It may be that demographics and immigration play a powerful force in bursting our ghetto bubbles. As Europe shrinks and their industrious young leave to avoid supporting an increasingly aging population, the culture in Europe will become less diverse and more of an echo chamber. And since both neighborhoods and businesses are largely static, interacting with strangers becomes increasingly rare.

In the US, on the other hand, our income and geographic mobility, combined with our immigration policies, force a constant change in the composition of our cultural “ghettos.” Our flexible labor model also causes considerable proximity churn, mixing and remixing the adjacencies of our lives.

The melting pot cultural model is our best hope for the future, provided we don’t abandon it for a ghetto-friendly, hyphenated-American, politically correct stew.

L3