Micromotives and Macrobehavior by Thomas C. Schelling & Thomas C. Schelling

Author:Thomas C. Schelling & Thomas C. Schelling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WWNorton
Published: 2005-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

4

SORTING AND MIXING: RACE AND SEX

PEOPLE GET SEPARATED along many lines and in many ways. There is segregation by sex, age, income, language, religion, color, personal taste, and the accidents of historical location. Some segregation results from the practices of organizations. Some is deliberately organized. Some results from the interplay of individual choices that discriminate. Some of it results from specialized communication systems, like languages. And some segregation is a corollary of other modes of segregation: residence is correlated with job location and transport.

If blacks exclude whites from their church, or whites exclude blacks, the segregation is organized; and it may be reciprocal or one-sided. If blacks just happen to be Baptists and whites Methodists, the two colors will be segregated Sunday morning whether they intend to be or not. If blacks join a black church because they are more comfortable among their own color, and whites a white church for the same reason, undirected individual choice can lead to segregation. And if the church bulletin board is where people advertise rooms for rent, blacks will rent rooms from blacks and whites from whites because of a communication system that is connected with churches that are correlated with color.

Some of the same mechanisms segregate college professors. The college may own some housing, from which all but college staff are excluded. Professors choose housing commensurate with their incomes, and houses are clustered by price while professors are clustered by income. Some professors prefer an academic neighborhood; any differential in professorial density will cause them to converge and increase the local density, and attract more professors. And house-hunting professors learn about available housing from colleagues and their spouses, and the houses they learn about are naturally the ones in neighborhood where professors already live.

The similarity ends there, and nobody is about to propose a commission to desegregate academics. Professors are not much missed by those they escape from in their residential choices. They are not much noticed by those they live among, and, though proportionately concentrated, are usually a minority in their neighborhood. While indeed they escape classes of people they would not care to live among, they are more conscious of where they do live than of where they don’t, and the active choice is more like congregation than segregation, though the result may not be so different.

This chapter is about the kind of segregation—or separation, or sorting—that can result from discriminatory individual behavior. By “discriminatory” I mean reflecting an awareness, conscious or unconscious, of sex or age or religion or color or whatever the basis of segregation is, an awareness that influences decisions on where to live, whom to sit by, what occupation to join or to avoid, whom to play with, or whom to talk to. It examines some of the individual incentives and individual perceptions of difference that can lead collectively to segregation. It also examines the extent to which inferences can be drawn from actual collective segregation about the preferences of individuals, the strengths of those preferences, and the facilities for exercising them.

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