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Originally Posted by Capsicum
I agree but it isn't easy to measure "acquired life experiences" (especially in lists of "top rankings" of diversity that measure demographics based on ancestry/race alone).
Self-identification kind of gets at that -- perhaps we assume that someone identifying as "Italian" has more "acquired life experiences" associated with cultural elements from Italy or of the Italian diaspora than someone who puts down only "white" or "American" for ancestry. Perhaps we assume that someone putting down "Nigerian" as an identifier has more firsthand experience with overseas or first-generation immigrant African culture than someone putting down "African American". But these are all assumptions. Maybe the African American has traveled abroad and lived in Italy more years than the Italian American, for instance.
High foreign-born population also gets of a kind of diversity of "acquired life experience", since the foreign born will be exposed to certain experiences, it might be assumed, simply by being in another country. However, again, that does not account for domestic diversities of life experiences (an Amish town, native reserves in northern Alaska, and inner cities of New York or LA could represent domestic life experiences as different or more different than two foreign locations such as upper class people living in London, UK and in Manhattan).
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These examples are micro or even nano-phenomenon within the mass of the general American experience lived by over 300 million people, though.
On a broader level, I am not really on board with the Global Metropolitan Affinity idea based primarily on lifestyle and that seems to have a lot of credence these days - especially on SSP. My sense is that most of the people who play this up have never really met or talked to the Parisians, Tokyoites, Muscovites, Londoners, etc. that they're so eager to lump in with New Yorkers in a global urban super-class. I doubt most of them have even been to these cities, and if they have they've never much further than happy hour at the Marriott and the boardrooms of multinationals.
Regardless of the eeewww factor, if you add everything up your random Parisian has more in common with the guy in Issoire than he does with a Londoner. And even the "UK influence" (EPL games on TV, Boddington's beer, Paddington bear, Harry Potter, Bridget Jones, Pink Floyd, Queen, James Bond, Harrods shopping bags, etc.) is present in Issoire just as much as it is in Paris.