Elite? Or Ultra-Citified?

A buzzy poll does not survey who it claims to survey

In recent weeks, you probably have seen articles about a Rasmussen poll (actually conducted last September) showing that elites do not want the rest of us to eat meat, cook with gas, engage in “unnecessary air travel,” and so on. Before piling onto this poll with my own commentary, I first wanted to look at the way it was conducted. Polls, like documentaries, can easily be used to construct a narrative rather than provide objective information.

The most comprehensive description I can find is a report by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, which commissioned the poll. The first thing I noted was the criteria for selecting the “elite.”

The Elites are defined as those having a postgraduate degree, a household income of more than $150,000 annually, and living in a zip code with more than 10,000 people per square mile. Approximately 1% of the total U.S. population meets these criteria.

The requirement of having a postgraduate degree and a household income more than $150,000 strikes me as not very strict. Google tells me that fourteen percent of Americans have a postgraduate degree, and twenty percent of U.S. households meet the income threshold. Even if there were zero correlation between income and education, almost 3 percent of the population would meet the criteria. But because the correlation between income and education is pretty high, a conservative estimate is that between 5 and 10 percent of the population is “elite” by those standards.

I can infer that the requirement to be “living in a zip code with more than 10,000 people per square mile” is doing a significant amount of work here in whittling the “elite” down to one percent. This is confirmed by checking out various zip codes with which I am familiar. My oldest daughter lives in a zip code in tony Newton, Massachusetts, where many households meet the elite income and education thresholds. But the population density there is less than half of what is needed to qualify for the Rasmussen survey. The same is true for many of the affluent zip codes near me.

In practice, a population density of more than 10,000 per square mile almost assures that high-rise buildings will supply a big share of housing. You are pretty much selecting for large northern cities, like New York, Chicago, and Boston. And you are selecting against some of the most affluent suburbs near those cities. Wealthy residents of large homes in Beverly Hills, California or Potomac, Maryland are going to be excluded from the sample.

In the United States, the typical person living in a zip code with at least 10,000 people per square mile is poor. I would bet that a large fraction of the zip codes with that much density are slums.

When you think of the elite, you think of the most affluent, highly-educated Americans. You think of what Charles Murray says is represented by Belmont. Residents of Belmont are not in the Rasmussen poll because Belmont fails to meet the density requirement.

Instead, what this sample is picking is people who are indeed well above average in terms income and education, but whose most distinguishing characteristic is choosing to live in crowded sections of older cities. The best label I can come up for this demographic is Ultra-Citified Upper Middle Class, or ultra-citified for short.

The ultra-citified do think differently from the rest of us. The report finds that 73 percent are Democrats, and only 14 percent are Republicans. 47 percent think that there is too much freedom in America, and only 11 percent think that there is too much government control. 77 percent favor rationing energy, gas, and meat to fight climate change, and only 2 percent oppose.

All of these divisions widen even further if the sample is restricted to graduates of the most selective colleges. So among the ultra-citified, the Ivy League alumni are the most stereotypically on the left.

I do not mean to dismiss the poll. But I think that it is wrong to characterize the ultra-citified as representing the very top of the status hierarchy in America. What they represent instead is a highly concentrated, homogeneous cohort that cares intensely about politics. In the big cities where they cluster, they can act more cohesively than the rest of us, which gives them disproportionate political influence there.

But if you were to study more broadly the affluent and highly-educated portion of the American public, you would find a diverse set of values and beliefs. It is not just “the deplorables” living in small towns that are alienated by the ultra-citified. It is not just the working-class urban neighborhoods that Murray symbolizes with Fishtown. The ultra-citified also alienate much of Belmont.

The ultra-citified are islands of insanity in an America that is still a sea of reasonableness. At a national level, the ultra-citified are destined to lose most of the political battles.