IS YOUR HOUSE red, or blue? “I suspect that immigration plays a role in inequality; if you open your doors to a large number of low-skilled workers who don’t speak the local language, they will drive up your rates of poverty and inequality, even if there’s no change in the relative income of the people who were there before. On a national level, this factor probably doesn’t drive a huge amount of the change in inequality over the last few decades. But on a local level, I suspect it does. A sizable number of blue cities also have vast fortunes made possible by the globalization of everything: finance, entertainment, technology. The concentration of those industries in blue cities drives up income inequality; it also drives up the price of the houses those kinds of people live in.”