JUST BEFORE THE Independence Day holiday, I came across an article in the Harvard Business Review entitled, "Crowded Places Make People Think More About the Future." It potentially says a lot about where we are as a country right now.In it, Oliver Sng, a research fellow at the University of Michigan, discusses his paper, "The Crowded Life is a Slow Life." Sng's study found that people in more densely-populated areas tend to be more "future-oriented." These preferences show up even when people are induced to "perceive" they are in a higher-density situation – such as reading fictitious articles about spiraling population growth, or simply listening to recordings of crowd sounds instead of white noise."In more densely-populated countries," Sng wrote, "we saw less sexual promiscuity, lower fertility rates, higher preschool enrollment, and a greater societal emphasis on planning for the future versus solving today's problems." These country-to-country differences carried over to U.S. states, where people in more densely-populated ones "married later, had fewer children, and were more likely to attain a bachelor's degree and participate in retirement savings plans."This resulted in a chart plotting states by future-focused thinking against population density – and what looks like a pretty strong correlation. In fact, the graph itself – with future orientation at the top and density on the right – almost looks like a distended map of the U.S., with the dense, future-oriented states in the top-right Northeast and sort of petering out toward the upper Midwest, with the more present-focused, more sparsely-populated states starting at the lower middle and sprawling out across the southwest.All of which made me think about these not-so-United States these days.In the last year or two – not coincidentally, just at the time educated liberal elites, comfortably in the ascendance under Barack Obama, began to recognize the growing backlash from who became Trump voters – there's been a surge of research finding a genetic basis for liberal and conservative political predispositions. Essentially, this research claims, liberals tend to be more analytic and reflective, more open to new experiences and different cultures, and generally smarter, more fun and more likely to enjoy Thai restaurants – all the things liberals pride about themselves.Meanwhile, the studies comfortingly confirm that conservatives are genetically inferior in intelligence, ability to reason and learn from new experiences, and willingness to study abroad or vacation outside Florida. One can only imagine what liberal reaction to such studies would be if they'd found genetically-rooted mental deficiencies, or inherited preferences for, say, soccer, on the part of racial minorities or women – but the results have been embraced by progressives with the smugness of, well, the kind of progressives that those troglodytes out there love to hate.
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