Well, to whatever extent this is true, I'd like to know --
1) Whether this is something very special to the US, versus happens in every country, and is a fact of life in remote / non-city areas, and
2) Does this call for a certain approach to how to effectively govern or design public policy if there is a east/west or city/suburban vs. rural social divide?
Attitudes in themselves are not a problem. Inability to have people agree on almost anything to move forward with government and economic life because there is a permanent divide in social/political climate is.
If a married couple cannot agree on finances, friends, raising kids, etc. ever, it's not pleasant for anyone.
> They describe the effect of mountain areas on personality as "small but robust"
The article doesn't quantify anything, so I'm more prone to believe it's hyped noise than anything real. But this phrase is a strong indicator that any attempt to use the findings in widespread policy will have bad results.
3) Do people from the University of Cambridge underestimate self-segregation due to US population mobility?
(FWIW, local politics in my country does anecdotally skew rural/right urban/left, but we fortunately have many other different divisions whose axes are uncorrelated with that particular one. I firmly believe having more than two major parties helps immensely on this front.)
Incidentally, my ultra-low-dimensional model after 2016 was "how far away does a US voter live from the largest city in their watershed?" It remains to be seen if this simplistic metric predicts anything useful in 2020.
It's a bit funny that this is "open science framework"...when the code sets the wd with absolute paths, and the R packages are not explicitly versioned. I wish more scientists would start using Docker to make their work environments reproducible.
1) Whether this is something very special to the US, versus happens in every country, and is a fact of life in remote / non-city areas, and
2) Does this call for a certain approach to how to effectively govern or design public policy if there is a east/west or city/suburban vs. rural social divide?
Attitudes in themselves are not a problem. Inability to have people agree on almost anything to move forward with government and economic life because there is a permanent divide in social/political climate is.
If a married couple cannot agree on finances, friends, raising kids, etc. ever, it's not pleasant for anyone.