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January 5 - January 14, 2022
My primary goal is to induce recognition of the ways in which America is coming apart at the seams—not seams of race or ethnicity, but of class.
I hereby operationally define the new upper class as the most successful 5 percent of adults ages 25 and older who are working in managerial positions, in the professions (medicine, the law, engineering and architecture, the sciences, and university faculty), and in content-production jobs in the media.
Members of the new upper class in every occupational domain are likely to have coworkers and colleagues from around the world with whom they interact regularly, and professional relationships that often merge with personal friendships.
elite parents’ constant praise of their children can backfire, because it so often consists of telling children how smart they are, not of praising children for things they actually do.
The generation gap between a mother and her thirteen-year-old daughter is different when the mother is in her mid-thirties and when the mother is approaching fifty.
For the 82 percent of American adults who are not in a managerial position or in the professions, that revolution which is so celebrated in accounts of the transformed workplace has had hardly any effect on their lives.
Just about all of the benefits of economic growth from 1970 to 2010 went to people in the upper half of the income distribution.
The culture of the new upper class carries with it an unmistakable whiff of a “we’re better than the rabble” mentality.
To someone who lives in the fashionable neighborhoods of Washington, communities such as Gaithersburg, Springfield, Chantilly, and Ellicott City are seen as unexceptional middle-class and upper-middle-class suburbs. But in fact the people in those zip codes have a combination of education and income higher than that enjoyed by all but 5 percent of other Americans.
The Washington area has the two critical conditions for the establishment of clusters in which the culture of the new upper class can flourish—a sufficiently large population of new-upper-class members and geographic contiguity of the neighborhoods where they live.
American women do not marry until their understandings are exercised and ripened; whereas in other countries most women generally only begin to exercise and to ripen their understandings after marriage.
Americans “consider marriage as a covenant which is often onerous, but every condition of which the parties are strictly bound to fulfill, because they knew all those conditions beforehand, and were perfectly free not to have contracted them.”
For Adams, the essence of politically useful religion was the Judaic monotheistic God. “I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation,” he wrote, by propagating “to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization.”
The founders were right. The success of America depended on virtue in the people when the country began and it still does in the twenty-first century. America will remain exceptional only to the extent that its people embody the same qualities that made it work for the first two centuries of its existence. The founding virtues are central to that kind of citizenry.
Over the last half century, marriage has become the fault line dividing American classes.
the family structure that produces the best outcomes for children, on average, are two biological parents who remain married. Divorced parents produce the next-best outcomes. Whether the parents remarry or remain single while the children are growing up makes little difference. Never-married women produce the worst outcomes.
I know of no other set of important findings that are as broadly accepted by social scientists who follow the technical literature, liberal as well as conservative, and yet are so resolutely ignored by network news programs, editorial writers for the major newspapers, and politicians of both major political parties.
Cohabiting mothers come disproportionately from the lower socioeconomic classes and they tend to provide worse environments for raising children than married mothers. That’s not only the reality on the ground, shaping the environments in the neighborhoods where they live, it is a reality that is likely to accelerate the deterioration of those neighborhoods as the children reach adulthood.
A substantial number of prime-age white working-age men dropped out of the labor force for no obvious reason. Whatever that reason may have been, it affected men with low education much more than men with high education.
How did they spend that extra leisure time? Sleeping and watching television. The increase in television viewing was especially large—from 27.7 hours per week in 1985 to 36.7 hours in 2003–5.
A man who fathers a child without marrying the mother may be a nice guy who is sorry it happened, and he may be trying to do what he can to help out. But it remains true that only a small minority of unmarried men end up being fathers to their children. Children need fathers, and the next generation in a community with lots of children without fathers is in trouble.
Healthy men who aren’t bringing home enough income to put themselves and one other adult above the poverty line are failing to pass a low bar.
I am a libertarian, and see a compelling case for returning to the founders’ conception of limited government.
I have used the phrase the American project frequently. It refers to national life based on the founders’ idea that the “sum of good government,” as Thomas Jefferson put it in his first inaugural address, is a state that “shall restrain men from injuring one another [and] shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.”
