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Thats an interesting theory, but I don't think it would pass muster of a statistical analysis. Political affiliations track much closer with gender, faith, and

Thats an interesting theory, but I don't think it would pass muster of a statistical analysis. Political affiliations track much closer with gender, faith, and economic standing then with Occupation. I would classify any pockets of political concentration as a result of subtle bias in selecting people rather then a natural result of the occupation. ( kinda like what they found here [1] with houses) Also people in rural area's generally don't carry around guns to protect themselves from wild animals with a few exceptions like the deep wilderness of Alaska. 1. http://www.bgu.ac.il/BIDR/research/staff/meron/papers/epa.pdf http://www.bgu.ac.il/BIDR/research/staff/meron/papers/epa.pd...

nostrademons 8y ago
I was thinking more in terms of economic system than occupation. The Mexican housecleaner for a Silicon Valley hotel, the American supply-chain executive at Apple, and the Shenzhen electrical engineer are all part of the same economic system, even though they're of wildly different races, social classes, occupations, geographies, and nationalities. Similarly, the Koch Brothers and the West Virginian coal miners are part of the same economic system (and disparate from the previous one), despite being of vastly different wealth levels and occupations. The casinos in downtown Las Vegas (which serve an older, whiter, and more American clientele) are part of a different economic system than many of the mega-resorts on The Strip, even though they're in the same industry, same occupation, and same geographical location. My definition of "economic system" is a constellation of related businesses that are all adapted to a particular level of technology. Certain technologies - particularly ones related to communication, transportation, energy, and finance - dictate an optimum arrangement of firms within the economy, because they directly affect transaction costs, and transaction costs are the reason we have firms instead of independent producers. When a major new technology - like the Internet - becomes widely adopted, that optimum changes, and many firms just no longer make economic sense anymore: even if the firm remains economically competitive within its market, its market no longer exists anymore, because the boundaries of how it makes sense to divide the economy into firms have shifted, as have what the economy actually produces. But it takes a long time - generations - for this to actually filter through all of the economy, because existing business relationships don't die until the companies involved run out of cash, which doesn't happen until a critical mass of their own customers run out of cash, and so on. So for a period of 30ish years, the two economies exist side-by-side, but often with a lot of friction between the two of them, along with a growing wealth disparity. People can feel that there's a new, alien way of life that threatens to destroy everything about what they know of the world, but because few people have visibility into the whole economy, they often can't place exactly why they're mad and end up seizing on surface manifestations of the problem.

nostrademons 8y ago

I was thinking more in terms of economic system than occupation. The Mexican housecleaner for a Silicon Valley hotel, the American supply-chain executive at Apple, and the Shenzhen electrical engineer are all part of the same economic system, even though they're of wildly different races, social classes, occupations, geographies, and nationalities. Similarly, the Koch Brothers and the West Virginian coal miners are part of the same economic system (and disparate from the previous one), despite being of vastly different wealth levels and occupations. The casinos in downtown Las Vegas (which serve an older, whiter, and more American clientele) are part of a different economic system than many of the mega-resorts on The Strip, even though they're in the same industry, same occupation, and same geographical location. My definition of "economic system" is a constellation of related businesses that are all adapted to a particular level of technology. Certain technologies - particularly ones related to communication, transportation, energy, and finance - dictate an optimum arrangement of firms within the economy, because they directly affect transaction costs, and transaction costs are the reason we have firms instead of independent producers. When a major new technology - like the Internet - becomes widely adopted, that optimum changes, and many firms just no longer make economic sense anymore: even if the firm remains economically competitive within its market, its market no longer exists anymore, because the boundaries of how it makes sense to divide the economy into firms have shifted, as have what the economy actually produces. But it takes a long time - generations - for this to actually filter through all of the economy, because existing business relationships don't die until the companies involved run out of cash, which doesn't happen until a critical mass of their own customers run out of cash, and so on. So for a period of 30ish years, the two economies exist side-by-side, but often with a lot of friction between the two of them, along with a growing wealth disparity. People can feel that there's a new, alien way of life that threatens to destroy everything about what they know of the world, but because few people have visibility into the whole economy, they often can't place exactly why they're mad and end up seizing on surface manifestations of the problem.