There has been a trend over the last few decades where more pickups are being sold with crew cabs (full front and rear seats, four regular doors) rather than regular cab (front seat only, two doors) or extended cab (front seat and small rear seat, two regular doors and two rear hinged doors that only open when the front doors are open). That and the increasing availability of luxury trimmings makes them more “family friendly”. Some pickup models have also been aimed at the “suburban family” market, such as the Chevrolet Avalanche (and a Cadillac version), Subaru Baja, and Honda Ridgeline.
In other words, vehicle companies have realized that not all pickup buyers are looking for basic work trucks. Of course, a middle income person may have to wait several years to buy a crew cab pickup with all of the luxury trimmings as a used truck, since a new one can approach the $50,000 price point.
minivans are used by big families (of varying incomes and nationalities), people who carpool, many self employed cleaning people and many others who have to lug “stuff” and “people”. The bigger SUVs ( Suburbans, Expeditions) and other higher end ones (Escalades, Land Rovers, etc) have a different demographic.
Native Californian. I still scored a 52 because I grew up in the San Joaquin Valley. I was the first in my family to go to college. My Dad was a blue collar factory worker and Vice president of his union. My Mom worked for a large family owned farm. We lived a few miles outside of town and lived very rural.
Now however, I live in the heart of Los Angeles, take the train every day and eat at local owned restaurants or my corner taco truck. The LA times posted a great map to see how your neighborhood voted in the election. Where I grew up was 54 Trump, 38 Clinton. My current neighborhood? 84 Clinton 13 Trump. Yeah.
In California, we may have a liberal bubble, but we are very diverse in regards to ethnicity and religion. Travelling outside of my California bubble, into the Midwest, one of the things I notice immediately is how white it is. It’s striking, though mostly not uncomfortable. The one exception was West Virginia where I was most definitely racially profiled. So, I’d argue that there are multiple kinds of bubbles and that we should try to understand where people are coming from outside of our various bubbles.
ETA: Regarding the restaurants. I don’t know if it’s a question of class as opposed to urban vs suburban vs rural. I live in the LA city limits. There are Denny’s, some IHOPs and a local diner chain called Norm’s, but there aren’t really Applebees, Chili’s, etc in the heavy urban areas. Now, go out into the suburbs and they are everywhere. Here in LA, you can’t throw a rock without hitting a taco truck (YUM), or a fast food joint.
The same goes from big box stores. We have lots ot Targets in LA city limits, but the closest Walmart is Burbank.
I really think, though, that some of the commentary here about unfair questions and such are missing that (a) this is a quick-hit survey and so necessarily misses some things, and (b) is asking about certain salient markers of working-class rurality specifically, which makes sense given its intended audience. (A quick survey like this directed at rural individuals might ask about, say, mass transit rather than Greyhound.)
The point of the survey is that we increasingly live in two* Americas where we don’t experience the same things. So of course it makes sense to many of us to object to questions about pickup trucks but not minivans or about specific movies or TV shows (as I did when I saw it, before I remembered the point of the quiz), since minivans are a marker of the lives of many suburban (but not so much rural) individuals, the further up the class scale you are the less likely you are to watch television (or at least to watch mass-market TV shows), and so on.
I would argue that two is an undercount, even if you limit it to the urban-rural divide—as some of the research I and other linguists are doing right now points out, there’s not only a more nuanced urban-suburban-rural divide, but we need to think in terms of different sorts of, e.g., rurality. Also, the conflation of rural with working-class and urban with (upper-)middle class bothers me, but again, simplification for for a quick-hit survey works.
I drive a big pickup truck but would never hang out with a smoker! Walmart (right now) is one of the few retailers doing OK in the current retail economic climate.
If the questions had included WHAT you order at the chains, I have a feeling that Murray’s list would only include a full slab of red meat and we’d be told that any entre that included the word “salad” didn’t count.
Yes, I am confused too especially when you consider the beliefs of Charles Murray. He caused a firestorm with his book Bell Curve due to his views on IQ and race. His whole shtick is that intelligence is now the basis upon which social classes are delineated:
@dfbdfb - Its doubtful many here missed the fact that this was a PBS survey, and that alone targets/represents a certain swath of the population. Am guessing the majority of people driving trucks are not listening to NPR’s All things Considered,; Wait,Wait Don’t tell me; or would know who Carl Kasell or Diane Rehm are.
I got a 33. I was surprised that I didn’t get lower as I most certainly live in a “professional-class” bubble. However I grew up in poverty and have spent some time in the rural areas. I thought it surprising that the quiz asked about friends but not family. I have plenty of family who have polar opposite political and religious views. I got zero points for the restaurants. Those don’t exist in my neighborhoods but I guess I wouldn’t go to them when traveling either. I’d seek out a local diner or ethnic restaurant.
Got a 21. Grew up in an urban neighborhood with lots of city employees, teachers, manager types (no one had a lot of money, mainly because most families had 5-13 kids, but education was highly valued). Live in a close-in suburb now. Watch a decent amount of non-serious TV, just not the shows on the list. Eat out regularly at neighborhood pub/pizza/cheesesteak/Chinese places, but hardly ever at chains. My kids know some fundamentalists, but I don’t. Did not recognize the Jimmie/Jimmy spelling issue and thought of Cowboys (no knowledge of NASCAR). Might get a pickup truck someday, but yeah, it would be a tricked out version.
I read Coming Apart a few years ago, and many, perhaps all, of the questions were presented there. The reason he wrote Coming Apart is to illustrate that the concepts he outlined in The Bell Curve (where people were too busy shooting the messenger to determine if it had any validity), were also applicable to different classes of whites in America.
The point of the questions was to get his readers, who for the most part tend to be high-IQ and liberal, to understand how little they have in common with mainstream white (and generally conservative) Americans. Qualitative rather than quantitative.
@hebegebe – wondering what your take is then on his idea that this intellectually superior overclass is “truer to the founding American virtues than is the white working class.”
And if you accept his basic hypothesis then Asians would make up the overclass. Doesn’t he advance in Bell Curve that they are intellectually superior in terms of IQ?
I’ll just note, as someone who found the basic conclusions of The Bell Curve misguided at best and a blatant misrepresentation of the research at worst, and who hasn’t read Coming Apart but finds its conclusions at best problematic if what I’ve seen second-hand is a correct representation, that while Murray’s reasons for the separation between social classes (meaning this in a broad sense, not just an upper-middle-lower continuum) don’t work, his overall descriptions of the underlying phenomenon really do seem to be sound.
TL;DR: It’s not necessary to accept someone’s analysis to agree with the descriptive side of their work.
I got a 49 and consider myself well read, well traveled, and quite liberal (today, but not always been), and I live in a very upper middle class, progressive area. I guess my score was skewed by my military service and my exposure to ‘normal’ American experiences (NASCAR, country music, etc.).
It’s been a long time since I read The Bell Curve. I consider Murray an important social scientist. I agree with @dfbdfb that his real strength is finding issues that others miss or are too afraid to look at in detail. His conclusions are a bit hit and miss.
