William Easterly also (i.e. like me) has disdain for this habit of making stupid generalizations about massive geographical “groups” – groups in scare quotes because they’re not the groups the generalizers say they are. “Coastal elites” versus “flyover country” – how meaningless can you get?

I was born in West Virginia and spent all of 10 days there as an infant before my family moved to Ohio.  Perhaps that’s a license for me to say why Appalachians are poor, drink too much, and voted for Donald Trump. The best-selling and widely praised “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” by J.D. Vance, proceeds along those lines. But I shouldn’t single out that book: Sloppy analysis of collections of people — coastal elites, flyover America, Muslims, immigrants, people without college degrees, you name it — has become routine. And it’s killing our politics.

And clogging up our heads with stupid.

Three laws guide this bogus analysis of groups. First, define the group by the outcome you are trying to explain. Second, invoke a stereotype and exaggerate it. Third, endow the group with innate permanent properties, akin to racial characteristics. Together, these errors establish a kind of collective guilt, blaming an entire ill-defined group for the failings of its individuals, even if the offenders are a tiny minority. This is both divisive and false — and all the more toxic because of its flavor of intellectual propriety.

Divisive, and false, and stupid. It’s the love-child of Tom Friedman and David Brooks, and it’s stupid.

First, defining the group by the outcome you are trying to explain:

Vance (who’s actually a third-generation Appalachian immigrant to Middletown, in western Ohio) tells how his grandparents smashed up a pharmacy and threatened a clerk who’d told his son not to play with a toy on display: “If you say another word to my son, I will break your fucking neck.” Hence, the definition: “Destroying store merchandise and threatening a sales clerk were normal to Mamaw and Papaw. That’s what Scots-Irish Appalachians do when people mess with your kid.”

When Appalachians move to western Ohio, Vance notes, “hillbilly values spread widely along with hillbilly people.” How do you know they’re still hillbillies? Because they wreck pharmacies. Defining Appalachians as those who are poor, uneducated, and violent, we find that Appalachian culture causes poverty, lack of education, and violence.

So, using that logic, somebody in Manhattan once ordered a latte at Starbucks while carrying the latest NYRB, therefore the coastal elite is in a bubble out of touch with the pharmacy-smashers in South Dakota. Or something.

The second law of pseudo-analysis of groups says, reinforce stereotypes. In the case of Appalachia, these have a long history — “Deliverance” and all that. Recent fires in the Smoky Mountains aroused suspicions about the “moonshine stills of the poor, ignorant hillbillies.” This takes the badly defined group fully into the realm of caricature. (Note that when Appalachians complain about such accounts, Vance and other analysts see a flawed culture that “makes it hard for Appalachians to look at themselves honestly.” )

You can watch the news media doing this all the time – all those little vignettes where they go out into the world to Talk To Someone, so that we can all then feel we’ve heard a Representative Sample of what people are thinking. I seriously wish they would stop doing that.

Group stereotypes typically have a kernel of truth, reflecting some trait which is over-represented — but the likelihood of the trait’s occurring is then greatly exaggerated. Consider the elderly Floridian. Florida’s proportion of elderly people is indeed above the national average, but not as much as you think — 17 percent are 65 or older, compared to a national average of 13 percent.

You know what that’s like? The finding that men tend to think women dominate conversations far more than they actually do. A number of women in a group approaching half but still short of it will be reported as a large majority; that kind of thing.

In the U.S., we “coastal elites” are likely to condemn stereotypes when they involve immigrants, nonwhites, or religious minorities. But we’re more accepting of stereotypes that portray Southern, Midwestern, uneducated, working class whites as stupid, racist, and homophobic. (You wonder why so many rejected our advice on how to vote?) On the other hand, if you’re thinking, “Speak for yourself” — you’re right! “Coastal elite” is another stereotype. We don’t all disdain Appalachia or flyover America.

The crucial point is that all these stereotypes purport to be findings. In fact, they’re the opposite: a refusal to see vast individual variation within groups.

There’s a slippage from these stereotypes, he says, to thinking the stereotypes are inherent characteristics.

The idea is that all group members have a biological or innate propensity to behave a certain way. Studies suggest instead upsurges of bad or extreme behavior by some members of such groups for historical, changeable, circumstantial reasons. There’s no evidence for innate, permanent traits.

We understand this for some groups, but not for others. We understand Floridians don’t have a biological tendency to be elderly, and that Florida wound up with more old people for reasons of history and climate. But many anti-racist liberals see Appalachians as akin to an inferior race innately prone to racism.

It’s all bogus. Groups don’t have characters or personalities or minds. “Coastal elites” and “flyover country” are equally meaningless.