The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [32]
Suburban Flight
The civil rights era and racial unrest in the cities in the 1960s also accelerated another massive geographical trend: the flight to the suburbs by affluent white households. Suburbanization was already under way in the 1950s, before racial politics came to the forefront. The rise of the automobile, combined with the postwar baby boom and the return to normalcy in the 1950s, spurred the surge in suburbanization. Then came a dramatic white flight to the suburbs in the 1960s and afterward, reflecting both social and economic forces. The social forces consisted mainly of the desire of many whites to live in homogeneous white neighborhoods. The economic forces consisted mainly of the search by affluent (and mainly white) households for quality schooling for their children.11
More affluent households increasingly sorted themselves into higher-priced affluent suburbs that supported better public schools based on higher tax collections. The influx of affluent households into favored suburbs raised property prices and priced out working-class households, which had to choose among less desirable urban and suburban locations. The poor were generally left to the low-rent and least desirable locations in the inner cities. Thus, Americans sorted themselves by class and race to produce today’s residentially divided America.
The economic ramifications of the suburban-urban divide were stark, in that school financing diverged between poor inner cities and affluent suburbs. Residential sorting became a crucial way in which educational and income inequalities were propagated from one generation to the next. In order to avoid a prolonged poverty trap, federal and state financial support for very poor school districts became more important than ever.
The political ramifications were equally stark: the affluent suburbs turned more Republican, and the poorer urban areas turned more Democratic. Congressional districts thereby became “safer” for Republicans or Democrats, with fewer swing districts as a result. In the safe districts, dominated by one of the political parties, the real political competition comes not in the November elections but during the primaries, tending to pull the Republicans in safe districts more toward the right and the safe Democrats more toward the left. We should remember, though, that big corporate money has pulled both parties to the right. The overall effect is a very conservative Republican Party and a Democratic Party that is generally centrist (or even right of center in districts where campaign financing looms especially large).
Still a Consensus Beneath the Surface
One possible reading of this chapter is that the search for a new economic consensus in America is a fool’s errand. After all, the country is deeply riven by cultural, geographical, racial, and class differences, all of which have become deeper in recent decades. The Tea Party seems to represent the latest ratcheting up of the ongoing battles between liberals and conservatives, northerners and southerners, whites and minorities. How, in these circumstances, can there possibly be a new set of shared values? I think this view of a nation in a fundamental and irreconcilable divide is wrong. There is much more consensus than meets the eye.
The real issue about consensus is not whether Americans can agree on everything important to their lives—clearly the answer to that is no—but whether Americans can agree on a set of national economic policies to promote overall efficiency, fairness, and sustainability. Here, then, are some things on which Americans broadly agree.
They agree that there should be equality of opportunity for American citizens. They agree that individuals should make the