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A review by femmecheng
The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop
3.0
I feel bad giving this book 3 stars, as clearly a lot of research went into it and there's nothing really terrible about it. However, this book took me an absurdly long time to read (including putting it down for about a week and a half) and felt like a drudge to get through despite me being very interested in the subject matter. For whatever reason I can't discern at the moment, this book just didn't hit the right notes, though it is an interesting topic.
I think one of the biggest issues I have with the book is that I am thoroughly convinced there is a political sorting that's going on (and has been going on for awhile now). However, I feel like the book spent 90% of the time trying to convince the reader this is the case (which worked! I'm very convinced. Though I largely agreed with the idea beforehand), and spent very little time on the "why it's happening" (besides nearly self-evident arguments that people tend to like living with people who think like themselves), the "why it's bad" (from what I can tell, it boils down to "Congress is less efficient". The author even talked about studies that showed that having people interact with people with opposing viewpoints doesn't seem to end in a rational utopia of mutual understanding, so it doesn't seem like not sorting is very good either), and the "how to fix it" (there was really very little said about this at all) aspects that I'm likely simply more interested in.
I think one of the biggest issues I have with the book is that I am thoroughly convinced there is a political sorting that's going on (and has been going on for awhile now). However, I feel like the book spent 90% of the time trying to convince the reader this is the case (which worked! I'm very convinced. Though I largely agreed with the idea beforehand), and spent very little time on the "why it's happening" (besides nearly self-evident arguments that people tend to like living with people who think like themselves), the "why it's bad" (from what I can tell, it boils down to "Congress is less efficient". The author even talked about studies that showed that having people interact with people with opposing viewpoints doesn't seem to end in a rational utopia of mutual understanding, so it doesn't seem like not sorting is very good either), and the "how to fix it" (there was really very little said about this at all) aspects that I'm likely simply more interested in.