. . . Charles Murray.
OVER THE PAST generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chance to join their ranks.
. . . .
As life has gotten worse for the rest of the middle class, upper-middle-class parents have become fanatical about making sure their children never sink back to those levels . . . .
It's when we turn to the next task -- excluding other people's children from the same opportunities -- that things become morally dicey. . . .
The most important [way that the well educated rig the system] is residential zoning restrictions. Well-educated people tend to live in places like Portland, New York and San Francisco that have housing and construction rules that keep the poor and less educated away from places with good schools and good job opportunities.
These rules have a devastating effect on economic growth nationwide. . . .
[A] second structural barrier is the college admissions game. Educated parents live in neighborhoods with the best teachers, they top off their local public school budgets and they benefit from legacy admissions rules, from admissions criteria that reward kids who grow up with lots of enriching travel and from unpaid internships that lead to jobs.
. . . .
[More important than the structural barriers, however, are] informal social barriers that segregate the lower 80 percent.
. . . .
American upper-middle-class culture . . . is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, "You are not welcome here."
. . . .
To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you've got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality.
. . . .
Status rules are partly about collusion, about attracting educated people to your circle, tightening the bonds between you and erecting shields against everybody else. We in the educated class have created barriers to mobility that are more devastating for being invisible. The rest of America can't name them, can't understand them. They just know they're there.
(David Brooks, "How We Are Ruining America," nytimes.com, July 11, 2017)
Mr. Brooks quotes Richard Reeves (Brookings Institution) and Elizabeth Currid-Halkett in support of his column.
He also should have given credit to Charles Murray for his brilliant 2012 book, Coming Apart. He focused on differences between what he called the new upper class -- about 5 percent of Americans -- and everyone else. And the "coming apart" he bemoans is essentially the same thing Mr. Brooks, Mr. Reeves, and Ms. Currid-Halkett limn out in different words.
Where does the new upper class come from? Mr. Murray's answers: From the increasing market value of brains, from the resulting wealth enjoyed by the brainy, through the effects of the college sorting machine, and through the inbreeding of new upper class children. "Highly disproportionate numbers of exceptionally able children in the next generation will come from parents in the upper-middle class, and more specifically from parents who are already part of the broad elite."
The resulting cultural divide leads to a new kind of residential segregation "that enables large portions of the new upper class to live their lives isolated from everyone else" -- namely in elite bubbles that Mr. Murray calls "SuperZips." These are zip codes, hang on, "where overeducated elitist snobs live."
[The balkanization of the new upper class, segregated from other Americans, leads to mutual ignorance. But the ignorance of the new upper class] about other Americans is more problematic than the ignorance of other Americans about them. It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale professors. But it is a problem if Yale professors, or producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisers cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers.
Mr. Murray then offers a questionnaire to test how much members of the new upper class know about other Americans. The questions are brilliant. Among them:
Have you ever lived for at least a year in an American neighborhood in which the majority of your fifty nearest neighbors probably did not have a college degree?
Have you ever held a job that caused something to hurt at the end of the day?
Have you ever had a close friend who was an evangelical Christian?
Who is Jimmie Johnson?
Since leaving school, have you ever worn a uniform?
What does the word Branson mean to you?
Mr. Brooks agonizes over the failure of a high school friend to know the social signifiers of the upper middle class. Mr. Murray shows rather convincingly that his new upper class is as clueless about the social signifiers of lower-class America.
Mr. Murray goes on to argue that his great "coming apart" threatens "a central aspect of American exceptionalism," namely American civic life, which leads to the decay of "social capital" needed to maintain a satisfying quality of life.
What social capital? Family. Work. Faith. Community.
What Mr. Brooks sees is very real. It's just that what he sees is not news. Mr. Murray and other traditionalists and conservatives have been making the same argument from years.
Mr. Brooks's upper-middle class elite and Mr. Murray's new upper class are substantially the same people. For the record, the editorial board of The Houston Chronicle largely inhabits, and certainly represents, these elite precincts.
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