A question:
During the last month, have you voluntarily hung out with people who were smoking cigarettes?
Answer this question and more and find out how culturally isolated you are. The quiz is “is inspired by American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray’s new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” which explores the unprecedented, class-based cultural gap in America. How culturally isolated are you?”
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May 15, 2012 at 3:55 pm
Donald A. Coffin
I scored “…between 9 and 12…In other words, even if you’re part of the new upper class, you’ve had a lot of exposure to the rest of America.”
I can safely say (tenured professor of economics, just retired that I am) that I’m a “part of the new upper class.” But I had a lot of interesting jobs early on, was a member of the Teamsters and of the Retail Clerks International Association (absorbed into the United Food and Commercial Workers)…and my first set of in-laws were a major source of contact with working-class people and issues.
I suspect I’m anything but unique in this respect.
May 15, 2012 at 5:18 pm
jasdeephundal
@Donald:
Not sure about how easy it was among those of your generation to go from the middle class to the upper middle class/upper class, but from my vantage point as a computer science student in a well regarded institution, it definitely seems rarer among those my age.
I grew up as the son of a unionized USPS letter carrier and a low level clerk in a manufacturing company, but nearly zero of my peers share a similar background. The people I do find around campus with this background are generally in fields where the level of financial success required to put oneself into the upper class is far less certain. Also, if my parents had not ridiculously emphasized the value of a STEM education and if I didn’t grow up in an area where there were a good number of technology people around, I doubt I’d be where I am today.
May 16, 2012 at 8:19 am
Donald A. Coffin
My family was always *culturally* part of the upper-middle-class, although in my generation not upper-middle-class in income. So I never transitioned. One difference betweent he 1960s (when I first started working) and now is that many fewer upper-middle-class kids have summer jobs (they are padding their resumes) or the sort of jobs I had. It makes a difference.
May 15, 2012 at 11:30 pm
afinetheorem
Quite clearly, rising income inequality has led to a greater segmentation of Americans based in some way on class, but that said,
1) Charles Murray is a racist hack,
2) Factory jobs and NASCAR are mainstream? Multiple World Cup games, including the final between Spain and Holland, had more TV viewers than any NASCAR race. Manufacturing employment is 11m out of 130m employed, or 18m if you include mining, logging and construction. Unsurprisingly, given his history, Murray interprets “what white people were like when I was a kid” as “mainstream.”
3) To write an entire book called “Coming Apart” about the divergence between the wealthy and the children vis-a-vis the working class and their children, yet assign no blame to the changes in income inequality in the last 35 years, is utterly insane.
June 11, 2012 at 6:40 pm
Anonymous
I agree with part of Murray’s point – that wealthy, coastal, well-insulated Americans are typically unfamiliar with and contemptuous of the social institutions of the working class. But the idea that there historically has been some fundamental way of being American that was good and wholesome and that is being destroyed is… well, nonsense. Being American has always been about differences, and usually about the tension between those differences. In the 1950’s – the era the clip reel in the video seems to focus on – American life might have been good and wholesome for Caucasian, male children like Murray, but it was a pretty crap time to be an African American (depending on where you lived), or a woman (depending on what you wanted out of life), or gay (period). Now, it is a crap time to be uneducated. That’s unfortunate, but it’s not unique.