Amid the stresses of the dot-com bust and the Great Recession, it was only white Americans who turned increasingly to drugs, liquor and quietus.
.. Noting that religious practice has fallen faster recently among less-educated whites than among less-educated blacks and Hispanics, their paper argues that white social institutions, blue-collar as well as white-collar, have long reflected a “bourgeois moral logic” that binds employment, churchgoing, the nuclear family and upward mobility.
But in an era of stagnating wages, family breakdown, and social dislocation, this logic no longer seems to make as much sense.
.. The result is a mounting feeling of what the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher calls white “dispossession” — a sense of promises broken, a feeling that what you were supposed to have has been denied to you. (The Donald Trump phenomenon, Dreher notes, feeds off precisely this anxiety.)
Meet Alpha: The Next ‘Next Generation’
Generation Alpha is part of an unintentional global experiment where screens are placed in front of them from the youngest age as pacifiers, entertainers and educational aids. They began being born in 2010, the year the iPad was introduced, Instagram was created and “app” was the word of the year, so they have been raised as “screenagers” to a greater extent than the fixed screens of the past could facilitate. For this reason we also call them Generation Glass.
The Midwest, Home of the Supermodel
One theory, which Clarke heard from a fellow scout, is that the Midwest is home to a disproportionate number of people whose ancestors were the vertically gifted Northern Europeans.
.. The Swedish and Norwegian immigrants who came to the U.S. in the late 19th century settled mainly in Iowa, Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Wisconsin. Countries like Norway, Sweden, Germany, and Denmark have minted some of the tallest people in the world for centuries. Some researchers refer to this as the “North-South gradient,” with people living in the colder European countries having, on average, a couple inches on the people living in warmer ones.
.. That means it behooves scouts to work where there isn’t much competition—like the vast, open plains—and to seek out girls and boys who aren’t already tied to a modeling agency.
Sizing Up Hillary Clinton’s Plans to Help the Middle Class
More than 30 percent of men in their prime are either unemployed or earn less than what’s needed to keep a family of four out of poverty, according to estimates by Lawrence Katz of Harvard.
.. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that wages in the middle of the distribution have increased by all of 6 percent since 1979.
.. For this she would have an extremely powerful force on her side: demography.
“The labor force is already shrinking,” said Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist who served as chief economic adviser to President Obama from late 2011 to the summer of 2013. “As it gets harder to hire, companies will come around to recognize that investments in their work force are in their long-term interest.”