Tim Harford—the FT’s ‘Under­cover Economist’—has pro­duced a video demon­strat­ing Thomas Schelling’s the­ory of racial seg­re­ga­tion, in 2 min­utes.

Schelling, who was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Eco­nom­ics for “hav­ing enhanced our under­stand­ing of con­flict and coop­er­a­tion through game-theory analy­sis”, showed with his Mod­els of Seg­re­ga­tion that even a mild pref­er­ence for the colour of your neigh­bour can lead to extreme segregation.

Har­fords view on this:

Although we as indi­vid­u­als may be ratio­nal and we may be tol­er­ant, the soci­ety that we pro­duce together may be nei­ther ratio­nal nor tolerant.