Bobos in Paradise author/new NYT op-ed columnist David Brooks hypothesizes in the September issue of the Atlantic that people who live in supposedly cosmopolitan areas tend to cluster around people like themselves even when they consider diversity an important value. An illustration from the first "noncontroversial" [Brooks' description] chapter of The Bell Curve: "Think of your twelve closest friends...If you had chosen them randomly from the American population, the odds that half of your twelve closest friends would be college graduates would be six in a thousand. The odds that half of the twelve would have advanced degrees would be less than one in a million. Have any of your twelve closest friends graduated from Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Caltech, MIT, Duke, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia, Chicago, or Brown? If you chose your friends randomly from the American population, the odds against your having four or more friends from those schools would be more than a billion to one."
People like us [Atlantic]