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September 20 - September 20, 2016
demarcate
miasma
obtuseness
mores.
It is not the existence of classes that is new, but the emergence of classes that diverge on core behaviors and values—classes that barely recognize their underlying American kinship.
not enough people had college educations to form a critical mass of people with the distinctive tastes and preferences fostered by advanced education. In the American adult population as a whole, just 8 percent had college degrees. Even in neighborhoods filled with managers and professionals, people with college degrees were a minority—just 32 percent of people in those jobs had college degrees in 1963.
affluence in 1963 meant enough money to afford a somewhat higher standard of living than other people, not a markedly different lifestyle. In 1963, the median family income of people working in managerial occupations and the professions was only about $62,000 (2010 dollars, as are all dollar figures from now on). Fewer than 8 percent of American families in 1963 had incomes of $100,000 or more, and fewer than 1 percent had incomes of $200,000 or more. This compressed income distribution was reflected in the residential landscape. In 1963, great mansions were something most Americans saw in the
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The new-upper-class culture is different from mainstream American culture in all sorts of ways. Some are differences in lifestyle that individually are harmless but that cumulatively produce cultural separation between the new upper class and mainstream America. Still others involve differences that consist of good things happening to the cognitive elite that are not open to the rest of America.
If you are really talented, and if your job is one where creativity is essential, you’ve got it made. You are at the center of senior management’s concern. What might make you happier? What support can be lavished upon you to free up your creativity? Above all, nothing must be done to cramp your style.
lacuna
In the early 1990s, Bill Gates was asked what competitor worried him the most. Goldman Sachs, Gates answered. He explained: “Software is an IQ business. Microsoft must win the IQ war, or we won’t have a future. I don’t worry about Lotus or IBM, because the smartest guys would rather come to work for Microsoft. Our competitors for IQ are investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.”1 Gates’s comment reflected a reality that has driven the formation of the new upper class: Over the last century, brains became much more valuable in the marketplace.
the bigger the stakes, the greater the value of marginal increments in skills. In 1960, the corporation ranked 100 on the Fortune 500 had sales of $3.2 billion.4 In 2010, the 100th-ranked corporation had sales of $24.5 billion—almost an eightfold increase in constant dollars. That kind of supersizing in the corporate world occurred across the range—the corporation ranked 500 in 2010 was about eight times larger than the 500th-ranked corporation in 1960. The dollar value of a manager who could increase his division’s profitability by 10 percent instead of 5 percent escalated accordingly.
Wealth enabled the development of an isolated new upper class. It did so first by enabling the new upper class to become spatially isolated.
As late as 1952, the mean SAT verbal score (now known as the Critical Reading score) of incoming Harvard freshmen was just 583, above the national mean but nothing to write home about.10 Then came the revolution. By 1960, the average SAT verbal score among incoming Harvard freshmen had jumped to 678. The progenitors of the revolution were aware of how momentous the shift had been. William J. Bender, Harvard’s dean of admissions, summed up the preceding eight years. “The figures,” he wrote, “report the greatest change in Harvard admissions, and thus in the Harvard student body, in a short
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Given this concentration of academic talent in a relatively few colleges and universities, the original problem has been replaced by its opposite. Instead of feeling sorry for the exceptionally able student who has no one to talk to, we need to worry about what happens when exceptionally able students hang out only with one another.13
The segregation of the college system now means that the typical classroom in a third-tier public university is filled with students who are not much brighter than the average young person in the nation as a whole, whereas the typical classroom in an elite school has no one outside the top decile of cognitive talent, and many who are in the top hundredth or thousandth of the distribution. Both sets of students are technically “college educated” when they get their BAs, but that’s where the similarity stops. The cognitive pecking order of schools is apparent to everyone—to
despite these changes, the student bodies of the elite schools were still drawn overwhelmingly from the upper-middle class. According to sociologist Joseph Soares’s analysis in The Power of Privilege, consistent with other such analyses, 79 percent of students at “Tier 1” colleges as of the 1990s came from families in the top quartile of socioeconomic status, while only 2 percent came from the bottom quartile.16 For Soares, these numbers are evidence of obvious bias against the most able students who are not from the upper-middle class and above. “Unless one believes that only rich people can
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The reason that upper-middle-class children dominate the population of elite schools is that the parents of the upper-middle class now produce a disproportionate number of the smartest children.
A new upper class that makes decisions affecting the lives of everyone else but increasingly doesn’t know much about how everybody else lives is vulnerable to making mistakes. How vulnerable are you?
balkanized.
acolytes.
it remains the case that at about the time the new infusion of talent hit the American economy, a great many good things started to happen within the private sector. So are we sorry that we have this new kind of upper class? The question has to be put in that way, because we don’t have the option of getting all the benefits of an energized, productive new upper class, one that makes all of our lives better in so many important ways, without the conditions that also tend toward a wealthy and detached new upper class.
rolling back income inequality won’t make any difference in the isolation of the new upper class from the rest of America. The new-upper-class culture is not the product of great wealth. It is enabled by affluence—people with common tastes and preferences need enough money to be able to congregate—but it is not driven by affluence. It is driven by the distinctive tastes and preferences that emerge when large numbers of cognitively talented people are enabled to live together in their own communities. You can whack the top income centile back to where it was in the 1980s, and it will have no
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chimerical
four aspects of American life were so completely accepted as essential that, for practical purposes, you would be hard put to find an eighteenth-century founder or a nineteenth-century commentator who dissented from any of them. Two of them are virtues in themselves—industriousness and honesty—and two of them refer to institutions through which right behavior is nurtured—marriage and religion.
