Do You Live in a Bubble?

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We’ll be talking about poverty and the idea of relative deprivation this week, topics that relate to our ongoing discussion of the culture wars and this weird political season. Conservative political scientist Charles Murray (the Bell Curve thesis guy in Conley’s Chapter 10) developed a quiz that is useful for helping us think about whether there is a real cultural separation between an upper class “bubble” and the larger mainstream American culture. Take the quiz and we’ll discuss. And here’s an essay by Yale Professor Gerald Jaynes, who disagrees with the whole premise of Murray’s quiz: “‘Mainstream America’ Doesn’t Actually Exist.”