A simple model showed mild personal preferences can segregate an entire neighborhood

Thomas Schelling built a toy model where people only move if too many of their immediate neighbors are unlike them — even a mild preference for some similarity, not outright prejudice. Running the model again and again, whole blocks still tipped into sharply segregated patterns, showing how individually modest preferences can produce a starkly divided outcome nobody specifically chose.

— Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior — 1978 (model first published 1971)
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