The affluent third recovers, endures some bumps, then stabilizes—and in some cases starts to improve—up to the present. By contrast, the bottom two-thirds suffer some initial bumps, followed by a much broader and continuing spike of unhealthiness. Whether the subject is out-of-wedlock births, fatherlessness, obesity rates, “financial worry,” “neighborhood trust”—name the metric—the same basic pattern holds: in each case, things are going relatively well for the top one-third—but heading into disastrous territory for everyone else.
