with a more unplanned "chaotic" buildup also seems to have both more diversity in class/social/race and also much more community activity overall. I grew up in one of those homogeneous planned neighborhoods that are supposed to be nicer with their gatehouse and HoAs, but it's my current place with it's development clusterfuck that results in pristine McMansions sitting next to mobile homes with abandoned cars in the front that I feel the most at home.

Recently I was in southern Mexico where I attended a Sunday meeting. Looking around the chapel I realized that 100% of the people (other than my gringo self) were Mexican. The place was completely packed, but there was essentially no racial or linguistic diversity. Perhaps there was class diversity, but that is harder to tell just by looking at people all wearing their sunday clothes. I wonder how unusual the diversity of the Eastern USA is compared to the rest of the world?

In general, Roman Catholic parishes tend to draw on neighborhoods. That can make for parishes pretty well uniform in income level, and other factors. It can also make for quite diverse parishes. (Though there may be multiple language communities.) It seems to be that the Washington, DC, parishes running from about noon to about two on a clock centered on the White House tend to be be fairly diverse.

LDS?

Marginal Revolution comments: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/08/wh...

Has the comment section on that site always been so terrible, or is it just inspired by certain topics? Yikes

IMO, the articles tend to be horrible too. But every once in a while there's something very good.

Fascinating to me that the corporate chains we love to hate like Olive Garden, Applebees, and big chain stores in general, have the benefit of facilitating the most cross-class* interactions of any business type. I saw a comment explain this could be due to a mixed social group where everyone can agree to go to Applebees because it's acceptable socially to the higher class people and acceptable financially to the lower class people.

*Important to note that "class" in this paper is defined as income class, even though they refer to it at times as social class

> *Important to note that "class" in this paper is defined as income class, even though they refer to it at times as social class

Those are essentially the same thing in the US, as opposed to, say, the UK, where it's quite a bit more complicated.

I would disagree. Social class divide is very opaque for those who aren't looking/ don't know how to see it, but it does exist. Take a rich general contractor of Southern Italian descent (say third generation American) compared to a middle-class elite private school teacher of English/Scottish descent (say 14th generation American). They aren't running in the same circles or living in the same neighborhood

Not class segregation, but racial segregation. Yesterday I flew to the Atlanta airport and from there to the Portland Oregon airport. Probably 75-80% of the people flying to Atlanta were black. I was in the airport for about 5 hours and 80+% of the workers were black. When it was time to fly to Portland, I looked around the departure area and realized that 100% of the people flying to Oregon were white and when I got to the Portland airport, I paid attention to the workers are realized that 100% of them were white. For some reason, I’d always assumed that cities would naturally have a diverse mix of people, apparently not.

Oregon for a while explicitly barred black people from entering or raiding in the state, at the constitutional level. While unenforceable thanks to the federal 14th amendment, the Oregon constitution wasn't fully amended to remove references to this until 2002. https://ballotpedia.org/Oregon_Remove_Constitutional_Referen...

I certainly would hope they would bar anyone from raiding in the state.

*residing

Portland- and Oregon in general- is something of a special case, because of its history legally excluding Black people. In general cities are better about accepting people of different ethnicity and backgrounds, but individual history and laws can override that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_black_exclusion_laws

It's really dependent on the area that you are in

https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Black2017-1...

I'm Canadian, and when road tripping through the states, coming up from California, I was struck by how suddenly white Portland was relative to all places south of it.

There were laws making it illegal for people of color to live in Oregon territory which persisted through statehood and weren't fully stricken until into the 20th century.

Now fly to Minnesota and see that most of the people on the flight are white but 90% of the airport workers are Somali.

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