Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World

by Tim Harford

But while our attraction to people who share our outlook is not new, what is new is that we’re far more able to indulge that desire. Women are now far freer, better educated and better paid, which is good news. But one unintended consequence of that freedom is what economists call ‘assortative mating’. Executives with MBAs used to marry their secretaries; now they marry other executives with MBAs. And just as people choose ever more similar spouses, they also choose ever more similar neighbourhoods in a process called ‘assortative migration’. In the United States, neighbourhoods are increasingly segregated – economically, politically, almost any way one cares to look at the data.