Placing an exclusive stress on the expansion of rights and freedoms of individuals by disregarding or underrating the concomitant rise of individual responsibilities brings about social pathologies. They undermine solidarity as the glue of social life.
.. The differing consequences for those at the top and those at the bottom are visible in the class-based responses to a key element of individualization: changing sexual mores.
After a period of turbulence and high divorce rates in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, the well educated are coming to terms with the sexual revolution by postponing marriage and delaying fertility as divorce rates for this class have stabilized or declined. The children of the affluent are, in turn, prospering.
Conversely, the less well off – from all backgrounds — have struggled with high levels of family dissolution, father absence and worklessness, leaving their own prospects, and those of their children, bleak.
.. All of which brings us back to the question of why there is so little rebellion against entrenched social and economic injustice.
The answer is that those bearing the most severe costs of inequality are irrelevant to the agenda-setters in both parties. They are political orphans in the new order
Poor Whites In France
Whereas the immigrants are incessantly debated by others, poor whites around Europe are something of a forgotten class. The economic crisis hit them hard. In France, many white working-class people now support Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National, who has an outside shot at getting elected president in 2017.
.. France remains one of the world’s least unequal countries.
.. “In a middle-class school,” she said, “you are in the conditions of work: sit down, take your books out of your bag, work. That’s not true at schools in poorer areas. When they go home, they often aren’t in conditions of work either. Often they share a bedroom with multiple siblings. Often their parents don’t work, so they are the only ones at home who get up in the morning and go to work.” The problems were similar for native French and immigrant kids, she said, except the latter often didn’t speak fluent French.
.. Did he really see homelessness as an acute threat? “Oh yes!” all three of them chorused. It could happen to anyone. Perhaps that fear is part of what it means to be white working class in Europe today.
.. What worries locals most, says the OSF report, is “incivility”.
.. Whenever she sat next to an old lady on the bus, she waited for the standard lament to pour out: “Our poor France, oh là là là là!”
Lombard had thought hard about why this was. “For old people, the young people are like a different tribe,” she said. “It’s like discovering the Zulus. The old talk as if they are not human: a race of youths.”
Harvard Admissions Needs ‘Moneyball for Life’
Specifically, our new model has helped us discover a strong positive correlation among three personality traits in children, and the creation of large fortunes, especially Wall Street fortunes. In brief:
1) Self-importance. From his public comments we have learned that Mr. Schwarzman, at age 17 or 18, was so certain Harvard had made a mistake in refusing him admission that he called the dean directly, to tell him.
.. The odds that a child will make outlandish sums of money when he grows up turns out to be strongly correlated with his willingness to challenge adult authority when that authority does not give him exactly what he wants. At bottom, he does not accept any authority higher than himself.
.. 2) An extreme need for external validation. We of course have screened for this in the past, but indirectly, by weighing heavily a child’s school grades. The trouble is that, while success in the classroom may indeed reveal a strong need for public approval, it can also result from sheer brilliance, or, worse, deep interest in the subject material.
.. The very qualities in children most likely to lead them to great financial fortune also render them predisposed, as adults, to giving those fortunes to rich universities, instead of, say, charitable organizations that actually need the money.
Hillary Clinton’s Hamptons Quandary
For the past several summers, Bill and Hillary Clinton have done what New York City’s moneyed residents have done for decades: They spent their vacation amid the prime beachside real estate of Long Island.
In 2011 and 2012, there was the eight-bedroom, 12,000-square-foot East Hampton rental with a heated pool that the couple took for part of August, the kind of house that typically goes for $200,000 per month, according to local real estate listings.
.. Donors who did not want to talk on the record offering Mrs. Clinton unsolicited advice said they hoped she could avoid the inevitable claims of elitism by not renting a Hamptons home again, given the optics of a presidential campaign and the still-sluggish economy.
.. At the same time, Mrs. Clinton and her allies, under intense pressure to raise money for both her campaign and Priorities USA Action, a super PAC supporting her bid, will need to woo the country’s wealthiest Democrats this summer, wherever the 0.001 percent happen to be.