I got a 50 – I expect my military experience answers made the difference between 50 and about 20 or so. I wouldn’t have lived in a small town, or walked on a factory floor (really a maritime maintenance facility, but I think that counts since almost all of the workers were blue-collar union folks), or a few of the others, had it not been for the Navy.
I got a 53. But I also am not sure how many points I “lost” because I don’t eat out at all, much less at any of the restaurants listed, and I don’t watch many television shows. As far as questions about my community and my personal blue collar work experiences and finances, I probably got 100%
I am not sure how, “have you bought a pickup truck”, or “giong fishing”, or “did you letter in anything?” (and I’m not sure why debate team or chess doesn’t count), the parade question, asking if you’d been in a parade that wasn’t about global warming, gay rights, or war opposition, certainly seems to indicate a bias on the part of the pollsters, and “Headaches don’t count, neither does carpal tunnel syndrome, nor does a sore rear end from sitting all day in front of a computer screen.” certainly shows a disdain for white collar workers.
That’s interesting…I also got a 50, and I also think that my serving in the Navy (along with growing up as an Army brat) raised my score.
It’s not just that he’s racist–it’s that this quiz fits firmly into his racist/conservative project. Let’s look at his questions, and see how he’d frame them if he weren’t trying to advance a racist/conservative project and were instead trying to figure out genuinely whether folks have a diverse social experience:
These first two help you figure out your rough socioeconomic class.
Here we go, getting started: 64% of the US population is white, but 78% of the rural/small town population is white.
Fine.
We’re getting back into weird territory: the majority of the working poor are women, but women make up only 30% of folks in the manufacturing sector. From the same link, manufacturing jobs are 80% white, again, disproportionately higher than white people in the general population.
Carpal tunnel doesn’t count? Way to exclude pink collar jobs, asshole.
This isn’t a racist question so much as it is a deeply Republican question. Why would you ask it this way, if you want to find out who lives in a bubble? Why not ask, “Have you ever had a close friend whose religious affiliation was different from yours?” The way this question is worded it suggests that someone deep within an evangelical church with no non-evangelical friends is less in a bubble than someone who regularly hangs with devout Hindus, Muslims, and Jews, as well as a wide cross-section of other faiths and atheists. That’s absurd.
Good.
To a lesser degree, this suffers from the same problem as above: a person who hangs out with a lot of folks who dropped out of high school is absolutely in more of a bubble than someone who hangs out with a lot of folks of different academic abilities, none of whom struggled extremely hard.
:rolleyes: Same problem.
Even more :rolleyes:. You wanna convince me that folks in the military are in less of a bubble than folks in civilian life? I mean, the military works real hard to make that NOT be true, for very good reason. That bubble is a big piece of unit cohesion.
Jimmie Johnson, the NASCAR driver? No, he’s not trying to exclude nonwhites at all here.
Again, we have the urban/rural divide: the disproportionately white rural population is a lot likelier to use a pickup truck than an urban population.
I don’t even know.
Urban/rural divide.
Pretty sure there’s the same urban/rural divide here: AFAICT, these restaurants are less common in metropolitan areas.
In high school, did you hang out with people in different social groups? This question is just trying to figure out which bubble you’re in.
You can’t ask people about which bubbles you’re in and then tell them if they’re in the Kiwanis bubble they’re not in a bubble.
What about not involving pro-life stuff? What about ever participated in political activism? Another question about which bubble you’re in.
This conflates several different professions, from low-income professions like CNA through professions like surgeon or general. It’s an extremely useless question.
WHO HITCHHIKES ANYMORE? I’m interested in the bus question.
Did you see the movie on the list with a black star or director? Me either.
Slightly better–but this is another “which bubble are you in?” question.
Huh? If you know about some place in Missouri it means one thing, if you know about some rich fucker it means another. How does this help you figure out if you live in a bubble?
So them’s the question. A few of them are pretty clearly biased against nonwhite people. A few of them are pretty clearly biased against women. Virtually all the rest just identify which social groups you hang out with, with no indication whatsoever whether there’s any heterogeneity in your groups.
This is a deeply shitty quiz.
I got a 29. 2nd gen or more American (actually it is 12) with middle class parents but it noted I went out a lot. On the restaurant list I have been to about half of them 3 or 4 times a year. However - if they had asked about Buffalo Wild Wings I have been about 150 times in the past year. I wonder what that would have done to the curve?
*I play Buzztime Trivia there about 3 times a week.
Dennis
I got 49. Although I’m an academic, I grew up poor in a working class neighborhood, which raised my score.
I agree the questions are bullshit. They’re only designed to identify how much interaction/identity you have with white working class America. They don’t identify any other bubbles.
I wonder about some of the questions too. Is watching The Big Bang Theory supposed to indicate you live in the bubble, or not? If you watch it, does that mean you’re an intellectual? Because some of the academics I know don’t even own TVs and have certainly never even heard of the show.