Some of the founders would say my list is incomplete, with frugality being one candidate for addition, and philanthropy (or benevolence) another.
Benjamin Franklin frequently invoked the language of religion, but rarely attended church and did not believe in the divinity of Christ, nor did John Adams, a practicing Unitarian. Washington was evasive about his views on traditional Christian doctrine. Hamilton and Madison were Anglicans who were also suspected to be less than orthodox about the details. And yet all were united in this: Religion was essential to the health of the new nation.
Catholic philosopher Michael Novak summarized this way: Liberty is the object of the Republic. Liberty needs virtue. Virtue among the people is impossible without religion.
James Madison echoed the sentiment when he wrote that “the belief in a God All Powerful, wise, and good, is so essential to the moral order of the World and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources.”
By the mid-twentieth century, the idea that school was a place to instill a particular set of virtues through systematic socialization had been rejected, the McGuffey Readers had disappeared, and so had some of the coherence in the idea of what it meant to be a good American.
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.
To get a sense of just how different attitudes were in the early 1960s, perhaps this will do it. These ever-married women were asked, “In your opinion, do you think it is all right for a woman to have sexual relations before marriage with a man she knows she is going to marry?” Note the wording. Not sex with someone a woman is dating, nor with someone a woman loves, but with a man she knows she is going to marry. Eighty-six percent said no.2
The traditional conception of marital roles took a big hit from the 1960s through the 1980s. A substantial class difference remained, however. As of the 2000s, almost 40 percent of Fishtown still took a traditional view of the woman’s role, compared to less than 20 percent of Belmont.
invidious
How do the children of cohabiting parents fare? The answer: About the same as the children of the old-fashioned form of single parenthood, women who are unmarried and not cohabiting.
Having two unmarried biological parents was associated with worse outcomes than having two married biological parents, and the outcomes were rarely better than those for children living with a single parent or in a “cohabiting stepparent” family.
If you are interested in the welfare of children, knowing that the child was born to a cohabiting woman instead of a lone unmarried woman should have little effect on your appraisal of the child’s chances in life. That’s the common theme of the systematic studies of this issue for more than twenty years.
For the NLSY-79 cohort, whose mothers turned age 40 between 1997 and 2004, the percentage of children living with both biological parents when the mother was 40 was sinking below the 30 percent level, compared to 90 percent of Belmont children who were still living with both biological parents. The divergence is so large that it puts the women of Belmont and Fishtown into different family cultures. The absolute level in Fishtown is so low that it calls into question the viability of white working-class communities as a place for socializing the next generation.
evidence is presented that industriousness has declined among all white males, but mostly among Fishtown males.
Vocation—one’s calling in life—plays a large role in defining the meaning of that life. For some, the nurturing of children is the vocation. For some, an avocation or a cause can become an all-absorbing source of satisfaction, with the job a means of paying the bills and nothing more. But for many others, vocation takes the form of the work one does for a living. Working hard, seeking to get ahead, and striving to excel at one’s craft are not only quintessential features of traditional American culture but also some of its best features. Industriousness is a resource for living a fulfilling
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Married men become more productive after they are married because they are married.
Put plainly, single prime-age males are much less industrious than married ones.
evidence is presented that Belmont has never had a crime problem worth worrying about; that Fishtown has suffered from a transforming growth in crime; and that it is difficult to tell whether other kinds of honesty have deteriorated.
For every 100,000 Fishtowners ages 18–65 in 1974, 213 were imprisoned. By the time of the 2004 survey, that number was up to 957. And those numbers are based on just state and federal prisoners. They don’t count people in jails, who amounted to around 100,000 whites in 1974 and 317,000 whites in 2004.
What Jefferson referred to as American “plain honesty” developed throughout the nineteenth century into our national self-image of a straightforward people who said what they meant and kept their word. The topic is integrity—doing the right thing not because the law will put you in jail if you don’t, but because of moral principles that you follow regardless of consequences.
evidence is presented that white America as a whole became more secular between 1960 and 2010, especially from the beginning of the 1990s. Despite the common belief that the working class is the most religious group in white American society, the drift from religiosity was far greater in Fishtown than in Belmont.
Religion’s role as a source of social capital is huge. “As a rough rule of thumb,” Robert Putnam wrote in Bowling Alone, “our evidence shows [that] nearly half of all associational memberships are church-related, half of all personal philanthropy is religious in character, and half of all volunteering occurs in a religious context.”1 But it’s not just the contributions of Americans in religious settings that make religion so important to social capital. People who are religious also account for a large proportion of the secular forms of social capital.
Religious worshippers and people who say religion is very important to them are much more likely than other persons to visit friends, to entertain at home, to attend club meetings, and to belong to sports groups; professional and academic societies; school service groups; youth groups; service clubs; hobby or garden clubs; literary, art, discussion, and study groups; school fraternities and sororities; farm organizations; political clubs; nationality groups; and other miscellaneous groups.
the main message of the graph is not the difference between the two neighborhoods; it is the steep rise in the percentage of whites in both neighborhoods who said they had no religion. The increase was especially pronounced from the mid-1980s onward.
even after the decline, the percentage of white Americans who are actively religious is still higher in both neighborhoods than in other advanced countries. In an international survey of religious attendance conducted in 1998–99, the percentages attending church regularly in Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Great Britain ranged from 2 percent in Denmark to 14 percent in Great Britain, compared to 32 percent for the United States.15 America is still exceptional in this regard; it is just less religious than it used to be.
