ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

Are You Out Of Touch With The Majority Of Americans?

Photographed by Raven Ishak.
How many Americans live in a bubble? That's the question a new quiz by PBS is trying to answer. The 1% are living in clusters, or bubbles, with little to no exposure to the culture and lifestyle of the other 99%.
To test just how thick your own bubble may be, PBS has created a 25-question quiz that determines how your real-world experiences measure up to the rest of America's. It asks whether you grew up in a middle-class neighborhood, if you've held blue-collar jobs, and if you've lived in poverty. It also takes into account which movies and TV shows you've seen in the last year, to gauge your consumption of pop culture. It then gives you a score between 0 and 100, with a small explanation on what your bubble is like. The higher your final score, the thinner your bubble is. The lower your score, the more insulated your bubble is.

According to Charles Murray
, an author and libertarian political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, the super wealthy and super educated are completely disconnected from the rest of American society. This fits in line with recent numbers on America's growing economic inequality. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the top 20% of U.S. households own more than 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% combine for just 0.3%. The median CEO-to-worker pay-ratio in the U.S. is 354 to 1. If the richest Americans are out of touch with the average American's daily life, cultural preferences, and real-life experiences, it widens the divide on issues like gender pay gap, minimum wage, and more.

Take the full quiz
and find out whether or not you're living in a bubble.
AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT

More from US News

ADVERTISEMENT