The New American Divide
The ideal of an ‘American way of life’ is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. Charles Murray on what’s cleaving America, and why.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577170733817181646.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
The little blurb that Google presented made me think that this was another condescending article that explained that things were bad because stupid poor people were stupid and poor, but decided to give it a chance. The author deliberately removes race from the discussion, the demographics are all about non-Latino whites (why does anyone think that Latinos are white anyway? they all look fabulously tanned to me!), which should help eliminate some mindless arguments about irrelevancies. It isn’t all fabulous; I particularly thought this was poorly written:
The best thing that the new upper class can do to provide that reinforcement is to drop its condescending “nonjudgmentalism.” Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn’t hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms. When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices.
However, the article appears to be chock full of actual stats (I didn’t pursue the numbers (and didn’t notice a link to do so)) and largely appears to be agenda free so presuming the author didn’t simply make the numbers up, it would seem that there is worth in considering what appears to be his thesis: the educated elite needs to rub elbows with the rest of the population and the uneducated, un-elite need to get married and get jobs. I am not convinced that financially things have remained static since the ’60s (the author says wages have remained the same after adjusting for inflation, something that jibes with what research I have done), I believe that actual purchasing power has declined by some 50% over the intervening period, which is one of the reasons why there are so many households that require two incomes to remain solvent.
Anyway, I recommend the article to my reader(s); it gives a thoughtful view of the divide that is settling in to our country, puts the ‘blame’ on likely inevitable cultural forces (as opposed to political forces) and discusses some approaches to ameliorate the effect. I doubt his screed will have any impact, but in my own small (tiny) way, I want to promote it.
This seems to go inline with the below article I sent you a few weeks ago. Maybe some of the underlying reasons for the bleak employment future of Gen Y is the environment they are raised in and their attitude towards work.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2012/01/09/the-future-of-work-top-10-employers-of-gen-y-workers/
One thing your article mentioned was: “As I’ve argued in much of my previous work, I think that the reforms of the 1960s jump-started the deterioration. Changes in social policy during the 1960s made it economically more feasible to have a child without having a husband if you were a woman or to get along without a job if you were a man; safer to commit crimes without suffering consequences; and easier to let the government deal with problems in your community that you and your neighbors formerly had to take care of.”
Im not sure how I feel about this, I think the idea of the gov helping a single mother is a good idea, I dont think a woman should be forced with to live with man to provide for her child. Also I dont think its that easy to get along with out a job, sure there are some out there who game the system but it would be easy to change the benefits to encourage them to get a job after a period of time. The crime aspect is something I dont get because the incarceration rates have skyrocketed since the 1960s, how is there no consequences to crimes?
It seems clear to me that personal responsibility is something that has gone out of our culture, everything is “society’s” fault now. One of the reasons why people get sued for so many things. Clearly our decent into the toilet has many contributing factors and it seems just as clear to me that it will take a wide variety of changes (some huge, some potentially trivial) to reverse the decent and get back to a stable society. Of course, there probably is no such thing as a ‘stable’ society in reality, that is probably the result of rose colored glasses coupled with the selective memory of hind site, but I believe I have been politically and culturally aware for the better part of the last 4 decades and I try hard to resist both rose colored spectacles and selective memory, so I am convinced that we really are experiencing something extra ordinary.
I could be full of BS and things could swing back through ‘normal’ on the route to another extreme. Why can’t we pause the pendulum at the bottom? Why does that have to be the point where it is moving fastest?