(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Well, that didn’t take long.
Just one day after the election, Thomas Edsall argues that Scott Brown won – and Americans generally are rejecting health care socializiation – because white people are just so darn racist.
No! It’s true! Because he read a book that says ethnically diverse neighborhoods have more social tension than ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods! The book had numbers in it and everything! That proves it!
Update: Edsall’s not alone. Howard Fineman, editor of Newsweek, thinks pickup trucks are racist.
Apparently not everyone’s ideological blinders have been loosened by this experience.
What do you suppose it will take to get through to these people?
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
I really hate “Bowling Alone” Putnam couldn’t have been more wrong. He wrote that stupid book as the internet was exploding and people where out exploring diverse ideas and joining diverse institutions. Furthermore, people weren’t bowling alone, they were spontaneously organization with friends and family.
He needs to scrap that book and burn it. It needs to be replaced with a book called “Surfing with Millions: how technology and innovation created a new American community” or my favorite title “I’m a smart academic and I totally got it wrong”
FYI, Edsall references the book in the article.
In addition, Putnam’s methodology is flawed because it fails to account for changes in the distribution of existing types of organizations. So even if you set the Internet and all that stuff aside, you have to account for the fact that over the same period when Little League baseball was declining, soccer leagues were exploding. But Putnam only examines the former.