Friendships and even romantic relationships are like international alliances—understood to serve personal advantage. In his book Coming Apart, Charles Murray reports that while stable marriages are more likely to contribute to various measures of life success, those most likely to form stable lifelong marriages are those at the elite levels of the social ladder.1 Those in the lower tiers, meanwhile, are experiencing catastrophic levels of familial and social breakdown, making it all but impossible for them or their children to move into the upper tier. Elites are studiously silent about the
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