And some of the very working class right wing leaning people that I know love that show.
I don’t watch it, I don’t have much time for entertainment, and I don’t like laugh tracks, but my understanding is that it makes fun of intellectuals, rather than celebrates them or even normalizes them.
I would actually lean toward liking BBT to be a “plus” in the algorithm that produces this survey’s score.
Ruby Payne has some quizzes about aspects of social class, what she calls “hidden rules,” that IMO get at, more effectively, what Murray is circling around. They still don’t show the diversity of your social experience, but they’re not quite so implicitly pro-rural-white-Republican. Worth taking a look at them.
All right, sorry to keep posting, but I just read over Payne’s quizzes, and I think they suffer from a lot of the same root problems as Murray’s. Neither Murray nor Payne seems to have approached the quizzes in a remotely scientific way (e.g., interviewing hundreds of people and cross-referencing answers by commonalities in social class or whatever, then creating a quiz based on those commonalities); both of them seem to have approached these quizzes like a Cosmo quiz, just knocking that shit out.
The quizzes tell you a lot more about the quizmaker than the quiztaker.
It mocks intellectuals/nerds/geeks under the guise of celebrating them. I think watching the shows listed in the quiz, like eating at the chain restaurants listed, bumps your score up a little higher. The idea being they’re highly popular, so if you’re participating you’re part of “mainstream American culture”.
If you answer the questions as “stereotypically working class, urban (and mostly not white)”–like the people of East Hollywood or South L.A., (the two places I have lived for the past decades)–then you’ll probably get a lower score. Few people around here know or care who Jimmie Johnson is (though I do), or NASCAR in general, or watch those TV shows. Yes, it’s looking for a class stereotype, but the classes of the U.S. today are not as simple as the creator of this test would have us think.
Bingo.
Well, not only that, but what about service industry jobs? Working in restaurants–especially fast-food restaurants–or housekeeping in hotels?
Way to exclude a huge portion of the working class in general. Those factory jobs are only about 10%, from my understanding.
I have hitchhiked, and I know who Jimmie Johnson is, and I’ve lived in low-education areas for a while – I actually got a “high” score – but it doesn’t correlate with many of the other questions, and means little. Murray’s assumptions all seem to indicate that he’s willing to ignore California–the most populous state.
Yes, that’s what it’s testing for.
If it were testing for pedants, we’d score a 98 (assuming higher is closer to the mark.)
Really, you don’t have any idea if your neighbors are college educated? If your powers of deduction are that poor, I don’t think a conversation is going to help. I could guess with 90% accuracy without ever having met them. Where they live, what they drive, what they wear to work - I could get 75% correct just with that info.
I got 22, but my work is in college towns with college faculty.
Have you hitchhiked, for fifty miles or more, in the last quarter century? I’ve poked around a little and am finding it very difficult to find stats on modern hitchhiking. But I also find it very difficult to believe that a significant chunk of the population has been long-distance hitchhiking in the twenty-first century
Right–but “How well do you know wipipo” isn’t what it’s titled. There’s a pretty big difference between that and “do you live in a bubble?”
Cute. Thing is, Murray claims to be a social scientist. It’s a little ridiculous to snark on people for being pedantic about the output of a social scientist.
It was in the mid nineties – from the Mexican border at Nuevo Laredo to L.A. But not since then, and I doubt hitchhiking is part of the “mainstream” today.
What a nasty arrogant elitist little quiz.
Guess what, Mr. Professor Man, some people just have good taste in beer.
Tell me you did not take that quiz through Facebook, the better to target you with inflammatory political ads, my dear, (Margaret Hamilton laugh here).
Oh, I got a 57, and I am the most bubbled person I know, I just happened to have grown up blue collar, like most of my professional high income friends.
And I would never buy less expensive beer to stock someone else’s refrigerator than I buy for my own - what was with that question?
Right, which is part of what makes it funny, when a septuagenarian tries to tell folks what normal people do.
I think this old fart just can’t stand the fact that social science trends more liberal than him, so he’s concocted this quiz in an attempt to make liberals feel like they’re not true Americans. The hilarious part is that liberals are so predisposed to question themselves that his stupid con is likely to make some people actually feel bad.
Nice one?
55 but it was so ridiculously full of stereotypes and stupidity it’s like it was written by a person who lived inside this bubble themselves and had no clue what it’s like to be white, poor, AND urban. They must think every poor person travels barefoot or by pickup to their favorite fishin hole or chugs beer while watching NASCAR.
Why the hell would I need to hitch hike? I grew up in Memphis. Everything I needed was in walking distance, and my god I was poor but I could still gather change for the city bus if I wanted to get to the New Mall.
I got a 42 when I took it. I get a lot of non-bubbly street cred for some poverty and living in low income neighborhoods. I was expecting more TV and sports questions that would have made me look more snobby and iconoclastic.