Although it may appear that way, this blog is not yet dead.
The last few months have been very busy, I've been suffering from writers block and I have been reading a lot.
I'm going on break for the next six weeks.
I hope to have something then.
The Diseases of Modern Life as seen through the Secular Confessional
Although it may appear that way, this blog is not yet dead.
The last few months have been very busy, I've been suffering from writers block and I have been reading a lot.
I'm going on break for the next six weeks.
I hope to have something then.
The other day an interesting graphic was posted on twitter which got me thinking about a post I wanted to write for a long time.
Back in 2014, The Pew Research conducted a Religious Landscape Study in the U.S. The study is interesting for its extensive demographic data which, when looked at a bit deeply is quite informative with regard to today's state of affairs.
In particular I'm interested in the data concerning households earning more than one hundred thousand dollars a year. This group or class constitutes the majority of the country's governing class. And by governing, I mean it in its most expansive context. Within this group are found senior and middle bureaucrats, lawyers, doctors, journalists, businessmen, accountants, virologists, business men, community elders and so on. Much attention is directed towards billionaires and media celebrities but the yeoman's work of day to day governance and organising the country is done by far less notable men. It's the values of this class that set the "tone" of the country.
In theory, Democratic government grant's sovereignty to the people and technically this is true, but in reality the issues that the people get to vote on and how their day to day affairs are run are largely based on the the decisions and values of the governing class. In a democracy some people are more equal than others.
Firstly, some Basic Demographic data.
What I've decided to do is concentrate on the major sized groups as I'm time limited and this isn't a full blown statistical survey. This covers 92% of the greater than $100K demographic. Interestingly, the impression that I've formed trawling the data is that the remaining 8% tends to cancel each other out on various values metrics. The Buddhists and the Hindus tend to be very permissive with regard to homosexuality and abortion, the Mormons and the Orthodox their opposite.
What I've tried to do is calculate the absolute number of each religious group in the >100K class and then determine their proportion in it. For example the Jewish community makes ups 4% of the U.S. population yet it makes up 5% of this class. If there are any errors in my calculations they are unintentional.
If we take the above minority groups out, then the composition of the governing class in the U.S. can be broken down as follows.